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

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

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[AlexGR]

We're at 15GB. I think I heard the Ethereum blockchain is at 10GB already. And nobody actually uses it for anything yet. I say good luck to 'em.

The data are a bit rusty for btc (and the numbers for visa are also calculated wrong)... Right now we are closing to 70gb with btc.

You really think miners are complete idiots, then. Chomping at the bit to bloat blocks to infinity with free spam...

~Come with me, reader, into the mind of the economic central planner... where "capitalism" is one broken production quota away from abject devastation and horror.~

If miners didn't mine txs => "Ohhh those bad miners are not mining txs... we must hard fork to show them a lesson"
If miners do mine txs => "Ohhhh those bad miners are mining junk txs... we must give them a lesson"

Whatever they do, it can be used for political friction.

[Fatman3001]

define "centralization"

....

Bitcoin mining, March 2016

"[–]macbook-air Bitcoin Miner - F2Pool 100 points 10 days ago

In HK, Alex asked me to “respect” his time by agree the consensus asap. Also someone else told me he had bought long position just before the roundtable, if we did not agree, he would lose huge financially. If it was not these two, I would probably have escaped away that night."

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/48dzom/antpool_limiting_the_block_size_is_much_more/d0j7sqx

[AliceGored]

We're at 15GB. I think I heard the Ethereum blockchain is at 10GB already. And nobody actually uses it for anything yet. I say good luck to 'em.

Looks like it's been a while since you ran a full node.

60GB? Oh my!

ZOMG, the totality of all transactions until now is (barely) bigger than downloading GTAV... after 7 years!

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

We're at 15GB. I think I heard the Ethereum blockchain is at 10GB already. And nobody actually uses it for anything yet. I say good luck to 'em.

The data are a bit rusty for btc (and the numbers for visa are also calculated wrong)... Right now we are closing to 70gb with btc.

You really think miners are complete idiots, then. Chomping at the bit to bloat blocks to infinity with free spam...

~Come with me, reader, into the mind of the economic central planner... where "capitalism" is one broken production quota away from abject devastation and horror.~

If miners didn't mine txs => "Ohhh those bad miners are not mining txs... we must hard fork to show them a lesson"
If miners do mine txs => "Ohhhh those bad miners are mining junk txs... we must give them a lesson"

Whatever they do, it can be used for political friction.

Miners deciding what size blocks to make and what price they charge for space in them is called Capitalism. What you advocate is something else... I'm sub-consciously transmitting that term to you now... please stand by.

[European Central Bank]

In HK, Alex asked me to “respect” his time by agree the consensus asap. Also someone else told me he had bought long position just before the roundtable, if we did not agree, he would lose huge financially. If it was not these two, I would probably have escaped away that night."[/i]

What type of pussy makes super important decisions because of some other asshole's plans? These guys need more spine.

[Fatman3001]

In HK, Alex asked me to “respect” his time by agree the consensus asap. Also someone else told me he had bought long position just before the roundtable, if we did not agree, he would lose huge financially. If it was not these two, I would probably have escaped away that night."[/i]

What type of pussy makes super important decisions because of some other asshole's plans? These guys need more spine.

That's Bitcoins decentralization you're talking about. Have some respect!

[European Central Bank]

That's Bitcoins decentralization you're talking about. Have some respect!

Pah. If the pool guys were real men like charles bronson or hulk hogan we'd be in way better shape. Looks like you could scare the lunch money out of most of the present guys with a couple of harsh words.

[Fatman3001]

That's Bitcoins decentralization you're talking about. Have some respect!

Pah. If the pool guys were real men like charles bronson or hulk hogan we'd be in way better shape. Looks like you could scare the lunch money out of most of the present guys with a couple of harsh words.

Looks like someone already did.

[AlexGR]

I doubt anyone is suggesting small blocks forever, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence of an emergency need to take some kind of drastic measures to increase the blocksize limit on an emergency basis..  and in that regard, the impression and/or creation of an emergency seems to be largely fabricated with a bunch of loud and whiny voices.

I think it was something like a year ago when Hearn predicted that urgent action must be taken or Bitcoin would ...crash. Yes, he said crash. The rationale was something like "ohh nodes will fill their mempools and nodes will start crashing and ohhhh, we need bigger blocks".

For a programmer it's very suspect why he didn't simply write a patch and say "here guys, this will fix nodes from crashing through a parameter that sets mempool size"... Why promote a hard fork for 8-20mb increases (which would be 20-50 times the legit activity of the network) instead of simply patching the software with a mempool limit, as 0.12 does?

The whole crisis / urgency scenario was bullshit, as was the "problem=>reaction=>solution" - in terms of ...proposed "solution".

