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

[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.

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?

We can adjust the costs. But how can we adjust performance? The only way I can think of, is, let's say farmer A gives hormones or a special diet so that his pigs get twice as fat in 6 months, compared to those of farmer B.

Because that's the issue here. Lower nm chips are typically more energy efficient for the same number of transistors, but changes in circuit architecture can also increase performance. So you have 2 elements to count.

It's not like you have 100 ghashes from one chip and 100 ghashes from another but the second just so happens to burn less energy. You have more ghashes as well. This means that the equipment that ultimately shuts down represents a smaller hashrate.

The gold mining/dredge bit doesn't work too well for Bitcoin. Haven't been following mining lately, but rule of the thumb was breake 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.

I'm talking about mega-dredges which were mainly used for inland mining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OyEvwCpuuQ&

[mmitech]

Bitstamp will be adding ETH soon, a source (a credible one) told me yesterday that the implementation is done and they are just testing and tweaking things at the moment... you know what is funny, I posted this on /r/ethtrader daily discussion and I got so many down votes, one went so far telling me I am trading my books this just gives you a hint about people trading position.

[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?

We can adjust the costs. But how can we adjust performance? The only way I can think of, is, let's say farmer A gives hormones or a special diet so that his pigs get twice as fat in 6 months, compared to those of farmer B.

Because that's the issue here. Lower nm chips are typically more energy efficient for the same number of transistors, but changes in circuit architecture can also increase performance. So you have 2 elements to count.

It's not like you have 100 ghashes from one chip and 100 ghashes from another but the second just so happens to burn less energy. You have more ghashes as well. This means that the equipment that ultimately shuts down represents a smaller hashrate.

>But how can we adjust performance?
Bigger pig farm = better performance. No need for pig steroids (faster chips), just raise more pigs (more miners, bigger farm) -> will have more pigs to sell. Easy peasy
Remember, the slaughterhouse doesn't care how quickly you fattened your pigs; all it cares about is how many pigs you got to sell.

>the equipment that ultimately shuts down represents a smaller hashrate.
Doesn't follow at all. Let's say the majority of mining gear today is mining 1 BTC @ cost of .7 BTC.
When teh Halvening cometh, that majority will [likely] shut down*

The gold mining/dredge bit doesn't work too well for Bitcoin. Haven't been following mining lately, but rule of the thumb was breake 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.

I'm talking about mega-dredges which were mainly used for inland mining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OyEvwCpuuQ&

Again, what is different? The gold miner without a staked claim (exclusive rights to the spot he mines), is subject to poor godless savages swarming in & mining the shit out of his spot. That is the case for Bitcoin -- everyone is competing for the same *cough* "digital gold"
*of course, this is not necessarily the case; we're not factoring in if *other miners have shut down (thus lowering difficulty -> making our shit gear profitable again)*. There's a prisoner's dilemma/Mexican standoff thingy that will happen when Halvening cometh...

[adamstgBit]

Bitstamp will be adding ETH soon, a source (a credible one) told me yesterday that the implementation is done and they are just testing and tweaking things at the moment... you know what is funny, I posted this on /r/ethtrader daily discussion and I got so many down votes, one went so far telling me I am trading my books this just gives you a hint about people trading position.

this is getting out of hand!
whats next bitpay will add ETH payments 

[adamstgBit]

[bargainbin]

^^

[adamstgBit]

remember us, remember why we died.

[bargainbin]

Meanwhile, back at the $$$ ranch, glamorous fabulosity intensifies...

()

[JayJuanGee]

Introduces a new type of DOS attack (go-fish-wit-ddos)
An attacker mines a segwit-block with 1000 transactions the network has not yet seen (The attacker creates these TX herself )The attacker has the witness data readily available. When other miners try to validate this block they will go through every single one of these TX and say "I don't have the witness data for this TX_ID, I have to call TCP::GetWitnessData( TX_ID ) aw yes this is valid" 1000 times

This attack isn't possible with the way segwit is constructed and comes from a lack of understanding . If the witness root hash doesn't match what is in the coinbase the block will be rejected by the node. At no point will each individual tx be requesting witness data .

Additionally , If we are going to speak more broadly about pros and cons segwit remove all malleability attacks which is huge.

Segnet 4 rolled out (getting closer to segwit final RC), spin up a node and test away--

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-March/012595.html

The exciting thing is it now supports LN app deployment and testing .

BitUsher:  I appreciate your sharing your ideas about some of the technical aspects of segwit, and accordingly, I would like to ask a question concerning an impression that I have about segwit, and I am not sure from where I got such idea.  Here goes: 

I am fairly non-technical, but I understand some of the layman oriented explanations, and my understanding of segwit is that it separates signature information from value transmission, and accordingly, to some extent the implementation of segwit causes two segments of the bitcoin blockchain or at least separates some of the non-value transmissions and information from the main secure financial segment of the blockchain (which currently has a 1 mb limit). 

After segwit, the current 1mb limit of the blockchain remains the more important portion of the transactions because it secures financial value, and the parts that are separated from the main secure blockchain are less valuable/important because they are not securing value (at least not financial value).   Accordingly, since segwit is separating value from non-value, does such technical abilities of segwit also cause more abilities to separate spam from non-spam in the financial portion of the blockchain?   

Let me explain what I believe is spam... Part of the definition of spam seems to be that those are transactions (transmissions) that are placed on the blockchain that are not paying any fees.. some of them may be valid, but some are not and accordingly, their priority is less important than the financial portion.  If the answer to what I am asking above is in the affirmative, then it seems likely that segwit could potentially go a long way towards removing spam attacks on the secure portion of the blockchain, no?, and free up additional space because seg wit will be separating out non-fee transactions (that may well include spam).  Can you or anyone else explain this better or let me if I am misunderstanding what seg wit could potentially bring to bitcoin?

[AlexGR]

Bigger pig farm = better performance.

That could work too.

>the equipment that ultimately shuts down represents a smaller hashrate.
Doesn't follow at all. Let's say the majority of mining gear today is mining 1 BTC @ cost of .7 BTC.
When teh Halvening cometh, that majority will [likely] shut down*

It doesn't go that way.

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitfury-unveils-fastest-bitcoin-mining-chip-ever-created/

Let's assume the article is generally correct.
Let's assume that in the year 2015 all bitcoins are mined by 28nm bitfury chips
Let's assume that the entire 2015 network made up of 28nm bitfury chips gave us 100 petahash.

Going to 2016:

Let's assume 40% of the miners have upgraded to the 16nm bitfury chips which are 4x faster for the same watts.

Now, when the 40% upgraded their mining operations, their 40 petahash became 160 petahash for the same watts.

The other 60% which did not upgrade, still have their ....60 petahash.

So in this scenario, the "to-be-retired" hardware will represent only 60 out of a total 220 petahash - even though they are 60% of the machines.

To make it more factual: All this hashpower that has been added in the last few months, well... it ain't from crap equipment.

Mar 18 2016   165,496,835,118   4.46%   1,184,672,491 GH/s
Mar 04 2016   158,427,203,767   -3.10%   1,134,066,098 GH/s
Feb 19 2016   163,491,654,909   13.44%   1,170,318,852 GH/s
Feb 07 2016   144,116,447,847   20.06%   1,031,625,717 GH/s
Jan 26 2016   120,033,340,651   5.89%   859,232,121 GH/s
Jan 13 2016   113,354,299,801   9.12%   811,421,684 GH/s
Dec 31 2015   103,880,340,815   11.16%   743,604,444 GH/s
Dec 18 2015   93,448,670,796   18.14%   668,931,642 GH/s
Dec 06 2015   79,102,380,900   8.77%   566,236,898 GH/s
Nov 24 2015   72,722,780,643   10.44%   520,569,941 GH/s
Nov 11 2015   65,848,255,180   5.77%   471,360,171 GH/s
Oct 29 2015   62,253,982,450   2.25%   445,631,364 GH/s

We've gone 3x in hashpower in just 5 months. These two thirds of the current hashpower that have added 800mn GH/s over the 400mn that we already had, are not from obsolete equipment that will go offline post-halving.

Again, what is different? The gold miner without a staked claim (exclusive rights to the spot he mines), is subject to poor godless savages swarming in & mining the shit out of his spot. That is the case for Bitcoin -- everyone is competing for the same *cough* "digital gold"

The point was that these large mega-dredges don't need separate bulldozers, rock trucks, loaders, excavators, sluice plants etc etc. They just process the dirt on the spot, thus eliminating tremendous fuel costs. They process a lot of yards and do so more economically. And as fuel costs go up, so can the savings increase.

[JayJuanGee]

3. In terms of manipulation, owning Bitcoins is actually a hedge against the ongoing PM manipulation as the mechanisms existing in the gold manipulation 'industry' are not found in bitcoin.

Based on historical prices, I would guess that the floor price of gold (due to demand for jewelry, decoration, and industrial uses) is less than 400 USD/oz.  If that is correct, gold's current market price of ~1200 USD/oz is at least 3-4 times its floor price, due to demand for speculative trading (people buying it expecting to make money when its price rises) and for hedging or value storage (people buying it because they think that other investment options are more likely to lose their value).    

Demand for speculative trading and hedging is dependent on people's feelings and beliefs about the future of the economy, and therefore very fragile -- as shown by the crash of the gold price from the peak of ~1800 to ~1000 USD/oz in 2013--2015.  The overpricing is sustained by intensive marketing by the likes of Max Kaiser, Peter Schiff, ZeroHedge, etc.

Bitcoin's floor price would be due to demand for use as a currency.  The number unknown, but very low; most estimates put it below 10 USD/BTC, and there is no reason to expect it to grow very quickly. (Indeed, if the network's capacity is not lifted, it is unlikely to rise at all.)  So bitcoin is far more overpriced than gold.  As in the case of gold, the overpricing is due to demand for speculative trading and (to a much lesser extent) hedging and value storage; and is sustained by marketing by Antonopoulos, Ver, Andreessen, Silbert, etc..

4. Bitcoins are far more scarce than gold and silver. There are ~6 billion ounces of above ground gold and only 15.4 million bitcoins. That's one bitcoin for every 390 ounces. That's now. The future is actually in favor of bitcoin:gold ratio.

Scarcity by itself does not make an item valuable; for this one also needs demand that is large compared to the supply.  Tickets for last year's lottery, Soviet Trabant cars, and the hairs on my head are all very scarce, and have a hard cap on future supply; yet are not very valuable.

Moreover, an item is not effectively "scarce" if there is an abundance of adequate substitutes.  Gold has no adequate substitutes for jewelry, and its possible substitutes for certain industrial applications are even more scarce.  In contrast, one can create an infinite number of cryptocurrencies that are equivalent to bitcoin, or even better than it.  

The only advantage of bitcoin over litecoin and other altcoins is its popularity, its "brand recognition".  (It has more hashpower than the altcoins, but that is because it is more profitable to mine, which is because its coins sell for a higher price; which is again because of its popularity.)  Popularity that is not rooted in an fudamental quality is very fragile; it  could be quickly destroyed by bad news, bad management, or by good marketing of the alternatives.

6. Even if above ground gold doubles or triples in the mid-term future, it will still preserve its value due to fiat inflating at a much faster pace. However bitcoin will be inflating at a much lower pace than both, hence being an adequate store of value, which also has good upside potential (gold's marketcap can't go 10x to 70+ trillion range with ease, unlike bitcoin which can hit 4k usd and do a 10x).

Only fools and criminals will "invest" by hoarding a currency, whether it is dollars or bitcoins.  Thus, comparing gold to dollars as store of value is a red herring -- a misleading argument that sleazy gold peddlers use all he time.  Good investments are things that will have real value due to expected real demand, not conventional value or value inflated by speculative demand; and, even better, that create real wealth.  Stocks, real estate, tools, shops are examples of such wealth-creating things that are automatically protected against inflation.  In many countries there are also bonds, issued by banks or the government, that pay back a value adjusted for inflation plus a small interest.

The term "inflation" can mean two things.  Popularly, it is any drop in the purchasing value of a currency.  Technically, it is a drop that is caused by an increase in the amount of currency in circulation, following the printing of new cash or the creation of more virtual money through easing of bank credits etc..  Bitcoin has a controlled and ultimately finite amount of the latter, so technically its inflation will decrease and eventually end.  In the popular sense, however, bitcoin's inflation  neither bounded nor temporary. The drop from ~1200 USD/BTC on 2013-11-28 to ~220 in Jan/2015 (a loss of 80% of purchasing power) was not due to the issuance of new coins.

I find it a bit ironic that you, Jorge, have been participating in this bitcoin forum (and this thread) for longer than me, and you still fail to understand several aspects of bitcoin.  You frame issues so narrowly in order to attempt to argue your same thesis, over and over and over, and that is your presumption and spinning of the conclusion that bitcoin has little to no value... ...   You present a lot of discussion, but your overall conclusion is that bitcoin is worthless with possibly a value of a bit over $10. That conclusion is amazingly dumb given the amount of investment into bitcoin's infrastructure, mining and ongoing developments. 

Alts are not going to take over bitcoin because none of the alts have anywhere near the same kind of networking advantages of bitcoin whether we are talking about speculators, consumers, investors, miners, developers, financial services, etc..  Each of these networking effects are in various levels of infancy, yet some of them are further along than others - but no other alt coins are even close, in the aggregate.... and especially, when you fold in the security of bitcoin's largely peer to peer set up.... no alts are even close... yet I am not hating on alts, because several of them are going to either be absorbed into bitcoin or copied by various bitcoin innovators in coming years and otherwise folding their features into bitcoin.

[bargainbin]

Bigger pig farm = better performance.

That could work too.

>the equipment that ultimately shuts down represents a smaller hashrate.
Doesn't follow at all. Let's say the majority of mining gear today is mining 1 BTC @ cost of .7 BTC.
When teh Halvening cometh, that majority will [likely] shut down*

It doesn't go that way.

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitfury-unveils-fastest-bitcoin-mining-chip-ever-created/

Let's assume the article is generally correct.
Let's assume that in the year 2015 all bitcoins are mined by 28nm bitfury chips
Let's assume that the entire 2015 network made up of 28nm bitfury chips gave us 100 petahash.

Going to 2016:

Let's assume 40% of the miners have upgraded to the 16nm bitfury chips which are 4x faster for the same watts.

Now, when the 40% upgraded their mining operations, their 40 petahash became 160 petahash for the same watts.

The other 60% which did not upgrade, still have their ....60 petahash.

So in this scenario, the "to-be-retired" hardware will represent only 60 out of a total 220 petahash - even though they are 60% of the machines.

To make it more factual: All this hashpower that has been added in the last few months, well... it ain't from crap equipment.

Mar 18 2016   165,496,835,118   4.46%   1,184,672,491 GH/s
Mar 04 2016   158,427,203,767   -3.10%   1,134,066,098 GH/s
Feb 19 2016   163,491,654,909   13.44%   1,170,318,852 GH/s
Feb 07 2016   144,116,447,847   20.06%   1,031,625,717 GH/s
Jan 26 2016   120,033,340,651   5.89%   859,232,121 GH/s
Jan 13 2016   113,354,299,801   9.12%   811,421,684 GH/s
Dec 31 2015   103,880,340,815   11.16%   743,604,444 GH/s
Dec 18 2015   93,448,670,796   18.14%   668,931,642 GH/s
Dec 06 2015   79,102,380,900   8.77%   566,236,898 GH/s
Nov 24 2015   72,722,780,643   10.44%   520,569,941 GH/s
Nov 11 2015   65,848,255,180   5.77%   471,360,171 GH/s
Oct 29 2015   62,253,982,450   2.25%   445,631,364 GH/s

We've gone 3x in hashpower in just 5 months. These two thirds of the current hashpower that have added 800mn GH/s over the 400mn that we already had, are not from obsolete equipment that will go offline post-halving.

Again, what is different? The gold miner without a staked claim (exclusive rights to the spot he mines), is subject to poor godless savages swarming in & mining the shit out of his spot. That is the case for Bitcoin -- everyone is competing for the same *cough* "digital gold"

The point was that these large mega-dredges don't need separate bulldozers, rock trucks, loaders, excavators, sluice plants etc etc. They just process the dirt on the spot, thus eliminating tremendous fuel costs. They process a lot of yards and do so more economically. And as fuel costs go up, so can the savings increase.

