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

[Cconvert2G36]

... This week in Stolfi's utopia.

In the grand experiment of Bitcoin, one involving a large number of human participants and for a variety of reasons... expecting only the right people being involved for the right reasons is ridiculous.

A tool has been created. What the tool enables, where that leads, and how, is up for history to decide. I doubt Satoshi was ignorant of this fact when he released it into the wild.

I'm sure his conscience will have an easier go of it than Oppenheimer's.

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

This is a known protocol design bug: signatures were defined in such a way that the cost of validating a transaction with N signatures is proportional to N² rather than N.  

It has a known simple solution: limit the number of inputs of a transaction to some reasonable value, say 20 or 100, independent of the block size limit.  That will keep the cost of verifying one transaction bounded

Most of that is Greek to me. How would a sharp Core supporter respond?

Oops, it is actually worse than N², apparently

Trying again: There is a complicated transaction that barely fits in a 1 MB block, that takes 30 seconds to validate.  Someone built a transaction twice as big, filling a 2 MB block, that takes twenty times as long (600 seconds; not just twice as long (60 seconds) as one would expect.

Right now there is no limit to the complexity of one transaction, except that the whole transaction must fit in a 1 MB block.  If the block size limit is increased, then one could issue the more complicated transactions like the one above, probably causing problems for miners.

But there is a known simple solution that (AFAIK) was used in BitcoinXT and/or BIP101.

[JorgeStolfi]

... This week in Stolfi's utopia.

In the grand experiment of Bitcoin, one involving a large number of human participants and for a variety of reasons... expecting only the right people being involved for the right reasons is ridiculous.

A tool has been created. What the tool enables, where that leads, and how, is up for history to decide. I doubt Satoshi was ignorant of this fact when he released it into the wild.

What attracted the scammers and snake oil peddlers was the money.  The big ones came in early 2013, it seems, although Hal Finney is said to have predicted that twist already in 2009.  IIRC, Satoshi reacted has if he had not given it much thought.

Satoshi's basic mistake was to make the currency non-inflationary.  It is forgivable, since he was a computer type and not an economist.  I would have made the same mistake. Inflation is bad, of course -- everybody knows that, right?

Satoshi's disappeared six months after Jed McCaleb repurposed MtGOX to be a bitcoin exchange, and 3-4 months before it was sold to Mark. Maybe Satoshi saw the future when MtGOX started to attract speculators.

[smooth]

Nothing is going to stay in some fixed microcosm when it is projected to grow. Satoshi himself said that Bitcoin was going to be big or nothing, so there was no vision that Bitcoin would remain some niche experiment as it, of course, had to start out small before it could become bigger.

Again: once, while discussing future user base growth, Satoshi considered 20% per year (doubling every 4 years) a "crazy" rate of growth.  That would be consistent with his chosen block reward schedule (halving every four years).  With a "non-crazy" growth rate of less than 20%/year, the USD value of the block reward would have deceased with time, forcing the system to transition gradually to fees.

Surely he was too smart to risk actual predictions, but on the other hand he cannot have expected the price to rise by a factor of 10 every year for 5 years.  So the USD value of the block reward too increased by almost he same factor, instead of decreasing as he may have expected.

The price rose so fast because of speculative investment and trading, fueled by predictions that it would one day replace VISA.  That surely is a use for bitcoin that he did not expect.  If there is something that the world did not need in 2009, and will never need, is another penny stock.  He would not have bothered creating bitcoin, if he knew that it would turn into that.

If he did not expect that to be part of the behavior, then he was completely stupid about markets, and I rather doubt that.

Once the possibility that it can someday replace VISA exists (or alternately function alongside VISA at a similar scale), people will speculatively trade on that possibility. Markets do not function in a manner where the value is in any way proportionate with number of current users. To the extent that value is proportionate with number of users at all, the basis for that proportionality is expected future users, a quantity that will certainly be highly volatile as current developments influence market consensus expectations of future outcomes.

How people on a trading thread could be so completely clueless about that is a mystery to me.

Anyway, block rewards will not necessarily increase nor decrease in USD value, it just depends on future market conditions. Either is possible. I certainly expect that this upcoming halving will see a decrease in USD value, but I can't be sure of that of course. As for future ones, nobody has any clue, whether they claim to or not.

Regarding signatures, I agree with JorgeStolfi that the simple measure of just limiting transactions to some reasonable size (at least temporarily) is easy and sufficient.

EDIT: He seems not clueless about markets, so we can rule out that he didn't expect and accept that speculation would occur

A rational market price for something that is expected to increase in value will already reflect the present value of the expected future increases.  In your head, you do a probability estimate balancing the odds that it keeps increasing.

[marcus_of_augustus]

A tool has been created. What the tool enables, where that leads, and how, is up for history to decide. I doubt Satoshi was ignorant of this fact when he released it into the wild.

I'm sure his conscience will have an easier go of it than Oppenheimer's.

i think it was well known that Oppenheimer was a psychopath that likely didn't have a conscience ... yet a remarkable mind never-the-less.

[Cconvert2G36]

A tool has been created. What the tool enables, where that leads, and how, is up for history to decide. I doubt Satoshi was ignorant of this fact when he released it into the wild.

I'm sure his conscience will have an easier go of it than Oppenheimer's.

i think it was well known that Oppenheimer was a psychopath that likely didn't have a conscience ... yet a remarkable mind never-the-less.

The guy that quoted the Bhagavad Gita...

Psychopath confirmed.

[Richy_T]

Why would be only 5-10, or only 500 nodes? There is no factual data to support that claim at all.

Everyone can have a p2p client that deals with 10kb/sec, has 100 mb storage requirements, needs 1 small cpu and 256mb ram. As you go up and up in hw requirements, cost goes up, "volunteers" go down - even if userbase goes up. As you hit datacenter level requirements the number of "volunteers" starts dropping significantly because costs start running in the 5 digit, then 6 digit category and eventually you'll be paying millions.

Some of us remember 8 bit CPUs running at 4Mhz with 1k of RAM and software stored on audio cassettes. Hard drives were just something you read about. The first one I actually had (nearly 10 years later) was 40MB

In the past 10 years, I have seen 10 racks of servers in a server room disappear into a handful of Virtual hosts. I'm currently running a full node on Amazon's smallest, weakest instance type. Their cost for storing the blockchain as it currently stands is on the order of $5/month.

These are issues we should not be worrying about until they are measurably becoming an issue. Like regularly full blocks already *are*

[JorgeStolfi]

The price rose so fast because of speculative investment and trading, fueled by predictions that it would one day replace VISA.  That surely is a use for bitcoin that he did not expect.  If there is something that the world did not need in 2009, and will never need, is another penny stock.  He would not have bothered creating bitcoin, if he knew that it would turn into that.

If he did not expect that to be part of the behavior, then he was completely stupid about markets, and I rather doubt that.

Once the possibility that it can someday replace VISA exists (or alternately function alongside VISA at a similar scale), people will speculatively trade on that possibility.

What I meant is other people started talking of bitcoin taking a significant slice of VISA's market, either sincerely or to pump the price.  Satoshi himself does not seem to have intended that, and even suggested the opposite:

Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions

I read that as "bitcoin is not meant to replace VISA or bank wires, but is meant to be used when a third party is not available or really not appropriate".

Anyway, block rewards will not necessarily increase nor decrease in USD value, it just depends on future market conditions. Either is possible.

Of course.  I was trying to guess what Satoshi was thinking when he defined the halving schedule.

[smooth]

I think he anticipated (possibly) being bigger than VISA

Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine.

Eventually at most only 21 million coins for 6.8 billion people in the world if it really gets huge.

etc.

He did anticipate that the block rewards would become insignificant though, long before they actually reach zero in 100+ years.

In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes

[AZwarel]

Why would be only 5-10, or only 500 nodes? There is no factual data to support that claim at all.

Everyone can have a p2p client that deals with 10kb/sec, has 100 mb storage requirements, needs 1 small cpu and 256mb ram. As you go up and up in hw requirements, cost goes up, "volunteers" go down - even if userbase goes up. As you hit datacenter level requirements the number of "volunteers" starts dropping significantly because costs start running in the 5 digit, then 6 digit category and eventually you'll be paying millions.

Some of us remember 8 bit CPUs running at 4Mhz with 1k of RAM and software stored on audio cassettes. Hard drives were just something you read about. The first one I actually had (nearly 10 years later) was 40MB

+1

I tried to explain this exact point many times before. Some pretend here that suddenly hardware will not increase anymore in the next 10 years, and we are all doomed because 60GB+ blockchain. I remember installing programs from 10+ floppy disks, and am only in my early 30s. My cell phone is stronger than university computers were ~15 years ago.

