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

[jojo69]

Would it be a stretch to say that there are too many people on the planet?

Yes. Estimates are the planet can support about 10 billion, which we should reach in about the year 2100.

Place is already a shithole and has degraded markedly in my lifetime.  It would be such an obscene cesspit at 10 billion that the mind recoils.

[jojo69]

https://courts.ms.gov/newsite2/index.php?cn=87490#dispArea
https://courts.ms.gov/newsite2/appellatecourts/docket/sendPDF.php?f=dc00001_live.SCT.17.M.1681.102741.5.pdf&c=87490&a=N&s=2
p45
Sun Jun 19 21:02:05 2011
Mark Karpelès:
hi, got a coin tracking system working now, got any bitcoin address with lots of old stolen coins anywhere I should track ?
mtgox:
did you track the 95k?

and following

@midmagic https://twitter.com/midmagic/status/953024852083945472
If this is what I think it is, this is one of the main former Ripple guys (Jed McCaleb) and Mark Karpeles talking directly about stealing BTC from their disused user accounts to make up for thefts:

mtgox: do you think you can tell how they rooted the box?

Mark Karpelès: difficult to say


Mark Karpelès: kernel is old, and password had been circulating on highly unsecure channels

 

[Bloomie]

I'll just re-state, we may also, theoretically, see a trend upwards beginning on or around February 18th, after tech-sector bonus wires start hitting exchanges.

I got to be brutally honest here, where did this bullshit rumor come from? Seems like some fake news that whales would put out there so that newb traders go long on margin and get rekt.

What bullshit rumor ? About January and February bonuses likely having a portion moved to exchanges for cryptocoin purchasing ?

A lot of people get paid on Thursdays or the 15 of every month. It has zero impact. It's bullshit and childish to think the price works like that. It doesn't. Even if it did, it would be priced in already.

The difference is that bonuses are very large checks compared to regular bi-weekly income. Most people have a system where they put some money into checking to pay for bills and things like that, and part of it into savings or investing. The difference here is that Wall Street guys are gonna be getting a fat 6 figure bonus check all at once. You know how people go on spending sprees when they get their tax returns? They only get a few thousand dollars at most and they're happy to spend it. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of Dollars on average per bonus. What's a few thousand dollars to buy some BTC for a guy who just got handed 200k?

We could be totally wrong here, but I don't think it's out of the question to see some new money flowing into the crypto market.

[itod]

@midmagic https://twitter.com/midmagic/status/953024852083945472
If this is what I think it is, this is one of the main former Ripple guys (Jed McCaleb) and Mark Karpeles talking directly about stealing BTC from their disused user accounts to make up for thefts:

Dear Lord:

[Thu Mar 3 12:45:08 2011] mtgox: pass is: 3r56t

They are talking about root SSH to main MtGox server. What an amateur hour that was. Read the whole log if you have the stomach for it:
https://courts.ms.gov/newsite2/appellatecourts/docket/sendPDF.php?f=dc00001_live.SCT.17.M.1681.102741.5.pdf&c=87490&a=N&s=2

[Last of the V8s]

https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.md
Is this an actual thing? A threat to XMR? or more?
@WeathermanIam https://twitter.com/WeathermanIam/status/953037672829931526
18m18 minutes ago
Replying to @giacomozucco

This is a legitimate threat to bitcoin. An altcoin with real utility. Grin is probably the first viable attempt.

My thought is that we should fork it and make it an airdrop if we can’t find a safe way to make it a side chain (ideal) and they insist on launching a new coin.

[JayJuanGee]

I'll just re-state, we may also, theoretically, see a trend upwards beginning on or around February 18th, after tech-sector bonus wires start hitting exchanges.

First quarters are shaping up to be bearish/volatile periods for Bitcorn, with upward cycles beginning Q2-ish.

Non-bullish is not the same as "bearish"... it be more aptly called:  "consolidation"   

I refer to them as "periods of opportunity"

That is not a bad way to keep your jo jo....


Wait. 

[Elwar]

After watching bitcoin's price climb throughout the years thousands of percent I must say that this time the <whatever the FUD is for the price going down this week> should spell its doom and the smart money will get out now because there's no way it will ever break another all time high. Bitcoin hardly ever surpasses previous ATHs, it is a rare site indeed.

[AlexGR]

Meanwhile, a rather balanced compare & contrast. From Vinny Lingham, even. whowouldathunkit?

https://vinnylingham.com/a-tale-of-two-bitcoins-20375d49d3d3

He makes some pretty bad points regarding the vision of Satoshi.

He names some points about bch and then says "that's closer to Satoshi's vision". Yet the points he quotes are the exact opposite, except technological scaling.

The Bitcoin Cash developers have the following philosophy around Bitcoin Cash:

1) Not everyone in the world should or will run a node and therefore making it economical to do so is not actually practical. Decentralization to the nth degree is a nice idea but they believe Bitcoin is a small world network. The tradeoff is that not everyone in the world will be able to run a node and so the question really is: How important is that level of centralization to trusting that the network as a whole can function? On Bitcoin, there are around 10,000 listening nodes today (so possibly 10x in terms of validating nodes), and probably over 30m people using Bitcoin worldwide, but it’s still unlikely that average users will want to run a node and would be comfortable trusting larger third parties.

2) Bitcoin was arguably designed to scale at layer 1, due to increases in computing capacity every 18 months, as per Moore’s Law. Brian Armstrong from Coinbase wrote about this a year ago. Bitcoin Cash intends to scale by increasing the block size, and not creating a layer 2 solution.

3) Nodes without mining power have no ability to contribute to the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin, so they are disregarded. The original white paper did not differentiate between the two, because it was never envisioned that you would have a node running without mining at the same time. Bitcoin Cash is using Nakamoto Consensus to determine consensus rule changes.

4) As per the original Bitcoin.org website — Satoshi said that a fee market should maybe exist, once the coins had been fully exhausted. There is no need to build a fee market today, as there is 120 years to plan for it. Keep transactions cheap and fast and ensure that there is global adoption first and foremost.

5) Anyone can submit changes to the network from any one of the multiple implementations/clients running Bitcoin Cash. If miners vote to adopt the change, a hard fork will occur and the network will continue to function using this consensus mechanism.

As many Bitcoin and Core developer supporters have indicated, the Bitcoin Cash philosophy is more closely aligned to Satoshi’s original white paper, but the centralization aspects of mining and other concerns around privacy and government resistance have come to the fore and as a result Bitcoin needs to pare back on these aspects because Satoshi could not have predicted these risks (ASIC mining, the rise of China, etc.)

1) What part of "peer-to-peer" didn't he grasp? You either have a client/server system, or a peer-to-peer, or a semi-centralized system with very few "peers" who are your servers, and thus aren't really "peers"... you are their client. How can a client/server system be closer to Satoshi's vision than a peer to peer system?

2) That's the only point that's correct, however some things in bitcoin code don't scale linearly and need change. Additionally, we don't only need jumps in processing capacity, we also need jumps in networking and fast storage capacity - and on top of that, affordability for these, so they can run on "peers", since it's a peer-to-peer system. You can't have a decentralized system that is based on a centralized topology because it's vulnerable.

Time and technological progression *ensures* the scaling of all blockchains, even those who will host videos instead of 226 byte txs. It's not a question of if, it's only a question of when. However if you rush things in this department, by having a network with expensive technical requirements, you lean more towards a server-based system rather than a peer-to-peer system (p2p is the novelty factor here). Centralized systems existed in the past too, and they all have a common theme when it comes to competing with the government: The government shuts them down.

3) So if a miner had a 51% majority and decided to change the rules of the game to issue all the coins he wanted, that would be ok, or would it be a 51% attack? Some things are pretty simple. The very concept of a 51% attack wouldn't even exist if arbitrary rewriting of the rules by the majority hashpower was ok. It wouldn't be considered an attack, it would be considered "nakamoto consensus fairly changing the rules of the game because the majority hashpower said so"...

4) Without fees, mining profitability will fall of a cliff, not in 100+ years, but in 6 to 14 years from now. No miner will stay around to mine 0.0 to 0.1 btc per block until "coins are exhausted" in over a century ahead so that a fee market develops. That's bullshit. Without fees and a fee market, BCH is not futureproof. If you exist as a coin on the premise that users will always have ample space to transact, and that users can always have txs on with 1-2-5 sat/byte, at that point your store of value property is destroyed because

a) the network will be unsafe (no mining incentive)
or
b) you implement a tail-emission inflationary scheme to cover mining incentives by issuing more coins than the initial 21mn target.

5) Satoshi was pretty adamant about not wanting competing implementations etc etc...

With all these serious problems in the rationale, how did he find "alignment" with the vision of Satoshi?

[TERA2]

If you look at 1W or 3D you see this flat line of soft support at 13500. Who is buying there? I imagine if there is a dip to 8000 its going to quickly come back to 13500.

[JayJuanGee]

First quarters are shaping up to be bearish/volatile periods for Bitcorn, with upward cycles beginning Q2-ish.

Agreed. I don't think we'll see much action until March.

You might be correct, but seems strange for you attempting to come off as some kind of a bearishly inclined soothsayer all of a sudden, with an attempted air of practicality.

We have all kinds of action going on in the bitcoin space more narrowly and the crypto space more broadly, so when you are suggesting that there is not going to be "much action until March" are you saying that we are going to stay within a $12500 to $17500 range, or a broader $10k to $20k range, or something else?  Even within those ranges, I would suggest that we still have significant "action", unless you are suggesting that "action" only counts if there is a BTC price break above $20k?

[gentlemand]

He makes some pretty bad points regarding the vision of Satoshi.

Mr. Lingham projectile shat his credibility out the window the moment he sold everything in anticipation of some long forgotten fork attempt. Most of these people seem to wind up blowing it at some point and then turn embittered when their own genius fails them.

[AlexGR]

He makes some pretty bad points regarding the vision of Satoshi.

Mr. Lingham projectile shat his credibility out the window the moment he sold everything in anticipation of some long forgotten fork attempt. Most of these people seem to wind up blowing it at some point and then turn embittered when their own genius fails them.

Contentious forks are a serious issue. I don't blame anyone for selling while anticipating such eventualities - because they can be chaotic. But I do blame him for overlooking a lot of pretty self-evident things in the thesis he wrote.

[gentlemand]

Contentious forks are a serious issue. I don't blame anyone for selling while anticipating such eventualities - because they can be chaotic. But I do blame him for overlooking a lot of pretty self-evident things in the thesis he wrote.

That's how you wind up with 50% or fewer coins for the same outlay than just staying put. At no point did I ever believe any of the contentious forks would succeed.

[JayJuanGee]

He makes some pretty bad points regarding the vision of Satoshi.

Mr. Lingham projectile shat his credibility out the window the moment he sold everything in anticipation of some long forgotten fork attempt. Most of these people seem to wind up blowing it at some point and then turn embittered when their own genius fails them.

Yes, exactly, and Lingham's genius was arguing fairly vociferously and persistently when in March 2017 BTC prices had dipped down from $1350-ish to $890 that he had expected that inevitably BTC prices would drop below $500, so HODLers should sell in order to buy back lower... and as we know that did not happen. even though there were a lot of folks trusting his self-proclaimed oracle representations.

[AlexGR]

Contentious forks are a serious issue. I don't blame anyone for selling while anticipating such eventualities - because they can be chaotic. But I do blame him for overlooking a lot of pretty self-evident things in the thesis he wrote.

That's how you wind up with 50% or fewer coins for the same outlay than just staying put. At no point did I ever believe any of the contentious forks would succeed.

You don't need to believe it will succeed. You only need to believe it has a high degree of risk to fuck things up. The market was pretty "constrained" prior to burying the 2x fork, and once that threat got buried, the purchasing power was unleashed from 7k -> 20k usd.

[HairyMaclairy]

Vinny Lingham is a fair and balanced intellectual like Donald Trump.  

Meanwhile a Zionist conspiracy is pushing down rental returns in Seattle by deploying massive sell walls on local property exchanges.  https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-area-rents-drop-significantly-for-first-time-this-decade-as-new-apartments-sit-empty/

[afbitcoins]

A lot of people get paid on Thursdays or the 15 of every month. It has zero impact.

You're not getting it.

There is likely to be a larger-than-usual fiat infusion into crypto-markets coming up on or around the 18th of Jan and Feb.

Fuck it. I'll shut up.

Let's see how things play out and see for ourselves.

Yes

[jbreher]

Meanwhile, a rather balanced compare & contrast. From Vinny Lingham, even. whowouldathunkit?

https://vinnylingham.com/a-tale-of-two-bitcoins-20375d49d3d3

He makes some pretty bad points regarding the vision of Satoshi.

He names some points about bch and then says "that's closer to Satoshi's vision". Yet the points he quotes are the exact opposite, except technological scaling.

Well, no. Nowhere does he say "that's closer to Satoshi's vision". Perhaps you are referring to the following?: "more closely aligned to Satoshi’s original white paper"? For that is something he actually does say - perhaps the closest to what you erroneously claim he said. If we're going to have a meaningful dialogue, you're going to need to speak with precision. Why don't you answer this, then point out which particular numbered stated attributes you believe to be at odds with this claim?

1) What part of "peer-to-peer" didn't he grasp? You either have a client/server system, or a peer-to-peer, or a semi-centralized system with very few "peers" who are your servers, and thus aren't really "peers"... you are their client. How can a client/server system be closer to Satoshi's vision than a peer to peer system?

Do you claim that every BTC user runs a fully-validating, non-mining wallet client (often erroneously referred to as a 'full node')? Do you claim that no BCH user runs a fully-validating, non-mining wallet client? If the answers respectively are not 'yes' and 'yes', then I fail to see what your point is. Neither is purely peer-to-peer, and neither is purely client-server.