>Now, when the 40% upgraded their mining operations, their 40 petahash became 160 petahash for the same watts.
The hashrate represents *additional* hashpower from new gear. Last gen hardware is still profitable to mine (other pig farmers are running it, so must be).

Also unreasonable to assume that all of the extra hashpower is from new gen chips -- that would imply that the rest of chip manufacturers/gear manufacturers have sold exactly no product since the new BitFury chips hit the market. Pretty difficult to swallow, because doesn't jive with reality.

This is typical Bitcoin thinking: Come up with a scenario, no matter how improbable, where everything doesn't immediately turn to shit, and discount everything else.

>these large mega-dredges don't need separate bulldozers [etc.]
Well yeah, that doesn't work because everyone else is mining your spot too, some with picks and pans, some with dredges just like yours. As you mentioned, more of your fancy dredges came over in the past five months. As n 3x more Now your newfangled dredge is dredging only 1/3 (one third) as many digital pigs as it did just 5 months ago. And come teh Halvening, it's gonna be *less than 1/6th* (because not just Halvening, but also more dredges showed up to dredge your spot in the meantime).

So yeah, to say that the Halvening is gonna be devastating is an understatement.
It's gonna be *disruptive*

[BitUsher]

or at least separates some of the non-value transmissions and information from the main secure financial segment of the blockchain (which currently has a 1 mb limit).  

After segwit, the current 1mb limit of the blockchain remains the more important portion of the transactions because it secures financial value, and the parts that are separated from the main secure blockchain are less valuable/important because they are not securing value (at least not financial value).  

Signatures or witnesses play an important role and are essential to the tx. They just don;t need to be permanently stored and thus can be pruned off to save space.

Accordingly, since segwit is separating value from non-value, does such technical abilities of segwit also cause more abilities to separate spam from non-spam in the financial portion of the blockchain?  

Separating out spam and non spam is a subjective task. Segwit seeks to impose higher fees on tx which burden the network by increasing the UTXO set , but those txs aren't necessarily spam(right now many are likely in this attack). Segwit seeks to more accurately assign a cost to tx's by discounting behavior which doesn't burden the network which in turn indirectly allows the network to handle more tx's , have healthier node, be more secure, and discourage spam. Ultimately it is futile to differentiate the difference between spam and non-spam and we really shouldn't care as long as certain behaviors aren't externalizing costs.

Part of the definition of spam seems to be that those are transactions (transmissions) that are placed on the blockchain that are not paying any fees.. some of them may be valid, but some are not and accordingly, their priority is less important than the financial portion.  If the answer to what I am asking above is in the affirmative, then it seems likely that segwit could potentially go a long way towards removing spam attacks on the secure portion of the blockchain, no?, and free up additional space because seg wit will be separating out non-fee transactions (that may well include spam).  Can you or anyone else explain this better or let me if I am misunderstanding what seg wit could potentially bring to bitcoin?

No, segwit doesn't attempt to discriminate between spam and non spam, merely allows the network to more accurately consider the externalities in a fee market. miners can still decide to include tx with no fees with segwit. Example -

Many Classic supporters have indicated that Segwit is an "Artificial Limitation" that is imposed by developers instead of the free market of miners and users determining what the fees should be . This may seem correct on the forefront , but only because their version of a free market doesn't consider the costs and externalities by such a system. It is akin to Allowing anyone to pollute the environment without considering the health of the ecosystem as a whole and the true costs of polluting the environment and how the costs are amortized and diffused accross everyone.

[Elwar]

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?

A convoluted way to use a debit card and Amazon coupons. I hope BTC has more going for it than that.

Being able to drop your bank and use an international currency that has a finite amount...I'd say that's quite a bit.

Can I do that with ethereums?

[yefi]

...
Dramatic change is coming - but the tiger crouches before it leaps poops. Be patient.

Fixed.
Let's be careful out there, Gentlemen.

Heh. To be fair, I never said it was going to be positive change.

[adamstgBit]

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?

A convoluted way to use a debit card and Amazon coupons. I hope BTC has more going for it than that.

Being able to drop your bank and use an international currency that has a finite amount...I'd say that's quite a bit.

Can I do that with ethereums?

not yet...

[bargainbin]

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?

A convoluted way to use a debit card and Amazon coupons. I hope BTC has more going for it than that.

Being able to drop your bank and use an international currency that has a finite amount...I'd say that's quite a bit.

Can I do that with ethereums?

not yet...

To be fair, can't do that with Bitcoin either -- Elwar's still getting his bank cards rejected by various ATMs.

@AlexGR: your 16nm story looks like utter crap

That is correct. We have just a handful of chips right now and all are used for R&D and profiling including occasional rapid unscheduled disassembly as we look for the limits of the chip . We are expecting the engineering lots in a few weeks time. Luckily our schedule was not affected by the recent Taiwan earthquake.

Our total hash power has increased due to our Gldani immersion cooling datacenter getting to full capacity.

[marcus_of_augustus]

wow, full-on troll mode has been enabled ... haven't seen it this bad in a while, they must be getting desperate.
If they can't break this flag to the down side the big bull gets the green light and its all on ... desperate shorts will get bulldozed.

[JayJuanGee]

or at least separates some of the non-value transmissions and information from the main secure financial segment of the blockchain (which currently has a 1 mb limit).  

After segwit, the current 1mb limit of the blockchain remains the more important portion of the transactions because it secures financial value, and the parts that are separated from the main secure blockchain are less valuable/important because they are not securing value (at least not financial value).  

Signatures or witnesses play an important role and are essential to the tx. They just don;t need to be permanently stored and thus can be pruned off to save space.

Accordingly, since segwit is separating value from non-value, does such technical abilities of segwit also cause more abilities to separate spam from non-spam in the financial portion of the blockchain?  

Separating out spam and non spam is a subjective task. Segwit seeks to impose higher fees on tx which burden the network by increasing the UTXO set , but those txs aren't necessarily spam(right now many are likely in this attack). Segwit seeks to more accurately assign a cost to tx's by discounting behavior which doesn't burden the network which in turn indirectly allows the network to handle more tx's , have healthier node, be more secure, and discourage spam. Ultimately it is futile to differentiate the difference between spam and non-spam and we really shouldn't care as long as certain behaviors aren't externalizing costs.

Part of the definition of spam seems to be that those are transactions (transmissions) that are placed on the blockchain that are not paying any fees.. some of them may be valid, but some are not and accordingly, their priority is less important than the financial portion.  If the answer to what I am asking above is in the affirmative, then it seems likely that segwit could potentially go a long way towards removing spam attacks on the secure portion of the blockchain, no?, and free up additional space because seg wit will be separating out non-fee transactions (that may well include spam).  Can you or anyone else explain this better or let me if I am misunderstanding what seg wit could potentially bring to bitcoin?

No, segwit doesn't attempt to discriminate between spam and non spam, merely allows the network to more accurately consider the externalities in a fee market. miners can still decide to include tx with no fees with segwit. Example -

Many Classic supporters have indicated that Segwit is an "Artificial Limitation" that is imposed by developers instead of the free market of miners and users determining what the fees should be . This may seem correct on the forefront , but only because their version of a free market doesn't consider the costs and externalities by such a system. It is akin to Allowing anyone to pollute the environment without considering the health of the ecosystem as a whole and the true costs of polluting the environment and how the costs are amortized and diffused accross everyone.

Thank you.  I think that you are pretty much confirming my consideration of the matter. 

I used the term Spam to suggest that there are likely nuisance attacks on the blockchain, and I understand that frequently it can be very difficult to distinguish between spam and non-spam ... so accordingly, bitcoin's decentralized system would not upgraded to stop spam...   It will be interesting to see how seg wit plays out, and additional tools that may be employed... I continue to foresee that there will continue to exist paid transactions and non-paid transactions and a certain level of prioritization for paid transactions.  At the same time, I believe that bitcoin remains valuable, too, when it continues to allow for a certain level of (likely lower priority) free transactions.

[gijoes]

wow, full-on troll mode has been enabled ... haven't seen it this bad in a while, they must be getting desperate.
If they can't break this flag to the down side the big bull gets the green light and its all on ... desperate shorts will get bulldozed.

They are getting into the trap this time around - leveraged shorts are increasing massively on BFX. Hopefully, they could raise above 20K - then, they'll provide enough squeeze fuel for us to finally break 450.