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

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Hence my question, why don't miners just ignore txs that carry too little fees? It's up to them to separate the paying customers from the freeloaders.

Only they can answer it.

It’s because they’re in a rush to secure the block reward. Innit?

[xyzzy099]

...
Who decided what the existing minimum fees are? Greenspan?

Are there minimum fees? If so, what are they/who/ how were they implemented?

min fees now seem to be set by core, via their software. Filthy non-coding Miners hardly get a look in anymore.

Anyone running a node (including miners) can set mintxfee and minrelaytxfee to whatever they want, can't they?

[Richy_T]

Correct - but you are relying on the kindness of strangers to get your tx in to a block. and that will only happen if there is spare capacity ( i.e it costs the miner zero to include it ) But bear in mind that the old 'reserved' portion of the block (50K) for free priority tx's is now gone (by default) and that the concept of priority is about to be killed off entirely, I think its fair to say that the idea of free tx's is dead.

There are still miners out there with old versions of the software and running the defaults. Thus, if there's not too much of a backlog, it's quite possible zero fee transactions will get included.

So if zero fee transactions are actually a problem, perhaps it is better that we do have a bit of miner centralization so we have professional miners who actually pay attention to what they are doing instead of a bunch of amateurs not acting in their rational self-interest as was supposed to happen.

[Andre#]

If I look at the last eight blocks (395,151-395,158) I see that 16,093 tx were processed for a fee of 3.08 BTC. That's 0.000191 BTC/tx or USD 0.0766 . I'm not sure how much zero-fee transactions are in there, but with an average of 7.7 cents, how much higher should the minimum fee bee in your opinion?

The average is problematic because there are some guys who are paying A LOT of fees without actually needing to pay them:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Anything above 50 satoshis/byte right now is overkill, yet some are paying >100 satoshi/byte which distort the average, while a lot of txs are in the 0, 1-10 and 11-20 satoshi/byte categories.

A lot? The past 24 hours only 1,079 free txs were processed, and 33,447 cheap ones (1-20 shatoshi/B). Compared with the almost 200k other txs, that's only 0.5% zero-fee and 14% cheap-fee txs.

I'm more concerned about 0 and 1-10.

10 satoshi x 250 bytes = 2500 satoshi for a normal tx = 1 cent.

Yeah, I say fuck them. Some countries even stopped minting 1 cent coins altogether due to the coin metal and minting costing more than 1 cent

If we assume that people paying more than 20 s/B fee are not spammers or abusers, then we gain only 17% in capacity by further pushing zero/cheap tx out of the system. That's peanuts. It means that if the 1 MB tx supply quota stays intact, some Bitcoin usage simply has to stop in favour of better paying usage. Given how small Bitcoin still is, that's pretty sad.

[rebuilder]

There are still miners out there with old versions of the software and running the defaults. Thus, if there's not too much of a backlog, it's quite possible zero fee transactions will get included.

So if zero fee transactions are actually a problem, perhaps it is better that we do have a bit of miner centralization so we have professional miners who actually pay attention to what they are doing instead of a bunch of amateurs not acting in their rational self-interest as was supposed to happen.

Don't amateurs mainly hash for pools? It seems hard to believe there's any significant hashrate operated by hobbyists who actually run their own bitcoind for mining.

[Dotto]

Massive pumps in tons of alts. Doge +76%. Some others less known +117%. Someone has a theory to explain this move?.

This doge is soo shortable that im tempted...

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[nor9865]

Massive pumps in tons of alts. Doge +76%. Some others less known +117%. Someone has a theory to explain this move?.

This doge is soo shortable that im tempted...

killing bitcoins pushing altcoins up and then when btc price is half down it is now, buying a lot of btc and then killing the altcoins again. its just a profitability issue for whales

[belmonty]

Massive pumps in tons of alts. Doge +76%. Some others less known +117%. Someone has a theory to explain this move?.

This doge is soo shortable that im tempted...

Is it some hacker laundering massive quantities of stolen Bitcoins through altcoin trading? When I see obscure coins getting pumped like UnionCoin with $157,810 daily volume I often wonder if it's being used for laundering. Maybe they are genuinely being pumped, but you never know. I hope whoever's profiting from those altcoins doesn't sell their Bitcoin stash.

[aztecminer]

Massive pumps in tons of alts. Doge +76%. Some others less known +117%. Someone has a theory to explain this move?.

This doge is soo shortable that im tempted...

i'll stab at it... because bitcoin is in can't scale but the halving gimp mode ?? #gimpcoin

[gizmoh]

Chinese Mining Pools Worried About Immature Segregated Witness Proposal

http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/01/26/chinese-mining-pools-worried-about-immature-bitcoin-core-block-size-proposal/


As if the Bitcoin community was not sick and tired of the ongoing block size debate just yet, it looks like the Chinese miners have come to a consensus of their own. The plan is to reject any forking of Bitcoin that does not gain 90% consensus or more while still favoring a 2 MB block size increase. During a recent meeting between mining pool operators, various security concerns associated with Segregated Witness were raised. It looks like Bitcoin Classic is winning this “race”.

[nor9865]

if the recent dev who quit bitcoins and has dumped all his coins is behind this, i *may* have an idea about the strategy he is using. let me breakdown (its still just speculations)

since he has sold all his btc he has liquidity, plus he is now on the banking side. which means he may or may not use his insider knowledge to push bitcoins down to the drain (as bankers have always been trying to do)

so what he *might* have proposed to the bank is the only way to make people less attracted to bitcoins is by pulling its price down, how to pull it down is by pushing altcoins up. pushing altcoins up will make people more interrested in altcoins than in bitcoins thus dropping its price stability (more or less stability it was having at $400+)

then when bitcoin price is totally at a point people wont be interrested in and altcoins price have risen over bitcoin price, they *might (if they did buy) * just flush all the altcoins down the drain and that would be more or less the end of the cryptocurrency era until something else happens which makes it resist.

possible people who will be profitable with this scenario is the dev who is now working with the banks and the banks since they will buy very low and sell very high.

well of course i may not have enough knowledge about cryptocurrency to be exact in my claims but if we speak about "finance" this is how its running in my mind for a possible explanation about whats happening.

there is also the fear that btc will go below $380 in the mind of people. if btc doesnt stabilise at $400+
i myself will start panicking since i recently (few months ago) bought a lot at $221 and $238

now if its at $380 i will still be 100$+ profitable over each btc i have but speaking about finance and profitability, for me its a $25 loss that i will be looking at. and i will start dumping with the crowd who will most probably be doing the same at $380.

[JayJuanGee]

I used to notice that btc-e.com usually has less price that other english exchanges,
but now, its price is more $2 above others like bitfinix and bitstamp

bitfinix  = 392.5
btc-e = 394.8

Yep, it can be a bit curious regarding how, from time to time, thee rates on the various exchanges change in one direction or another, and surely, can cause various arbitrage opportunities,  especially, if the difference is either just coincident or inaccurate perception matters....

[nor9865]

Chinese Mining Pools Worried About Immature Segregated Witness Proposal

http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/01/26/chinese-mining-pools-worried-about-immature-bitcoin-core-block-size-proposal/


As if the Bitcoin community was not sick and tired of the ongoing block size debate just yet, it looks like the Chinese miners have come to a consensus of their own. The plan is to reject any forking of Bitcoin that does not gain 90% consensus or more while still favoring a 2 MB block size increase. During a recent meeting between mining pool operators, various security concerns associated with Segregated Witness were raised. It looks like Bitcoin Classic is winning this “race”.

what will the outcome of bitcoin classic have over the actual up and down price?

