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

[Torque]

Peter, I understand you are a big fan of BitcoinGold and a holder, too. And you wish for others to buy up the price. But this is not the way to go about it.

Again just like with BCash, Peter R. is a "big fan" of any forked coin that he got for free and didn't have to pay for directly out of his pocket.

Such a transparent shill that guy.  

[d_eddie]

Won't LN make payment processors like Bitpay totally obsolete?

But I think LN fees will be too high and the network too impractical to compete with on-chain payments on an uncrippled cryptocurrency.

<crystalball>
Incentives, Peter. With the entry cost of setting up a LN hub close to the simple funding of channels, my guess is there will be fierce competition on prices, some of which motivated by purely political, rather than financial, reasons (as in: I, for one, will start a hub as soon as it's practical). With such low-denominator price wars, and low ROI volunteers helping the net nearly for free (as full nodes already do today), I don't see how a high fee level could be sustained.
</crystalball>

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Peter, I understand you are a big fan of BitcoinGold and a holder, too. And you wish for others to buy up the price. But this is not the way to go about it.

Again just like with BCash, Peter R. is a "big fan" of any forked coin that he got for free and didn't have to pay for directly out of his pocket.

Such a transparent shill that guy.  

And in the morning he'll be gone. We know his type.

[cAPSLOCK]

Big Head and Shoulders... now little head and shoulders, but our dandruff is getting worse.

[Peter R]

Won't LN make payment processors like Bitpay totally obsolete?

But I think LN fees will be too high and the network too impractical to compete with on-chain payments on an uncrippled cryptocurrency.

<crystalball>
Incentives, Peter. With the entry cost of setting up a LN hub close to the simple funding of channels, my guess is there will be fierce competition on prices, some of which motivated by purely political, rather than financial, reasons (as in: I, for one, will start a hub as soon as it's practical). With such low-denominator price wars, and low ROI volunteers helping the net nearly for free (as full nodes already do today), I don't see how a high fee level could be sustained.
</crystalball>

There was a really interesting talk on "Recharging Lightning" at Scaling Bitcoin Stanford by Aviv Zohar.  You can watch it here:

https://youtu.be/3pd6xHjLbhs?t=1h2m21s

He showed that LN fees in fact wouldn't be as low as many people expect because:

- channels eventually become depleted and need to be "recharged." This costs 1 on-chain fee which needs to be amortized over the life of the channel.

- the bigger you make the channel the longer it lasts before needing a "recharge," but then the more money you tie up.  There is an opportunity cost associated with this money tied up in a channel (modeled as an interest rate by Zohar).  

Zohar shows that the only way fees can be very very small, is if channels are very very richly funded OR if on-chain fees are also very small.  Neither of these conditions will hold however (well outside of a highly-centralized hub-and-spoke model where the hubs control all of the LN channels).

[Peter R]

Peter, I understand you are a big fan of BitcoinGold and a holder, too. And you wish for others to buy up the price. But this is not the way to go about it.

Again just like with BCash, Peter R. is a "big fan" of any forked coin that he got for free and didn't have to pay for directly out of his pocket.

Such a transparent shill that guy.  

Uh...BMB just made that up.  For God's sake, executables from the Bitcoin Gold github repo stole people's private keys!

[Neo_Coin]

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Peter, I understand you are a big fan of BitcoinGold and a holder, too. And you wish for others to buy up the price. But this is not the way to go about it.

Again just like with BCash, Peter R. is a "big fan" of any forked coin that he got for free and didn't have to pay for directly out of his pocket.

Such a transparent shill that guy.  

Uh...BMB just made that up.  For God's sake, executables from the Bitcoin Gold github repo stole people's private keys!

Pft. You love it

[Peter R]

Peter, I understand you are a big fan of BitcoinGold and a holder, too. And you wish for others to buy up the price. But this is not the way to go about it.

Again just like with BCash, Peter R. is a "big fan" of any forked coin that he got for free and didn't have to pay for directly out of his pocket.

Such a transparent shill that guy.  

Uh...BMB just made that up.  For God's sake, executables from the Bitcoin Gold github repo stole people's private keys!

Pft. You love it

Oh fine, you caught me.

[BlindMayorBitcorn]

Aha. That was fun. Now if we could just shoot right back up above $16k we can pretend it never happened.

[d_eddie]

Won't LN make payment processors like Bitpay totally obsolete?

But I think LN fees will be too high and the network too impractical to compete with on-chain payments on an uncrippled cryptocurrency.

