Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[fisheater22]

This is completely false and a misinterpretation even of the fake Satoshi post.  You're typing flat out propaganda.

You are stating assumptions as facts and assumption is the mother of all fuckups. You do not know whether it is fake or real and therefore ignore serious risks involved.

Support Classic.  If you do not, Bitcoin will die and you will get rabies.  By the way, it is I, the real satoshi.

You do not know whether it this is fake or real and therefore ignore serious risks involved.

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[r0ach]

That's more about the technicalities of a normal fork-split situation rather than a social-engineered takeover attempt.

You're using double standards acting like Blockstream pretending they should have dictatorship over Bitcoin isn't a social engineer takeover attempt itself.  Devs don't control Bitcoin.  Devs are politicians and we don't have a one party system.  If we did, Bitcoin would be centralized and worthless.  Whoever wants to rage quit because they don't get to be dictator and do everything their way, let them.  

I'm also tired of people pretending the Lightning Network is actually a sure thing.  I have my doubts about how it will work in the real world, and people like Anonymint claim it won't work at all.  Maybe it will, but people aren't very big into just trusting some group of people that they will maybe someday in the future increase scalability while price could either stagnate or go down until that happens.  Segwit is too little, too late, and LN is too far off.  There has to be some kind of bandaid for investors in the meanwhile until LN can be fully released and evaluated.

And please, don't even pull the "price doesn't matter" bullshit lol.  Bitcoin is a currency, if one of your main development goals isn't to increase it's network effect and value, then you're probably doing it wrong.  A currency is a consensus mechanism between individuals in lieu of barter.  In order to fulfill that goal, the largest number of people possible have to be holders or it's either harder for them to do business, or they can't do business at all.  This means sane Bitcoin development has to constantly be trying to expand capacity to fit more users.  Unless capacity is already high enough for world reserve currency, any stagnation of capacity increase while users are demanding more will be viewed negatively by the market.

There's also no such thing as "spam".  If you think spam exists, it means minimum transaction fee is not set high enough.  Zero fee transactions should not exist in the first place.

[AlexGR]

That's more about the technicalities of a normal fork-split situation rather than a social-engineered takeover attempt.

You're using double standards acting like Blockstream pretending they should have dictatorship over Bitcoin isn't a social engineer takeover attempt itself.  Devs don't control Bitcoin.  Devs are politicians and we don't have a one party system.  If we did, Bitcoin would be centralized and worthless.  Whoever wants to rage quit because they don't get to be dictator and do everything their way, let them.

If you don't like how bitcoin is you create an altcoin. There is no dictatorship involved. You can change from a single parameter to every parameter.

If you want to change bitcoin itself there is the strong possibility that other developers might disagree if you propose something that is not optimal. Since you can't have multiple implementations for every single point of disagreement (multiple forks/currencies as a result / corrosive to trust in the currency) it is logical to first find a consensus. Is that a "dictatorship"?

[r0ach]

If you don't like how bitcoin is you create an altcoin. There is no dictatorship involved.

Correct.  Anything that's not the longest chain is an altcoin.  Everything about Byzantine solutions involves keyword TEMPORARY consensus.  What was once the main chain today is an altcoin tomorrow because it's not the consensus anymore.

[JorgeStolfi]

And get we get pass this satoshi appeal to autority now?  As iCEBREAKER observed, Your big statist lie is that "Bitcoin was created to replace commercial banking, not central banking."

Is a car a good way to cross the Atlantic?  By plugging some holes and attaching some empty tanks at the bottom, a car may perhaps be made to float well enough to do it.  But it will never be as good for that task as a boat.  The reason is that, when the car was designed, every detail was chosen with one purpose in mind: travel on roads.  If the purpose had been to travel across the ocean, almost every detail would have been different -- as one can see by comparing the car to any boat.

The point is: to tell whether some artifact is a good choice for some purpose, it is worth checking what purpose it was designed for.  Sometimes a thing developed for one goal turns out to be very good, or even optimal, for some other goal; but those occasions are very rare.  Almost always, changing the purpose requires a complete redesign, starting from a blank page.