[CuntChocula]

Nothing is going to stay in some fixed microcosm when it is projected to grow. Satoshi himself said that Bitcoin was going to be big or nothing, so there was no vision that Bitcoin would remain some niche experiment as it, of course, had to start out small before it could become bigger.

Again: once, while discussing future user base growth, Satoshi considered 20% per year (doubling every 4 years) a "crazy" rate of growth.  That would be consistent with his chosen block reward schedule (halving every four years).  With a "non-crazy" growth rate of less than 20%/year, the USD value of the block reward would have deceased with time, forcing the system to transition gradually to fees.

Surely he was too smart to risk actual predictions, but on the other hand he cannot have expected the price to rise by a factor of 10 every year for 5 years.  So the USD value of the block reward too increased by almost he same factor, instead of decreasing as he may have expected.

The price rose so fast because of speculative investment and trading, fueled by predictions that it would one day replace VISA.  That surely is a use for bitcoin that he did not expect.  If there is something that the world did not need in 2009, and will never need, is another penny stock.  He would not have bothered creating bitcoin, if he knew that it would turn into that.

If he did not expect that to be part of the behavior, then he was completely stupid about markets, and I rather doubt that.

Once the possibility that it can someday replace VISA exists (or alternately function alongside VISA at a similar scale), people will speculatively trade on that possibility. Markets do not function in a manner where the value is in any way proportionate with number of current users. To the extent that value is proportionate with number of users at all, the basis for that proportionality is expected future users, a quantity that will certainly be highly volatile as current developments influence market consensus expectations of future outcomes.

How people on a trading thread could be so completely clueless about that is a mystery to me.

Anyway, block rewards will not necessarily increase nor decrease in USD value, it just depends on future market conditions. Either is possible. I certainly expect that this upcoming halving will see a decrease in USD value, but I can't be sure of that of course. As for future ones, nobody has any clue, whether they claim to or not.

Regarding signatures, I agree with JorgeStolfi that the simple measure of just limiting transactions to some reasonable size (at least temporarily) is easy and sufficient.

EDIT: He seems not clueless about markets, so we can rule out that he didn't expect and accept that speculation would occur

A rational market price for something that is expected to increase in value will already reflect the present value of the expected future increases.  In your head, you do a probability estimate balancing the odds that it keeps increasing.

TL;DR? Bullish?

[BitcoinjunkieZ]

Bitcoin Prise again on another rise for the 1000$ ?  
Would be great

[smooth]

TL;DR? Bullish?

Cautiously bullish at the moment. I think the Hearn-Crypsy dump was overdone, but Im not a very good short term trader.

[Patel]

I'm bearish for the next 2-3 months. We'll stay above 275, but it's gonna be a slow decline to 300 or so.

1W MACD not looking good. Especially because MACD has almost always been in green since March 2015, it's time to see some red.

All this hard fork talk will contribute to it.

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[Mrpumperitis]

great discussion guys    roach n alex    , jorge n smooth , azwarel n richy and a few others debating gd tech talk

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[r0ach]

Satoshi's basic mistake was to make the currency non-inflationary.

Anonymint made the same mistake as you, thinking it's somehow more ethical to have an inflationary currency.  I think I have debunked that notion in the link below:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13544160#msg13544160

I wrote that too before: it became a pyramid investment scheme and a tool for crime.  

You need to lay off the moonshine before typing stuff like this.  All forms of currency are either pyramids or ponzies.  Any finite commodity like gold where you can attempt to corner the market is a pyramid scheme.  Paper money is a Ponzi because the infinite printing fulfills the requirement for needing a continuous stream of investors or you're by definition robbing the others.  The unsustainable requirement of the Ponzi is also fulfilled by the fact that currency is inherently an options contract for goods or services in the future.  The fact that I can just refuse to accept your paper currency and switch to a different currency making you not able to redeem anything gives it an always unsustainable nature each second of the day.  They're nothing but option contract time bombs.

The only honest man's currency is to remove the abstraction and just use flat out barter.  You're making a deal with the devil in order to have more efficient specialization of labor.  And "crime", give me a break.  You can delete every currency that exists and there will still be crime, so what are you even talking about.

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation