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

[Paashaas]

I have. Hence my position as a Segwit skeptic.

I don't see exchanges, devs and users complaining how flawed Segwit it, nobody lost money ore saw critical errors.  I only see that bullshit in the Bcash camp.

Can you provide me technical arguments/proof why Segwit is 'flawed' ore show it at the Github?

All those devs are interested in youre arguments.

No. What does that LN to do with Segwit? I'm not following your train of inquiry here.

Trying to convince me that you did your homework while you dont even looked at Segwit features..

(Bcash) shit noob.

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[d_eddie]

Most peoples' taxes are taken out of their paycheck. With BitWage you can get your paycheck direct deposited to a bitcoin address without your company ever knowing you are getting paid in bitcoin.

This is nice. I will check it out.

In Europe I was able to pay bills, rent (until I talked my landlord into taking BTC directly), etc. with bitwala. Not sure if there is a similar service in the US but a quick google search gives welto.io, coinbills.com and coinsfer.com.

Is Bitwala still working? After the great debit card purge, I'm not sure it's so easy anymore. Waiting eagerly for new arrangements to regrow a pool of bitcoin card operators.

Buy a used car with bitcoin or go to the very few auto dealers in the US that accept BTC (again, what...every 5 years? are you holding fiat so you can buy a car?). When I wanted a car in Germany I went to a localbitcoins guy and got the cash to pay for the car.

I think localbitcoins is banned in Germany.

(Oh nos! I have to buy a gift card! That's not bitcoin! It allows you to have bitcoin as your main currency and not rely on banks or holding fiat that loses value over time, take the 3% discount through gift cards already).

Are you referring to Amazon here? What is in your experience/opinion the best way to get gift cards via btc?

[DaRude]

Hi I’m new here . Who the fuck is this roach geezer . What a complete asshole. Why does everyone put up with his shit?
Edit:weeeee

our legendary troll.
did you just create new account for asking this here? or are you him?  

Yes a new account . No I’m not him . I’m also known as bitcoinpsycho

There's an ignore button next to his/her name that's been clicked more times than google.com and also on anyone that quotes him/her

[bitcoinPsycho]

Hi I’m new here . Who the fuck is this roach geezer . What a complete asshole. Why does everyone put up with his shit?
Edit:weeeee

our legendary troll.
did you just create new account for asking this here? or are you him?  

Yes a new account . No I’m not him . I’m also known as bitcoinpsycho

There's an ignore button next to his/her name that's been clicked more times than google.com and also on anyone that quotes him/her

thanks for that it is actually me messing about waiting for the price to explode and having a pop at roach

[realr0ach]

Neo-marxists at EA attempt to put women in WW2 shooting game as front line soldiers.  99.9% of playerbase responds that it's a stupid and laughable idea.  EA responds by banning them all from forum for not being SJWs HAHA:

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-battlefield-subreddit-is-such-a-mess-that-mods-have-banned-topics-about-historical-accuracy/

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

So relevant.

I assumed you did not want to discuss losing all your money at Bitmexico.

You got the first (and probably the last) merit from me.

blyat

[Elwar]

Is Bitwala still working? After the great debit card purge, I'm not sure it's so easy anymore. Waiting eagerly for new arrangements to regrow a pool of bitcoin card operators.

I left Germany in 2016, I think Bitwala stopped working after I left. After I had my landlord start accepting BTC directly the only thing I used Bitwala for was paying my many speeding tickets.

I think localbitcoins is banned in Germany.

It was...sorta. After I used it for getting cash to buy a car I started selling BTC on localbitcoins. Then Germany "banned" it. What actually happened was that they blocked people connecting from German IP addresses. And they locked all of the German listings so you could no longer create new ads or edit your old ones.

What this ended up doing was it created a monopoly for me in my area at a high rate of return. While there was competition in the US driving down rates close to a few percent, I had a few ads going from 10% to 15% per trade. I actually only wanted to get a little spending money and spread the word of BTC but having such a monopoly and high rate of return I continued selling, immediately putting the money back into bitcoins after the trade. The Germans knew how to use VPNs.

Are you referring to Amazon here? What is in your experience/opinion the best way to get gift cards via btc?

For Amazon I use purse.io for the discount (I had an APO address in Germany, but there was also a way to get stuff at 15% discount on amazon.de).

For gift cards there is gyft.com and egifter.com. I prefer egifter because you can get your gift card very close to the dollar amount you are spending.
They have 100s of retailers from most chain restaurants to most chain clothing stores.

[Raja_MBZ]

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-15/bitcoin-manipulation-study-is-less-than-it-seems

[jbreher]

@jbreher
Ok, you are skeptic, fine. My question to you would be: are you even using SegWit enabled features in Bitcoin?

Of course not. I am a Segwit skeptic. Why would I commit any of my funds to something I think is fundamentally flawed? That would be irrational, right? (1)

Have you tried the LN (testnet is fine too) I'm curious to know if you are skeptic on a theoretical level only

No. What does that LN to do with Segwit? I'm not following your train of inquiry here.

Here is a question for you. Are you familiar with the term 'fungibility'? Can you understand how creating two classes of BTC destroys this property? (Well, after claiming one question, you asked two.) (2)

(1) Fine but to me is like "I don't like carrots!" Have you ever tried them? "no, I think they would kill me".
(2) No SegWit, no LN easy.

Why would I commit any of my funds...

You can use testnet coins........

Fungibility: yes I know what it is and that's a concern for me as well but I know a few ways to protect my privacy. They are costly but I don't care since I value my privacy a lot.

Your line of inquiry really makes little sense. What do you expect I would learn from 'using' LN that I don't know already?

I mean, I'll grant that LN 'works' in the default case. Of course, there is nothing that I find useful that I could do with it. What am I going to do - draw another penis on some stupid crowdsourced image? What a waste of time. AintNobodyGotTimeForThat.png.

Incidentally, your carrot analogy is stupid. Somehow, I expected better from you.

[jojo69]

we should have lightningkitties

[jbreher]

I have. Hence my position as a Segwit skeptic.

I don't see exchanges, devs and users complaining how flawed Segwit it, nobody lost money ore saw critical errors.  I only see that bullshit in the Bcash camp.

Can you provide me technical arguments/proof why Segwit is 'flawed' ore show it at the Github?

Yes. Fungibility. Reliance on miners not to revert to 'anyonecanspend' - an incentive for which only increases over time. A new ability for miners to fail to validate all portions of blocks. The list goes on. And that's before starting into the issues with LN.

All those devs are interested in youre arguments.

Bullshit. The community has been over them multiple times. The devs consider these issues acceptable risks. I don't. Perhaps you are merely ignorant of them, D^4?

No. What does that LN to do with Segwit? I'm not following your train of inquiry here.

Trying to convince me that you did your homework while you dont even looked at Segwit features..

I am quite familiar with Segwit features, thankyouverymuch. And its antifeatures as well - of which you seem to be willfully ignorant.

[mindrust]

I left Germany in 2016

Why did you leave? You found a better place to live? Where did you go? Somewhere crypto&tax friendly ?

[RejectedBanana]

Old news but nice interviews concerning latest ETF attempt:

VanEck, SolidX Team Up On Bitcoin ETF

ETF.com: How is this product different from the previous one SolidX filed for that was denied by the SEC?

Gallancy: The index is a big difference. Additionally, the price of the fund will be around $200,000, which is meant to alleviate any concerns that the SEC may continue to have around retail investors getting involved in bitcoin via an ETF package.
We’re optimistic that, over the long term, the SEC will change their minds about that, but in the short term, what we need to do is provide the SEC with a product that meets all of the specifications they require to get it over the finish line. If they're concerned about retail, we need to address that, and so we’ve done so.

The insurance aspect is something we had in our original filing, but it just wasn’t particularly well-covered. It’s a very important piece of the equation. ETF investors shouldn’t be subject to operational risk. Bitcoin is a bearer asset. If you didn’t have insurance around bitcoin, if something were to go wrong, if your bitcoin were lost or stolen or hacked—whatever it is—you’d have a big problem.

We have a syndicate of A-rated insurers that cover the corpus of the fund. Nobody else is doing that.
It’s this combination of things—the restructured index, the high share price and the insurance—that create a product the SEC will view positively.

Hyland: 1st Bitcoin ETF Closer To Reality

ETF.com: How likely is it that we’ll see a bitcoin or cryptocurrency ETF approved anytime soon?

Hyland: I think we get them sooner rather than later. But I also think that if we don't see any action by the SEC in the next two months, we’ll jump to 2019 and beyond. I don't see the SEC going from red light to green light anytime near the midterm election. It’ll make them gun-shy.

I handicap the odds of a U.S. ETP in crypto as follows: 20% chance in 2018; 60% chance in 2019; and a 20% chance beyond 2019.

[infofront]

I have. Hence my position as a Segwit skeptic.

I don't see exchanges, devs and users complaining how flawed Segwit it, nobody lost money ore saw critical errors.  I only see that bullshit in the Bcash camp.

Can you provide me technical arguments/proof why Segwit is 'flawed' ore show it at the Github?

Yes. Fungibility. Reliance on miners not to revert to 'anyonecanspend' - an incentive for which only increases over time. A new ability for miners to fail to validate all portions of blocks. The list goes on. And that's before starting into the issues with LN.

All those devs are interested in youre arguments.

Bullshit. The community has been over them multiple times. The devs consider these issues acceptable risks. I don't. Perhaps you are merely ignorant of them, D^4?

No. What does that LN to do with Segwit? I'm not following your train of inquiry here.

Trying to convince me that you did your homework while you dont even looked at Segwit features..

I am quite familiar with Segwit features, thankyouverymuch. And its antifeatures as well - of which you seem to be willfully ignorant.

Bitcoin isn't fungible anyway. That's why Coinbase closed my account last year for having blacklisted coins. At least LN offers some better privacy.

And I think he was referring to the fact that LN pretty much required segwit.

[El duderino_]

I left Germany in 2016

Why did you leave? You found a better place to live? Where did you go? Somewhere crypto&tax friendly ?

I thought germany was very crypto friendly ......

[Rsiyz]

RAJA:  AND MEMES WITH PENISES FROM YOUR FAGYY BITCOIN FANCLUB IS  RELEVANT HERE??!! is it about bitcoin theme  topic??

 or 10k memes , pictures with ass..like bottom  or another IDONTKNOWWHATABOUTISTHATPICTURE

BAN ALL GRAPHIC IT THIS TOPIC AND BE BITCOIN --- TALK----

 

[Toxic2040]

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-15/bitcoin-manipulation-study-is-less-than-it-seems

+1 WOsMerit

Anti-paywall measures activated..

University of Texas at Austin finance professor John Griffin and graduate student Amin Shams just posted a paper suggesting that cryptocurrency prices are manipulated.  The paper has received a great deal of attention in the media, but there is a disconnect between the paper and the press coverage in terms of quantification.

For example:

    The authors suggest the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex buys bitcoin with another cryptocurrency -- tether -- to push up Bitcoin prices. How much? Four basis points per 100 bitcoin. With Bitcoin at $10,000, for example, that means Bitfinex spends $1 million to push the price up to $10,004.
    The authors assert that the purchases are not random in that they occur more often after Bitcoin prices have fallen. How much? After the biggest drops in Bitcoin price, 1  Bitfinex buys 72 extra bitcoin. More than 100,000 Bitcoin frequently trade in an hour, and often much more during periods of high volatility.
    The authors examined the 87 hours with the largest flows of bitcoin and tether and found that the hours following them accounted for 50 percent of the "meteoric rise" in bitcoin. That sounds impressive, but the rise over the period discussed was from about $1,000 to $8,000. The authors used compounded returns, which mean returns in those 87 hours averaged 1.2 percent. For the S&P 500 Index, a 1.2 percent move is a big hour. For Bitcoin, not so much.

To an academic, it's often more important that a result have “statistical significance,” which is to be clearly something other than random noise, than “practical significance,” which is to be of a size that would interest a trader or regulator. But, here too, the results are less than impressive.