Bitcoin was not created to replace commercial banking or credit cards: it says that on the very first paragraph of the whitepaper.  It was not created to replace central banking either.  Nor to be a store of value, a high-value settlement system, a micropayment system, a lucrative investment, a tool for illegal trade, etc.. In fact, its goal was not even to create a new currency. 

As it says everywhere on the paper, starting with the title, Satoshi s goal was to create

an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party

The bitcoin protocol is the best solution that Satoshi found to accomplish that goal.  All its parts were chosen with that goal in mind.  If the goal had been something else, the design would have been different.  Or he may not have bothered to create it at all: since there were already pretty good solutions for those other goals, but not for that particular one.

The new currency was created only because Satoshi (and everybody else) did not know how to achieve that goal with existing currencies. 

Understanding the original goal helps one see that bitcoin is actually terribly inadequate for most of the other purposes.  In particular: 

Bitcoin is not a viable replacement for commercial banking, because it is too expensive, slow, unsafe, complicated -- and lacks many features that bank customers want, like ability to reverse payments, customer assistance, credit, deposit insurance, etc..

And its capacity is too limited: it is OK for the few legal payments where a trusted intermediary is not available or really undesirable -- which a normal person may need a couple times per year, maybe.  It is totally insufficient for millions of people using it for all their payments (or, worse, for micropayments).  Perhaps that much volume could be handled by off-chain solutions or some "overlay network" -- but then there is no reason to use bitcoin: banks and credit cards are already great "off-chain" solutions.

If Bitcoin cannot replace commercial banking, much less all payments with national currencies, then it cannot replace central banking either.

Bitcoin is not a viable a longterm store of value, because it has no mechanism to stabilize its value.  (Even if it were truly scarce -- which it isn't -- there are plenty of things that are just as scarce but totally worthless.)

For its stated goal, it did not need such mechanism. All it needed was that the value would remain almost stable over a few days, between earning some coins and spending them in another payment. And its very use as a currency would endow it with some value, that would vary only slowly because usage would vary only slowly.

(Satoshi at one point refers to an hypothetical increase in usage of 20% per year as "crazy".  If it had increased at that "crazy" rate, and bitcoin had not been turned into a pyramid investment schema, the price today should be less than 0.50 USD/BTC.)

as if the Genesis Text was about $2 ATM fees instead of TBTF bailouts

The most hilarious thing in the "bitcoin space" may be the belief that Satoshi was a libertarian and wanted to destroy banks, based entirely on that single headline in the genesis block. 

But the headline had a specific technical purpose, namely to prove that he had not been doing any pre-mining.  That purpose required it to be a headline of a major paper published on that same day.  So, which is less likely: that he patiently delayed the launch of bitcoin until a vaguely relevant headline came up; or that he rushed to launch the system when he saw that vaguely relevant headline on his newspaper? 

Or perhaps he just picked up the newspaper that he had on his desk, and typed in its main headline?

unless you are satoshi maybe?

Let me say only that I am neither Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto nor Craig Steven Wright. 

[AlexGR]

If you don't like how bitcoin is you create an altcoin. There is no dictatorship involved.

Correct.  Anything that's not the longest chain is an altcoin.  Everything about Byzantine solutions involves keyword TEMPORARY consensus.  What was once the main chain today is an altcoin tomorrow because it's not the consensus anymore.

In that sense, yes. But that doesn't mean just because you are a mining majority that you are the "right" coin. For example if hackers get control of two mining pools with 60% mining power and start mining blocks with million new coins out of thin air, people, exchanges, miners etc, can select the old chain - and for all intents and purposes it will be considered the legitimate chain and not the "altcoin".

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

Anything that's not the longest chain is an altcoin.

Actually:

• The blockchain that you should trust is the valid blockhain that you can get that has the most proof of work.
• A blockchain is valid if and only if the software you are running says that it is valid.
• "The bitcoin blockchain" is the blockchain that you call "the bitcoin blockchain".

