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

[Toxic2040]

The next 4 hours are critical  - we stand ready to break through the final bearline.

If you disregard the froth of the 20K top you can draw all kinds of resistance between 46 and 4850

I don’t want to live in a world where we never went to $20k

Almost there....now what? I keep waiting for the earth to shake or there be some other sign..then I remember its just a line of pixels on my screen.


Frothless.

[Paashaas]

People still drinking milk?

It was made to grow babies not for adults.

[Toxic2040]

All things considered, I vote to replace " A handmaid's tale" with a "Canticle for Leibowitz", but all excellent choices to illustrate a point.
Which one?

A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river.
The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung by the scorpion, but the scorpion argues that if it did that, they would both drown.
The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion.
The scorpion climbs onto the frog's back and the frog begins to swim, but midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog, dooming them both.
The dying frog asks the scorpion why did it do it [stung the frog], to which the scorpion replies "I couldn't help it. It's in my nature."

Anything that makes you think is good in my book. I do think the above is perhaps my favorite parable of all time. Simplistic at first glance, I enjoy the rabbit hole it can take you down.

+1 WOsMerit

[Biodom]

A premise: you wake up one day, and nobody knows anything about bitcoin (or any other crypto)...cypherpunk does exist, just no bitcoin..you, however, know as much as you know now.
Similar to "Yesterday" [the movie] premise, which is that all "Beatles" info got somehow erased from the mankind's collective memory with the exception of the main character (I am sure that there might be a twist in the end, though).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uqvgPm8U4c

I know that this is impossible, but what would you do?
Is someone here with a knowledge to reconstruct Satoshi's paper?
I am simply curious since I know the general outline, but probably wouldn't be able to properly formulate it.

[Ibian]

^Anyone have a tl;dr for those books?  

You need to read them.

As in, you need to read them. Gives a clearer view of how the clown world we live in work. (start with 1984 and brave new world)

[Ibian]

A feminist circle jerk sounds hot.

You forget one thing. Quality control.

[Icygreen]

People still drinking milk?

It was made to grow babies not for adults.

Is this better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMlpmqKGwZE

[HairyMaclairy]

A premise: you wake up one day, and nobody knows anything about bitcoin (or any other crypto)...cypherpunk does exist, just no bitcoin..you, however, know as much as you know now.
Similar to "Yesterday" [the movie] premise, which is that all "Beatles" info got somehow erased from the mankind's collective memory with the exception of the main character (I am sure that there might be a twist in the end, though).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uqvgPm8U4c

I know that this is impossible, but what would you do?
Is someone here with a knowledge to reconstruct Satoshi's paper?
I am simply curious since I know the general outline, but probably wouldn't be able to properly formulate it.

I think we would have enough to go on (without looking at the paper):

• SHA 256 / Hashing
• Proof of work
• Difficulty retargeting
• 21 million cap, 100 million sats, halving every 4 years
• Miners to bundle transactions from mem pool, blocksize cap
• Blockchain / timechain / merkle trees
• Public key / private key addresses, sign to send
• validate UTXOs as unspent

One thing I don’t understand is how Bitcoin achieves consensus on time

[Ibian]

A handmaid's tale is fucking feminist circle jerk and the dumbest shit ever. Like companies would lose profits to fire women. Free market keeps that shit from happening.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar

Just sayin...

"The practice lacked an economic justification, except for during times of economic-downturn,".

Which is to say, it was economically justified.

Which is irrelevant. The main point is that small children need their mother 24/7 during their earliest years. If they are not with them for more than 20 hours per week, their psychological development becomes damaged. It has the same effect as if they are abandoned entirely.

[JSRAW]

People still drinking milk?

It was made to grow babies not for adults.

Is this better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMlpmqKGwZE

I used to do that whenever I went to my village as a kid. I was one of the fav kid among our cows, but one day some calf got jealous, they ganged up on me and beat the shit out of me,  True story.

[mindrust]

I fully realized my RVN profits.   It means I took no prisoners. In other means, dumped em all. It was going parabolic. Couldn't resist. 1630sats was a very good price.

As of today, without any Altcoin bullshit I am above pure 5BTC.