<crystalball>
Incentives, Peter. With the entry cost of setting up a LN hub close to the simple funding of channels, my guess is there will be fierce competition on prices, some of which motivated by purely political, rather than financial, reasons (as in: I, for one, will start a hub as soon as it's practical). With such low-denominator price wars, and low ROI volunteers helping the net nearly for free (as full nodes already do today), I don't see how a high fee level could be sustained.
</crystalball>

There was a really interesting talk on "Recharging Lightning" at Scaling Bitcoin Stanford by Aviv Zohar.  You can watch it here:

https://youtu.be/3pd6xHjLbhs?t=1h2m21s

He showed that LN fees in fact wouldn't be as low as many people expect because:

- channels eventually become depleted and need to be "recharged." This costs 1 on-chain fee which needs to be amortized over the life of the channel.

That's right. That's where CoinJoin-like refunding can help. Actually, I'm not 100% positive that system has been extended to deal with refunding yet, but it can and it will. You can then plan your re-fundings in advance, and pay a fraction of the fee if you are willing to wait.

- the bigger you make the channel the longer it lasts before needing a "recharge," but then the more money you tie up.  There is an opportunity cost associated with this money tied up in a channel (modeled as an interest rate by Zohar).  

Zohar shows that the only way fees can be very very small, is if channels are very very richly funded OR if on-chain fees are also very small.  Neither of these conditions will hold however (well outside of a highly-centralized hub-and-spoke model where the hubs control all of the LN channels).

I would much prefer a written source, but I do get the gist of the model, which seems indeed sensible. I would like to see some quantitative estimates on "very very richly founded". In principle, I agree that at first it could be so that you need a mammoth channel to deal with the occasional mammoth payment (or several squirrel payments), but once a system is in place that implements a kind of "packet switching" for payments, splitting them over different channels/routes, that problem will disappear. All it takes for the system to work in a quasi-steady state is the global I/O of the channels to nearly null out, which means little fresh btc need enter/exit the LN.

Alternatively, Average Joe - who runs a LN hub whose net capacity flow is negative (more BTC going out than in) - could send fiat or other low-fee cryptos into some LN-friendly exchange, which in turn would refill Joe's channel with positive capacity. It remains to be seen how the flow will be organized, although until salaries are paid in BTC I imagine normal user channels would send more than they receive on average. The net effect for Joe would be that of "buying moar", which for an enthusiastic LN volunteer (possibly politically motivated), sounds quite desirable.

[Neo_Coin]

Meanwhile, as BTC comes down this is the regular performance of ETH

[TERA2]

im still waiting for ETH to correct to $50

[Peter R]

I would much prefer a written source, but I do get the gist of the model, which seems indeed sensible. I would like to see some quantitative estimates on "very very richly founded". In principle, I agree that at first it could be so that you need a mammoth channel to deal with the occasional mammoth payment (or several squirrel payments), but once a system is in place that implements a kind of "packet switching" for payments, splitting them over different channels/routes, that problem will disappear. All it takes for the system to work in a quasi-steady state is the global I/O of the channels to nearly null out, which means little fresh btc need enter/exit the LN.

Alternatively, Average Joe - who runs a LN hub whose net capacity flow is negative (more BTC going out than in) - could send fiat or other low-fee cryptos into some LN-friendly exchange, which in turn would refill Joe's channel with positive capacity. It remains to be seen how the flow will be organized, although until salaries are paid in BTC I imagine normal user channels would send more than they receive on average. The net effect for Joe would be that of "buying moar", which for an enthusiastic LN volunteer (possibly politically motivated), sounds quite desirable.

Zohar modeled the flow of coins as a random walk.  For example, if a channel starts with Alice and Bob each holding $100 dollars, and if you imagine them routing through their channel N payments of $10 each, we'd expect the channel to be fully lopsided after routing 100 transactions ( [$100 / $10]^2 ).  If recharging the channel costs $30, then fees need to be at least $30 / 100 = $0.30 per transaction per hop.  If it takes 5 hops to route your payment, that is at least $1.50 in fees.  

Anyways, this is is the gist of Zohar's model.  

[UnDerDoG81]

ETH grown 10000% in 1 year. Yet everybody is talking about a bitcoin bubble 

It seems like ETH is unstoppable.

[Arriemoller]

Dear Bitcorn,

Hi! I know, we don't talk much anymore. I'm semi-retired, and you're big time now. But listen.

We would all be really tickled if you'd stay above $16k.