The question "in a persistent fork of the blockchain, which branch will be the real bitcoin?" is basically a religious question.  You should think about it as you would think of "in a schism of my Church, which side will be the True Church?".

[r0ach]

Bitcoin is not a viable a longterm store of value, because it has no mechanism to stabilize its value.  (Even if it were truly scarce -- which it isn't -- there are plenty of things that are just as scarce but totally worthless.)

Bitcoin's real value can only be determined by on-chain transaction volume, denominated in number of transactions (assuming transaction fee is above 0), value of average transaction, or both.  If nobody is doing business on-chain, there will be no demand for coins, meaning no liquidity in markets, and price will drop seeking liquidity.  Which is why not raising block size is utterly stupid if you care anything about price with Lightning Network not released yet.

If Lightning Network is ever released and functions, it's technically just bundling the same on-chain transactions, so price would continue to increase with an increase in LN volume, just not with an increase in security from fees being bundled.  Most people would probably argue Bitcoin has enough security already, and mining increasing to the point of infinity where the entire planet is covered by a bitcoin miner is probably not a good idea.

[hdbuck]

And get we get pass this satoshi appeal to autority now?  As iCEBREAKER observed, Your big statist lie is that "Bitcoin was created to replace commercial banking, not central banking."

Is a car a good way to cross the Atlantic?  By plugging some holes and attaching some empty tanks at the bottom, a car may perhaps be made to float well enough to do it.  But it will never be as good for that task as a boat.  The reason is that, when the car was designed, every detail was chosen with one purpose in mind: travel on roads.  If the purpose had been to travel across the ocean, almost every detail would have been different -- as one can see by comparing the car to any boat.

The point is: to tell whether some artifact is a good choice for some purpose, it is worth checking what purpose it was designed for.  Sometimes a thing developed for one goal turns out to be very good, or even optimal, for some other goal; but those occasions are very rare.  Almost always, changing the purpose requires a complete redesign, starting from a blank page.

Bitcoin was not created to replace commercial banking or credit cards: it says that on the very first paragraph of the whitepaper.  It was not created to replace central banking either.  Nor to be a store of value, a high-value settlement system, a micropayment system, a lucrative investment, a tool for illegal trade, etc.. In fact, its goal was not even to create a new currency.  

As it says everywhere on the paper, starting with the title, Satoshi s goal was to create

an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party

The bitcoin protocol is the best solution that Satoshi found to accomplish that goal.  All its parts were chosen with that goal in mind.  If the goal had been something else, the design would have been different.  Or he may not have bothered to create it at all: since there were already pretty good solutions for those other goals, but not for that particular one.

The new currency was created only because Satoshi (and everybody else) did not know how to achieve that goal with existing currencies.  

Understanding the original goal helps one see that bitcoin is actually terribly inadequate for most of the other purposes.  In particular:  

Bitcoin is not a viable replacement for commercial banking, because it is too expensive, slow, unsafe, complicated -- and lacks many features that bank customers want, like ability to reverse payments, customer assistance, credit, deposit insurance, etc..

And its capacity is too limited: it is OK for the few legal payments where a trusted intermediary is not available or really undesirable -- which a normal person may need a couple times per year, maybe.  It is totally insufficient for millions of people using it for all their payments (or, worse, for micropayments).  Perhaps that much volume could be handled by off-chain solutions or some "overlay network" -- but then there is no reason to use bitcoin: banks and credit cards are already great "off-chain" solutions.

If Bitcoin cannot replace commercial banking, much less all payments with national currencies, then it cannot replace central banking either.

Bitcoin is not a viable a longterm store of value, because it has no mechanism to stabilize its value.  (Even if it were truly scarce -- which it isn't -- there are plenty of things that are just as scarce but totally worthless.)

For its stated goal, it did not need such mechanism. All it needed was that the value would remain almost stable over a few days, between earning some coins and spending them in another payment. And its very use as a currency would endow it with some value, that would vary only slowly because usage would vary only slowly.

