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

[nullius]

I think I’m not alone in rooting for anyone who shorts in this market to get fucked.

I would expect in the short, medium, and long term that bitcoin will go down. If you can hold your short for a few years you might become a billionaire.

Is proudhon actually unaware that maximum potential profits from a short are limited?  I confirmed by mathematics that the difference between a positive integer < 10⁹ and zero is finite and < 10⁹.


(Edit—I also realize what ought to be obvious:  Anyone shorting Bitcoin is not holding any.  Because being long and short in the same asset would be insane.  If you’re long and you expect a drop, you sell:  You don’t borrow more of the asset to sell it.  (Edit again:  Though if one were to start applying “proudhon maths” consistently, maybe going simultaneously long and short in the same asset would be a hedge.))

Long bitcoin, short the bankers

Go, Bitcoin, go!

[LFC_Bitcoin]

Who else?


 

[JayJuanGee]

Entered shorts at 10472, already locked in some profits to cover fees in case we go back to entry (where i moved my stop)

Excellent move! I would expect in the short, medium, and long term that bitcoin will go down. If you can hold your short for a few years you might become a billionaire.

What would you consider the odds of "might"? Approximately, .00937182% give or take .00127668% (8 digits for more precision and to appease the likes of nullius) or am I being too generous in my estimations of what you consider as a reasonable understanding of "might"?

I think I’m not alone in rooting for anyone who shorts in this market to get fucked.

Yes, from time to time, we do get to witness a whole hell of a lot of reckening of shorts, and surely we might wish that such reckening happens more frequently than it does.

Personally, I am looking forward to the day when some really BIG ASS players get recked BIG time when they play around with fractional reserving (rehypothecating), and get their asses handed to them because they had not sufficiently covered for the sometimes unexpected UPpities that can happen.  Not sure if it will happen (or be disclosed), but thinking that there are decently good chances that it will happen at some point in our next BTC run (presuming one comes).

(Edit—I also realize what ought to be obvious:  Anyone shorting Bitcoin is not holding any.  Because being long and short in the same asset would be insane.  If you’re long and you expect a drop, you sell:  You don’t borrow more of the asset to sell it.  (Edit again:  Though if one were to start applying “proudhon maths” consistently, maybe going simultaneously long and short in the same asset would be a hedge.))

It seems to me that there are a lot of more experienced traders that figure out ways to hedge both directions, including shorting and including playing with margin, and surely the smarter ones figure out meaningful ratios to play rather that betting all or nothing or even betting exceedingly BIG - because many of us likely realize that there continues to be nuances in regards to how markets can be played, and there are also a variety of plays that can be made to remain profitable while at the same time, pigs get fed and hogs get slaughtered (or some variation of that expression that suggests incrementalism is o.k. and playing either (both) side is o.k. as long as NOT getting too greedy)

[savetherainforest]

 ROFL !!! ... Tomorrow I will go buy and make my own! <3

But what happens if you lose 1 or the order of them? ... I guess its a guessing game then... ... but meh... U probably wouldn't use that in case some kind of house burning accident or something.

[xhomerx10]

^Stamp a number on each keyword - preferably the number matching the required order of the keys - and you won't have to worry.
I want to do this - just because it's so cool!

[OutOfMemory]

But what happens if you lose 1 or the order of them?

You add the index number, possibly obfuscated (reversed order, as a simpler example)
get creative

[JayJuanGee]

^Stamp a number on each keyword - preferably the number matching the required order of the keys - and you won't have to worry.
I want to do this - just because it's so cool!

What about dealing with a "losing one" scenario that STRF had mentioned?

You suggesting that "cool" people do not have the right (if that's an appropriate word choice?) to lose any of those 12, 18 or 24 washers?

But what happens if you lose 1 or the order of them?

You add the index number, possibly obfuscated (reversed order, as a simpler example)
get creative

Same question to you OOM (ditto) - as I had raised above for homerx (except substitute "creative" for "cool").

