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

[JayJuanGee]

O.k... take for example, when a few months ago, he said that Coinbase was going to support Classic XT etc...

FTFU - Coinbase said they were going to test XT...

Ok. thanks.. I was kind of shooting off the cuff.. by memory... but what you say sounds exactly correct... and much more accurate than what I said.. but my point, in part, was that Armstrong has been increasing and increasing and increasing his involvement in the debate, rather than merely making statements regarding what his company was going to do.. he is currently seeming to be involved in an ongoing battle of persuasion to convince a lot others what they should do, too... which for me is beginning to come off as a bit much and causing me desires to remove some of my dinero from their system.

Armstrong's is working in the best interests of his investors. His investors are invested in a decentralized control of Bitcoin where they can leverage there competitive advantage.

A lot of people are ignoring the centralized authoritative control over the direction bitcoin development is taking, but the fact remains as much as I dislike Coinbase there company's success is built on the success of the same Bitcoin I'm invested in.

Blockstream are working to change bitcoin in a way that will undermine Coinbase, it will undermine the Bitcoin I'm invested in. Should Bitcoin be optimized today as a settlement network their company vision and business model is dead in the water.  That in its self is not a reason to not optimist bitcoin to be a settlement network. I have a preference to see bitcoin evolve organically, I think its premature to limit the block size as a stimulus to catalyse bitcoin as a settlement network. I want to decentralize financial control and totally disrupt incumbent financial players.

I want as many people as is technically feasible to settle directly with each other on the blockchain, that doesn't mean I don't want to see LN, or off chane networks, it just means I want LN or Coinbase to succeed or fail on there own merits I don't want to see anyone controlling the development direction in bitcoin to favor one or the other business models. 

Sure... fair enough that you described your perception of what the interests are here, yet I don't agree that you are reflecting it accurately when you suggest that coinbase is aiming for decentralized bitcoin and that somehow blockstream is in control of core's direction.

I personally see the current situation as classic, xt, coinbase and other advocates of change failing to meet their burdens of evidence and/or persuasion and therefore, core sticks with the status quo.  At the same time the advocates of classic, xt and coinbase etc are very vocal and emotional about the lack of change because they believe that they have sufficiently met the burden of evidence and/or persuasion... or that being louder is going to carry some weight in the decision making regarding change or future direction of bitcoin etc. 

There is no ruling out future changes so long as any such proposed changes are presented as convincing to a large majority of the stakeholders in order to test and adopt the changes.  At this point, no one is really controlling bitcoin.. it remains decentralized, and the fact that neither xt or classic were implemented helps to show that it remains decentralized.. sure at some point some version of various aspects of each xt and/or classic may be incorporated.. just like seg wit is currently in the works.  whether it is blockstream, coinbase or any other company, they will need to work around these anticipated directions, and I am repeating that I am pulling a lot of my money out of coinbase because I continue to perceive that they are continuing to be too pushy in the space in their efforts to achieve consensus by stick rather than carrot... or maybe just having less activism from Coinbase would be more appealing to me under these current circumstances.

[AlexGR]

the thing is high fees hurting bitcoin IMAGE.
thats the biggest down side

There are no high fees in bitcoin.

fine then,

 the endless debate with 0 progress for years is hurting bitcoin image

better?

the simple fact that the video "what is bitcoin" where it says "no fee", which now needs to be changed to "only ~5cent fees"
is a huge setback.

Americans (I guess you are also exhibiting the same pattern even if you are a Canadian) always blow my mind. They are burning fuel by the gallons, they can buy all types of junk for hundreds or thousands of dollars, they've been born in such abundance and quality of life that they can afford to say things like "ohh fuck bloat, I'll just buy a hard disk that costs 300$" (which is the wage of a developing nation worker) and the next minute they'll be saying things like "I don't want to pay 1-2-5 cents in fees" or they'll be pushing for the massive destruction of value, such as in the case of a contentious hard fork, saying that this will somehow lift some obstacle and increase their ...value. It's plain stupidity.

Only people who are taking abundance for granted can be pushing for situations where the destruction of value can be promoted as "solution" to issues that they are lucky enough to don't even have to care about, like the 2-3-5 cents in fees.