(Satoshi at one point refers to an hypothetical increase in usage of 20% per year as "crazy".  If it had increased at that "crazy" rate, and bitcoin had not been turned into a pyramid investment schema, the price today should be less than 0.50 USD/BTC.)

as if the Genesis Text was about $2 ATM fees instead of TBTF bailouts

The most hilarious thing in the "bitcoin space" may be the belief that Satoshi was a libertarian and wanted to destroy banks, based entirely on that single headline in the genesis block.  

But the headline had a specific technical purpose, namely to prove that he had not been doing any pre-mining.  That purpose required it to be a headline of a major paper published on that same day.  So, which is less likely: that he patiently delayed the launch of bitcoin until a vaguely relevant headline came up; or that he rushed to launch the system when he saw that vaguely relevant headline on his newspaper?  

Or perhaps he just picked up the newspaper that he had on his desk, and typed in its main headline?

unless you are satoshi maybe?

Let me say only that I am neither Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto nor Craig Steven Wright.  

Funny how for someone not "believing" in bitcoin you still cling on religiously to what Satoshi intended/said/meant or not and based on a 8 years old WP.

Still a troll.

[mymenace]

Bitcoin is not a viable a longterm store of value, because it has no mechanism to stabilize its value.  (Even if it were truly scarce -- which it isn't -- there are plenty of things that are just as scarce but totally worthless.)

Bitcoin's real value can only be determined by on-chain transaction volume.  If nobody is doing business on-chain, there will be no demand for coins, meaning no liquidity in markets, and price will drop seeking liquidity.  Which is why not raising block size is utterly stupid if you care anything about price with Lightning Network not released yet.

If Lightning Network is ever released and functions, it's technically just bundling the same on-chain transactions, so price would continue to increase with an increase in LN volume, just not with an increase in security from fees being bundled.  Most people would probably argue Bitcoin has enough security already, and mining increasing to the point of infinity where the entire planet is covered by a bitcoin miner is probably not a good idea.

yes maybe true

is it any different to oil or other stores of value, not really

lets try oil

[JayJuanGee]

So are you saying that we are going down, and I should sell a bit more... ha hahaha... what fucking looney to attempt to judge what someone else should be doing.

Must be that English is not my first language, neither my second. I was (trying to) positively cheer for you bitcoin reaching 502$ so you are in the green as well, and only envy your considerable stake. No harm intended and good for you that you managed to get your average price down while only trading with 10% of your stash.

Edit: for the record, I do not trade at all. Cold storage + small amounts for weekly / monthly usage.

Yep. Seem like I misunderstood some of your assertions and I thought that you were attempting to defend the downward price predictions of  Morefreecoins.

Thanks for the clarification.

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[Richy_T]

they are trying their power grab,

Power grab? If there is any power to grab, that is a problem in and of itself.

[Andre#]

That's more about the technicalities of a normal fork-split situation rather than a social-engineered takeover attempt.

You're using double standards acting like Blockstream pretending they should have dictatorship over Bitcoin isn't a social engineer takeover attempt itself.  Devs don't control Bitcoin.  Devs are politicians and we don't have a one party system.  If we did, Bitcoin would be centralized and worthless.  Whoever wants to rage quit because they don't get to be dictator and do everything their way, let them.  

I'm also tired of people pretending the Lightning Network is actually a sure thing.  I have my doubts about how it will work in the real world, and people like Anonymint claim it won't work at all.  Maybe it will, but people aren't very big into just trusting some group of people that they will maybe someday in the future increase scalability while price could either stagnate or go down until that happens.  Segwit is too little, too late, and LN is too far off.  There has to be some kind of bandaid for investors in the meanwhile until LN can be fully released and evaluated.