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

We're at 15GB. I think I heard the Ethereum blockchain is at 10GB already. And nobody actually uses it for anything yet. I say good luck to 'em.

Looks like it's been a while since you ran a full node.

60GB? Oh my!

ZOMG, the totality of all transactions until now is (barely) bigger than downloading GTAV... after 7 years!

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

I've been a non-mining SPV node for a while now. I've come to terms with that.

[inca]

I doubt anyone is suggesting small blocks forever, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence of an emergency need to take some kind of drastic measures to increase the blocksize limit on an emergency basis..  and in that regard, the impression and/or creation of an emergency seems to be largely fabricated with a bunch of loud and whiny voices.

I think it was something like a year ago when Hearn predicted that urgent action must be taken or Bitcoin would ...crash. Yes, he said crash. The rationale was something like "ohh nodes will fill their mempools and nodes will start crashing and ohhhh, we need bigger blocks".

For a programmer it's very suspect why he didn't simply write a patch and say "here guys, this will fix nodes from crashing through a parameter that sets mempool size"... Why promote a hard fork for 8-20mb increases (which would be 20-50 times the legit activity of the network) instead of simply patching the software with a mempool limit, as 0.12 does?

The whole crisis / urgency scenario was bullshit, as was the "problem=>reaction=>solution" - in terms of ...proposed "solution".

For some reason your answer entirely misses the fact that blocks are filling up. A cheap transaction flooding attack brought the network to it's knees just last week.

You are that dog cartoon saying 'everything is fine' as the house burns down around you.

[JayJuanGee]

JayJuanGee you're a small blocker?  

I'm o.k. with the current plan to implement seg wit first and to reassess the blocksize limit situation after seg wit is in play for a while.

I doubt anyone is suggesting small blocks forever, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence of an emergency need to take some kind of drastic measures to increase the blocksize limit on an emergency basis..  and in that regard, the impression and/or creation of an emergency seems to be largely fabricated with a bunch of loud and whiny voices.

Seems like we are going to see how seg wit plays out and then be able to reassess the blocksize limit situation at that time.


Further I believe that there is no meaningful proposal on the table to merely increase the blocksize limit without also attempting to affect bitcoin governance, which demonstrates to me that proposals that have recently been on the table to immediately increase the blocksize limit appear to be largely disingenuous.

you're right even small blockers aren't small blockers anymore.

i guess to be a "small blocker" these days means you place a lot of value on keeping the system "lightweight".

I value that to, but not enough to sacrifice user experience, give up micro TX,  etc...

i guess there is a spectrum of "blockers"  

I don't attribute malicious intentions to the folks who are conservative about increasing the block size limits, and even though an immediate increase of 2 mg block limits may seem simple, it seems reasonable to me to tread with caution in spite of loudmouths and whining especially when the block increase proposals were also coupled with governance issues.

Speaking of blockers and governance, seems like the 12th is right around the corner...

Maybe I will want to change my answer to the poll to respond three times..??

 The price on the 12th will bounce between $410 and $430... hahahahahahaha.. hopefully ending the day with $430 rather than $410.

[AliceGored]

The whole crisis / urgency scenario was bullshit, as was the "problem=>reaction=>solution" - in terms of ...proposed "solution".

Amen.

"the malicious miner DoS limit from 2010 is still in place, delays & fees up, investor confidence in future capacity growth down => listen to technical experts: to increase a constant would be a harsh blow to muh decentralization, non-mining rasb pi node on LJR internet is sad => let me tell you about highly connected and well funded Blockstream pre-paid scrip payments lightning hubs, out in 2 weeks."

[AlexGR]

I doubt anyone is suggesting small blocks forever, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence of an emergency need to take some kind of drastic measures to increase the blocksize limit on an emergency basis..  and in that regard, the impression and/or creation of an emergency seems to be largely fabricated with a bunch of loud and whiny voices.

I think it was something like a year ago when Hearn predicted that urgent action must be taken or Bitcoin would ...crash. Yes, he said crash. The rationale was something like "ohh nodes will fill their mempools and nodes will start crashing and ohhhh, we need bigger blocks".

For a programmer it's very suspect why he didn't simply write a patch and say "here guys, this will fix nodes from crashing through a parameter that sets mempool size"... Why promote a hard fork for 8-20mb increases (which would be 20-50 times the legit activity of the network) instead of simply patching the software with a mempool limit, as 0.12 does?

The whole crisis / urgency scenario was bullshit, as was the "problem=>reaction=>solution" - in terms of ...proposed "solution".

For some reason your answer entirely misses the fact that blocks are filling up. A cheap transaction flooding attack brought the network to it's knees just last week.

