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

[Fatman3001]

Lol, https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4ckqxt/a_bribe_attack_is_ongoing/

But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

The most secure blockchain in the world

Sort of like saying Buckingham Palace isn't safe because an attacker could just rent it and kill The Queen.

[bargainbin]

Lol, https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4ckqxt/a_bribe_attack_is_ongoing/

But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

The most secure blockchain in the world

Sort of like saying Buckingham Palace isn't safe because an attacker could just rent it and kill The Queen.

If the Buckingham Palace is for rent, to anyone, all the time,  murder is perfectly legal & has no consequences, & "The Queen is dead" = "UK is dead," then absolutely.

P.S. Seriously tho, if UK lived or died by The_Queen, do you really believe the Brits would be stupid enough to rent out her lair? That sounds exactly like the sort of  shortsighted junkie mentality Bitcoin is riddled with.
P.P.S. Dear Adolf, hello! Listen, Mein Fuhrer, you'll never believe this, you sitting down?
1. Rent out the Buckingham Palace for a night
2. Kill Queen
3. ? ? ?
4. PROFIT! Britain is ours, lol!

[aztecminer]

You are living in a dream world if you believe a majority of users doesn't support 2MB blocks. And not only "majority" i would also say "supermajority".

Which is why I support segwit and core's roadmap. So typical for a classic supporter to spread misleading information by insinuating I wasn't in favor of larger blocks.

LOL! So typical for a "smallblocker" to assume that everybody who is in favor of 2MB has to be a Classic supporter.

TBH i even dont think that 2MB are somehow urgently needed at the moment or better said i dont think everything will fall apart if we dont raise the limit anytime soon. There is a lot hysteria in this whole discussion imo.

But what i really think came to surface in this discussion is imo that (like i said before) the community is being held hostage by developers that are (at least partly) acting completely immature, irrational and extremely aggressive to others that disagree even slightly and i dont even get started about that shitty censorship that has taken place. Not by Core itself but they could have acted more decisive in that regard.  

Like i said, a second or even third team is needed so when in 2 or 3 years the next crucial decisions are coming we are able to choose.

you know what ?? i have several hardware servers that are over six year old technology.. they run great still, they are Dell 2950 1U servers.. i have mostly migrated everything from those six year old servers and replaced with virtual servers or new hardware server, except for one server. it is running some accounting and product tracking software for one the companies i maintain. the company is totally reliant upon their accounting and product tracking software, if it goes down they are fukd, cant do business until it is back up.. i look at this six year old server and it has an amber light on it.. that means something might be going wrong..i look and see the battery is dead on the perc raid controller card.. np no big deal .. fukit i don't expect anything bad to happen to this server, it has been running great for six years. i can see something is wrong with the perc card but it seems to not be causing an issue to the accounting software.. fukit, i'm just going to leave the accounting software on this six year old server .. i aint gonna do anything about it.. why should i ?? i dont expect anything bad to happen.

that is how you are looking at things. this is where experience with technology comes into play.. i'm not leaving the six year old server like that. instead of waiting until that six year old server dies, i decided to spin up a virtual server and will migrate the accounting software to this new virtual server. here is the kicker: i am going to do this BEFORE my six year old server with the blinking amber light has a fatal hardware error and brings that accounting software down and that entire company to a grinding halt.. today i know its just a bad battery on the perc card, what if tomorrow that perc card goes bad ?? the point is, from an engineering viewpoint, u dont wait when u see a problem developing just because in YOUR OPINION and YOUR EXPECTATIONS that nothing bad is going to happen. in technology, it is more likely than not that something bad is going to happen. we don't take the risk, because if we do and the something bad happens then u have a company losing money every single day they cannot operate.

your veiwpoint is the reason why i do not allow programmers to fuk with hardware. programmers are just smart enough to be dangerous.. as we have seen with bitcoin, the programmers are doing the dangerous thing, they are waiting and taking that risk that nothing bad is going to happen.

[AlexGR]

It's generally understood that parties who own hashing hardware will be reluctant to perform attack because a successful attack can drastically decrease the value of the hardware they own. Thus it can be said that ASICs made Bitcoin much more secure due to this stickiness.
But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

Well, he acknowledges that miners won't act against their self-interest in decreasing the value of hardware they own, by attacking themselves, but then ignores it as a disincentive for (irresponsibly) renting hashpower to an attacker.

In other words, if a miner who owns millions of $$$ in gear won't do an attack himself, why would he rent hardware to allow another one to attack bitcoin and devalue his hardware in the process. Why would a miner risk a multi-million $$$ devaluation on his stash and hardware, to get a few extra thousand bucks?