And please, don't even pull the "price doesn't matter" bullshit lol.  Bitcoin is a currency, if one of your main development goals isn't to increase it's network effect and value, then you're probably doing it wrong.  A currency is a consensus mechanism between individuals in lieu of barter.  In order to fulfill that goal, the largest number of people possible have to be holders or it's either harder for them to do business, or they can't do business at all.  This means sane Bitcoin development has to constantly be trying to expand capacity to fit more users.  Unless capacity is already high enough for world reserve currency, any stagnation of capacity increase while users are demanding more will be viewed negatively by the market.

There's also no such thing as "spam".  If you think spam exists, it means minimum transaction fee is not set high enough.  Zero fee transactions should not exist in the first place.

This.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

It's some pretty cold turkey. 

That's England, not Turkey.

Did England ever have camels? During the supercontinent days, maybe? I think that's a sort of comical idea, that.

Feel free to discuss.

[r0ach]

Lauda says really bright folks have done some serious thinking and concluded 4MB with SegWit will put security in danger.

Grave danger, presumably.

If you mean a sigops attack fix, hilariously, it can be fixed with a hard fork, which is what a block size increase is...a hard fork.  The 1MB people like to claim that block size will be raised without a sigops fix done at the same time, claiming Bitcoin would immediately die.  This means a segwit soft fork is inherently more dangerous than a hard fork, while also being more complex.

[AlexGR]

And please, don't even pull the "price doesn't matter" bullshit lol.  Bitcoin is a currency, if one of your main development goals isn't to increase it's network effect and value, then you're probably doing it wrong.  A currency is a consensus mechanism between individuals in lieu of barter.  In order to fulfill that goal, the largest number of people possible have to be holders or it's either harder for them to do business, or they can't do business at all.  This means sane Bitcoin development has to constantly be trying to expand capacity to fit more users.  Unless capacity is already high enough for world reserve currency, any stagnation of capacity increase while users are demanding more will be viewed negatively by the market.

There's also no such thing as "spam".  If you think spam exists, it means minimum transaction fee is not set high enough.  Zero fee transactions should not exist in the first place.

Satoshi said the system was not suitable for micropayments. He said it would probably not be suitable for <0.01 txs. He considered spam a problem and he said he is taking intentional measures to restrict very small transactions.

The value of the network will not increase if the blockchain is 100 terabytes full of junk, requiring gbps to move around junk. But it will increase if it is efficient in its hardware and network resources even if that means restricting dust - as it was intended to. Not by me, not by "blockstream", but by satoshi himself.

Bitcoin isn't currently practical for very small micropayments.  Not for things like pay per search or per page view without an aggregating mechanism, not things needing to pay less than 0.01.  The dust spam limit is a first try at intentionally trying to prevent overly small micropayments like that.

Bitcoin is practical for smaller transactions than are practical with existing payment methods.  Small enough to include what you might call the top of the micropayment range.  But it doesn't claim to be practical for arbitrarily small micropayments.

Forgot to add the good part about micropayments.  While I don't think Bitcoin is practical for smaller micropayments right now, it will eventually be as storage and bandwidth costs continue to fall.  If Bitcoin catches on on a big scale, it may already be the case by that time.  Another way they can become more practical is if I implement client-only mode and the number of network nodes consolidates into a smaller number of professional server farms.  Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical.  I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial.

I am not claiming that the network is impervious to DoS attack.  I think most P2P networks can be DoS attacked in numerous ways.  (On a side note, I read that the record companies would like to DoS all the file sharing networks, but they don't want to break the anti-hacking/anti-abuse laws.)

If we started getting DoS attacked with loads of wasted transactions back and forth, you would need to start paying a 0.01 minimum transaction fee.  0.1.5 actually had an option to set that, but I took it out to reduce confusion.  Free transactions are nice and we can keep it that way if people don't abuse them.

It would be nice to keep the blk*.dat files small as long as we can.

The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.

But for now, while it's still small, it's nice to keep it small so new users can get going faster.  When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won't matter much anymore.

There's more work to do on transaction fees. In the event of a flood, you would still be able to jump the queue and get your transactions into the next block by paying a 0.01 transaction fee.

