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

[8up]

One good thing though: there seems to be remarkably few empty blocks in the last hours.

Antpool was getting a nice ribbing today for mining empty blocks because they don't want to pause their miners for a few seconds. Perhaps they stopped , but comments on twitter suggested they will continue this practice most have avoided lately regardless of it limiting the capacity of the network. Somewhat hypocritical being they are one of the more sympathetic large pools to classic besides slush.... but as Satoshi envisioned, we should be fine with security even if miners are selfishly competing for their own self interest and care little about the ecosystem.  

Is this what the dreaded "fee market event" or "blockopolapse" is supposed to look like? My txs are immediately confirming on the next block with 4-6 pennies more than the average last week? Any more predictions for the end of the world?

Last week it was at 40-50 satoshi/byte, now it's at 60 satoshi/byte (actually the 51-60 range has 0 wait), so it's unikely you are paying 4-6 pennies more (unless your wallet is overpaying). More like 0-2.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

the last month in words: exponential fee rise in bitcoin vs exponential price rise in ethereum. which one do you prefer!?

[BitUsher]

Last week it was at 40-50 satoshi/byte, now it's at 60 satoshi/byte (actually the 51-60 range has 0 wait), so it's unikely you are paying 4-6 pennies more (unless your wallet is overpaying). More like 0-2.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

I have been watching my txs closely and using different wallets. It really depends upon the moment and the wallet used as their isn't a consistent dynamic fee solution across all wallets. so yes, some wallets are indeed overpaying from my txs... most notably Core appears to more aggressively raise the tx fee and some others are underestimating the appropriate tx fee causing a 2-3 block delay.

 There is definitely no crisis , but some odd bugs to fix and improvements that we can implement to better handle a fee market. This is a wakeup call to developers to make improvements before users start moving to better wallets.

the last month in words: exponential fee rise in bitcoin vs exponential price rise in ethereum. which one do you prefer!?

When should I expect an exponential fee rise? How high will it get and when do you predict?

FYI - An exponential fee rise in ethereum would be much worse than bitcoin because ETH is treated as fuel for a turing complete script that can inefficiently burn through the fuel in loops and therefore higher fees would exponentially make using ethereum more costly rather than just running a script on a server or oracle.  

[bargainbin]

... How do we know something like LTC or any other alt can handle the pressure? It's had a very relaxing life so far. They all have the luxury of lack of spotlight. The same old shit would pop up wherever the heat was pointed. ...

Many ways to stay safe. One is to be perpetually aggressive/threatening & invest (or, as it happened, think that already have) in weapons/heavy armor.
The other is simply not picking fights.
The problem with Bitcoin, from the git-go (actually from this bullshit), Bitcoiners adopted the former

[8up]

systems must also be adaptive. otherwise they die. life and death in this sense are also only seperated by time.

the nice thing is. we will find out, if we were too fast too slow or exactly right. other cryptos will try different settings; and one of these will probably be far superior to the settings the divided bitcoin community set for itself.

Let them do it. Who cares?

And if it's acceptable, feasible and seems fitting for Bitcoin, then Bitcoin can incorporate it down the road. Bitcoin is not currently broken in spite the many loud mouth fudding about Bitcoin supposedly being broken.

i fear, this assumption was/is wrong.

[8up]

the last month in words: exponential fee rise in bitcoin vs exponential price rise in ethereum. which one do you prefer!?

When should I expect an exponential fee rise? How high will it get and when do you predict?

[/quote]

you have a kind of hostage situation here. if shit hits the fan and people want to sell into fiat or alts (read bankrun), they will have to move their coins to exchanges first. believe me. this will lead to good ol' gox drama, when transactions where in limbo for several hours, while markets crashed. people will bid higher and higher to get their transaction thru...

this is when we will see exponential fee prices.

[xyzzy099]

The problem with Bitcoin, from the git-go (actually from this bullshit), Bitcoiners adopted the former

Just curious...  I have noticed that whenever you include a URL in a post, the base of the URL pretty much always gets replaced with "https://bitcointalk.org".  Any idea how that happens?

[BitUsher]

you have a kind of hostage situation here. if shit hits the fan and people want to sell into fiat or alts (read bankrun), they will have to move their coins to exchanges first. believe me. this will lead to good ol' gox drama, when transactions where in limbo for several hours, while markets crashed. people will bid higher and higher to get their transaction thru...

this is when we will see exponential fee prices.

So you are suggesting that tx fees will rise to such a degree that it is cost prohibitive for users to transfer them to exchanges? How high of a fee is this in your opinion? You understand that people don't need to use an exchange to offload their BTC , right, BTC is very liquid unlike alts and all someone needs to do is spend their btc to divest.