You know, there are very poor countries where even the 2-3-5 cents are actually money that one can do something in their life, like buy something to eat. I would respect those if they actually complained. But you know why they would not complain? Because they would understand that all alternative payment systems are asking them not 2-3-5 cents, but 100 times that. The cost to transfer around 200$ over the globe, through a bank wire, a western union transfer or paypal is in the tens of dollars, if you include all fees and commissions.

Last, but not least, there are countries, in which people suffer from fluctuating currency rates and who appreciate Bitcoin's store of value characteristics as their national currency slides downwards. And then there are all those who already enjoy the privilege of being in a country with stable or strong currency and who are like "fuck that, let's now destroy bitcoin's value for the lolz through a hardfork... let's fork the currency because, well... I don't like core devs".

I know I haven't directly addressed the point about the ...video and the fees, but the answer is there, between the lines.

[ChartBuddy]

Coin



Explanation

[AlexGR]

It can be made a reality pretty easily if we co-locate the miners and nodes into a single data center - or a few data centers well interconnected with big fat lines, in a way that even 1gb blocks at 3000tx/sec would not be an issue. But then you don't really have a peer to peer bitcoin. You have a (centralized) client/server one with plenty of attack vectors, including physical raids.

No I don't see it, were do you get customers to make this vision a reality, if you think it's pretty easily JUST DO IT?

The point was that while it is doable, it is not a desirable outcome because it practically stops being a decentralized peer-to-peer version of Bitcoin.

[JayJuanGee]

I think that I understand that you are engaging in a bit of hyperbole, here, yet?   I really wonder about ETH versus BTC today?  

I own zero ETH, and I own quite a bit of BTC..... but for some reason, I feel very close to zero inclination to convert even .0001BTC to ETH... Maybe it is just me?  Good luck everyone, but I feel pretty good in my BTC at the moment especially compared with the current status of ETH.  On the other hand, if I owned a little bit of ETH, I probably would be inclined to convert it to BTC, but that inclination is probably merely a bit of a personal bias that I am experiencing at the moment.  

If they are serious about buying Eth as a potential fear their values aren't aligned with bitcoin and they really cannot see how technically Eth is ridiculous. Once Eth switches to PoS there will be a strong incentive to fork Ethereum as a sidechain on bitcoin where all bitcoin holders are rewarded free æthereum to run their DAPPs. Of course there is still the problem of finding a DAPP that makes business sense but at least geeks will have their toys and be able to make atomic transfers between BTC and  æthereum and never need to buy any fuel whatsoever .

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563925.0

There already exist multiple ethereum forks with much cheaper "fuel" that can run the exact same DAPPs... but at least ethereum has slightly better PoW security than the alternative forks... Vitalik is doing away with that advantage soon so get ready for free fuel to all bitcoin users!

I appreciate your seemingly technical explanation, and I don't really attempt to follow ETH too much, except how it may relate in aspects to BTC and that finding out some things about ETH is kind of unavoidable in recent times when ETH had done about a 12x increase in about 2 months.

Could you say that above you suggesting that such future changes in the ETH space is going to cause a more than 99% decrease in the value of ETH; however, it could take several months for ETH to crash?  I personally get the sense that ETH's crash is going to be much more severe than Bitcoin's 2014 crash.  Recall that Bitcoin went from $1,200-ish to less than $200 in about one year.  I get the sense that ETH is going to crash from $12 to less than $2 in a much quicker time span and thereafter, ETH is likely not to recover in any kind of monetary sense... but maybe that is just my shooting from the hip (rather than really being knowledgeable about ETH in any kind of meaningful way).

[BitUsher]

no I cant afford a VPN service, nor do I trust the VPN host, I only run a full node on my work PC and my Home Server. Bandwidth is not an issue where I live, nor would it be an issue if blocks were 10X larger.

Ahhh , I see the problem , you prefer anecdotal evidence of one rather than looking at trends and statistics to show the scope of the problem.

with regards to block chain growth is not a concern at this time. It was on r/bitcoin and it's unfortunately been censored, I'm sorry I didn't make a copy as I have wanted to reference it many times.

Here are the numbers which indicate how ridiculous scaling on the chain is for mass adoption-

Bitcoin Classic Big Block Future- 7 billion people making 20 blockchain tx day

○ 24,000 MB blocks or 3456 GB a day or 1,261,440 GB a year
○ ~500 Mbit/s best-case with IBLT @ 20tx/day/person

Bitcoin Core Payment Channel Future- 7 billion people making 20 blockchain tx day

○ 133 MB blocks - unlimited transactions count
○ ~3 Mbit/s with IBLT

[Adrian-x]

O.k... take for example, when a few months ago, he said that Coinbase was going to support Classic XT etc...

FTFU - Coinbase said they were going to test XT...

Ok. thanks.. I was kind of shooting off the cuff.. by memory... but what you say sounds exactly correct... and much more accurate than what I said.. but my point, in part, was that Armstrong has been increasing and increasing and increasing his involvement in the debate, rather than merely making statements regarding what his company was going to do.. he is currently seeming to be involved in an ongoing battle of persuasion to convince a lot others what they should do, too... which for me is beginning to come off as a bit much and causing me desires to remove some of my dinero from their system.

Armstrong's is working in the best interests of his investors. His investors are invested in a decentralized control of Bitcoin where they can leverage there competitive advantage.

A lot of people are ignoring the centralized authoritative control over the direction bitcoin development is taking, but the fact remains as much as I dislike Coinbase there company's success is built on the success of the same Bitcoin I'm invested in.

Blockstream are working to change bitcoin in a way that will undermine Coinbase, it will undermine the Bitcoin I'm invested in. Should Bitcoin be optimized today as a settlement network their company vision and business model is dead in the water.  That in its self is not a reason to not optimist bitcoin to be a settlement network. I have a preference to see bitcoin evolve organically, I think its premature to limit the block size as a stimulus to catalyse bitcoin as a settlement network. I want to decentralize financial control and totally disrupt incumbent financial players.

I want as many people as is technically feasible to settle directly with each other on the blockchain, that doesn't mean I don't want to see LN, or off chane networks, it just means I want LN or Coinbase to succeed or fail on there own merits I don't want to see anyone controlling the development direction in bitcoin to favor one or the other business models. 

Sure... fair enough that you described your perception of what the interests are here, yet I don't agree that you are reflecting it accurately when you suggest that coinbase is aiming for decentralized bitcoin and that somehow blockstream is in control of core's direction.

I personally see the current situation as classic, xt, coinbase and other advocates of change failing to meet their burdens of evidence and/or persuasion and therefore, core sticks with the status quo.  At the same time the advocates of classic, xt and coinbase etc are very vocal and emotional about the lack of change because they believe that they have sufficiently met the burden of evidence and/or persuasion... or that being louder is going to carry some weight in the decision making regarding change or future direction of bitcoin etc. 

There is no ruling out future changes so long as any such proposed changes are presented as convincing to a large majority of the stakeholders in order to test and adopt the changes.  At this point, no one is really controlling bitcoin.. it remains decentralized, and the fact that neither xt or classic were implemented helps to show that it remains decentralized.. sure at some point some version of various aspects of each xt and/or classic may be incorporated.. just like seg wit is currently in the works.  whether it is blockstream, coinbase or any other company, they will need to work around these anticipated directions, and I am repeating that I am pulling a lot of my money out of coinbase because I continue to perceive that they are continuing to be too pushy in the space in their efforts to achieve consensus by stick rather than carrot... or maybe just having less activism from Coinbase would be more appealing to me under these current circumstances.

I see bitcoin first and foremost as a value exchange protocol and code second,  the change to the economic incentives that preserve bitcoin as the biggest threat we see today, and while the Core Developers will have the code peer reviewed they have no economic insight to suggest their changes are economically sound, let alone a peer review of any economic impact study.


The evidence is there, the problem is FUD a result of the inability to appropriately assess the risks. I may just rate the relative risks differently.  Blockstream's conflict of interest and the fact many of the Core Developers have a salary dependant on not understanding the risks is beyond suspicious.

[adamstgBit]

the thing is high fees hurting bitcoin IMAGE.
thats the biggest down side

There are no high fees in bitcoin.

fine then,

 the endless debate with 0 progress for years is hurting bitcoin image

better?

the simple fact that the video "what is bitcoin" where it says "no fee", which now needs to be changed to "only ~5cent fees"
is a huge setback.

Americans (I guess you are also exhibiting the same pattern even if you are a Canadian) always blow my mind. They are burning fuel by the gallons, they can buy all types of junk for hundreds or thousands of dollars, they've been born in such abundance and quality of life that they can afford to say things like "ohh fuck bloat, I'll just buy a hard disk that costs 300$" (which is the wage of a developing nation worker) and the next minute they'll be saying things like "I don't want to pay 1-2-5 cents in fees" or they'll be pushing for the massive destruction of value, such as in the case of a contentious hard fork, saying that this will somehow lift some obstacle and increase their ...value. It's plain stupidity.

Only people who are taking abundance for granted can be pushing for situations where the destruction of value can be promoted as "solution" to issues that they are lucky enough to don't even have to care about, like the 2-3-5 cents in fees.

You know, there are very poor countries where even the 2-3-5 cents are actually money that one can do something in their life, like buy something to eat. I would respect those if they actually complained. But you know why they would not complain? Because they would understand that all alternative payment systems are asking them not 2-3-5 cents, but 100 times that. The cost to transfer around 200$ over the globe, through a bank wire, a western union transfer or paypal is in the tens of dollars, if you include all fees and commissions.

Last, but not least, there are countries, in which people suffer from fluctuating currency rates and who appreciate Bitcoin's store of value characteristics as their national currency slides downwards. And then there are all those who already enjoy the privilege of being in a country with stable or strong currency and who are like "fuck that, let's now destroy bitcoin's value for the lolz through a hardfork... let's fork the currency because, well... I don't like core devs".

I know I haven't directly addressed the point about the ...video and the fees, but the answer is there, between the lines.

you call me an "American" O_O, ya well your mom's a bitch and you know what that makes you!
lol! just kidding.

I'm sorry if i sound all emotional about 5cent fees... but yes i do believe this hurts the image, maybe not the fee cost per say, but it's more about all the random "why are my TX not going thorught" and then asholes being like "you dumb ass you didnt pay the appropriate fee DUH! "

everything is NOT fine, sure it all works and still relatively cheap, but you can't say all this BS hasn't hurt bitcoin's image and price, in my view blocksizebitchfest has hurt bitcoin real bad on multiple levels. fuck there a huge devied in the comminty now, who's to blame?? idk the specific poeple dont matter, the point is blocksizebitchfest is a HUGE source of FUD from all angles and there is no end in sight.

[Adrian-x]

It can be made a reality pretty easily if we co-locate the miners and nodes into a single data center - or a few data centers well interconnected with big fat lines, in a way that even 1gb blocks at 3000tx/sec would not be an issue. But then you don't really have a peer to peer bitcoin. You have a (centralized) client/server one with plenty of attack vectors, including physical raids.

No I don't see it, were do you get customers to make this vision a reality, if you think it's pretty easily JUST DO IT?

The point was that while it is doable, it is not a desirable outcome because it practically stops being a decentralized peer-to-peer version of Bitcoin.

My point is its not doable, and thinking its doable so long as its centralized is part of the problem.

[ZyclonRacerX]

...
Americans (I guess you are also exhibiting the same pattern even if you are a Canadian) always blow my mind. They are burning fuel by the gallons, they can buy all types of junk for hundreds or thousands of dollars, they've been born in such abundance and quality of life that they can afford to say things like "ohh fuck bloat, I'll just buy a hard disk that costs 300$" (which is the wage of a developing nation worker) and the next minute they'll be saying things like "I don't want to pay 1-2-5 cents in fees" or they'll be pushing for the massive destruction of value, such as in the case of a contentious hard fork, saying that this will somehow lift some obstacle and increase their ...value. It's plain stupidity. ...

Envious foreigner:
Roughly half of humankind lives on $2 a day or less.
Those humans can't afford to run nodes.
They also can't afford the 8c fees you propose.
They can't afford to use Bitcoin, period.
You foreigners always blow my mind. How can you be so fucking ignorant?
Also: how come are you foreign guys always so poor?