[AZwarel]

Bitcoin is not a viable a longterm store of value, because it has no mechanism to stabilize its value.  (Even if it were truly scarce -- which it isn't -- there are plenty of things that are just as scarce but totally worthless.)

Bitcoin's real value can only be determined by on-chain transaction volume.  If nobody is doing business on-chain, there will be no demand for coins, meaning no liquidity in markets, and price will drop seeking liquidity.  Which is why not raising block size is utterly stupid if you care anything about price with Lightning Network not released yet.

If Lightning Network is ever released and functions, it's technically just bundling the same on-chain transactions, so price would continue to increase with an increase in LN volume, just not with an increase in security from fees being bundled.  Most people would probably argue Bitcoin has enough security already, and mining increasing to the point of infinity where the entire planet is covered by a bitcoin miner is probably not a good idea.

Exactly. Problem is i guess most here are not understanding or dismiss principal economics, and forget the one and only rule: the free market - if it is indeed free - always wins in the long run, and no politically driven central controlled engineering can go against the collective wisdom and need of the users. That is supposed to be the whole point of bitcoin.

If the market wants bigger and bigger space for transactions ON the blockchain in the future - most tend to forget how great things like asset registry, stocks, bonds, etc have been told will be residing ON the blockchain, not on some 3rd party, semi centralized pseudo solution mechanism- , developers* have no choice, than to give it. If they do not, and the expanding market sees that the utility/liquidity of the most prevalent version stopped serving the market, they leave, either to another implementation - like Classic seems to be right now -, or choose another solution. Creative destruction, the mechanism of free market evolution.

I do not understand how "smallblockers" or elitist (read Hayek's Fatal Conceit) forget this simple fact:
the utility hence the value of the network is solely based on the judgement of the USER - who might have no clue about the technical part, bandwidth, storage space - but the system is for them. It can not exist for the will of developers/miners. Without millions of users, whom voluntary agree to hold, move, invest economic value in the network, mining and development is meaningless. If core can not find a solution for the needs, someone else will, for there is economic reward for it!

Without ever increasing adoption, and new utility, like colored coins for example, the price will stop growing, and mining becomes ever increasingly useless - because the coinbase reward diminishes, fees can not go up - no new users who would compete for blockspace -, and network value diminishes**.

Just as r0ach and others tried to explain, and frankly, it gets frustrating after a while:
Economic reasons trump technical/engineering/ideological reasons in real life EVERY time, especially in an open, competitive market.

It does not matter, if someone against ever increasing blocks because "oh noes, decentralization!!!***", if the majority of the users value more blockspace, increased tx/s more than home PC run nodes, they will sacrifice the ability to do home PC run nodes for them; if the market reaches a consensus about an increase, it will happen, for the market sees it as a change to deliver greater value for the majority of the participants - that is essentially the consensus reaching mechanism, what satoshi described. There are no all knowing wise guys, who tell the peasants what is good for them (and that his tx is "spam". Such arrogant elitism!). That is whats happening with Bitcoin Classic in front of our very eyes, and yet some still do not get that the market always wins!

And yes, participation is voluntary in the network. If some do not like the decision of the majority****, leave, or stay and stop sulking, it does not help anyone.

*and anyone can be a developer, bitcoin is permissionless, hence "true bitcoin" has no meaning;
**if the total value of economic activity increases globally, and bitcoin is at a fixed non increasing capacity hence value, than the ratio of bitcoin value/global value gets smaller with time, towards zero;
***bitcoin is not exempt of economic principles. If it gets robust enough, it also has to operate on the rules of economic scaling. CPU mining vanished as network value went up, same will happen with cheap PC run nodes, it is inevitable.
****this is not democracy, this is meritocracy. Build up 30% hashpower, or buy a million BTC, than you can influence the consensus greater. Stop the culture marxist bullshit about "all ideas are equally valid, i do not like yours, so everything must stop". They are clearly not, and that is good. More risk taking investment (knowledge, resources, service) equals more "votes".

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation