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

[HairyMaclairy]

Mem pool almost empty again.  

It is amazing to see. going from over 200k down to under 100 at certain points.

I don't think an empty mempool is a bullish sign, but, hard to tell since most of those 200k transactions at the height were spam.
 

To me, an empty mem pool is bearish.  Shows low volume.  Big spikes seems to mean big price movements. I am associating very high priced fee movements with price drops (panic sales) and big spikes without high fees as pumps (organic exchange transactions).

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[somac.]

Mem pool almost empty again.  

It is amazing to see. going from over 200k down to under 100 at certain points.

I don't think an empty mempool is a bullish sign, but, hard to tell since most of those 200k transactions at the height were spam.
 

To me, an empty mem pool is bearish.  Shows low volume.  Big spikes seems to mean big price movements. I am associating very high priced fee movements with price drops (panic sales) and big spikes without high fees as pumps (organic exchange transactions).

seems reasonable, I'll keep an eye on that myself

[shizuska]

A different question, now: how do you invest in precious metals? Do you actually buy silver and gold ingots to store, or do you purchase ETFs? I would like to include some general silver indexes in my portfolio.

It's 100% pointless to purchase metals if you don't buy physical.  All the unallocated metals are rehypothecated so there's 500+ owners per ounce.  They're just meaningless derivative contracts.  When the Comex blows up, or when the govt has to revalue gold and silver exponentially higher to extinguish the debt bubble, you will either receive $0 for your contract, or they will cash out your contract at $20 an ounce of silver right before revaluing it to hundreds of dollars an ounce.  In other words, paper owners miss out entirely on the once in a lifetime avalanche of profits.

What is the purpose of this paper hedge then?  Nothing!  It's an insurance policy that doesn't pay out.  Paper metals are worthless.  As for allocated metals instead of the unallocated variety, maybe you will get lucky, maybe not.  If the organization has any type of serious weight like that Texas bullion depository, the govt will probably try to seize it.  Things like the ETFs have a good chance of being seized, but I doubt they will attempt seizing private holder's metals again.

For one, they know zero people will give them up since nobody trusts the govt now.  Secondly, they've already done a stealth confiscation by rigging the markets 10x more than usual post-2008 and having entities like JP Morgan take delivery of the physical as an agent of the US govt at the suppressed price.  The only type of paper metals worth bothering with would be miners, but I have a feeling the govt will nationalize all assets in the ground as "deep storage" and leave anyone holding shares holding the bag.

TLDR:  Buy either Canadian Maple Leafs, 10 oz Sunshine mint bars, or kilo bars

As a large holder of silver (about same ammont as crypto) i do not agree with your point of view. I looked into buying physical silver and compared the prices, even if i had bough a decent amount i would have paid about 7-8% extra and i live in a country where there is no VAT associated with buying silver as an investment. Other problem is that total ammount in kgs would have been around 300kg, so storing would have not been easy aswell.
 
Instead i chose to buy SIVR ETF which gives investors direct and pure exposure to silver by holding the physical metal in HSBC vaults. It has tracked the spot price of silver perfectly at a low cost for the precious metals segment.

I pay around 0.3% per year maintenance fee and could not be happier (well 40 $ pound would make me happier ), i would have paid around 25 years of fees if i had bought physical.

[flynn]

Regarding this POW problem, instead of replacing the SHA-256 POW by something else, we could change Bitcoin so it accepts two POW algorithms at a time, lets say a CPU one and we keep SHA256 also, each algo having its own difficulty, a block being valid if signed by either algo.

This way ASICs would have to compete with CPUs with a fair ratio, and probably disappear after some time because of the costs.  

Maybe one could even use PoS to vote on the ratio...

If you want an ASIC block every T1 minutes and a CPU block every T2 minutes, the ratio between the two is k=T1/T2
That ratio "k" may be chosen by the community or computed another way.