This is the first time I made an altcoin investment and cashed out without fucking it up. I hope I don't get addicted.

[600watt]

I fully realized my RVN profits.   It means I took no prisoners. In other means, dumped em all. It was going parabolic. Couldn't resist. 1630sats was a very good price.

As of today, without any Altcoin bullshit I am above pure 5BTC.

This is the first time I made an altcoin investment and cashed out without fucking it up.

congrats & well deserved.

I still think that investing in alts to "gain moar btc" is like sheep investing in slaughterhouses to gain more wool.


“All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall.”

[mirakal]

Voting poll is early this time.

Voted already, $6,000 over, here we go.

[Toxic2040]

A premise: you wake up one day, and nobody knows anything about bitcoin (or any other crypto)...cypherpunk does exist, just no bitcoin..you, however, know as much as you know now.
Similar to "Yesterday" [the movie] premise, which is that all "Beatles" info got somehow erased from the mankind's collective memory with the exception of the main character (I am sure that there might be a twist in the end, though).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uqvgPm8U4c

I know that this is impossible, but what would you do?
Is someone here with a knowledge to reconstruct Satoshi's paper?
I am simply curious since I know the general outline, but probably wouldn't be able to properly formulate it.

In my opinion, yes to state it simply. The problem increases trying to determine if the butterfly would flap its wings in exactly the same fashion to achieve a outcome we are all familiar with. Once you have the concept of proof of work the rest is fairly trivial. Its important to understand that since v0.3.9 Satoshi has not been involved at all in the development of what we now call Bitcoin-Core. Imho it was not a seminal piece of code writing to be completely honest. I mean ffs he wrote it in C and for windows. Currently v0.17.1 is almost a totally different beast compared to the original qt versions. Leaned down and most of the kludge scooped out and streamlined with better extensions.

I think we would have enough to go on (without looking at the paper):

• Proof of work
• Difficulty retargeting
• 21 million cap, 100 million sats, halving every 4 years
• Miners to bundle transactions from mem pool, blocksize cap
• Blockchain / timechain / merkle trees
• Public key / private key addresses, sign to send
• validate UTXOs as unspent

One thing I don’t understand is how Bitcoin achieves consensus on time

Not sure I understand your question and it appears you answered yourself. The difficulty adjustment is hard coded into bitcoin. Every 14 day or so(every 2,016 blocks generated)difficulty is adjusted so blocks are produced every 10 minutes. In more technical terms..a new nonce is generated by hashing the block of previous transactions and old nonce together. The number that creates is smaller than the current difficulty target of the network. Miners employing proof of work search for this number until they find it and this in turn creates a new block that is added to the chain. Rinse and repeat.

If you mean actual communication between nodes on the network and the propagation of data that is horse of another color and probably better left to someone who understands networks better than me.

[HairyMaclairy]

difficulty is adjusted so blocks are produced every 10 minutes

Maybe I am being retarded but where does the measuring stick come from?  How does Bitcoin know how long “10 minutes” is?

[Toxic2040]

difficulty is adjusted so blocks are produced every 10 minutes

Maybe I am being retarded but where does the measuring stick come from?  How does Bitcoin know how long “10 minutes” is?

By comparing the timestamps of the last 2016 blocks and seeing how closely it comes to the 14 day target. Difficulty is then adjusted up or down to try and reach that target of time it took to generate 2016 blocks. Its sort of circular but once you wrap your head around it not so bad.

[Phil_S]

Frothless.

Yep. That's a pretty important line, imo.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg50155216#msg50155216

[Cryptotourist]

How does Bitcoin know how long “10 minutes” is?

As Toxic mentioned, or in detail & comparison:

https://medium.facilelogin.com/the-mystery-behind-block-time-63351e35603a

[Toxic2040]

Yep. That's a pretty important line, imo.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg50155216#msg50155216

Credit where credit is due.

+1 WOsMerit

Guys. Your petty feuds are super-boring.

Our feuds are anything but petty..  

How does Bitcoin know how long “10 minutes” is?

As Toxic mentioned, or in detail & comparison:

https://medium.facilelogin.com/the-mystery-behind-block-time-63351e35603a

A much more elegant explanation than I gave.  Thanks.