[BitUsher]

I appreciate your seemingly technical explanation, and I don't really attempt to follow ETH too much, except how it may relate in aspects to BTC and that finding out some things about ETH is kind of unavoidable in recent times when ETH had done about a 12x increase in about 2 months.

Could you say that above you suggesting that such future changes in the ETH space is going to cause a more than 99% decrease in the value of ETH; however, it could take several months for ETH to crash?  I personally get the sense that ETH's crash is going to be much more severe than Bitcoin's 2014 crash.  Recall that Bitcoin went from $1,200-ish to less than $200 in about one year.  I get the sense that ETH is going to crash from $12 to less than $2 in a much quicker time span and thereafter, ETH is likely not to recover in any kind of monetary sense... but maybe that is just my shooting from the hip (rather than really being knowledgeable about ETH in any kind of meaningful way).

Yes, I agree the Eth crash may be worse , because there has been a serious amount of money pumping the coin and that money will run out and when early investors start offloading that will cause a quick loss in confidence. It may already be starting , but no one can predict markets.

[marcus_of_augustus]

In the beginning there was only darkness, then Satoshi said to Nakamoto "do we have consensus?" and then there was light.

[coins101]

.... 7 billion people making 20 blockchain tx day...

Is there any single electronic payment system that has more than 1bn users?  Probably all combined.

That's before taking into account babies, the elderly, those too poor to know what money actually is, etc.

[adamstgBit]

In the beginning there was only darkness, then Satoshi said to Nakamoto "do we have consensus?" and then there was light.

then what happened?

[coins101]

In the beginning there was only darkness, then Satoshi said to Nakamoto "do we have consensus?" and then there was light.

So it's actually Satoshi & Nakamoto? 

I've been saying it wrong all this time? Why didn't anyone forward the memo to me, you complete load of bastards.

[AlexGR]

.... 7 billion people making 20 blockchain tx day...

Is there any single electronic payment system that has more than 1bn users?  Probably all combined.

That's before taking into account babies, the elderly, those too poor to know what money actually is, etc.

I think visa has 2.4bn cards, although many might be duplicate (one holder, multiple cards).

[TReano]

seems like we are consolidating which is great longer term either for stability and growth.

[BitconAssociation]

In the beginning there was only darkness, then Satoshi said to Nakamoto "do we have consensus?" and then there was light.

So it's actually Satoshi & Nakamoto?  

I've been saying it wrong all this time? Why didn't anyone forward the memo to me, you complete load of bastards.

Captain & Tennille, OTOH, was a creepy fat dude with a multitraker. Called himself Captain, named his multitracker Tennille. Yeah, creepy, I know. The name's intentionally deceptive.
Just figured you'd want a heads-up.

[BitUsher]

.... 7 billion people making 20 blockchain tx day...

Is there any single electronic payment system that has more than 1bn users?  Probably all combined.

That's before taking into account babies, the elderly, those too poor to know what money actually is, etc.

That was just one example. Here is another example:

Half a billion users making 20 tx a day and 5k micro transactions a day(per minute bandwidth charges, per page ad free internet charges to pay certain content providers) and millions of Oracles/covenants/DAPPs/IOT devices all making txs every day.

With payment channels this is possible. Without It is just silly and unforeseeable.  

In the beginning there was only darkness, then Satoshi said to Nakamoto "do we have consensus?" and then there was light.

then what happened?

Nakamoto consensus remains and the immutable blockchain has remained resilient against multiple political coups. The majority of users, miners and developers understand that changes must have technical merit to risk first.

[adamstgBit]

.... 7 billion people making 20 blockchain tx day...

Is there any single electronic payment system that has more than 1bn users?  Probably all combined.

That's before taking into account babies, the elderly, those too poor to know what money actually is, etc.

That was just one example. Here is another example:

Half a billion users making 20 tx a day and 10k micro transactions a day(per minute bandwidth charges, per page ad free internet charges to pay certain content providers) and millions of Oracles/covenants/DAPPs/IOT devices all making txs every day.

With payment channels this is possible. Without It is just silly and unforeseeable.  

HOPEFULLY payment channels are available before we have half a billion users making 10k micro transactions a day.

untill then 1MB is still not enough.