[gentlemand]

Is it some hacker laundering massive quantities of stolen Bitcoins through altcoin trading? When I see obscure coins getting pumped like UnionCoin with $157,810 daily volume I often wonder if it's being used for laundering. Maybe they are genuinely being pumped, but you never know. I hope whoever's profiting from those altcoins doesn't sell their Bitcoin stash.

It's happened plenty of times in the past too. It's often orchestrated by pump groups who then run away with vast profits. I can't see much has changed and if I was laundering I'd be using something dependable like LTC.

[AlexGR]

If I look at the last eight blocks (395,151-395,158) I see that 16,093 tx were processed for a fee of 3.08 BTC. That's 0.000191 BTC/tx or USD 0.0766 . I'm not sure how much zero-fee transactions are in there, but with an average of 7.7 cents, how much higher should the minimum fee bee in your opinion?

The average is problematic because there are some guys who are paying A LOT of fees without actually needing to pay them:

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Anything above 50 satoshis/byte right now is overkill, yet some are paying >100 satoshi/byte which distort the average, while a lot of txs are in the 0, 1-10 and 11-20 satoshi/byte categories.

A lot? The past 24 hours only 1,079 free txs were processed, and 33,447 cheap ones (1-20 shatoshi/B). Compared with the almost 200k other txs, that's only 0.5% zero-fee and 14% cheap-fee txs.

That's 33.447 transactions too many.

Practically, except those who overshot the fees at the bottom of the chart, everything included are cheap txs. There is nothing expensive at sub-10cents (not that 10 cents are expensive). The 14% is just ultra-cheap / near zero cost and most of the rest are slightly above ultra cheap.

If you have an average of even 30 satoshi per byte, then 1megabyte will cost ~0.3btc, a gigabyte 300 btc and a terabyte 300k BTC.

That's just 120mn USD for fucking up the blockchain / bloating it 15x upwards, while the marketcap is valued at several billions With half the fees (15 satoshi), it goes to 60mn usd for a 1TB attack. With larger blocks it becomes much easier and faster to accomplish if miners don't start cutting the trash off.

With "cheap storage" like this, even a third party enterprise can come aboard and say I'll use the Bitcoin blockchain for distributed storage of 50-100-200 GB for the X or Y application where I'll be using modified clients to pull out the data. And yeah, I'm willing to pay your peanuts in fees to do that, why not.

If we assume that people paying more than 20 s/B fee are not spammers or abusers, then we gain only 17% in capacity by further pushing zero/cheap tx out of the system. That's peanuts. It means that if the 1 MB tx supply quota stays intact, some Bitcoin usage simply has to stop in favour of better paying usage. Given how small Bitcoin still is, that's pretty sad.

10, 20, 40, 60 s/B, are all peanuts - not serious fees. 1c, 2c, 5c, 7c it's all way too cheap.

But if you can get away with abusing the network with the lowest possible cost, why not.

[CuntChocula]

...
That's just 120mn USD for fucking up the blockchain / bloating it 15x upwards, while the marketcap is valued at several billions ...

Bitcoin is unsafe is what it is!

[gizmoh]

Chinese Mining Pools Worried About Immature Segregated Witness Proposal

http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/01/26/chinese-mining-pools-worried-about-immature-bitcoin-core-block-size-proposal/


As if the Bitcoin community was not sick and tired of the ongoing block size debate just yet, it looks like the Chinese miners have come to a consensus of their own. The plan is to reject any forking of Bitcoin that does not gain 90% consensus or more while still favoring a 2 MB block size increase. During a recent meeting between mining pool operators, various security concerns associated with Segregated Witness were raised. It looks like Bitcoin Classic is winning this “race”.

what will the outcome of bitcoin classic have over the actual up and down price?

My take on short term outcomes:

Classic Adopted =  BIG price DOWN short term - Many early adopters/core supporters might sell. Core attacks/New Pow/ Bad press.

NO Consensus = NEUTRAL short term -  Price be determined via natural demand/supply & TA

Classic Rejected = NEUTRAL to Small Price UP short term - Uncertainty within the Market will be cleared "temporarily".