Once k is chosen, this can be proven true :

T1 = 10mn*((1+k)/k)  and T2=10mn*(1+k)

with k=1 (as many ASIC blocks than CPU blocks) that gives the obvious result : T1=T2=20mn
with k=2 (twice more CPUs than ASIC)  T1=15mn and T2=30mn

Technically no problem.

[explorer]

A different question, now: how do you invest in precious metals? Do you actually buy silver and gold ingots to store, or do you purchase ETFs? I would like to include some general silver indexes in my portfolio.

It's 100% pointless to purchase metals if you don't buy physical.  All the unallocated metals are rehypothecated so there's 500+ owners per ounce.  They're just meaningless derivative contracts.  When the Comex blows up, or when the govt has to revalue gold and silver exponentially higher to extinguish the debt bubble, you will either receive $0 for your contract, or they will cash out your contract at $20 an ounce of silver right before revaluing it to hundreds of dollars an ounce.  In other words, paper owners miss out entirely on the once in a lifetime avalanche of profits.

What is the purpose of this paper hedge then?  Nothing!  It's an insurance policy that doesn't pay out.  Paper metals are worthless.  As for allocated metals instead of the unallocated variety, maybe you will get lucky, maybe not.  If the organization has any type of serious weight like that Texas bullion depository, the govt will probably try to seize it.  Things like the ETFs have a good chance of being seized, but I doubt they will attempt seizing private holder's metals again.

For one, they know zero people will give them up since nobody trusts the govt now.  Secondly, they've already done a stealth confiscation by rigging the markets 10x more than usual post-2008 and having entities like JP Morgan take delivery of the physical as an agent of the US govt at the suppressed price.  The only type of paper metals worth bothering with would be miners, but I have a feeling the govt will nationalize all assets in the ground as "deep storage" and leave anyone holding shares holding the bag.

TLDR:  Buy either Canadian Maple Leafs, 10 oz Sunshine mint bars, or kilo bars

As a large holder of silver (about same ammont as crypto) i do not agree with your point of view. I looked into buying physical silver and compared the prices, even if i had bough a decent amount i would have paid about 7-8% extra and i live in a country where there is no VAT associated with buying silver as an investment. Other problem is that total ammount in kgs would have been around 300kg, so storing would have not been easy aswell.
 
Instead i chose to buy SIVR ETF which gives investors direct and pure exposure to silver by holding the physical metal in HSBC vaults. It has tracked the spot price of silver perfectly at a low cost for the precious metals segment.

I pay around 0.3% per year maintenance fee and could not be happier (well 40 $ pound would make me happier ), i would have paid around 25 years of fees if i had bought physical.

HSBC?  Good to have it stored with a trustworthy organization.  I'm sure all is as it should be.

[flipperfish]

Regarding this POW problem, instead of replacing the SHA-256 POW by something else, we could change Bitcoin so it accepts two POW algorithms at a time, lets say a CPU one and we keep SHA256 also, each algo having its own difficulty, a block being valid if signed by either algo.

This way ASICs would have to compete with CPUs with a fair ratio, and probably disappear after some time because of the costs.  

Maybe one could even use PoS to vote on the ratio...

If you want an ASIC block every T1 minutes and a CPU block every T2 minutes, the ratio between the two is k=T1/T2
That ratio "k" may be chosen by the community or computed another way.

One k is chosen, this can be proven true :

T1 = 10mn*((1+k)/k)  and T2=10mn*(1+k)

with k=1 (as many ASIC blocks than CPU blocks) that gives the obvious result : T1=T2=20mn
with k=2 (twice more CPUs than ASIC)  T1=15mn and T2=30mn

Technically no problem.

Yes, I meant to use PoS to vote on the value of k. But setting it to a fixed value could be enough already.

[flynn]

Regarding this POW problem, instead of replacing the SHA-256 POW by something else, we could change Bitcoin so it accepts two POW algorithms at a time, lets say a CPU one and we keep SHA256 also, each algo having its own difficulty, a block being valid if signed by either algo.

This way ASICs would have to compete with CPUs with a fair ratio, and probably disappear after some time because of the costs.  

Maybe one could even use PoS to vote on the ratio...

If you want an ASIC block every T1 minutes and a CPU block every T2 minutes, the ratio between the two is k=T1/T2
That ratio "k" may be chosen by the community or computed another way.

One k is chosen, this can be proven true :

T1 = 10mn*((1+k)/k)  and T2=10mn*(1+k)

with k=1 (as many ASIC blocks than CPU blocks) that gives the obvious result : T1=T2=20mn
with k=2 (twice more CPUs than ASIC)  T1=15mn and T2=30mn

Technically no problem.

Yes, I meant to use PoS to vote on the value of k. But setting it to a fixed value could be enough already.

It should be chosen so no private entity can gather 51% of the global POW. But gathering 51% of the CPU (on top of 51% of ASIC to grab back 51% of the global mining power) will probably be difficult since everyone will mine this part.
We could also make it a 3-POW thing : 1/3 CPU 1/3 GPU and 1/3 ASIC

[shizuska]

A different question, now: how do you invest in precious metals? Do you actually buy silver and gold ingots to store, or do you purchase ETFs? I would like to include some general silver indexes in my portfolio.

It's 100% pointless to purchase metals if you don't buy physical.  All the unallocated metals are rehypothecated so there's 500+ owners per ounce.  They're just meaningless derivative contracts.  When the Comex blows up, or when the govt has to revalue gold and silver exponentially higher to extinguish the debt bubble, you will either receive $0 for your contract, or they will cash out your contract at $20 an ounce of silver right before revaluing it to hundreds of dollars an ounce.  In other words, paper owners miss out entirely on the once in a lifetime avalanche of profits.

What is the purpose of this paper hedge then?  Nothing!  It's an insurance policy that doesn't pay out.  Paper metals are worthless.  As for allocated metals instead of the unallocated variety, maybe you will get lucky, maybe not.  If the organization has any type of serious weight like that Texas bullion depository, the govt will probably try to seize it.  Things like the ETFs have a good chance of being seized, but I doubt they will attempt seizing private holder's metals again.

For one, they know zero people will give them up since nobody trusts the govt now.  Secondly, they've already done a stealth confiscation by rigging the markets 10x more than usual post-2008 and having entities like JP Morgan take delivery of the physical as an agent of the US govt at the suppressed price.  The only type of paper metals worth bothering with would be miners, but I have a feeling the govt will nationalize all assets in the ground as "deep storage" and leave anyone holding shares holding the bag.

TLDR:  Buy either Canadian Maple Leafs, 10 oz Sunshine mint bars, or kilo bars

As a large holder of silver (about same ammont as crypto) i do not agree with your point of view. I looked into buying physical silver and compared the prices, even if i had bough a decent amount i would have paid about 7-8% extra and i live in a country where there is no VAT associated with buying silver as an investment. Other problem is that total ammount in kgs would have been around 300kg, so storing would have not been easy aswell.
 
Instead i chose to buy SIVR ETF which gives investors direct and pure exposure to silver by holding the physical metal in HSBC vaults. It has tracked the spot price of silver perfectly at a low cost for the precious metals segment.

I pay around 0.3% per year maintenance fee and could not be happier (well 40 $ pound would make me happier ), i would have paid around 25 years of fees if i had bought physical.

HSBC?  Good to have it stored with a trustworthy organization.  I'm sure all is as it should be.

Well the ETF is audite annualy and all of my lawyers are sure if something radical happens with economy i can sue and get the physical silver as it is backed.
Anyway silver is around 10% of my portfolio and i see it being a great way to make some profit when next crises hits in 2-3 years or so.

[d_eddie]

This is why GPU/CPU mining is a lot better than ASICs i think.

GPU companies have to build&sell GPUs no matter what because gamers need to game. CPU manufacturers have to build&sell CPUs no matter what because there will be a demand whether people mine crypto or not. Nvidia/AMD/Intel will be making hardware no matter what. They can't be deceived by evil crypto criminals.