You are that dog cartoon saying 'everything is fine' as the house burns down around you.

"We can't have 1mbforevah"
"We want 1cent-txsforevah" (and if we get to 2 cents we say the network is down to its knees because we didn't pay the 2-3-5 cent fee)

Newsflash: The system is not based on the premise of 1 cent txs forevah.

Fees are dynamic, based on the load. You don't pay the fees => you get in line. And wait.

The network operates normally for those that follow proper tx pricing. If they don't, it's usually because their wallet makes wrong assumptions about fees. They should upgrade to core 0.12. But then they'd have to download 10gb txs and 60gb spam... ooops.

The whole crisis / urgency scenario was bullshit, as was the "problem=>reaction=>solution" - in terms of ...proposed "solution".

Amen.

"the malicious miner DoS limit from 2010 is still in place, delays & fees up, investor confidence in future capacity growth down => listen to technical experts: to increase a constant would be a harsh blow to muh decentralization, non-mining rasb pi node on LJR internet is sad => let me tell you about highly connected and well funded Blockstream pre-paid scrip payments lightning hubs, out in 2 weeks."

Once "XT" appeared to be dead and buried the market went from low 200's to 500's.

Is this lack of "investor confidence"?

When did it go back down?

When we had the coordinated threat of forking by Gavin + the FUD by Hearn.

When did it go back up?

When Classic was buried.

The only thing the market cares is contentious hard forks. The capacity issue is priced in as are the dev responses to it (which, contrary to the propaganda, is not 1mbforevah).

[JayJuanGee]

I doubt anyone is suggesting small blocks forever, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence of an emergency need to take some kind of drastic measures to increase the blocksize limit on an emergency basis..  and in that regard, the impression and/or creation of an emergency seems to be largely fabricated with a bunch of loud and whiny voices.

I think it was something like a year ago when Hearn predicted that urgent action must be taken or Bitcoin would ...crash. Yes, he said crash. The rationale was something like "ohh nodes will fill their mempools and nodes will start crashing and ohhhh, we need bigger blocks".

For a programmer it's very suspect why he didn't simply write a patch and say "here guys, this will fix nodes from crashing through a parameter that sets mempool size"... Why promote a hard fork for 8-20mb increases (which would be 20-50 times the legit activity of the network) instead of simply patching the software with a mempool limit, as 0.12 does?

The whole crisis / urgency scenario was bullshit, as was the "problem=>reaction=>solution" - in terms of ...proposed "solution".

For some reason, whiners sure do get a lot of press, and part of the reason seems to be that it plays into what mainstream wants to see happen, and really, people also buy into stupid ass simplified analogies.. suggesting "the bitcoin ceo... blah blah blah" or "bitcoin's management is failing... blah blah blah" and to suggest that there are any one spokesperson for bitcoin... or to say "core developers are acting childish and not like 'real' managers,"  and there will be a lot of evidence of various people acting childish, and then they will say, "see look, childish behavior handling more than $6billion in value, it shouldn't be worth that much."

Even though the message is simple, to me, it remains strange regarding how many supposedly bitcoin supporters are buying into that "scale or die" propaganda.

[inca]

I doubt anyone is suggesting small blocks forever, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be sufficient evidence of an emergency need to take some kind of drastic measures to increase the blocksize limit on an emergency basis..  and in that regard, the impression and/or creation of an emergency seems to be largely fabricated with a bunch of loud and whiny voices.

I think it was something like a year ago when Hearn predicted that urgent action must be taken or Bitcoin would ...crash. Yes, he said crash. The rationale was something like "ohh nodes will fill their mempools and nodes will start crashing and ohhhh, we need bigger blocks".

For a programmer it's very suspect why he didn't simply write a patch and say "here guys, this will fix nodes from crashing through a parameter that sets mempool size"... Why promote a hard fork for 8-20mb increases (which would be 20-50 times the legit activity of the network) instead of simply patching the software with a mempool limit, as 0.12 does?

The whole crisis / urgency scenario was bullshit, as was the "problem=>reaction=>solution" - in terms of ...proposed "solution".

For some reason your answer entirely misses the fact that blocks are filling up. A cheap transaction flooding attack brought the network to it's knees just last week.

You are that dog cartoon saying 'everything is fine' as the house burns down around you.

"We can't have 1mbforevah"
"We want 1cent-txsforevah" (and if we get to 2 cents we say the network is down to its knees because we didn't pay the 2-3-5 cent fee)

Newsflash: The system is not based on the premise of 1 cent txs forevah.

Fees are dynamic, based on the load. You don't pay the fees => you get in line. And wait.

The network operates normally for those that follow proper tx pricing. If they don't, it's usually because their wallet makes wrong assumptions about fees. They should upgrade to core 0.12. But then they'd have to download 10gb txs and 60gb spam... ooops.

In a world where incoming transactions over 24 hours is less than blockspace that is fine - mild irritation to a few bitcoin users. Even as we are now with occasional surges of activity where transaction volumes fill the mempool leading to transaction delays it resolves soon enough as the backlog clears - with lots of complaints of a temporary nature.

The actual problem comes next if transactions continue to ramp up as they have progressively leading to a backlog which never clears. Then it doesn't matter what price your wallet chooses, it will not guarantee inclusion by a miner, as the next person putting a transaction in will out bid you (yay fee market!).

Being economically naive you would hurrah! at a working fee market. But actually by enforcing limited transactional scarcity with a blocksize cap what you actually do is break bitcoin for most people. Suddenly stuck transactions are widespread and sure you can still use bitcoin but fees will simply spiral upwards until they are ridiculous.

The best bit is that as the network becomes increasingly congested actually performing a flooding attack to completely disrupt the network becomes trivially cheap to employ.

[Andre#]

Perhaps this animated graph of block size and transaction fee can show you.

http://organofcorti.blogspot.nl/2016/03/block-size-and-transaction-fee-animation.html

A more detailed (and non-animated) view:

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ze8NXBUY7Z0/VtpIeA1cFYI/AAAAAAAAFeU/Ju1kct5bWHk/s1600/post2_plot2_2016-03-05.png

I will take it on faith that those graphs are factually accurate.

That goes for the graphs of blockchain.info as well. Luckily, all data is public, so everyone can check it if he wants.

A large majority of people already accept that Blockchain.info produces factually accurate information, so it seems to make little to no sense to me that you would be attempting to suggest that blockchain.info may either not be credible or that it is somehow similar in stature to some other random source.  

I never said that blockchain.info isn't credible. In fact, that list of blocks and their sizes of my first reply came straight from blockchain.info . I objected to your reference to a graph of average block sizes, because taking the average of block sizes is not a good way to try to show that there's enough space left. On the other hand, it is you who put blockchain.info on a pedestal. I don't see why the graph of Coindesk, or a site like tradeblock.com would be considered a less good source.

they still don't demonstrate some kind of emergency state, and even though a bit more granular than blockchain.info, they are not really showing anything that should cause panic. 

Suppose a bus company starts running a service in 2010. At first, you'd only see one or two people in the bus. As the bus service becomes more known, more people travel on the bus. Nowadays, busses are often completely occupied. It's common that people are left at the bus stops having to wait for the next one, esp. if they bought the cheapest tickets.

You can see that this happens more and more often. However, anyone who bought the most expensive ticket always manages to get on the next bus. Nevertheless, it happens more and more often that more and more people with the cheap tickets have to skip buses.

Yet, you say there's no reason for panic. You don't expect that the demand for the bus service will keep growing.

Your analogy of a bus seems somewhat forced, and the subsequent post of AlexGR seems to adequately, reasonably and effectively respond to various deficiencies of your bus analogy.  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg14164904#msg14164904

I think it's a good analogy, which makes the issue easier to understand. If there are flaws in the analogy, I'm happy to discuss them. The criticism of AlexGR that people on a bus are real, and Bitcoin transactions in a block (according to him) are not, is just childish.

His other remark that it's cheap to buy all the space in a block (because blocks are quite small and transactions cheap), doesn't discredit the analogy. If someone wants to take out the high speed train from Amsterdam to Paris, he can buy all the train tickets. It's doable, and effectively a DOS attack preventing any other people from using the train. If anything, it shows my analogy is a correct one.

and maybe even if there are ways to show charts that separate spam and legit transactions 

I can imagine that a flood of tx without fee can be considered spam. But nowadays, only mining pools use zero fee tx to payout their miners. There are hardly any zero fee tx issued otherwise. (800 in the past 24 hours, source: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ ) But if a tx carries a fee, how to decide if it's spam or not? What is your definition of spam?

I have no fucking clue about various technicalities.... I am of the understanding that there are a lot of transactions that are being sent to the blockchain to make it seem to be more full than it is in order to attempt to whine about some kind of blockchain crisis.  AlexGR addressed some of this in his post, too when he discusses how inexpensive it is to fill up the blocks with nonsense.  

If you don't understand the various technicalities, then our discussion stops right there. I do acknowledge that some people like to issue txs for no other reason then to show what happens when blocks are full for a significant period of time. Those periods are easily to recognise as they last a couple of days. However, don't forget these attacks are so easy, because there's only so little free space left an attacker needs to buy up.