Your fears appear to describe a market run which is the same risk for any currency. Market runs typically don't inspire users to run from a volatile currency to an even more volatile and riskier currency.

[craked5]

you have a kind of hostage situation here. if shit hits the fan and people want to sell into fiat or alts (read bankrun), they will have to move their coins to exchanges first. believe me. this will lead to good ol' gox drama, when transactions where in limbo for several hours, while markets crashed. people will bid higher and higher to get their transaction thru...

this is when we will see exponential fee prices.

So you are suggesting that tx fees will rise to such a degree that it is cost prohibitive for users to transfer them to exchanges? How high of a fee is this in your opinion?

I'd say your question isn't the right one.

The question would rather be: do we wish a transaction system in which only the ones sending incredibly big transactions can go through?

That means bitcoin will actually become a system for wealthy people only and companies...
Not sure it's what I want... I'll go with LTC if this happens.

[bargainbin]

The problem with Bitcoin, from the git-go (actually from this bullshit), Bitcoiners adopted the former

Just curious...  I have noticed that whenever you include a URL in a post, the base of the URL pretty much always gets replaced with "https://bitcointalk.org".  Any idea how that happens?

No idea, guessing I'm just being sloppy. Another try: http://www.coindesk.com/assange-bitcoin-wikileaks-helped-keep-alive/
*that one works.

[8up]

you have a kind of hostage situation here. if shit hits the fan and people want to sell into fiat or alts (read bankrun), they will have to move their coins to exchanges first. believe me. this will lead to good ol' gox drama, when transactions where in limbo for several hours, while markets crashed. people will bid higher and higher to get their transaction thru...

this is when we will see exponential fee prices.

So you are suggesting that tx fees will rise to such a degree that it is cost prohibitive for users to transfer them to exchanges? How high of a fee is this in your opinion?

$10 to $20 if there is constant demand and a fear of crashing price especially if the take-over of another crypto becomes an option). time is king in such a market situation. fee prices will plummet after the event or at least be very volatile.

not the case now. but ethereum after another x2 growth can be seen as a serious competition. (and that's not to far off)

[BitUsher]

I'd say your question isn't the right one.

The question would rather be: do we wish a transaction system in which only the ones sending incredibly big transactions can go through?

That means bitcoin will actually become a system for wealthy people only and companies...
Not sure it's what I want... I'll go with LTC if this happens.

The fees are not calculated by the quantity of funds sent but Bytes used thus a microtx can cost more than sending a billion dollars.
So you must be suggesting that bitcoin fees will rise to 10-20 usd soon.... or do you consider "big transactions" to be ones of 10-100 usd ?

$10 to $20 if there is constant demand and a fear of crashing price especially if the take-over of another crypto becomes an option). time is king in such a market situation. fee prices will plummet after the event or at least be very volatile.

This doesn't follow through ... If their is constant fear of a price crash or users moving over to another alt than that will relieve capacity bottlenecks and bitcoin tx price will become less expensive. 10-20 USD appear to be wildly high and suggests a champagne problem where bitcoins usage dramatically increases due to spam or new users overnight. Where are you deriving these estimates from? Do you really expect bitcoin to increase its userbase that much in the next year?  We would have to see at least a 166x to 300x increase in user adoption to see those prices in the next year.. Have you been drinking so much moon juice that you believe this is possible or have you not bothered to do the math?

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Alts like ETH have a long way to grow before they get to the point that we’re at now, and the world knows it. The days of Bitcoin Maximalism are gone for good.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[8up]

assuming there are 5 million active bitcoiner of which 1 million decide to sell a small medium or big part (this doesn't matter in this case).

these 1 million people (in a market exodus) will meet with a constant demand of transactions (>1MB/block). in fact this will be a classic bankrun scenario (extremely congested network) - be aware: this will not be for very long (hence i wrote exponential price rise - i better would have added a subsequent collapse in fee prices) but a time periode of 1/2 day up to 4 days, when transacting is only possible by bidding ones transactions fee up and up and up...

have you traded on mt.gox while the market crashed? have you tried to get out your funds of mt.gox when it collapsed. it will feel this way for many more users than @ mt. gox. this will by no means be the end of bitcoin. but the end of the domination of bitcoin. and maybe this is what is best for the ecosystem. maybe another crypto takes the torch from bitcoin there on.

[MirkoIta]

I sent a tx from my wallet using the normal fee suggested (it used 6927 sats for a 225 bytes tx) and received one from exchange with a fee of 18258 sats for 373 bytes.

Result is:

my wallet's tx included after 3 blocks.

exchange's tx included in the first block.


I think mempool must be mainly full of sh*t... just a thought from a BCT lurker.

[bargainbin]

...
I think mempool must be mainly full of sh*t... just a thought from a BCT lurker.

Yeah, ChartBuddy is just a govvy shill spreading fuds, u got nothin' to worry 'bout.

[BitUsher]

assuming there are 5 million active bitcoiner of which 1 million decide to sell a small medium or big part (this doesn't matter in this case).

these 1 million people (in a market exodus) will meet with a constant demand of transactions (>1MB/block). in fact this will be a classic bankrun scenario (extremely congested network) - be aware: this will not be for very long (hence i wrote exponential price rise - i better would have added a subsequent collapse in fee prices) but a time periode of 1/2 day up to 4 days, when transacting is only possible by bidding ones transactions fee up and up and up...

have you traded on mt.gox while the market crashed? have you tried to get out your funds of mt.gox when it collapsed. it will feel this way for many more users than @ mt. gox. this will by no means be the end of bitcoin. but the end of the domination of bitcoin. and maybe this is what is best for the ecosystem. maybe another crypto takes the torch from bitcoin there on.

This scenario is more likely with alts, but an unlikely hypothetical all currencies have. It ignores the fact that markets are efficient and those on the edge of divesting will already have their coins loaded in an exchange in anticipation so there will be no bitcoin tx occurring for a majority during this "bank run" It will go from exchange token to offline exchange token tx to alt or fiat to alt tx or fiat tx without ever hitting the blockchain.

The mtgox scenario is completely different because users trust remained in bitcoin but not the exchange itself. In your scenario users trust would be in the exchange but not the currency and exchanges don't care if you sell your BTC for an alt or the other way around, they just want tx volume.

[8up]

assuming there are 5 million active bitcoiner of which 1 million decide to sell a small medium or big part (this doesn't matter in this case).

these 1 million people (in a market exodus) will meet with a constant demand of transactions (>1MB/block). in fact this will be a classic bankrun scenario (extremely congested network) - be aware: this will not be for very long (hence i wrote exponential price rise - i better would have added a subsequent collapse in fee prices) but a time periode of 1/2 day up to 4 days, when transacting is only possible by bidding ones transactions fee up and up and up...

have you traded on mt.gox while the market crashed? have you tried to get out your funds of mt.gox when it collapsed. it will feel this way for many more users than @ mt. gox. this will by no means be the end of bitcoin. but the end of the domination of bitcoin. and maybe this is what is best for the ecosystem. maybe another crypto takes the torch from bitcoin there on.

This scenario is more likely with alts, but an unlikely hypothetical all currencies have. It ignores the fact that markets are efficient and those on the edge of divesting will already have their coins loaded in an exchange in anticipation so there will be no bitcoin tx occurring for a majority during this "bank run" It will go from exchange token to offline exchange token tx to alt or fiat to alt tx or fiat tx without ever hitting the blockchain.

The mtgox scenario is completely different because users trust remained in bitcoin but not the exchange itself. In your scenario users trust would be in the exchange but not the currency and exchanges don't care if you sell your BTC for an alt or the other way around, they just want tx volume.

mainly agree. it's a kind of worst case scenario. i won't rule out in my planing, hence why i diversified my crypto holdings over the last 6 month. still 70% bitcoin though.

[BitUsher]

mainly agree. it's a kind of worst case scenario. i won't rule out in my planing, hence why i diversified my crypto holdings over the last 6 month. still 70% bitcoin though.

Nothing wrong with diversifying you investments. Many Eth investors have turned a nice profit from their pump campaign. It will be interesting to see what happens when the pump stops or , Vitalik runs out of money and needs to start dumping his large stake in Eth to pay the bills of the operation(soon!), MSFT starts promoting their own ethereum fork , or a Turing complete sidechain is added to bitcoin. Nothing is wrong with speculating however as long as the risks are accurately disclosed and discussed.

[JayJuanGee]

Can't wait until small block retards are proved to be irresponsible idiots by empirical data points.

We should make a list of them, so in the future we will never forget who they were and humiliate them forever.

There's no such thing as a small block retard.

People have ideas and inclinations based on information that they have, and there's a lot of misinformation out there regarding what's even going on with the block chain; how much is spam, whether an increase is currently justified and/or wether segregated witness will take care of some if not all of this spamming blockage to the extent blockage exists and if not what would be better additional solutions going forward once segregated witness is in place.

Yeah people have different ideas and most of them are dumb ideas.

That's why it's important to relie on the empirical facts to judge who are right and who are the fucking irresponsible retards. It's darwinian selection. It's a process way more efficient than pointless debating.

So now we are going to see that full block are not good at all and see who were the dangerous retards who thought full blocks were somehow cool.

It's like the bolcheviks. They have ideas and they thought they were right. They talked badly of people who disagree with them. Then the testing of their ideas prove that they were huge retards and that they had their head full shit. Gmaxwell and Adam Back are the Lenin of their time. The sooner the market route around them, the better.

It seems to me you have a very precise idea of your own position at least.

I don't have such brutal and clear opinion on this issue. And from the grasp of complexity I was able to see, it seems impossible for me to have a clear point of view of the situation as we're still lacking data.

Yeah small blocks have problems, but what do you want? Bigger and bigger blocks? You do realize that in order to scale the Visa transactions we would need 800GB blocks... Seems complicated to me...

Yep. In that respect, when dealing with money and likely to continue to be attacked by governments and financial institutions, security is much more important than trying to grow too fast and to act as if you are visa when you don't have institutionalized protections.

Size is the most powerful protection. The most economic transactions flow through Bitcoin the harder it is to attack it.

"Trying to grow too fast"   Transactions double every year. That's just natural growth. If you don't like growth go use some altcoins before Bitcoin become one.

You are ridiculous.

You are not saying much of anything in your above post.. or at least whatever you seem to be saying is quite unclear.  You seem to be attempting to suggest that currently bitcoin is suffering from some kind of pending emergency, when actually the opposite is the case, and bitcoin happens to be super secure with a tremendous amount of hashing power.. which is really a great thing to have during such infancy years and while bitcoin is still suffering multiple spam / ddos attacks (and still remaining robust under such attacks).

O.k.  let me presume that you are a supporter of XT and or classic.  Just for a moment, if we remove their fatal flaws (that is their attempts to make changes to bitcoin governance), and we only focus on their blocksize change proposals, then we see that XT had a schedule of changes (doubling the blocksize limit every couple of years), and classic had an immediate blocksize limit increase.

What are you saying that you want?

Are you only talking about blocksize limit increases, or are you talking about governance?  You seem to be using words to talk about blocksize limit increase, but your insistence on such (seemingly right away) makes it sound as if you have a hidden agenda and what you really want is some kind of change to bitcoin governance.. which is a much more complicated issue.

So clearly state exactly what you are proposing and why the current path of implementing seg wit first is supposedly not sufficient in order to achieve what you want?  Hello goofball.  

Governance and blocksize issues are connected.

If we are stuck today with 1Mb it's because Back, Maxwell and Hill want it like that. Their vision, and agenda, is to make Bitcoin a clearinghouse.

I think this is the dumbest idea ever. I will do everything that I can to make their plan fail in order to protect the value of my bictoins and to protect the value Bitcoin could offer to mankind.

By raising the blocksize limit right now with Classic, we would let Bitcoin breath and quietly growth, and we would get rid of those toxic people.

It's not a problem if people choose to stay with Core for now though. What is important is the choice to hard fork our way out of the power of Back/Maxwell/Hill exists. And the more economic reality will hit the face of small blockists with rising fees, disgruntled users and altcoin market cap exploding, the less the support for Core there will be.

Until the day where the HF will happen because bitcoiners will see the light and stopped being fooled by Blockstream. Meanwhile I will be there all along to explain how dumd Back and Maxwell are so their support start to crumble sooner rather than later.

In other words, even though you have been throwing out the ongoing and repeated rhetoric about problem with the blocksize limit, etc etc etc., your main and real concern is governance.

I don't see what purpose is served by conflating those two issues except to confuse a large number of people who begin to believe that there is some kind of technical problem with bitcoin, and really what you and some others are asserting is that you do not like the governance system of bitcoin. 

Certainly, it is not easy to change governance issues, and the problem is more complicated.

i personally get the sense that a large number of purported big blockers are also distracted by these various governance questions and attempting to suggest (while getting very emotional about the issue) that for some reason governance is broken because they cannot get their proposed block size increase to go through.

It's all just bullshit and a fabricated issue.

In order to have security and certainty, changes to the protocol should be difficult to achieve.. and it is very misguided to suggest that any of these folks are in charge of anything (Back, Maxwell or other core supporters) merely because they are stating opposition to quick and nearly uncontemplated changes that have not been tested and have not allowed seg wit to go through first.  You know seg wit is a very big deal, and it is going to address a lot of issues in bitcoin, while at the same time, there is going to be a necessary adjustment and adaptation period.. and the fact that  many of the core developers are committed to entertaining and outlining proposals for further changes within a few months of the implementation of seg wit should demonstrate that they are seriously considering ways to advance bitcoin in terms of scaling to likely increased demand.