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

[realr0ach]

If you want to talk to a bear go to talk to roach

I'm not a "bear", just tired of the vast amount of lies in bitcoin like people claiming it's "decentralized" when it's not, and people claiming it has better fundamentals than metals when it doesn't.  People are pushing these lies for personal gain.  It's really the exact opposite of what they claim it is - the MORE centralized bitcoin is, the EASIER it is to manipulate the price higher because the incentive for the small amount of actors who control it is greater.  You see the same thing in any altcoin where one guy controls the whole market, he can easily pump it.

Centralization is price positive in other words, but these idiots claim the price is going up because "decentralization" LOL.  There's only two types of markets, aggregate markets and fraud markets controlled by one person or a cartel. Bitcoin is obviously not an aggregate market for anyone who watches market activity, nor is it decentralized.

[bones261]

If you want to talk to a bear go to talk to roach

I'm not a "bear", just tired of the vast amount of lies in bitcoin like people claiming it's "decentralized" when it's not, and people claiming it has better fundamentals than metals when it doesn't.  People are pushing these lies for personal gain.  It's really the exact opposite of what they claim it is - the MORE centralized bitcoin is, the EASIER it is to manipulate the price higher because the incentive for the small amount of actors who control it is greater.  You see the same thing in any altcoin where one guy controls the whole market, he can easily pump it.

Centralization is price positive in other words, but these idiots claim the price is going up because "decentralization" LOL.  There's only two types of markets, aggregate markets and fraud markets controlled by one person or a cartel. Bitcoin is obviously not an aggregate market for anyone who watches market activity, nor is it decentralized.

With all due fairness, someone who is deluded and tells an untruth really isn't lying. Shouldn't we give many of these people the benefit of a doubt?

[d_eddie]

Why would a system that allows cheating be needed?

Sorry, I don't understand the question.

Unless you meant LN is a system that allow cheating. Well, with LN you can give a try at cheating, but only if you have a stake (a channel open) and you are ready to risk the whole stake should your cheat fail.

Yes that is what I meant. So LN is intended to allow small payments, at low cost, that do not overload the base of the network. The most important feature of the base is tht it is trustless, so uncheatable. This is a bit difficult for me.

This is the price to pay for instant transactions (no onchain confirmation), but I'd say LN's anti-cheating mechanism is near perfect. Anyone who spots a cheating transaction within 24 hours (I think - or was it 48?) of its timestamp can give the cheaters what they deserve and pocket a handsome reward. My bet is the network will be swarming with bounty hunters.

[Ludwig Von]

Why would a system that allows cheating be needed?

Sorry, I don't understand the question.

Unless you meant LN is a system that allow cheating. Well, with LN you can give a try at cheating, but only if you have a stake (a channel open) and you are ready to risk the whole stake should your cheat fail.

Yes that is what I meant. So LN is intended to allow small payments, at low cost, that do not overload the base of the network. The most important feature of the base is tht it is trustless, so uncheatable. This is a bit difficult for me.

This is the price to pay for instant transactions (no onchain confirmation), but I'd say LN's anti-cheating mechanism is near perfect. Anyone who spots a cheating transaction within 24 hours (I think - or was it 48?) of its timestamp can give the cheaters what they deserve and pocket a handsome reward. My bet is the network will be swarming with bounty hunters.

So the system that must allow us, average Joe 's to use BTC as money for everyday spending needs bounty hunters to avoid cheating? Why not ask the FBI or any of the alphabet agencies, they will be glad to do so... . I do not believe we need this kind of system... . Moreover, the hunter easily becomes the cheater in this kind of arrangements... .

[RejectedBanana]

Maybe I'm naive, but with all these noobs and old-timers alike whining about transaction fees, I worked out some back of the envelope calculations:

The Bitcoin network is consuming about 100 million kWh to process nearly 400,000 transactions per day. That works out to about 250 kWh per transaction, or about a week of modest home consumption, or enough to power 8 typical US households for a day.