FYI, I believe classic is the way to go.

[belmonty]

Is it some hacker laundering massive quantities of stolen Bitcoins through altcoin trading? When I see obscure coins getting pumped like UnionCoin with $157,810 daily volume I often wonder if it's being used for laundering. Maybe they are genuinely being pumped, but you never know. I hope whoever's profiting from those altcoins doesn't sell their Bitcoin stash.

It's happened plenty of times in the past too. It's often orchestrated by pump groups who then run away with vast profits. I can't see much has changed and if I was laundering I'd be using something dependable like LTC.

I was checking which exchanges had the most volume on coinmarketcap, and an exchange I have never noticed before called Jubi has the highest volume for some coins. BTC38 is the other high volume exchange today. If it's a pump group responsible it seems to be a Chinese group pumping mostly on Chinese exchanges. They must already have vast profits which could damage Bitcoin's price if they convert to fiat.

Infinitecoin

1   Jubi   IFC/CNY   $ 51,628   $ 0.000009   92.69 %   
2   BTER   IFC/CNY   $ 3,168   $ 0.000009   5.69 %   
3   Poloniex   IFC/XMR   $ 718   $ 0.000009   1.29 %   
4   BTER   IFC/LTC   $ 187   $ 0.000009   0.34 %   


Vertcoin

1   Jubi   VTC/CNY   $ 89,361   $ 0.043608   83.72 %   
2   Poloniex   VTC/BTC   $ 9,199   $ 0.039420   8.62 %   
3   Bittrex   VTC/BTC   $ 4,744   $ 0.039227   4.44 %   
4   BTER   VTC/CNY   $ 2,787   $ 0.036467   2.61 %   
5   BTER   VTC/BTC   $ 602   $ 0.039101   0.56 %   


Dogecoin

1   BTC38   DOGE/CNY   $ 2,699,170   $ 0.000369   63.06 %   
2   Jubi   DOGE/CNY   $ 596,870   $ 0.000380   13.94 %   
3   Poloniex   DOGE/BTC   $ 524,357   $ 0.000347   12.25 %
4   Bittrex   DOGE/BTC   $ 167,072   $ 0.000355   3.90 %
5   BTER   DOGE/CNY   $ 75,496   $ 0.000349   1.76 %
6   BTER   DOGE/BTC   $ 73,332   $ 0.000355   1.71 %

[JayJuanGee]

I found this bitcoin article to be insightful and informative,


http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/01/25/bitcoin-not-dead/

The article puts some perspective on the various seemingly emergency attempts at pushing for bigger blocks with the mining of bitcoin... and that those attempts at bigger blocks seem to be intended to make an emergency are likely ways to cripple/undermine decentralized aspect of bitcoin in various regards.

With the author's initial classification of bitcoin as a currency, recently, I have been becoming a bit irked with those kinds of comments to attempt to classify bitcoin as a currency.

Surely, the author is very bullish and positive about the real paradigm changing peer to peer aspects of bitcoin, and so he does not imply anything negative in his assertion that bitcoin is serving as a kind of currency.

I would suggest that even though bitcoin has some currency attributes, bitcoin remains way too new in size and familiarity and infrastructure to really compete in any kind of meaningful way like any kind of real and regular currency (even though it does have some aspects of currency, for sure)..

In my current thinking, bitcoin remains way too small to really fit the currency definition, so for me, the term “currency” is a bit too imprecise, yet, it seems that years from now, if bitcoin continues to expand, bitcoin could become a very real contender in various currency circles.. and surely become a paradigm shifting form of medium of exchange and storage of value, and surely bitcoin’s various strengths is one of the perceived threats of bitcoin and that is something that seems to becoming more and more unstoppable and worthy for some legacy financial institutions to consider ways to fight bitcoin and to make various attempts at undermining bitcoin because bitcoin continues to threaten legacy financial institutions in profit generation.