But ASICs? This is cancer.

There is no way Nvidia/Intel build HW and mine Bitcoin without getting noticed but Bitmain can. Because that's their only job. Nvidia and the others can't run a 2 businesses at once. They are making GPU/CPU's and we are exploiting their business. Good for us.

Maybe Cobra is right. Better late than ever.

My opinion is that preparing for a soft PoW change would be a good thing. Keywords: preparing and soft.

A monopoly on mining is an evil thing. It keeps decentralization from really taking place. However, changing PoW drastically without a grace period would only alienate the "good" miners - probably ruin them, and piss them off enough to turn them (rightfully) bad.

One way could be to have a PoW that alternates between a few different hash functions - some of which hard to implement on ASICs, probably because of insane RAM requirements although there are alternatives. The alternance should be based on past history; the percentage of SHA-256 blocks could be dynamic, so "good" miners are incentivized to keep their percentage high by maintaining good demeanor. Or there could be a multiple PoW in each block, so that both a SHA-256 proof and some other proof(s) are necessary for validation. Each PoW function should maintain a different difficulty scale, and the difficulties could be combined into some overall metric. Such a system would be highly tweakable, and adapt dynamically.

(EDIT - about "softness". The initial conditions could be 100% ASIC-based, 0% others, as it is now. Then in times of mempool storms, or fork FUD, or whatever, the "others" might be gently pushed up until the situation gets back to normal.)

Any working solution should be designed with game theory in mind, not only the obvious complexity theory. A long check on testnet would be necessary, to figure out at least the complexity part, if not the game theory part.

(Inb4 - Bitcoin is a scam designed to centralize because no digital money can ever blah blah the Joos blah blah gold and silver.)

[xhomerx10]

[PRE-SALE][ICO] Petro $PTR - Oil backed crypto currency launched by Venezuela
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3006037.0

The Petro thread is being run by a commie bureaucrat and it is all very sad...

...

• If you like McDonalds or Burger King, you can find them in Caracas.
• You can actually find any other major multinational brand and, among them, many US companies operating in Venezuela.

...
Therefore Venezuela is definitely not a "communist dictatorship", not even close.
Venezuela is a liberal democracy with elected governments that the US have tried to overthrow (undemocratically) for 20 years....

...needs some of you good political arguers to respond

It is very difficult to argue with the truth, sir. US is constantly meddling in Venezuala elections for the last 20 years.

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."[/list]

Predominately US but a hegemony of deep state actors through all western government pushing coups and invading countries in the name of democracy, security and safety.

The actors include banking cabal, business monopolies, family dynasties, policy control departments in government.

Using secret services (Britain, Australia, US) as their military arm to conduct foreign and domestic operations to further centralization and globalization of money and business.


Proof in points.

1) There is no cure
2) No voting on foreign policy - domestic only
3) Who owns your reserve bank - do you really know
4) Less and less people do not own their own home
5) You are constantly getting less for your dollar
6) ISIS disappeared in 12 months - been around for over 8 years - boom just like that
7) Really - just watch CNN and FOX for a week or 2 - then it gets crazy
Bitcoin


these are so weird these points

only answer is they certainly are not helping their citizens - dumb policies that just compound more and more each year

other points

a) What countries do we bomb - Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya
    Where does immigration and refugees come from - stop bombing the F$%CKING countries then

 Can you expand on point 4?  Maybe cite some evidence.  There have never been more homes for people to own and pretty much every new home must be bought on time with bank loans.  How is it that less and less do not own their own home?  

[d_eddie]

I'd posted my reply about PoW change before reading the posts by Icygreen, flipperish, flynn and others.

I, too, would like the full nodes to have a say in the relative distribution of hash functions, but full nodes are too easy to sybyl attack. PoS vote is also dangerous, because established miners have huge availability they could employ to crush GPU- or CPU- friendly functions. That's why we will eventually need to figure out more game theory to have a stable solution.

