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

[CuntChocula]

You keep implying a link between "economic majority" and "nodes."  Not obvious to me.
Nodes could be created & run (at minimal expense) by actors hodling no bitcoin; many (most) hodlers don't run nodes, so?

You aren't realizing that full nodes validate both the longest PoW chain and if the valid rules are being followed. What you are describing is the creation of an alt , which is fine and has no direct impact on bitcoin. Nodes that don't have economic interests behind them are of little value. Not all nodes are equal!

Here is an analogy to consider:

What is worth more: 5 large fortune 500 companies and their userbase that enjoys their products and services or 100 shell companies with no capital, no products, and no users? What happens in an ecosystem when these 100 shell companies are introduced to a location and the general public chooses to ignore them because they don't like their product?

I don't care what the full nodes do, it is irrelevant to my [implicit] question, which is: What makes you believe there's any correlation between nodes & BTC wealth?

[BitUsher]

I don't care what the full nodes do, it is irrelevant to my [implicit] question, which is: What makes you believe there's any correlation between nodes & BTC wealth?

Your question is generic and open ended and can be interpreted in multiple ways. So I will take a stab at explaining different aspects. A node is indeed relatively cheap to produce and maintain, but nodes without economic intrest are valueless just like anything in life - fiat, assets, stocks, ect..).The reason why certain nodes are more valuable than others is because the network effect. A single user behind a full node with an active wallet is more valuable than a userless ec2 node because the node is being tested for bugs and has a real economic actor behind it that can make both economic decisions as to assigning value to items and the consensus rules within his wallet. A node controlled by a processor /wallet/ merchant has a greater value as they have a pool of users interacting with their node and thus conforming to their consensus rules.

Here is an analogy to consider:

What is worth more: 5 large fortune 500 companies(these companies can be represented by humans and code alone and don't nessesarily need to sell a physical good) and their userbase that enjoys their products and services or 100 shell companies with no capital, no products, and no users? What happens in an ecosystem when these 100 shell companies are introduced to a location and the general public chooses to ignore them because they don't like their product?

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Why are we back above 400? Has the Toominista Rebellion really been defeated?

[BitUsher]

Why are we back above 400? Has the Toominista Rebellion really been defeated?

Appears to be china news or stock market getting slammed due to uncertainty and a small amount of capital flight... when consensus is reached or other competing implementations give up I expect a much higher bump.

[inca]

Why are we back above 400? Has the Toominista Rebellion really been defeated?

Appears to be china news or stock market getting slammed due to uncertainty and a small amount of capital flight... when consensus is reached or other competing implementations give up I expect a much higher bump.

Yep once we get consensus - either a fork higher or Core fold and increase the maximum blocksize to arrest complete loss of support from the entire ecosystem - the relief rally (conveniently timed as a pre-halving surge) could be epic.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[BitUsher]

Why are we back above 400? Has the Toominista Rebellion really been defeated?

Appears to be china news or stock market getting slammed due to uncertainty and a small amount of capital flight... when consensus is reached or other competing implementations give up I expect a much higher bump.

Yep once we get consensus - either a fork higher or Core fold and increase the maximum blocksize to arrest complete loss of support from the entire ecosystem - the relief rally (conveniently timed as a pre-halving surge) could be epic.

Hopefully you aren't presenting a false dichotomy... as core is soft forking higher to an effective 2MB with Segwit , and classic is HF higher to 2MB with BIP 102. Your statement above is misleading as it insinuates that core needs to fold to increase capacity when they already decided to increase the blocksize with segwit last year.

The one exception to a huge rise is if there is a great split in the community... as there are many large stakeholders who are core supporters and have different agendas than just going mainstream and making a big profit that others have. This is why any proposal that doesn't at least attempt to get 95% consensus of the last 1k blocks (because this merely represents a indirect rough estimate of economic node support ) is dangerous and can potentially leave us in a situation of uncertainty and during a hard fork one might see massive sell offs on both chains.  It does make for some interesting game theory as many whales are conservative large bag holders and can do things like make massive investments in ASIC's or dump their all their coins on one fork in an attempt to devalue the other chain. It would be better if they can work together especially since I don't see any real capacity differences between core and classic...but , never a dull moment, like always.

[adamstgBit]

Segregated Witness

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Segregated Witness

[adamstgBit]

inevitably we will have to increase block size

but with Segwit and all the other scaling work done, we won't need much more than a few dozen MB in the end.

[coinsplz777]

Why are we back above 400? Has the Toominista Rebellion really been defeated?

Appears to be china news or stock market getting slammed due to uncertainty and a small amount of capital flight... when consensus is reached or other competing implementations give up I expect a much higher bump.

Yep once we get consensus - either a fork higher or Core fold and increase the maximum blocksize to arrest complete loss of support from the entire ecosystem - the relief rally (conveniently timed as a pre-halving surge) could be epic.

Wow, can you smell the bitcoins at $3K! 

[CuntChocula]

I don't care what the full nodes do, it is irrelevant to my [implicit] question, which is: What makes you believe there's any correlation between nodes & BTC wealth?