+1 WOsMerit

Bitcoin tries to maintain its block time to be around 10 minutes with its difficulty algorithm. Why it is 10 minutes? Why not 2 or 20 minutes? The very first reference of having 10 minutes as the bitcoin block time comes from the original research paper, which introduced bitcoin in 2008, by Satoshi Nakamoto. It has only one reference, and 10 minutes is not a concrete suggestion, but takes as an example.

    A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore’s Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory.

Let’s say block time is 2 minutes — and the average network latency to reach that block to other miners in the bitcoin network is 1 minute (this is just an example, in practice it’s quite less than this). This value of latency is independent of the block time. All the miners in the network mine simultaneously and independently. Let’s say everyone is mining the 3500th block (assume all start mining at time t0) — and the miner tom solves the puzzle first and broadcasts the block to the rest of the miners at time t0 + t, where t is the time taken by tom to mine the 3500th block. Now peter, another average miner finds tom’s block at (t0 + t)+ 1, due to the network latency of 1 minute. Peter and every other miner, who complete mining the same block with (delta_t)i times lagging, where ; (t0 + t)< (t0 +t) + (delta_t)i < (t0 + t) + 1 or can be reduced to 0< (delta_t)i< 1, succeed in solving the puzzle, but waste all their energy — and all those blocks will be orphan blocks with no mining rewards. The total wastage of hashes in the complete network due to the orphan blocks would be:

sum of { (t+ (delta_t)i ) * (hr)i } for every i where (delta_t)i is the additional time from t, the miner ith took before noticing the block mined by tom — and (hr)i is the number of hashes per minute the ith miner generates.

If we increase, the difficulty by p%, then both t and (delta_t)i will increase in, let’s say the same p1%. Since this makes (delta_t)i increases, the number of miners who complete mining where (t0 +t) + (delta_t)i < (t0 + t) + 1 will go down. So, in the above function of wastage, the number of is will go down — so the wastage. Let’s go through few examples with concrete values.

    If the value of t is 2 minutes, and then every miner who completes mining a block before 3 minutes time period (with 1 minute network latency) will only contribute to the waste (except the miner who finishes very first and gets the reward). Here you can see, there is a 50% of time gap where a miner can fall into this time period. [ 50% = (3–2)/2 * 100]
    If the value of t is 4 minutes, and then every miner who completes mining a block before 5 minutes time period (with 1 minute network latency) will only contribute to the waste. Here you can see, there is a 25% of time gap where a miner can fall into this time period. [ 25% = (5–4)/4 * 100]
    If the value of t is 8 minutes, and then every miner who completes mining a block before 9 minutes time period (with 1 minute network latency) will only contribute to the waste. Here you can see, there is a 12.5% of time gap where a miner can fall into this time period. [ 12.5% = (9–8)/8 * 100]
    If the value of t is 10 minutes, and then every miner who completes mining a block before 11 minutes time period (with 1 minute network latency) will only contribute to the waste. Here you can see, there is a 10% of time gap where a miner can fall into this time period. [ 10% = (11–10)/10 * 100]

Now you can see, as the block time increases, the percentage of wastage goes down. Considering all the other factors, Satoshi Nakamoto thinks the wastage at the 10minutes block time is acceptable. Along with the wastage, if multiple nodes start generating the same block simultaneously or within a short period of time, this will lead into multiple and more frequent bitcoin forks. Frequent folks, will make the bitcoin network less healthy, and the transaction confirmation time will increase, as everyone has to wait till the bitcoin network becomes eventually consistent.

Note: In the above calculation 1 minute of network latency was taken just as an example to make the math easier. A 2013 paper by Decker and Wattenhofer in Zurich measures bitcoin network latency, and determines that 12.6 seconds is the time it takes for a new block to propagate to 95% of nodes.

Deeper rabbit hole about propagation.
https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf

[Phil_S]

Yep. That's a pretty important line, imo.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg50155216#msg50155216

Credit where credit is due.

+1 WOsMerit

Also, it's interesting when in 2018 the price got very close:

month #1
month #3
month #5
month #7
month #9
month #11