4) Without fees, mining profitability will fall of a cliff, not in 100+ years, but in 6 to 14 years from now. No miner will stay around to mine 0.0 to 0.1 btc per block until "coins are exhausted" in over a century ahead so that a fee market develops. That's bullshit. Without fees and a fee market, BCH is not futureproof. If you exist as a coin on the premise that users will always have ample space to transact, and that users can always have txs on with 1-2-5 sat/byte, at that point your store of value property is destroyed because

a) the network will be unsafe (no mining incentive)
or
b) you implement a tail-emission inflationary scheme to cover mining incentives by issuing more coins than the initial 21mn target.

The solution is so clear in its simplicity, it is truly stunning that you do not get it. _IF_ we were to reach a point where the fees were insufficient to incentivize any given miner to mine, then blocks will not be mined. This will create more demand for transaction processing. More demand & lees supply => prices rise to the point where block mining is incentivized. What price? The price of mining a transaction onto the blockchain. The price we call 'transaction fee'.

[LewisPirenne]

https://vinnylingham.com/a-tale-of-two-bitcoins-20375d49d3d3

It’s clear from the recent surge in Ripple (a highly centralized coin) to $2+ ($100bn+ market cap), that the market/traders definitely don’t care much about centralization.

From my reading of Vinny's twits and his argument with Core team over the past year, I thought his ideology follows more closely with the ETH and BCH crowd.  

The problem with the above statement is that those who don't care about centralization will probably end up using the upcoming bankster and govcoin in due time.  So I have maintained in the past that ALT isn't really the problem, but govcoin with monthly airdrop in the form of Universal Basic Income or social welfare would be the real competition.  Because Bitcoin is voluntary and based on incentives, people can leave any time if they want.  So it got to be deflationary for hodlers to hold and fee market high for miners to secure.

I mean if you are in crypto only for the money, I think it's perfectly fine for people to play with bankster/govcoin.  After all, crony capitalism is highly lucrative and the overlords always want their goons and hanger-on to be well paid to set an example for others.  Even if you are a diehard rebel planning to pull a disappearing act once the revolution fails, it still may be sensible to hedge a bit because if we can't get Gold Standard 2.0 empowered by Internet, than it's more likely that we will end up with some dystopian Fiat 2.0, paid for and paved with the blood of crypto pioneers.  So with some bankster/govcoin on hand, you can actually claim some plausible deniability or at least as someone being led astray and now repentant.

[AlexGR]

Well, no. Nowhere does he say "that's closer to Satoshi's vision". Perhaps you are referring to the following?: "more closely aligned to Satoshi’s original white paper"? For that is something he actually does say - perhaps the closest to what you erroneously claim he said. If we're going to have a meaningful dialogue, you're going to need to speak with precision. Why don't you answer this, then point out which particular numbered stated attributes you believe to be at odds with this claim?

This is what I'm having problem with:

As many Bitcoin and Core developer supporters have indicated, the Bitcoin Cash philosophy is more closely aligned to Satoshi’s original white paper

...essentially implying that there is some consensus, even from bitcoin supporters, that bch is following the vision of satoshi better than btc, and then "backs it up" with a quote - when in fact you could insert another 100 quotes that are a condemnation.

I don't know if he wants to play "balanced" or something, but it's not a case of balance, it's a case for accuracy.

Do you claim that every BTC user runs a fully-validating, non-mining wallet client (often erroneously referred to as a 'full node')? Do you claim that no BCH user runs a fully-validating, non-mining wallet client? If the answers respectively are not 'yes' and 'yes', then I fail to see what your point is. Neither is purely peer-to-peer, and neither is purely client-server.

Per your rationale, if BTC, say, has 20.000 nodes and BCH has 20 nodes, they are the same, in their neither being pure p2p or pure client/server... yet, if you aren't intellectually dishonest, you realize that there is a big quality difference.

The solution is so clear in its simplicity, it is truly stunning that you do not get it. _IF_ we were to reach a point where the fees were insufficient to incentivize any given miner to mine, then blocks will not be mined. This will create more demand for transaction processing. More demand & lees supply => prices rise to the point where block mining is incentivized. What price? The price of mining a transaction onto the blockchain. The price we call 'transaction fee'.

That would create an anomalous mining scheme, where miners only bother if they have a batch of txs to do with fees and then disappear... then they'll wait for a good backlog to buildup plenty of fees and give it a shot again... it would be something like a difficulty adjustment scheme, but based on real-time intention of people who want to transact. If the last block was confirmed recently = no serious backlog for the miner to even bother with. Let it build up several thousand txs and then try to mine.