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

[JorgeStolfi]

This may be of interest too: @rpietila claims that MtGOX had less than 70,000 clients, counting all accounts with at least 0.001 BTC:

MtGox leak analyzed

Code:

	69266	951441		
mBTC+	#	#BTC	avg	
10 000k	5	130 809		26161,8000
1 000k	96	212 762		2216,2708
100 000	1266	318 490		251,5719
10 000	7291	219 331		30,0824
1 000	17851	62 630		3,5085
100	16389	6 834		0,4170
10	13675	528		0,0386
1	12693	57		0,0045

It seems that among the claimed 1 million Mt.Gox users, there was 69266 accounts with a balance of at least 1mBTC. In total, they were supposed to hold BTC951,441.

[ ... ]

=> Due to findings above ("j", median, and the fact that Gox had only 70,000 customers despite the claims), I will be prompted to revise the Bitcoin # number of users downward from the 2.0 million in the previous month.

EDIT: markup

[JorgeStolfi]

Things feel strange... Huobi's volume is VERY low and falling... No TA postings in this thread... No exchanges have been robbed today... What is happening?

[podyx]

Things feel strange... Huobi's volume is VERY low and falling... No TA postings in this thread... No exchanges have been robbed today... What is happening?

calm before the storm brother

all bitcoin got is action and murder and plots u cant solve

[JorgeStolfi]

Huobi looks like it will have only 1/3 of yesterday's volume - ~30 kBTC.
OKCoin BTC/CNY may have 1/2 of yesterday's volume.
OKCoin LTC/CNY also looks like 1/3.

I did not find anything about today being a holiday in China.  Mar/12 is arbor day, but is a business day as usual.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[creekbore]

Huobi looks like it will have only 1/3 of yesterday's volume - ~30 kBTC.
OKCoin BTC/CNY may have 1/2 of yesterday's volume.
OKCoin LTC/CNY also looks like 1/3.

I did not find anything about today being a holiday in China.  Mar/12 is arbor day, but is a business day as usual.

Hey Jorge, well its been a rather anaemic day on Bitstamp (over the last 9 hours).

[pinky]

Things feel strange... Huobi's volume is VERY low and falling... No TA postings in this thread... No exchanges have been robbed today... What is happening?

Market is preparing for the next big jump - it could go down or up ~200$. It can take a few days before it starts, but quite soon we will see.

[JorgeStolfi]

Market is preparing for the next big jump - it could go down or up ~200$. It can take a few days before it starts, but quite soon we will see.

In what sense is it "preparing"?

The market is just a bunch of traders.  How is each trader "preparing", for what, and why?

[creekbore]

Things feel strange... Huobi's volume is VERY low and falling... No TA postings in this thread... No exchanges have been robbed today... What is happening?

Market is preparing for the next big jump - it could go down or up ~200$. It can take a few days before it starts, but quite soon we will see.

Based on?  Cows lying in a specific direction?  Tea leaves?  Planets in alignment?

[ErisDiscordia]

OH my dear Eris, this thread has become so littered by strawmen that I fear the whole forum will catch on fire if I drop a match...

I won't address them all, I'll just leave one important thought here for all to consider. I haven't seen it mentioned in the whole debate:

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR SOCIETY AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT

Neither do I, of course. That is the point. The main one. Frame it and put it above your bathroom mirror.

You do not know.

Here we have this wonderfully complex and complicated web of interaction and interrelation of human beings, set in an equally complex biosphere. To think that YOU have the capability to process all of the necessary information and come up with the answers for what needs to be done to make everyone better off...is hubris, dangerous, arrogant hubris, which lies at the heart of the failings of our current system.

Actually, I have written about this topic before

An excerpt:

So you have thought about this and come to the conclusion that what is needed is to tax corporations. Pass laws against polluting the environment, against discrimination and for consumer protection. Raise the minimum wage, strengthen gun control, lower some benefits, raise others, add this, subsidize that, prohibit this, cut that or some other sort of arbitrary fix or tweak to the system. Now all we have to do is convince all these “apathetic voters” to realize the correctness of these solutions, vote in the “right people” into office and then everything will be much much better than it is today. I’m really sad I have to tell you this, but: you are not so smart. You may think you have figured out how exactly to change society for the better but that’s only because you haven’t thought deeply enough about the issue and you are probably vastly overestimating your ability to gather the necessary data, integrate them into a meaningful model of what is going on (by the way have you ever noticed that the map is not the territory and your model of what is going on is probably far away from reality?), correctly identify causal relationships within that model and estimate the effects of your desired changes, including all the unforeseen consequences. In other terms, you are probably way too arrogant in your supposed knowledge of where the problems lie and how to “fix them”.

There is one basic fact of history which all of these people seem to be happily ignoring; we have already tried all this. Countless times. Has it helped? What makes you think that this time it will be different? This time we will have honest politicians? This time we will pass the right laws and do the right things? I’m sorry to tell you that you have fallen prey to a grand idealistic utopianism – namely the utopian idea that it is possible to create a central government filled with honest people working towards the greatest benefit for all and actually accomplishing such a goal!

Do not fall prey to the Grand Utopia.

[Frequency]

NEW TIMESTAMP ACHIEVED:

Only two blocks to hit 12.500.000 bitcoins mined??..
Blocknr 290.000

I know its not relevant but some nice math..  

[octaft]

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR SOCIETY AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT

Neither do I, of course. That is the point. The main one. Frame it and put it above your bathroom mirror.

So is this an admission that you aren't actually sure that a society without government would be so much better?

[elebit]

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR SOCIETY AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT

That is a trusim, but one that does mislead the lesser intelligent.

Because while it is true that one does not know what is best for society, it is often trivial to point out something that is good for society. And that is what matters in practice.

[pinky]

Market is preparing for the next big jump - it could go down or up ~200$. It can take a few days before it starts, but quite soon we will see.

In what sense is it "preparing"?

The market is just a bunch of traders.  How is each trader "preparing", for what, and why?

By preparing I mean that we are waiting for some bad or good news. This is obviuos, because we had many inside days, that alone indicate indecision of market participants, with lower volatility. The longer we stay in this range, the bigger move we'll see. You can also see from order book, that 600, 650 and 700 are levels to watch. We are also slowly completing multi month triangle - we are at it's upper line, but there is just not enough buying pressure to overcome resistance. Triangle still has 4-5 weeks to finish, but if stay at this level for a few days, we will test descending trendline once again. Many signs...

[threecats]

Plus cows laying down.

[elebit]

This may be of interest too: @rpietila claims that MtGOX had less than 70,000 clients, counting all accounts with at least 0.001 BTC:

That is indeed interesting.

We know that MtGox had over a million user accounts. Given that you do not register an account if you don't intend to use it, because it is quite useless unless you give up a metric ton of personal information, that tells us that most users did get their money out in time. "Only" 70k accounts got burned in the crash. That is actually better than the numbers speculated on before.

(Full disclosure: I am one of those who did get their money out. I did have some at one point, and then I was lured in again to play the arbitrage in november, but got cold feet and pulled out my last coins early december.)

I have said it before, but the bank situation for MtGox made it pretty difficult for use it to actually buy Bitcoins that way. So it couldn't have attracted many newbies any more. In the end, it was probably an even split between bots and people who wanted to arbitrage from that.

=> Due to findings above ("j", median, and the fact that Gox had only 70,000 customers despite the claims), I will be prompted to revise the Bitcoin # number of users downward from the 2.0 million in the previous month.

Now that is just pulling numbers out of your ass.

How many accounts that were still active in the end of MtGox has absolutely nothing to do with how many Bitcoin users there are except to establish a lower bound for it. (That said, I do believe 2 million is in the right order of magnitude for completely different reasons. We can not infer from the network how many users carry Bitcoins.)

[ErisDiscordia]

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR SOCIETY AND HOW TO ACHIEVE IT

Neither do I, of course. That is the point. The main one. Frame it and put it above your bathroom mirror.

So is this an admission that you aren't actually sure that a society without government would be so much better?

Of course I'm not sure! Isn't my forum screen name a dead giveaway that I am certain of nothing?  

I have my suspicions, though. And one of them is that letting billions of people, who have equally no idea how to run everything, try to run a small part of their lives & surroundings in myriads of different ways...will result in a better situation for most, compared to the centrally planned alternatives. Now why do I suspect that? It has to do with how information flows. From trying countless times I know this is a difficult concept to get across and grasp for most people. I'll help myself out with another excerpt, this time not written by myself:

Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of “conditioned verbal habits”). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart—that is, from the biogram.

No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.

Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram—what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants—is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less “real.” They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, “a tool, a machine, a robot.”

Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class— the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe— is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

I call this the Snafu Principle.

In my own words: a decentralized system seems preferable to a centralized one, because it tends to produce what people actually need on an individual level more efficiently, because there is actual information feedback going on. There has been talk about roads and who would build them if governments weren't around. Richy_T was the only one to spot the hidden implication: who knows if we really need roads? We have them now, yes, together with cars and they fulfill a certain function. But look at the traffic jams everywhere, with mostly one person per vehicle idling their engines and releasing toxic fumes into the environment. Maybe roads can indeed be build by someone who doesn't have to turn a profit (i.e. government) and the fact that they exist is a bad thing.

[Erdogan]

[...]
... ... OTHERWISE, we will truly be living in a survival of the fittest, dog eat dog world... Most people would NOT want to live in such a society.

This is important. I agree, but why do you think, while most people don't want to live in a dog eat dog world, that we will have one in a free society?

If you meet a stranger somewhere in the wilderness, what is your first thought? Kill him and steal his boots?

[ErisDiscordia]

[...]
... ... OTHERWISE, we will truly be living in a survival of the fittest, dog eat dog world... Most people would NOT want to live in such a society.

This is important. I agree, but why do you think, while most people don't want to live in a dog eat dog world, that we will have one in a free society?

If you meet a stranger somewhere in the wilderness, what is your first thought? Kill him and steal his boots?

I think the quote by JayJuanGee is one of the many strawmen I have been alluding to. I have often seen this argument made, usually followed up by some talk about "human nature". What I fail to understand about this position is this: if it is true and human nature is vicious, crooked and evil (something I choose not to believe), then how is the creation of an institution with the legal monopoly on initiating force helping the situation? Especially since this institution is operated by the very same vicious, crooked and evil human beings?

In the end it boils down to the question of whether you trust people in general. I do. And if you don't, you're afraid that they'll be mean to you without the presence of some punishing force...I would suggest traveling around a bit more.

[Erdogan]

The main problem with ancap is that there's nothing preventing a violent gang (a new government if you will) from forming, because everyone else is being so peaceful, and if everyone else stops being peaceful, then it it isn't ancap any more - its just regular anarchy.

Ancap will only work if there is some force to stop people from conducting acts of violence, preferably some force that isn't corruptible. So, until we have open-source peacemaking enforcement droids no such utopia can exist.

That is why you need also the principle of self defense.