The average cost of electricity in the US is 12 cents per kWh which works out to $30 per transaction or 0.0015 BTC at $20k. This is the break-even transaction fee in terms of energy usage. Any less, you're getting a deal and should be happy to wait for confirmation, any more and hopefully your premium speeds things up.

I personally think $30 is a fair price to securely move any amount of BTC to anyone in the world in typically less than an hour, until either electricity costs come down or the network becomes more energy efficient as demand and use dictate. It's way cheaper and more convenient than a wire. And wires are never intended for small amounts. They're for heavy lifting and high priority transfers. Just try and think about trying to send someone several kilos of gold for $30. For better or for worse, BTC has or will become the favored child of savvy millionaires, governments, and institutions to store (HODL!1) and transmit increasingly vast sums of wealth, sans regulation or too much oversight for the time being.

Besides, there already exists a cheaper and more energy efficient way to send crypto: it’s called Litecoin, et al. You want a cheaper transaction fee, switch to a cheaper coin. It’s less than 50 cents to send Litecoin and your transaction is confirmed way faster. Save your BTC transaction fees for heavy lifting.  All these arguments about trying to achieve Visa's daily transaction capacity - why? We already have Visa. Do people really need to securely and irrevocably purchase coffee on the world's first and most desirous blockchain? BTC serves a way different purpose than Visa, and I'm happy having both for the time being. Soon enough there will be Xapo, Revolut, and Square charge card options that will work out a cheap way to transact off-chain and settle on-chain once a month or year or whatever floats your boat.

To me, the analogy between to gold, silver, copper seems apt for various crypto. The abundance, demand, difficulty and cost of extraction and delivery costs get factored into each crypto's price. But BTC still has some tricks up its sleeve, like LN and atomic swaps and other inevitable network improvements clever people will eventually figure out. The future crypto ecosystem looks bright to me. And hopefully the carbon footprint will improve as energy sources and blockchain efficiencies shift into the future.

[AlcoHoDL]

Have you ever noticed bitcoin con artists always try to portray bitcoin as gold in visualization to pretend it has value?  Sorry, real gold and silver are far superior in fundamentals.  All you're doing is highlighting the psychological fact that gold and silver are the Schelling point of money and base of Exter's pyramid when you try to pretend bitcoin is gold.

You're so wrong... Have you ever carefully examined a physical Bitcoin? Have a good look at the image attached at the end of my post.

Notice what it says along the edge: "1 Troy Oz 999 Fine Copper". Do you know why? In order to stress the fact that Bitcoin's value doesn't come from some rare material properties (like gold or silver). Rather, its value comes from its set of rare mathematical properties, which is something entirely non-material. So, it doesn't matter at all whether a Bitcoin (its private key) is printed on a gold coin, a copper coin, a piece of paper, carved on a piece of wood, stored in any analogue or digital medium, or even spoken over a phone conversation. All these material objects are just carriers of information. Bitcoin's value is not derived from the material itself, but it is contained in the information it carries.

The problem is that we humans have been brainwashed from the day we are born, to associate value with something material. If we can't see or touch something, it can't possibly have any value, right? Wrong! And Bitcoin is currently the best demonstration of this, just like a mathematical equation, such as E = m*c^2, is not valuable because of the kind of paper it's written on, but because of the information its symbols and their associations carry.

The physical Bitcoin depicted in the image below does not serve any practical purpose. It is not necessary to exist. It is merely there to help guys like you understand and take notice of it. After all, a paper wallet is worthless, right? Contrast this with that beautiful, shiny coin! This has got to be much more valuable than that petty paper wallet, right?

[itod]

If you want to talk to a bear go to talk to roach

I'm not a "bear", just tired of the vast amount of lies in bitcoin like people claiming it's "decentralized" when it's not, and people claiming it has better fundamentals than metals when it doesn't.