[Fatman3001]

Lol, https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4ckqxt/a_bribe_attack_is_ongoing/

But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

The most secure blockchain in the world

Sort of like saying Buckingham Palace isn't safe because an attacker could just rent it and kill The Queen.

If the Buckingham Palace is for rent, to anyone, all the time,  murder is perfectly legal & has no consequences, & "The Queen is dead" = "UK is dead," then absolutely.

P.S. Seriously tho, if UK lived or died by The_Queen, do you really believe the Brits would be stupid enough to rent out her lair? That sounds exactly like the sort of  shortsighted junkie mentality Bitcoin is riddled with.

"Sort of like" implies less than perfect parity.

My point was more in line with your last bit. Miners won't rent out a significant portion of their gear like that.

[aztecminer]

Bitcoin Undervalued By Over $200, Investment Bank Report Finds

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-undervalued-200-needham-report/

why they not mention the blockchain not scaling issue ?? this sounds like an advertisement more than anything else.

[bargainbin]

It's generally understood that parties who own hashing hardware will be reluctant to perform attack because a successful attack can drastically decrease the value of the hardware they own. Thus it can be said that ASICs made Bitcoin much more secure due to this stickiness.
But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

Well, he acknowledges that miners won't act against their self-interest in decreasing the value of hardware they own, by attacking themselves, but then ignores it as a disincentive for (irresponsibly) renting hashpower to an attacker.

In other words, if a miner who owns millions of $$$ in gear won't do an attack himself, why would he rent hardware to allow another one to attack bitcoin and devalue his hardware in the process. Why would a miner risk a multi-million $$$ devaluation on his stash and hardware, to get a few extra thousand bucks?

You are assuming that (remaining value of mining hardware) > (sum total of "bribe"). That's a grossly erroneous assumption, especially with the halvening coming up

[bargainbin]

...
"Sort of like" implies less than perfect parity.

My point was more in line with your last bit. Miners won't rent out a significant portion of their gear like that.

See my post above, and explain why not. To simplify:
If you're going to net 1 BTC from your miner in its lifetime, and I offer you 2 BTC, why would you not accept it?*
*Taking into account that you are able to sell your BTC for USD, making BTC's value after the sale irrelevant.


P.S., just to be clear: This would fall on its face if the miners *couldn't sell BTC.* If BTC was the only store of value in the world,the miners would be only hurting themselves by undermining (lol) BTC value. Sadly, it ain't the case -- there's USD, turnips, gold, etc., etc.

[aztecminer]

Segwit soon + 2mb fork being scheduled by core = around 4mb blocks during 2017, there's nothing to discuss about block size unless you demand 8mb now.

until it happens, it still didnt happen.. all this was already supposed to have happened, yet it never did happen.. and now your saying its going to happen supposedly soon.. just like before.. deja vu .. how about getting the work done first... and then we will stop discussing it.

[AlexGR]

It's generally understood that parties who own hashing hardware will be reluctant to perform attack because a successful attack can drastically decrease the value of the hardware they own. Thus it can be said that ASICs made Bitcoin much more secure due to this stickiness.
But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

Well, he acknowledges that miners won't act against their self-interest in decreasing the value of hardware they own, by attacking themselves, but then ignores it as a disincentive for (irresponsibly) renting hashpower to an attacker.

In other words, if a miner who owns millions of $$$ in gear won't do an attack himself, why would he rent hardware to allow another one to attack bitcoin and devalue his hardware in the process. Why would a miner risk a multi-million $$$ devaluation on his stash and hardware, to get a few extra thousand bucks?

You are assuming that (remaining value of mining hardware) > (sum total of "bribe"). That's a grossly erroneous assumption, especially with the halvening coming up

I seriously doubt that obsolete and ineffective hardware that is to be retired can actually mount a 51% attack. Its hashrate would be way below that threshold, possibly something like 10-20%.

[aztecminer]

Wow. I miss a couple of days due to a nasty lung infection (requiring antibiotics) and what do I see?

The Easter Bunny crawled back in his hole and we're right back where we've been for the last few weeks. Hovering around $416.

Yawn. If it was the morning I'd be making coffee. It's a few hours before my usual bedtime so I probably won't be able to get to sleep.

Boozing, toking and partying are definitely not on the agenda, so I should sentence myself to a night of bed rest and let the Clarithromycin do its work.

Thank gawd I live in a country with "socialized" healthcare. Imagine that. Taxpayers stealing profits from insurance corporations.

In the US, to pay for healthcare the government steals from every citizen.

A tax on just being alive.

+1.. thats true, and janet yellen wants to tax us to keep our money in the bank too.. obviously that will fail too .

[adamstgBit]

Segwit soon + 2mb fork being scheduled by core = around 4mb blocks during 2017, there's nothing to discuss about block size unless you demand 8mb now.

its not about the short term implications
short term everyone should be fine with either segwit or 2MB
its the longer term I dont like the sound of. I think LN is a drastic change and may prove to be non user friendly and impractical... ( not to mention not at all "free" its going to cost 2 BTC TX fees to open and close payment channels )

I need to be able to SELL the idea to poeple.
if bitcoin is >1$ to TX on its hard to SELL poeple on the idea... digital money that is expensive to TX feels like broken digital money ( especially when every other alternative, crypto or otherwise, can offer lower fees/TX )


on the other hand, if we go with classic all we get is a theoretical drop in security ( less full nodes ) ( let's not kid ourselves my paper wallets are not less secure due to hobbyist nodes getting forced out of a GROWING ecosystem  )

and i can continue to SELL the idea of truly frictionless money + we also get segwit!!!

thats why we continue to discuss


frictionless money thats the thing we are losing goign with core


we lose the frictionless  part AND we lose the money part

i like these parts and i dont want to give them up so easily

frictionless money


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYEDA3JcQqw

classic offers ALL the same things core does + frictionless  money
core  offers ALL the same things classic does - frictionless  money

[aztecminer]

So... how's that scaling-solution-that-is-not-supposed-to-be-a-scaling-solution-so-do-not-criticize-it-for-being-a-bad-scaling-solution going?

which scaling solution again ?? XT, classic, therealthing, Pure, original

[bargainbin]

It's generally understood that parties who own hashing hardware will be reluctant to perform attack because a successful attack can drastically decrease the value of the hardware they own. Thus it can be said that ASICs made Bitcoin much more secure due to this stickiness.
But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

Well, he acknowledges that miners won't act against their self-interest in decreasing the value of hardware they own, by attacking themselves, but then ignores it as a disincentive for (irresponsibly) renting hashpower to an attacker.

In other words, if a miner who owns millions of $$$ in gear won't do an attack himself, why would he rent hardware to allow another one to attack bitcoin and devalue his hardware in the process. Why would a miner risk a multi-million $$$ devaluation on his stash and hardware, to get a few extra thousand bucks?

You are assuming that (remaining value of mining hardware) > (sum total of "bribe"). That's a grossly erroneous assumption, especially with the halvening coming up

I seriously doubt that obsolete and ineffective hardware that is to be retired can actually mount a 51% attack. Its hashrate would be way below that threshold, possibly something like 10-20%.

The gear is neither obsolete nor ineffective.
It makes a perfectly good profit now, but will stop making a perfectly good profit when block reward is halved.

Maybe an analogy would make this clearer:
   1. You raise pigs.
   2. It costs you $10 to raise & fatten one for the slaughter.
   3. You get paid $19/pig
   4. Halvening comes, you can only get half of what you used to, i.e. $9.50/pig.
   5. What used to make you $9 now *costs you* $.50.

[AlexGR]

It's generally understood that parties who own hashing hardware will be reluctant to perform attack because a successful attack can drastically decrease the value of the hardware they own. Thus it can be said that ASICs made Bitcoin much more secure due to this stickiness.
But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

Well, he acknowledges that miners won't act against their self-interest in decreasing the value of hardware they own, by attacking themselves, but then ignores it as a disincentive for (irresponsibly) renting hashpower to an attacker.

In other words, if a miner who owns millions of $$$ in gear won't do an attack himself, why would he rent hardware to allow another one to attack bitcoin and devalue his hardware in the process. Why would a miner risk a multi-million $$$ devaluation on his stash and hardware, to get a few extra thousand bucks?

You are assuming that (remaining value of mining hardware) > (sum total of "bribe"). That's a grossly erroneous assumption, especially with the halvening coming up

I seriously doubt that obsolete and ineffective hardware that is to be retired can actually mount a 51% attack. Its hashrate would be way below that threshold, possibly something like 10-20%.

The gear is neither obsolete nor ineffective.
It makes a perfectly good profit now, but will stop making a perfectly good profit when block reward is halved.

Maybe an analogy would make this clearery:
   1. You raise pigs.
   2. It costs you $10 to raise & fatten one for the slaughter.
   3. You get paid $19/pig
   4. Halvening comes, you can only get half of what you used to, i.e. $9.50/pig.
   5. What used to make you $9 now *costs you* $.50.

Some ASICs make a profit right now even if they have a low performance/high consumption index, yet they won't after the halving.

Those ASICs who are going to be shut down are not the latest and more efficient but rather the slower and more power hungry. Perhaps 2 generations old or more.

I'm not really worried about rogue attackers in situations like these. My only concern is government-mounted attacks with technology* that surpasses what miners have. Whether we are talking extremely effective ASICs on silicon, GaAs implementations that clock like mofos or ...QCs.

* Or even quantity in terms of ordinary equipment.

[Fatman3001]

...
"Sort of like" implies less than perfect parity.

My point was more in line with your last bit. Miners won't rent out a significant portion of their gear like that.

See my post above, and explain why not. To simplify:
If you're going to net 1 BTC from your miner in its lifetime, and I offer you 2 BTC, why would you not accept it?*
*Taking into account that you are able to sell your BTC for USD, making BTC's value after the sale irrelevant.


P.S., just to be clear: This would fall on its face if the miners *couldn't sell BTC.* If BTC was the only store of value in the world,the miners would be only hurting themselves by undermining (lol) BTC value. Sadly, it ain't the case -- there's USD, turnips, gold, etc., etc.

If you don't understand what you yourself wrote then I fear I can't help you much. I guess I could point out that we've already experienced this and it resolved itself. Fast growing pools often have larger payouts (sometimes more than 10%). That's why Ghash.io managed to capture more than 51% of the network for a brief moment in 2014. But greed realigned with self-interest and threw stupidity out.

Basically, the guy you're linking to just wants to brand classic supporters as the spawn of satan and pure evil. Which may or may not be true (they are bitcoiners), but it seems to muddle up his thinker a bit.

So... how's that scaling-solution-that-is-not-supposed-to-be-a-scaling-solution-so-do-not-criticize-it-for-being-a-bad-scaling-solution going?

which scaling solution again ?? XT, classic, therealthing, Pure, original

I think it's called "Snitch On The Run" or "Crypto Apartheid" or something.

[bargainbin]

It's generally understood that parties who own hashing hardware will be reluctant to perform attack because a successful attack can drastically decrease the value of the hardware they own. Thus it can be said that ASICs made Bitcoin much more secure due to this stickiness.
But wait... what if an attacker rents hardware instead of buying it? It's much simpler than buying hardware: no complex logistics, little overhead, no concerns about how an attack would affect hardware price. Attacker would need to pay slightly above the market price to make sure he gets more than a half of total hashpower to make sure that it's statistically certain his attack can succeed.

Well, he acknowledges that miners won't act against their self-interest in decreasing the value of hardware they own, by attacking themselves, but then ignores it as a disincentive for (irresponsibly) renting hashpower to an attacker.

In other words, if a miner who owns millions of $$$ in gear won't do an attack himself, why would he rent hardware to allow another one to attack bitcoin and devalue his hardware in the process. Why would a miner risk a multi-million $$$ devaluation on his stash and hardware, to get a few extra thousand bucks?

You are assuming that (remaining value of mining hardware) > (sum total of "bribe"). That's a grossly erroneous assumption, especially with the halvening coming up

I seriously doubt that obsolete and ineffective hardware that is to be retired can actually mount a 51% attack. Its hashrate would be way below that threshold, possibly something like 10-20%.

The gear is neither obsolete nor ineffective.
It makes a perfectly good profit now, but will stop making a perfectly good profit when block reward is halved.

Maybe an analogy would make this clearery:
   1. You raise pigs.
   2. It costs you $10 to raise & fatten one for the slaughter.
   3. You get paid $19/pig
   4. Halvening comes, you can only get half of what you used to, i.e. $9.50/pig.
   5. What used to make you $9 now *costs you* $.50.

Some ASICs make a profit right now, even if they have a low performance/high consumption index, yet they won't after the halving.

Those ASICs who are going to be shut down, are not the latest and more efficient, but rather the less efficient and more power hungry. Perhaps 2 generations old or more.

I'm not very worried about rogue attackers in situations like these. My only concern is government-mounted attacks with technology that surpasses what miners have. Whether we are talking extremely effective ASICs on silicon, GaAs implementations that clock like mofos or ...QCs.

Look at the pig farmer example I gave you. It's a good model to work with, good level of abstraction because you can actually build on it/tweak it to reflect reality in a more nuanced/exact way.

For instance, you can make it more accurate by allowing for the fact that you're not the only pig farmer, and many pig farmers will go out of business when halvening cometh & pig price is cut in half. You can plug in your own profit margins, model pork belly futures (mining contracts), etc, etc.

That way we could see exactly where our disagreements lie. Not toss opinions against each other & get mad.
Governments with high-tech gear are neither here nor there -- Chinese government could simply nationalize all the mines in China, no biggie.

@Fatman: I don't understand what you're trying to say, so I guess dead end I don't particularly care about whose side that reddit guy's on, or if such an attack is actually happening -- my point is it could happen, and is likely to happen, and the period right before teh Halvening (& The Forkening), is the most likely time for it to happen.

[Mrpumperitis]

BTC moving down, ETH moving up  

It's almost starting to look like ETH might take over.

I better go buy an ETH debit card then to spend all of these ETHs.

Or go visit an ETH accepting restaurant.

I can use them to buy things at Amazon for a discount right?

as far as i can remember BTC price declines really began once payment processors started dumpin btc to fiat daily for merchants that would normally have held them for longer.  check the date when Bitpay opened for business...This to me was the first of many BTC fiat leaks which led to selling pressure.
ETH is not for buying items from shops/restaurants but can be used as a currency if the businesses wants too or they could create their own Dapp & loyalty token. I hope they never use ETH as mainstream currency as this will only encourage more ETH payment processors for merchants to turn up.
Ethereum’s creators themselves don’t refer to it as a “cryptocurrency.” Ethereum is a shared computing platform, and its base unit is ether, the “cryptofuel” that powers the network: “a token whose purpose is to pay for computation, and is not intended to be used as or considered a currency, asset, share or anything else.”

also you may ask who will pay for this token computation...well in under 3months there is samsung,microsoft,unbuntu rwe,40+ banks and many more..

[AlexGR]

Look at the pig farmer example I gave you. It's a good model to work with, good level of abstraction because you can actually build on it/tweak it to reflect reality in a more nuanced/exact way.

For instance, you can make it more accurate by allowing for the fact that you're not the only pig farmer, and many pig farmers will go out of business when halvening cometh & pig price is cut in half. You can plug in your own profit margins, model pork belly futures (mining contracts), etc, etc.

Yeah, I skipped the example altogether because it assumed equal farming efficiency and costs, which isn't really suitable for the ASIC analogy where you have much faster equipment and more energy efficiency.

And I can't see how I can tune it to make one farmer better at ...growing pigs, when these have a very predetermined type of growing. Cost efficiency, yes, this we can tune, saying one farmer needs X money to grow a pig and another needs X/2 money to grow a pig.

Gold mining can provide better examples. You could have bulldozers, rock trucks, sluice plants, loaders, excavators all burning tons of diesel and giving you 100-200-300 yards an hour (without breakdowns), or you could be running a floating dredge at 200-300-500-800 yards an hour which only burns its own fuel (which is much much less than all the other equipment combined). So you have more yardage AND more fuel efficiency = win.

For "Gold Rush" fans, I think Tony Beets said it best... something to the effect "well all those guys, Todd, Parker, etc are not gonna be here in 10-20 years due to cost efficiency. But the dredge will be here dredging. It takes few people to operate, it has only one piece of equipment requiring diesel, so you can't go wrong."

[bargainbin]

Look at the pig farmer example I gave you. It's a good model to work with, good level of abstraction because you can actually build on it/tweak it to reflect reality in a more nuanced/exact way.

For instance, you can make it more accurate by allowing for the fact that you're not the only pig farmer, and many pig farmers will go out of business when halvening cometh & pig price is cut in half. You can plug in your own profit margins, model pork belly futures (mining contracts), etc, etc.

Yeah, I skipped the example altogether because it assumed equal farming efficiency and costs, which isn't really suitable for the ASIC analogy where you have much faster equipment and more energy efficiency.

And I can't see how I can tune it to make one farmer better at ...growing pigs, when these have a very predetermined type of growing. Cost efficiency, yes, this we can tune, saying one farmer needs X money to grow a pig and another needs X/2 money to grow a pig.

We can easily factor this in by assuming pig-raising costs are not the same for all farmers (which also happens to be the case IRL. Raising a pig in a NY penthouse is costlier than raising a pig @ a Chinese Pig Factory.). So let's say it costs some pig farmers only $5 to raise a pig now, while $10 for others. How does this break my model? Sure, the $5 farmers will remain profitable after the halvening, but ...so what?

The gold mining/dredge bit doesn't work too well for Bitcoin. Haven't been following mining lately, but rule of the thumb was break even in ~3 mo -- if you don't, you ain't going to. Because while your dredge was dredging, other, more efficient dredges got to dredging, right where your dredge dredges (you don't stake a claim in Bitcoin, everyone mines for the same coins), requiring you to either upgrade your dredge or GTF out of the dredging business.