[Crypt0n14ni]

Adding to this analysis with confirmed math and science:

https://i.imgur.com/jrBnsoe.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7WtrdZ0S1w

[nullius]

 ROFL !!! ... Tomorrow I will go buy and make my own! <3

But what happens if you lose 1 or the order of them? ... I guess its a guessing game then...

O(n!) for the order.  If you totally lose the order, then it depends on how many of those precious washers there are to permute.

12! is only 479,001,600, easy for a computer to bruteforce search.  24! is an awful lot bigger, and would require over 2⁷⁹ work to bruteforce—say goodbye to your coins, unless you have a vast amount of supercomputing resources.  For BIP 39 (not Electrum), the checksum bits can help to optimize the work that you do when searching; but you will still need to do the search.

(For comparison, the ordering of a deck of cards has 52! permutations, about 2²²⁵.)

If you lose only a part of the order—say, if just a few washers fall off the end and scatter across the floor—then recovery will accordingly be easier.

What about dealing with a "losing one" scenario that STRF had mentioned?

You suggesting that "cool" people do not have the right (if that's an appropriate word choice?) to lose any of those 12, 18 or 24 washers?

Each washer that you totally lose means 2048 trial-and-error attempts to replace it, if you still know the ordering of all washers (including the blank spots).  That’s exponential, to the power of the number of lost washers.

Losing one is easy to fix!

If you lose up to 3–4 washers, it should be feasible to recover your coins with a home PC and much patience.  If you lose 5–6, recovery will be awfully expensive; it may still be worthwhile for a whale wallet.  If you lose 7, I would guess that the NSA’s supercomputers could still recover your coins—maybe.  If you lose 12, recovery will be far beyond the combined capability of all computers on earth; that is why 12 words is the minimum seed length.

I myself use 24-word seeds, for to protect even against superintelligent space aliens with star-sized computers and a few billion years of spare time.  But note that Bitcoin’s public-key security level is the same level as that of a 12-word seed, i.e. 128 bits.  (Bitcoin uses 256-bit elliptic curve keys, but brute force is not the best known way to attack that class of cryptography; this is many orders of magnitude faster.)

If you lose the ordering and lose some washers, then—eh, good luck, LOL!

You add the index number, possibly obfuscated (reversed order, as a simpler example)
get creative

I don’t think that obfuscation is in any way useful to protect you there.  Indeed, it is more likely to frustrate you—after you forget how you obfuscated.  Just rely on keeping the whole thing secret, which it needs to be anyway.


Just seeing this for the first time.  Damn, I like it.  Though you probably want to research the properties of your washer material carefully, if you want for it to be fire-resistant, etc.  Compare Jameson Lopp’s trials of various seed-storage products.

Most importantly, this requires no Bitcoin-specific hardware purchases that are usually infeasible to make anonymously.  Inexpensive materials available at any hardware store, and maybe even already on-hand in your garage—excellent!


Final edit:  Thinking over those numbers, and the BIP 39 use of a bit of PBKDF2, I am slightly revising down my estimates of how many lost washers you can recover.  I am accustomed to thinking pessimistically from a defender’s perspective, and thus making somewhat liberal assumptions about what a cracker can do.  Whereas I don’t want to dose people with hopium about how many lost seed words they can get back, realistically.  Let’s put it this way:  I would not be surprised if somebody can crack 4 words on high-end home PC hardware in a semi-reasonable time; but if you rely on doing that, you may be in for a lot of pain!

[philipma1957]

short-term correlation between BTC and equities or even other assets

It's not a "short-term correlation" so much as a new paradigm. Let me know when you understand the difference.

It started in feb as both the market and btc crashed hard.

It is fairly true for 2020.

Far less true prior to 2020.

Most  likely will not be true in 2021 or 2022.

Part of the reason if was not true prior to 2020 was it was too novel and too small. But this year a lot of  market money has bounced into btc as markets are besides theirselves with fears of a big crash.

It is still too small a cap under 300 bill not to delink from the market.