    The four basis-point increase in Bitcoin prices explains less than 1 percent of the variance. While it technically meets normal standards of statistical significance, given the guesswork the authors had to do to collect data and the complexity of the analysis, I consider it more likely to be noise than signal.
    The authors have only 20 data points to support the claim of 72 extra Bitcoin, and they fit them using a model with six parameters. The usual rule of thumb is you want 30 observations per parameter to rely on the results, and that's not taking into account the data and complexity issues mentioned above.
    The 50 percent "meteoric rise” claim is declared significant because the authors picked 10,000 sets of 87 hours at random, and none of them averaged a 1.2 percent return for Bitcoin. That is indeed strong evidence that the 87 hours following the hours with the largest Bitcoin and tether flows are not random. But we already knew they weren't random, they were times of high transaction volume, which would be expected to have more volatile prices than average, and trading volume was much higher on the upswings than the downswings.

I don't mean to be completely negative on the paper.  I've played with the data the authors use, and it is very frustrating. There is a lot of work -- including a lot of guesswork, unfortunately -- to compile numbers that can be used to test hypotheses. The tests themselves are complex. Moreover, it's likely that the phenomena under study are evolving rapidly during the study period. As a result, any conclusions have to be taken as suggestive only. But in areas as little understood as cryptocurrency trading dynamics, even suggestions are valuable. (Full disclosure: I own Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.)

I've only touched on the headline claims of the article. There is a lot more substance in it. Some of the claims that got less attention have better support. Anyone seriously interested in these issues should read the paper, not as an authoritative last word, but as a plausible account backed by some data.

I also don't mean to deny that cryptocurrency prices are manipulated. I'm a crypto-believer, and am impressed by the huge amount of honest developer talent and innovative vision improving the crypto code base every day, whether prices are soaring or crashing, more for love than money. That is where I put my faith. But there are plenty of crooks and profiteers as well. It would be extraordinary if some of them weren't trying to manipulate prices -- and worse.

Moreover there are obvious inconsistencies in the complex and novel cryptocurrency markets. That makes it unclear whether behavior is manipulation or rationalization. This paper is a small step in improving our understanding, not an indictment of tether or cryptocurrencies.
 

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

    Specifically, the paper looked at all three-hour periods from March 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018 and found that after the 5 percent with the largest declines, Bitfinex bought an average of 72 bitcoin in the following hour.

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Bitcoin

Good morning.

Cloud pierced. Time to push thru? Actual analysis after coffee? Maybe...still hodling.

[jbreher]

Bitcoin isn't fungible anyway.

Yet Segwit drives a trifurcating wedge right through any vestige of fungibility. Three distinct classes of BTC. All with differing security properties. This is novel in Segwit.

And I think he was referring to the fact that LN pretty much required segwit.

Well, for some value of 'pretty much' ... (i.e., No, a malleability fix is not required, it merely makes it easier. And Segwit is not the only possible malleability fix. Even if it were, The SegWit Omnibus Changeset bundled a bunch of other crap in with Segwit itself. Lastly, the security-destroying so-called 'soft fork' activation methodology was not required).

... well, for this particular implementation of LN, anyhoo.

[Elwar]

I left Germany in 2016

Why did you leave? You found a better place to live? Where did you go? Somewhere crypto&tax friendly ?

I thought germany was very crypto friendly ......

Oh no...Berlin maybe, but I was near Frankfurt...the headquarters for the EU and ECB. Germany made bitcoin a "private money" which is all well and good (Germany acknowledges that bitcoin is a currency! Yay!) except now it is essentially considered a foreign currency when it comes to being able to set up an exchange. That comes with all of the legal difficulty that comes with setting up a foreign exchange. That's why there's really no exchange in Germany and localbitcoins was shut out. For me, selling bitcoins as a private individual was fine because it would be like me selling a gold coin or a personal item.

I left Germany for that wonderful place called Afghanistan. Not so crypto friendly.

[Rosewater Foundation]

ass

Satisfying. 

[Karartma1]

@jbreher
Fine. It's not a fight I want to have here. No need for it. Time will tell if SegWit + LN will work well.
I tried, I use and trust Bitcoin as it is now but I know that there's still a lot of work to do.
About LN cons as we speak:
- Routing kind of sucks;
- Channels balancing must be improved;
- Peers need to be online to receive txs...

But, jbreher, Rome was not build in a day.

Use SegWit and LN: need coins?