Then WTF are you doing here? Why are you wasting your tome with this group of people in deep ignorance? Isn't there some gold/silver/metals forum where you can find smarter audience for your rants? The mere fact that you are constantly lurking here speaking nonsense is a witness you deeply know you are completely wrong, otherwise you would not have that obsessive need to speak to people who can not understand what you are talking about.

[fabiorem]

Then WTF are you doing here? Why are you wasting your tome with this group of people in deep ignorance? Isn't there some gold/silver/metals forum where you can find smarter audience for your rants? The mere fact that you are constantly lurking here speaking nonsense is a witness you deeply know you are completely wrong, otherwise you would not have that obsessive need to speak to people who can not understand what you are talking about.

R0ach is a redpiller. They are kind of religious zealots who want to spread their "redpills" around. They are also obsessed with jews, reptilians, fluorides, etc. Get used to it.

[jojo69]

AAAAAIGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!


18xxx

IT"S OVER, RUN FOR THE HILLS!!

[milkshock100]

meanwhile, the pullback continues.

Well it is Sunday...

[Syke]

Sunday Bloody Sunday!

[alexeft]

Maybe I'm naive, but with all these noobs and old-timers alike whining about transaction fees, I worked out some back of the envelope calculations:

The Bitcoin network is consuming about 100 million kWh to process nearly 400,000 transactions per day. That works out to about 250 kWh per transaction, or about a week of modest home consumption, or enough to power 8 typical US households for a day.

The average cost of electricity in the US is 12 cents per kWh which works out to $30 per transaction or 0.0015 BTC at $20k. This is the break-even transaction fee in terms of energy usage. Any less, you're getting a deal and should be happy to wait for confirmation, any more and hopefully your premium speeds things up.

I personally think $30 is a fair price to securely move any amount of BTC to anyone in the world in typically less than an hour, until either electricity costs come down or the network becomes more energy efficient as demand and use dictate. It's way cheaper and more convenient than a wire. And wires are never intended for small amounts. They're for heavy lifting and high priority transfers. Just try and think about trying to send someone several kilos of gold for $30. For better or for worse, BTC has or will become the favored child of savvy millionaires, governments, and institutions to store (HODL!1) and transmit increasingly vast sums of wealth, sans regulation or too much oversight for the time being.

Besides, there already exists a cheaper and more energy efficient way to send crypto: it’s called Litecoin, et al. You want a cheaper transaction fee, switch to a cheaper coin. It’s less than 50 cents to send Litecoin and your transaction is confirmed way faster. Save your BTC transaction fees for heavy lifting.  All these arguments about trying to achieve Visa's daily transaction capacity - why? We already have Visa. Do people really need to securely and irrevocably purchase coffee on the world's first and most desirous blockchain? BTC serves a way different purpose than Visa, and I'm happy having both for the time being. Soon enough there will be Xapo, Revolut, and Square charge card options that will work out a cheap way to transact off-chain and settle on-chain once a month or year or whatever floats your boat.

To me, the analogy between to gold, silver, copper seems apt for various crypto. The abundance, demand, difficulty and cost of extraction and delivery costs get factored into each crypto's price. But BTC still has some tricks up its sleeve, like LN and atomic swaps and other inevitable network improvements clever people will eventually figure out. The future crypto ecosystem looks bright to me. And hopefully the carbon footprint will improve as energy sources and blockchain efficiencies shift into the future.

Thanks for the really fine thoughts! Cheers! 

[bones261]

Maybe I'm naive, but with all these noobs and old-timers alike whining about transaction fees, I worked out some back of the envelope calculations:

The Bitcoin network is consuming about 100 million kWh to process nearly 400,000 transactions per day. That works out to about 250 kWh per transaction, or about a week of modest home consumption, or enough to power 8 typical US households for a day.

The average cost of electricity in the US is 12 cents per kWh which works out to $30 per transaction or 0.0015 BTC at $20k. This is the break-even transaction fee in terms of energy usage. Any less, you're getting a deal and should be happy to wait for confirmation, any more and hopefully your premium speeds things up.

I personally think $30 is a fair price to securely move any amount of BTC to anyone in the world in typically less than an hour, until either electricity costs come down or the network becomes more energy efficient as demand and use dictate. It's way cheaper and more convenient than a wire. And wires are never intended for small amounts. They're for heavy lifting and high priority transfers. Just try and think about trying to send someone several kilos of gold for $30. For better or for worse, BTC has or will become the favored child of savvy millionaires, governments, and institutions to store (HODL!1) and transmit increasingly vast sums of wealth, sans regulation or too much oversight for the time being.

Besides, there already exists a cheaper and more energy efficient way to send crypto: it’s called Litecoin, et al. You want a cheaper transaction fee, switch to a cheaper coin. It’s less than 50 cents to send Litecoin and your transaction is confirmed way faster. Save your BTC transaction fees for heavy lifting.  All these arguments about trying to achieve Visa's daily transaction capacity - why? We already have Visa. Do people really need to securely and irrevocably purchase coffee on the world's first and most desirous blockchain? BTC serves a way different purpose than Visa, and I'm happy having both for the time being. Soon enough there will be Xapo, Revolut, and Square charge card options that will work out a cheap way to transact off-chain and settle on-chain once a month or year or whatever floats your boat.

To me, the analogy between to gold, silver, copper seems apt for various crypto. The abundance, demand, difficulty and cost of extraction and delivery costs get factored into each crypto's price. But BTC still has some tricks up its sleeve, like LN and atomic swaps and other inevitable network improvements clever people will eventually figure out. The future crypto ecosystem looks bright to me. And hopefully the carbon footprint will improve as energy sources and blockchain efficiencies shift into the future.

The problem with your calculations is that it does not include the 12.5 BTC reward the miners get with each block. That alone rewards the miners about 90.00 USD per tx at the current price. At this point in the game, the tx fees are just extra profit padding. Furthermore, Litecoin is a competitor. What kind of enterprise recommends that you just use a competitor if you want it cheaper, faster and of the same quality? 

[jbreher]

Jbrerher is so dumb (or wantonly ignorant?) that he was given the most perfectly succinct description of the difference between linear scaling and non-linear scaling, conceded it was non-linear .... and then sighed, as if to say linear is so obviously better that he has no time to explain that wisdom to us.

I don't recall the exchange of which you speak. Might you be so kind as to link to it, or provide a clearer description thereof?

[alexeft]

.........

The problem with your calculations is that it does not include the 12.5 BTC reward the miners get with each block. That alone rewards the miners about 90.00 USD per tx at the current price. At this point in the game, the tx fees are just extra profit padding.

And?

[realr0ach]

I've already addressed every single one of these topics numerous times.

You may have missed my other post (or maybe you ignored it, I dunno) so here:

1. You say that Andreas Antonopoulos is wrong.

Of course he's wrong.  He's a freaking used car salesmen pumper motivational speaker.  Most of the bitcoin devs disagree with him on numerous issues as well.  Why do people pretend he's the fucking gospel truth of bitcoin?  He's a PUMPER, that's ALL.  How often do you hear him say something like "well yea, this bitcoin thing might die or fail somehow"?  Pretty much never even though every bitcoin dev has said words like that before.  That's how you can tell he's a just a pumper or conman.  People claim Max Keiser is a pumper, but Antonopolous shills about 4000x harder on any issue than him.

2. Bitcoin is not a store of value.

Of course it's not a store of value, or at the very least a far worse store of value than the numerous alternatives that already exist:

http://steemit.com/money/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-23-the-achilles-heel-of-cryptocurrency-economic-fundamentals-seigniorage-fee

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-13-why-the-economics-of-bitcoin-don-t-actually-work-what-satoshi-really-meant-when-he-said-the-price-would

3. Bitcoin is not a unit of account.

As I already explained, bitcoin is probably the unit of account of regulatory arbitrage currently, but the state will inevitably crush that role since govt is a monopoly on force and doesn't like people ignoring it's edicts.  The fact that it's not fungible makes it insanely easy for them to do so as well.  You are essentially signing up to create a paper trail for the state to crush you with.

4. Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange.

I don't recall ever stating it's not a medium of exchange.  ANYTHING can be a medium of exchange.  You can literally use dogshit as a medium of exchange

5. Bitcoin is not decentralized. (thousands of full nodes, thousands of miners, dozens of pools, bunch of devs who all joined voluntarily.)

Correct, I explained how things such as entropy relate to the fundamentals and decentralization of bitcoin and anyone can see it evolves into the equivalent of a valueless, closed entropy system after reading this:

http://steemit.com/steemit/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-14-defining-if-cryptocurrency-has-a-value-or-zero-value-from-a-fundamental-scientific-perspective

http://steemit.com/bitcoin/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-24-bitcoin-has-involuntarily-turned-many-programmers-into-conmen

6. Bitcoin is a scam. And a lie.

Correct, it's mostly a rent seeking usury scheme in practice and I explained why here:

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@r0achtheunsavory/the-r0ach-report-18-the-great-pow-lie

7. Bitcoin is worthless.

Correct, reference section #2, #5, and #6

[itod]

Maybe I'm naive, but with all these noobs and old-timers alike whining about transaction fees, I worked out some back of the envelope calculations:

The Bitcoin network is consuming about 100 million kWh to process nearly 400,000 transactions per day. That works out to about 250 kWh per transaction, or about a week of modest home consumption, or enough to power 8 typical US households for a day.

The average cost of electricity in the US is 12 cents per kWh which works out to $30 per transaction or 0.0015 BTC at $20k. This is the break-even transaction fee in terms of energy usage. Any less, you're getting a deal and should be happy to wait for confirmation, any more and hopefully your premium speeds things up.

I personally think $30 is a fair price to securely move any amount of BTC to anyone in the world in typically less than an hour, until either electricity costs come down or the network becomes more energy efficient as demand and use dictate. It's way cheaper and more convenient than a wire. And wires are never intended for small amounts. They're for heavy lifting and high priority transfers. Just try and think about trying to send someone several kilos of gold for $30. For better or for worse, BTC has or will become the favored child of savvy millionaires, governments, and institutions to store (HODL!1) and transmit increasingly vast sums of wealth, sans regulation or too much oversight for the time being.

Your calculations are way off. Here are exact figures, you can check them in multiple places. I'll put them in per/hour base:
- BTC networks consumes 113.000 US$ of electricity per hour, based on 0.12 US$/KWh price
- during that hour it generates 1.800.000 US$ worth of BTC, based on 19.500 US$/BTC price
- of that amount, 360.000 US$ are transaction fees and 1.440.000 US$ block rewards
- on that proportion, 22.600 US$ electricity is spent on transaction fees and, 90.400 US$ of electricity is spent on block rewards
- since there are on average 13.800 Transactions/hour, price of electricity spent for each transaction is 1.63 US$

This is the minimal price of transaction BTC network can not afford to go bellow, and it will not go down before the Lightning networks are introduced. Everything above that we are paying now is because saboteurs and spammers are polluting the blockchain in their failed attempt to prove BCash is better than BTC.

[bones261]

.........

The problem with your calculations is that it does not include the 12.5 BTC reward the miners get with each block. That alone rewards the miners about 90.00 USD per tx at the current price. At this point in the game, the tx fees are just extra profit padding.

And?

Who do you think is the most likely suspect of spamming this network to artificially inflate the tx market?
I'll give you a clue.

[jojo69]

WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!!

[milkshock100]

Help get me out now...