The real question is not if they are linked at the moment but when does btc pass the market and leave it behind.

BTC already has left the market behind.

The mere fact that you can draw short-term correlation between February 2020-ish to present, hardly means shit.

It's like cavemen looking at shadows in a cave trying to proclaim that they know what is going on outside the cave, when it would be much more informative to look outside the cave and determine directly what is going on rather than relying upon shadow interpretation (aka limited information).

While you may want that to be true right here right now as I type the evidence shows it to be not yet.  When and if it goes up up and away in 2021 to 50-100k and in 2022 to 250k you would be correct.   But then again I am just a guy typing on a keyboard in NJ, USA.

 Not an insider or a big BTC owner. I dabble at it all. More of a very small business for me than anything else.

[xhomerx10]

^Stamp a number on each keyword - preferably the number matching the required order of the keys - and you won't have to worry.
I want to do this - just because it's so cool!

What about dealing with a "losing one" scenario that STRF had mentioned?

You suggesting that "cool" people do not have the right (if that's an appropriate word choice?) to lose any of those 12, 18 or 24 washers?

But what happens if you lose 1 or the order of them?

You add the index number, possibly obfuscated (reversed order, as a simpler example)
get creative

Same question to you OOM (ditto) - as I had raised above for homerx (except substitute "creative" for "cool").

 Well I don't plan to put more than a couple of cups of coffee worth of Bitcoin in that wallet, I just think it's cool.
I'll probably keep it on a fob in my pocket and then when I'm paying for a purchase, I'll pull it out, gesture towards it and swing it around while saying "Do you accept Bitcoin?"
When they say, "No, sorry we only accept cash or credit cards",  I'll remind them it's the 21st century, wink at them, tell them they should get with the program and chuckle while slipping that dazzling piece of high-tech jewelry back into my pocket. 

[AlcoHoDL]

Guys ('n' gals), don't forget to add a passphrase ("25th word"), in addition to your seed. Doing so, will protect you from someone finding the seed. Even a relatively weak passphrase will give you enough time to move your coins to another wallet when you discover that the seed has been found (and while the thief is brute-forcing the passphrase). A strong passphrase will make it virtually impossible for a thief to have access to your coins.

A passphrase (more than one, to be precise) will also add plausible deniability of ownership of your coins, should you ever be required (or be forced) to reveal your stash, as I've explained in this post.

[jojo69]

[nullius]

It’s funny:  Before I saw the below, I was just thinking to write a Development & Technology post about BIP 39 flaws, especially the stupid cargo-cult crypto use of PBKDF2 and the ill-designed “passphrase” feature.  I should probably do it sometime.

(To be clear:  The use of seed phrases is good, very good.  The standard just has some points that are ill-advised, which you can safely ignore.)

Guys ('n' gals), don't forget to add a passphrase ("25th word"), in addition to your seed.

I recommend against this.  It is security theatre that simply increases your chance of losing your coins (if you forget your passphrase), without adding any significant security.

Doing so, will protect you from someone finding the seed. Even a relatively weak passphrase will give you enough time to move your coins to another wallet when you discover that the seed has been found (and while the thief is brute-forcing the passphrase). A strong passphrase will make it virtually impossible for a thief to have access to your coins.

That is an unrealistic expectation.

If your seed phrase is compromised, how likely do you really think it is that you will discover that before your coins are gone?

How much time do you expect a passphrase to buy you?  I mean, in quantitative terms based on real data about how fast password crackers can crack a weak passphrase stretched with a piddling 2048 iterations of PBKDF2 security theatre.


The security of your seed phrase rests on keeping the seed phrase secret.  Generate the seed phrase using a cryptographically secure source of randomness (CSPRNG), and set it in your mind that your coins are gone if that gets compromised.

Unless you have considerable security expertise for evaluating the benefit of what you are doing according to a sound security model, pinning your hopes on the passphrase only gives you a false sense of security—especially when you start with the low standard, “even a relatively weak passphrase”!  Whereas you already have a strong “passphrase”:  It is the seed phrase itself.

If you were capable of reliably memorizing a cryptographically secure passphrase for the long term (which you are not—and I’m not, either!), then you could simply memorize the seed phrase (don’t try this unless you want to lose your coins).  The whole purpose of engraving your seed phrase in metal is to make sure that you don’t lose pseudorandom information which is strong in the first instance.

A passphrase (more than one, to be precise) will also add plausible deniability of ownership of your coins, should you ever be required (or be forced) to reveal your stash, as I've explained in this post.

“Plausible deniability” is a concept that needs to die.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-January/015547.html

[...]

I rather suspect the concept of “plausible deniability” of having been invented by a detective or agent provocateur.  There are few concepts more useful for helping suspects shoot themselves in the foot, or frankly, for entrapping people.

[...]

If you are publicly known to be deepy involved in Bitcoin, then nobody will believe that your one-and-only wallet contains only 0.01 BTC.  That’s not even “plausible”.  But if you have overall privacy practices which leave nobody knowing or suspecting that you have any Bitcoin at all, then there is nothing to “deny”; and should a Trezor with (supposedly) 0.01 BTC be found in your possession, that’s much better than “plausible”.  It’s completely unremarkable.

Whereas if you are known or believed to own large amounts of BTC, a realistic bad guy’s response to your “decoy” wallet could be, “I don’t believe you; and it costs me nothing to keep beating you with rubber hose until you tell me the *real* password.”

It could be worse, too.  In a kidnapping scenario, the bad guys could say, “I don’t believe you.  Hey, I also read Trezor’s website about ‘plausible deniability’.  Now, I will maim your kid for life just to test whether you told me the *real* password.  And if you still don’t tell me the real password after you see that little Johnny can no longer walk, then I will kill him.”

The worst part is that you have no means of proving that you really *did* give the real password.  Indeed, it can be proved if you’re lying by finding a password which reveals a hidden wallet—but *you* have no means of affirmatively proving that you are telling the truth!  If the bad guys overestimated your riches (or if they’re in a bad mood), then little Johnny is dead either way.

In a legalistic scenario, if “authorities” believe you have 1000 BTC and you only reveal a password for 0.01 BTC, the likely response will not be to let you go.  Rather, “You will now sit in jail until you tell the *real* password.”  And again:  You have no means of proving that you did give the real password!

“Plausible deniability” schemes can backfire quite badly.

[...]

That was in reply to this:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-January/015529.html

I think you're under-appreciating how useful the "plausible deniability". Someone I know was (solo) traveling to the United States when a border agent asked her to unlocked her phone; thumbed through her apps, ended up finding tinder and went through all her recent conversations to make sure she wasn't involved in any "pay for sex things".

In the same light, I travel frequently and constantly have my trezor on me. If I am asked to unlock it, I will have no problems doing so (as refusal will no doubt lead to deportation) and showing my personal wallet (which sadly hasn't had much use since fees became ridiculous).

Trezor's "plausible deniability" scheme could very well result in you going to jail for lying to border security, because it's so easy for them to simply brute force alternate passwords based on your seeds. With that, they have proof that you lied to customs, a serious offense.

I would strongly advise you not to use it in that situation.

Real life is not like the movies.

You never want “plausible deniability”.  What you want is to be above suspicion.  For example, nobody who knows me “IRL” would ever suspect that I have secret bitcoins.  Neither cops nor robbers will even think of it.  I don’t need to construct the types of cocked-up stories that investigators enjoy tearing apart, or make decoy wallets.  I don’t need to deny anything, “plausibly” (“Focus on the IF!”) or otherwise:  Nobody will even ask.

[Hueristic]

...

FYI, I ve found people don't like to hear uncomfortable truths but will eat up lies that make them feel safe.

[Biodom]

Rule #1 in bitcoin:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ipy7le/rule_number_one_in_bitcoin/

well...many people here don't really care about that, ostensibly.

or...'don't wrench me, bro!'