[Icygreen]

I think it's an English mistake. I read it as "less and less people own homes". Which is true.

[d_eddie]

Also, if I'm allowed to dream wildly on future Bitcoin technology development, I would love some kind of blockchain checkpointing to be implemented. This allows ultra-light nodes to have no trust (or very little) when first syncing.

[conspirosphere.tk]

One way could be to have a PoW that alternates between a few different hash functions

There are already multi-algo PoW coins from a long time (myriad and digibyte for ex.). They can be mined with anything concurrently. But imho at the moment the risks of a PoW change seems higher than the risks of staying the course. But having a Plan B ready is always a good idea.

[Spaceman_Spiff_Original]

I'd posted my reply about PoW change before reading the posts by Icygreen, flipperish, flynn and others.

I, too, would like the full nodes to have a say in the relative distribution of hash functions, but full nodes are too easy to sybyl attack. PoS vote is also dangerous, because established miners have huge availability they could employ to crush GPU- or CPU- friendly functions. That's why we will eventually need to figure out more game theory to have a stable solution.

Could you elaborate on the bold part? I didn't quite understand.

[d_eddie]

I'd posted my reply about PoW change before reading the posts by Icygreen, flipperish, flynn and others.

I, too, would like the full nodes to have a say in the relative distribution of hash functions, but full nodes are too easy to sybyl attack. PoS vote is also dangerous, because established miners have huge availability they could employ to crush GPU- or CPU- friendly functions. That's why we will eventually need to figure out more game theory to have a stable solution.

Could you elaborate on the bold part?

PoS - Those who can prove ownership of coin get more votes.

Short: An established miner has (or can quickly have) lots of coin lying around, so he can steer the voting result more easily than a few hodlers with the same total stake (read: stash).

Longer: Giving each satoshi the same voting weight is a hard problem, possibly unsolvable. What is needed is a hypothetical system of incentives that makes GPU- and CPU- miner owned satoshis as heavy as ASIC-miner owned ones. Is such a system practical to implement? Does it ever exist? I doubt it. That's why PoS is dangerous.

[conspirosphere.tk]

I, too, would like the full nodes to have a say in the relative distribution of hash functions

I would like an option for semi-full nodes, where they can store fractions of the blockchain bittorrent-like, and above all incentives for them and the full nodes, like a small fraction of the fees.

[d_eddie]

I, too, would like the full nodes to have a say in the relative distribution of hash functions

I would like an option for semi-full nodes, where they can store fractions of the blockchain bittorrent-like, and above all incentives for them and the full nodes, like a small fraction of the fees.

A kind of distributed checkpointing? That would be nice, I agree.

However, Bittorrent as a protocol has a lot of back-and-forth chatter, more so if it's trackerless and decentralized (DHT). That's why it just won't play nice with mesh networks like TOR. I don't know anything about the technicals of checkpointing, though. There might be some alternative solutions, but their efficiency needs to be accurately evaluated.

[Icygreen]

 I've been considering running a mining rig simply for the education it would offer but I'm on the fence knowing that it may not be profitable and also realizing it will likely change drastically in the short term future. I also don't want to buy from jihan with bcash some overpriced, outdated box.
I mean, I seed my torrents properly and I'd prefer to contribute to BTC pools but where to start today?

[d_eddie]

I've been considering running a mining rig simply for the education it would offer but I'm on the fence knowing that it may not be profitable and also realizing it will likely change drastically in the short term future. I also don't want to buy from jihan with bcash some overpriced, outdated box.
I mean, I seed my torrents properly and I'd prefer to contribute to BTC pools but where to start today?

We're in the same position. Mining has become a hardcore game for big players. It's financially risky and you are subjected to the whims and abuses of people like Jihan. Not to mention the policies of governments. They can't stop bitcoin, but they can stop miners fairly easily, giving the minimum mining farm size of today.

That's another reason why I would love some real decentralization by soft PoW modulation.