I get the sense that seg wit filters out spam too, so maybe we are going to witness some better representations of what's going on once seg wit is live?.

How does SW filters spam? How does it decide which tx is spam and which is not?

I don't really know on a technical level, and so I rely on some of the descriptions regarding what it is supposed to do. My understanding is that it separates transaction involving fees from other non-fee information.  Accordingly, we are likely going to see how it plays out, but it seems to incorporate a lot of good solutions that may address some of the spamming matters.

If you don't know if SW is going to mark certain tx as spam, then don't claim it. "Lets see how it plays out" doesn't give me much confidence. That both applies to implementing SW as a complicated soft fork, as to changing the working of the blockchain from plenty of room in blocks to scarcity of space in blocks.

Anyhow, there is work on seg wit at the moment and a plan to begin with that (coming soon) and then to give further consideration to whether an additional physical block size limitation needs to be incorporated as well.. so I really am still having difficulties grappling with some of the panick.   

How many people need to wait for how many next buses until you panic? Or don't you care about others, as long as you can afford your bus ticket?

Why does it matter what I think?  

Because I'm having a discussion with you. If I wouldn't be interested in what you think, I wouldn't take you serious.

and I never said that the blocksize never needs to be increased, as you seem to be attempting to attribute to me.

Unless I understood you wrong, you seem to think that blocks are not almost permanently full, or not getting there so soon in order to plan for an increase of the block size limit. I beg to differ, and I'm trying to show you (1) blocks are quite full already, and (2) as the number of tx roughly doubles every year, it is clear that the growth of Bitcoin usage will have to come to a halt very soon. Of course, once LN is up and running, things may be different. But I'm far, far from convinced this will be the case in 6 to 12 months from now.

In other words: how many tx do you think Bitcoin should be able to process today, in 3 months, in 6 months, and in one year's time?

getting repetitive.  I think that there are expansion plans in place... good enough for me for the moment....

You don't answer my question. It may be (still) good enough at the moment, but next year? For sure, it can't be more than 400,000 tx. Something got to give.

Fact: the number if tx per day is close to the limit of 250,000. We recently touched that twice. (sources: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= , http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-daily-transactions/ )

We crossed the 20,000 tx/day in June 2012
We crossed the 50,000 tx/day in August 2013
We crossed the 100,000 tx/day in March 2015
We crossed the 200,000 tx/day in January 2016

And the hard limit is a little over 250,000...

So, do you think 250,000 tx/day is sufficient for Bitcoin to be successful? Do you think 400,000 tx/day is sufficient by the end of this year, when SW is rolled out and most other software is updated to take advantage of it? Do you think 400,000 tx/day will be enough until LN comes into existence?

Again, it doesn't really matter that much what I think.  

Then we can stop this discussion.

But it seems that AlexGR addressed this matter too.

 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg14164904#msg14164904

In essence, there may be some peaks of 250k transactions per day, but likely not even really close to that in regards to legitimate transactions  and there remain adequate expansion plans already in the works and likely many more to come.. so why fret about something that is still in the works and not at an emergency state yet?

Transactions that are paid for are legitimate. If you want to use the intent of the person doing the tx as criterion for legitimacy, then you throw out the censorship resistance quality that Bitcoin is famous for.

[AliceGored]

"We can't have 1mbforevah"
"We want 1cent-txsforevah" (and if we get to 2 cents we say the network is down to its knees because we didn't pay the 2-3-5 cent fee)

Newsflash: The system is not based on the premise of 1 cent txs forevah.

Fees are dynamic, based on the load. You don't pay the fees => you get in line. And wait.

The network operates normally for those that follow proper tx pricing. If they don't, it's usually because their wallet makes wrong assumptions about fees. They should upgrade to core 0.12. But then they'd have to download 10gb txs and 60gb spam... ooops.

My quantum experiment isn't quite working as well as I'd hoped.

It boils down to this:

Those in favor of lifting the central protocol limit are not in favor of unlimited free transactions... they are in favor of miners determining pricing along their supply curve. The fact that you insist on running your solo mine with 0 tx blocks proves this point. There is a cost to the miner in mining larger blocks, both directly (stale risk), and indirectly, in terms of overall network health.

You, otoh, insist that miners need the steady hand of blockstream to determine where that supply curve abruptly stops. The core dev's are the power rangers protecting the system from outright collapse under the load of massive free spam being shoved into blocks. Of course that part isn't centralization tho.

[ChartBuddy]

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Explanation

[coins101]

Talking about TX fees in a system that can hold transactions for years, decades or centuries is such a pointless exercise.