[nullius]

(Edit—I also realize what ought to be obvious:  Anyone shorting Bitcoin is not holding any.  Because being long and short in the same asset would be insane.  [...])

Not true at all, i hold btc and short it at the same time, but when im trading im only expecting to lose 1% per trade, but since im counting in bitcoin and not in dollars, if i sell and market pumps i lose a lot of %s in btc, so in order to increase my btc holdings i try to make use of small movements to make profits

Well, this is interesting:  What, exactly, is the difference between selling BTC that you own, and selling BTC that you borrowed on margin—other than the latter costing interest money (and having unbounded potential loss—but I note you said you set a stop-limit on the upside)?

I don’t see how that would protect you from an unexpected pump in the market, any differently than a stop-limit buy order on the upside.

(Of course, counting in Bitcoin and not dollars is good.  Who the hell wants Fed toilet paper?)

[savetherainforest]

12! is only 479,001,600, easy for a computer to bruteforce search.

Ahahaha.... imagine spending 2-3 years in a row just if u lose one to introduce like 500K combinations. (Probably it will be worth it and the motivation would grow even higher when seeing the price rise!   )


Edit: Probably developing your own software to interact with the wallet and introduce each combination would be more efficient. Also you can make a blockchain just for that! And basically you can use the network as an addon app to compute the missing numbers or letters with brute force!

[Paashaas]

30 day return hits this lower range ore very close to it. It usually follows with by atleast a 20% pump.

[JayJuanGee]

short-term correlation between BTC and equities or even other assets

It's not a "short-term correlation" so much as a new paradigm. Let me know when you understand the difference.

It started in feb as both the market and btc crashed hard.

It is fairly true for 2020.

Far less true prior to 2020.

Most  likely will not be true in 2021 or 2022.

Part of the reason if was not true prior to 2020 was it was too novel and too small. But this year a lot of  market money has bounced into btc as markets are besides theirselves with fears of a big crash.

It is still too small a cap under 300 bill not to delink from the market.

The real question is not if they are linked at the moment but when does btc pass the market and leave it behind.

BTC already has left the market behind.

The mere fact that you can draw short-term correlation between February 2020-ish to present, hardly means shit.

It's like cavemen looking at shadows in a cave trying to proclaim that they know what is going on outside the cave, when it would be much more informative to look outside the cave and determine directly what is going on rather than relying upon shadow interpretation (aka limited information).

While you may want that to be true right here right now as I type the evidence shows it to be not yet.  When and if it goes up up and away in 2021 to 50-100k and in 2022 to 250k you would be correct.   But then again I am just a guy typing on a keyboard in NJ, USA.

 Not an insider or a big BTC owner. I dabble at it all. More of a very small business for me than anything else.

My comment is not based on wishing; it is instead based on a description from where BTC came and where BTC currently is.  

Sure, my description has an assertion that we are NOT currently in a correlation status, and perhaps the future will lend some more light upon whether we had been in a correlation status, yet I had already been repeatedly proclaiming that mere short-term correlation, to the extent that you had identified it to be happening since February until present, does not actually rise to the level of a reasonable assessment regarding where we are at or from where we came.  

Furthermore, my description does not presume future BTC price direction as you seem to be ascribing to my comment...  You are full of nonsense if you believe that BTC prices would have to reach $50k to $100k in 2021 or alternatively $250k in 2022 in order for me to be correct.  Fact of the matter is that I am already correct based on data that is already in.  Future prediction about BTC price movement remains another category and there are a lot of potential variable outcomes, some outcomes are more bullish, some are less bullish and there are even bearish or flat scenarios that could play out too.  

One thing about the future is that you cannot really know for sure what might happen, until it has already happened.. otherwise the future is based on a series of probabilities, as you already realize that understanding.

Of course, any kind of description of where we are in terms of BTC price or where we had been can be used with a certain amount of prescriptive elements contained therein in order to attempt to ascribe probabilities to potential future paths forward.  

As I mentioned several times already, the three strongest characterizations of BTC price prediction models include: 1) planB's stock to flow, 2) 4-year fractal and 3) s-curve exponential adoption based on metcalfe and networking principles.  

Even though these BTC price prediction models might feel like they are locked into some kind of absolutes about the future, they are still based on probabilities rather than certainties - and people can even disagree regarding how much certainty to assign to various price points contained therein or whether the model might end up needing to be adjusted or end up breaking in the future based on how future data plays out... but they are currently NOT broken nor in need of adjustment based on surprise data points, such as purported short-term correlation.. blah blah blah.

None of those above mentioned BTC price prediction models are currently out of line with the seemingly short-term evidence of BTC correlation with stocks, gold and/or other assets...

Furthermore, there have been a decent number of in-depth analysis of BTC suggesting that BTC has shown historical performance that is amongst the most uncorrelated of asset classes, and even those discussions are not negated by short-term periods of seeming correlation.   Do you need links for any of those studies that have been floating around the space for 5 years or more?

Sure it is possible that the future might not look like the past and any model that is worth its salt should attempt to account for the data as it comes in or if there might be meaningful deviations that might suggest the model(s) to not have as much predictive power, or maybe all of a sudden bitcoin will go from being an immature as fuck asset class to becoming mature, which would likely change the way that it performs in the future.. but currently, there is no real actual strong evidence to suggest that any meaningful or material changes have been happening in bitcoin in order to cause bitcoin to all of a sudden be treated as a mature asset class or to become correlated on a longer time horizon, in spite wishful projections based on such short-term observations of purported correlations.

Yes, the passage of time would provide more data to verify if currently seemingly valid BTC prediction models are still playing out within a range that allows the price prediction models to be true, but why the hell do we need more passage of time in order to figure out what the fuck is going on in BTC?

We have a decent amount of data already. We have more than 10 years worth of BTC price data, as BTC has been increasing in adoption, and its networking effects have been building, but bitcoin still remains pretty damned, immature, no? 

Seems that we do not need to go through such passage of time of future time with our hands in the air and saying that we have no idea what might happen in order to already appreciate that so far in BTC's wee lil short life it is not correlated to stocks, gold or other assets, even though we could look at short snippets of charts and visualize certain shorter term periods and proclaim that such correlation could be argued to be present, blah blah blah, based on incomplete information, as I already mentioned several times.

Sure Phillip, conclude what you like regarding where bitcoin is or where it came from including your need for more passage of time in order to feel comfortable in figuring out where bitcoin might be going, including if you want to believe that there is correlation presently that actually matters in really understanding what is happening with BTC, and if want to believe that you need more evidence, such as the passage of 1, 2 or 3 more years of data and for BTC to reach certain predetermined and seemingly random price points before you would become convinced or comfortable regarding where we are at currently, then that is your choice to have those kinds of beliefs that seem to NOT be based on the evidence that is already here, staring you in the face.  

^Stamp a number on each keyword - preferably the number matching the required order of the keys - and you won't have to worry.
I want to do this - just because it's so cool!

What about dealing with a "losing one" scenario that STRF had mentioned?

You suggesting that "cool" people do not have the right (if that's an appropriate word choice?) to lose any of those 12, 18 or 24 washers?

But what happens if you lose 1 or the order of them?

You add the index number, possibly obfuscated (reversed order, as a simpler example)
get creative

Same question to you OOM (ditto) - as I had raised above for homerx (except substitute "creative" for "cool").

 Well I don't plan to put more than a couple of cups of coffee worth of Bitcoin in that wallet, I just think it's cool.
I'll probably keep it on a fob in my pocket and then when I'm paying for a purchase, I'll pull it out, gesture towards it and swing it around while saying "Do you accept Bitcoin?"
When they say, "No, sorry we only accept cash or credit cards",  I'll remind them it's the 21st century, wink at them, tell them they should get with the program and chuckle while slipping that dazzling piece of high-tech jewelry back into my pocket.  

That's right homer.  Don't plan on taking any shit - a sign of truly reaching fuck you status.