Don't want to seem ungrateful, but like jojo says, we have mouths to feed. Food for thought.

Well, yes, actually, I am o.k. if we do not necessarily stay above $16k; however, we have kind of gotten used to this newly found wealth.


I am kind of suspecting that we have decent possibilities to stay within a $14k to $18k price range, yet I get the sense that due to the ongoing level of dispute about the actual price, there could be considerable movement that will include $11k to $20k, and so in that regard, we are kind of still in a sub $20k consolidation range that remains quite large. 

Certainly, I would like to break upwards, too, or even to stay within the range, whether the more solid range is $14k to $18k or whether such more solid range is $11k to $20k.  Either way, the bitcoin price battle has not stopped, and there remains disagreement.  Bears would really love to push BTC prices down, but they are running into too much support and buying support continues to catch up and to keep up.  In the end, we are going to break above $20k, it is just a matter whether that breaking up happens within a week or if it takes a few months to accomplish.

Breaking down seems less likely than breaking up, such as 43.71497%-ish, but UP still seems the more likely with about a  56.28503% chance.. in other words, currently, up remains more likely than down.  hahahahahaha   

Can you show how you got that percentage conclusion. Thank you.

Love from,

Everyone on this thread. X

Oh shit, "we" are all fucked now, because even rjclarke is playing the royal "we" card.

Just to be clear,  those numbers were pulled out of a near total contextualized assessment of BTC market dynamics accounting for historical happenings, momentum and future probabilities of a variety of events that have not yet happened, including trade volume representations, knowns, unknowns and uncertainties.

In other words, I am employing a kind of amalgoratiated "speculation" within conformity of the WO tradition.     

Makes more sense, now?  Are "we" satisfied? 

So...from your ass?

[d_eddie]

Thanks for the summary, Peter!

Zohar modeled the flow of coins as a random walk.  For example, if a channel starts with Alice and Bob each holding $100 dollars, and if you imagine them routing through their channel N payments of $10 each, we'd expect the channel to be fully lopsided after routing 100 transactions ( [$100 / $10]^2 ).

It might actually be even worse than that if the transactions are not independent (and I assume they aren't, at least until the salary-in-BTC is a reasonable assumption).

If recharging the channel costs $30, then fees need to be at least $30 / 100 = $0.30 per transaction per hop.  If it takes 5 hops to route your payment, that is at least $1.50 in fees.  

However, increasing the number of channels per LN node makes the average unbalance converge to a normal (Gaussian) distribution: a bell centered on zero with a standard deviation (width) that grows with average transaction size.

The number of channels can be increased with limited (ideally null) additional financial exposure by making the channels smaller - if the hypothetical transaction slicer/packetizer is in place.

Besides, you're assuming funding a channel costs 15% of the channel capacity (30$ for 200$ capacity). I don't think this is realistic, as the blockchain related funding cost should only be a function of the number of utxos under SW regime. And it would definitely be a SW transaction.

I guess we'll see.

[d_eddie]

Just to be clear,  those numbers were pulled out of a near total contextualized assessment of BTC market dynamics accounting for historical happenings, momentum and future probabilities of a variety of events that have not yet happened, including trade volume representations, knowns, unknowns and uncertainties.

In other words, I am employing a kind of amalgoratiated "speculation" within conformity of the WO tradition.     

So...from your ass?

How brutal, Arriemoller! 

[JayJuanGee]

I feel like gentleman.


This fucking thing, aka bitcoin, has performed beyond expectations, no?

We had a 78x increase in a bit more than 2 years (that is $250 to $19,666), and even with a 43% correction down from $19,666 to $11,060,


we are still floating largely in the 60x to 70x price appreciation arena, no (that is mostly between $15k and $17.5k)?


Relatively speaking, I feel a whole hell-of-a lot more "gentleman" than I did 2 years ago. 

That's for sure. 

Of course, the lower the price goes, the more disappointed that I will become because I will feel less rich than I had felt, but still, I still feel quite gentle and man...

Is it just me?  Am I be delusional?

[HairyMaclairy]

You guys do realize that subchannels and sub-sub channels are a thing.  

And subchannels don’t have to transact in Satoshis.  They could be any token.  I’m going to launch a Hairy token for my Lightning Channel.  

Those are highly artificial restraints Zohar has applied to LN.  Which means his model isn’t worth the paper it’s not written on.

This is the problem with Peter.  He talks shit but sufficiently technical shit that many cannot see through it.