Your question is generic and open ended and can be interpreted in multiple ways. So I will take a stab at explaining different aspects. A node is indeed relatively cheap to produce and maintain, but nodes without economic intrest are valueless just like anything in life - fiat, assets, stocks, ect..).The reason why certain nodes are more valuable than others is because the network effect. A single user behind a full node with an active wallet is more valuable than a userless ec2 node because the node is being tested for bugs and has a real economic actor behind it that can make both economic decisions as to assigning value to items and the consensus rules within his wallet. A node controlled by a processor /wallet/ merchant has a greater value as they have a pool of users interacting with their node and thus conforming to their consensus rules.

When you say "valuable," valuable to what/whom? All nodes validate & relay transactions, so how does the network know (and why should it care) about how much BTC the node's creator has? A node is a node, it validates according to its ruleset, no more no less?

Here is an analogy to consider:

What is worth more: 5 large fortune 500 companies(these companies can be represented by humans and code alone and don't nessesarily need to sell a physical good) and their userbase that enjoys their products and services or 100 shell companies with no capital, no products, and no users? What happens in an ecosystem when these 100 shell companies are introduced to a location and the general public chooses to ignore them because they don't like their product?

How does the network know how to value a node? I must be missing something very basic.

[Richy_T]

Having studied the data for another project, it has come to my attention that some of the miners out there are still mining with a 750k soft-limit.

What this means is that some blocks which appear to be 75% full are, effectively 100% full. This skews the averages. I'm not going to have ChartBuddy change the way he calculates the averages but I am going to have him mark them in the dots. I think purple will be the color to use.

Additionally, someone seems to be mining with a 250k soft limit. I don't know what to make of that and I'm not going to add any processing for it but just thought I'd note it out of interest.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

The competition has arrived:

Today Wilcox and his startup Zcash are launching the first public alpha release of the cryptography world’s best shot yet at perfectly untraceable digital money. Using a mathematical sleight-of-hand known as a “zero-knowledge proof,” Zcash (until recently known as Zerocoin or Zerocash) offers the same anti-forgery assurances as bitcoin: No one can counterfeit Zcash, or spend the same Zcash “coin” twice. But thanks to its zero-knowledge feature, any spender or receiver can also choose to keep their Zcash payment entirely secret

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/zcash-an-untraceable-bitcoin-alternative-launches-in-alpha/

For its first four years online, a portion of every mined Zcash coin will go directly to Wilcox’s Zcash company and a smaller portion to a non-profit he’s creating to oversee the Zcash code and community longterm.

 

[findftp]

inevitably we will have to increase block size

but with Segwit and all the other scaling work done, we won't need much more than a few dozen MB in the end.

We?

You do not have my consent.
Create you're own alt coin.
Fuck the fork, I will stay on the legacy chain.
Make your coins obsolete by spending them on the fork...

[peonminer]

Segregated Witness

[yefi]

Having studied the data for another project, it has come to my attention that some of the miners out there are still mining with a 750k soft-limit.

What this means is that some blocks which appear to be 75% full are, effectively 100% full. This skews the averages. I'm not going to have ChartBuddy change the way he calculates the averages but I am going to have him mark them in the dots. I think purple will be the color to use.

Additionally, someone seems to be mining with a 250k soft limit. I don't know what to make of that and I'm not going to add any processing for it but just thought I'd note it out of interest.

Hi Rich,

I think it would be useful if Chartbuddy's explanation link described all of the new additions. I was scratching my head a bit when I first saw the block-fullness diagram. At the moment the explanation just covers the walls. Thanks!

[BitUsher]

When you say "valuable," valuable to what/whom? All nodes validate & relay transactions, so how does the network know (and why should it care) about how much BTC the node's creator has? A node is a node, it validates according to its ruleset, no more no less?

How does the network know how to value a node? I must be missing something very basic.

When there are human beings on the other end of the nodes , those human beings have agency to value one node over another. They can value a full node or a SPV node differently because one offers better security and the other requires less resources(Fraud proofs and pruned full nodes will offer a greater variety.) Nodes that are controlled by merchants/exchanges ect have more value because the users and businesses value them.

The Code doesn't have any AI in it that makes a conscious assessment as to its relative value. The humans at the other end of the nodes are merely an extension of the network that place value on the nodes and the rules behind the code.

What you are missing is that Humans are part of the Bitcoin network.

[sAt0sHiFanClub]

right and if 75% of miners went to some fork probably 99.9% would come join them shortly after and then who cares about anything else?

[snipity snip]

The Vote is = The longest valid PoW chain, with an emphasis on valid and only nodes deciding what is and isn't valid. The miners can hash all they want on an invalid chain , but they won't be necessarily following the nodes or economic majority.

This matters because when you look at how the hardforks are rolled out they are not polling the nodes but miners for an rough and indirect means of determining node support. There very well could be a dangerous situation where 75% of miners decide to fork , but over 75% of nodes and the economic consensus decides not to which would be very dangerous.  This is why I recommend that all hardforks have at least 95% consensus of blocks within the last 1k to activate a countdown. Luckily Bitcoin classic still has time to change their minds from 75% to 95% as they have yet to release code.

What, exactly, are the nodes going to accept as valid except what the miners create? They (miners) crack the puzzle, then put the block together and publish it - the others then build on this..  Nodes then follow the longest one.

What you are saying makes no sense.

but over 75% of nodes and the economic consensus decides not to which would be very dangerous

No its not - if they choose to follow anything other than the longest, valid chain then they are no longer following bitcoin. If they want their coins, however, they will.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation