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

[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...

[Dabs]

Yeah, bitcoin isn't gold. It's been called gold 2.0.

And so ... bitcoin is also worthless but you were able to buy silver with it. That's not a scam? Or rather it was a trade for something you had, which you didn't value, for something which you think has value? Bitcoin for silver.

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.

Yet the guy didn't have much bitcoins because he spent and used it. So he was pumping bitcoin for nothing. (Unless he planned on people donating to him recently; which I find unlikely.) I don't recall any of his talks as sounding like pumping, and his earlier talks didn't sound like a use car salesman. Perhaps that has improved with time as he speaks much better now.

Anyway, thank you for all the links to your posts, I think I will read them. You are an interesting person.

But I agree with you, Max Keiser is a pumper, sounds like one too. But he's been saying that since several years ago, while at the same time giving away bitcoins to people he meets.

[realr0ach]

Help get me out now...

Your first error as a bitcoin shill was admitting that bitcoin is in an engineered bubble and that gold and silver are in a negative, engineered, inverse bubble making them far better buys:

For this to ‘end’ it requires central banks worldwide to address their issues.

They’ve avoided doing so until now via suppression of gold etc  but the day of reckoning may have come.

[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?

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.

I suppose you want me to assume that it is miners that are spamming. Why not assume that they are aware of networking effects and that it is to their interest to not spam, but allow as many legitimate transactions as possible? The bcash gang is excluded from this assumption by definition!

[milkshock100]

how low can we go...

[gentlemand]

I suppose you want me to assume that it is miners that are spamming. Why not assume that they are aware of networking effects and that it is to their interest to not spam, but allow as many legitimate transactions as possible? The bcash gang is excluded from this assumption by definition!

It's bleeding obvious it's them.

As soon as it looked like Segwit2X was a go fees went from dollars to near free in a matter of hours. Funny that.

I think this particular time it is conceivable this is pure demand as we're manic, but in the past it was pure spamming to push the big block agenda.

[alexeft]

I suppose you want me to assume that it is miners that are spamming. Why not assume that they are aware of networking effects and that it is to their interest to not spam, but allow as many legitimate transactions as possible? The bcash gang is excluded from this assumption by definition!

It's bleeding obvious it's them.

Who is them? The miners in general or the bcash company?

[podyx]

Are we poor again??

[jojo69]

The zombies got Kevin.  I can hear his screams down by the wire.  Almost out of ammo...saving one for myself.