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

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

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[cAPSLOCK]

OK!  Some Liquid impressions and thoughts.

So, today I stumbled across a ridiculous arbitrage opportunity.  Using some android decentralized trustless exchange apps I was able to buy L-TUSD and sell for L-BTC and make a fairly nice little profit.  Rinse and repeat until the liquidity provider had no more to sell.

But this had me doing LBTC and Tether transactions... A LOT of them.  So just some thoughts on Liquid.

++Liquid is FAST!  During dozens transactions from one wallet to another, by the time I switched apps the transaction was both received, AND confirmed.  I never had to wait for just about anything.  This was true for both LBTC and LTUSD moves.

++The privacy is strong.  Here is one of the transactions.  Can you see what I was moving.  From where to where?  The amounts of any of it/  The amounts of the sending UTXOs? NO, No, and No.  You can see some addresses, but you do not know for sure which is the receiving address and which was for change.  As far as I can tell this privacy is Monero Strength (just the CT part, Monero is still MUCH better overall) and no one including Federaion member have ANY idea what I am doing, really. https://blockstream.info/liquid/tx/6a08693544181255b1f079ffd0a5ae5f149aa212fca2d96a3475be3aaf6ae7f3

++Transaction fees are cheap.  But not really much cheaper than the Bitcoin network.  They make these scale.  I was spending about a dime for every transaction.

++Blockstream has broken bitcoin so they can rip off the miner.  Just kidding.  I wanted to turn into a BSV conspiracy theorist for a sec.  BUT Blockstream *is* taking 100% of these fees, and has built a powerful Bitcoin sidechain that might make them some pretty serious money.  They are basically positioning themselves as a modern day payment rail like Visa or Amex.

++The programmibility is quite excellent.  Obviously the "Dex" stuff is trailing ETH and Solana et al a little.  But it IS WORKING. on a pure BTC sidechain... AND it is WAY CHEAPER than those other chains.  AND it does not leave a bunch of useless data on the base BTC chain.

++When doing this activity I had to get used to keeping a teeny little pile of L-SATs behind to act as transaction fees nomatter what asset I was sending.  This is analogous to ETH Gas or Gwei or whatever they call it.  Except it's like 11 cents.

As far as I understand ALL of my trades happened trustlessly on the Liquid blockchain at little to no risk to me whatsoever.  No third parties, or at least a blind distributed federation making it possible.  I really think Liquid is still a sleeper.  And I also think, since it is opersource it will be the foundation that will allow lots of nice competition in the whole "smart contracts / DeFi" world, while making the better tradeoffs.

In fact, I think the ONLY thing ETH has over this is devshare and network effect, which honestly are pretty important.  But the incentive for smart developers to come over from weighty sharding base layer chains, and to develop on a BTC sidechain might be enough to inherit Bitcoin's own network effect, and possibly (I hope) leave all the mistakes like ETH in the dust.  

I lost badly at the little underground poker room I go to from time to time last night... It was a terrible night.  *BUT* this little arbitrage opportunity completely recouped those losses and more.  Hooray for all the ways of being a degen!  Wait did I say *I* did all that above.  I take it back.  It was someone else!

[JayJuanGee]

it could/can all be so simple

I appreciate the perspective that the bitcoin switch is on whether it is in the up or in the down position.  Nice little touch.

Shitcoins have come back very strong, good portion of them have completely elimanted their weekend losses and are up on the week. Bitcoin looks very tired and heavy in comparison.

To me this could mean 2 things. 1) no significant retail buying is happening with BTC anymore. or 2) BTC investors know something that the shitcoins don't, which is most likely more dumps on Monday. Or I guess both.

Don't like any of those options honestly.

Haha made me smile! Last time "significant retail buying" of BTC happened back in December 2017! Does that mean we're still in a bear?

We're not observing shitcoins here. The fact that some of that crap "came back very strong" doesn't mean a shit. All shitcoins are doomed (well, most the overwhelming majority (perhaps in the 99%+ arena?) of them).  

FTFY

Furthermore serveria.. you seem to be exactly on point to highlight a kind of distraction that seems to exist with somac's ongoing inclinations to want to both compare bitcoin to shitcoins and his getting all worked up about whether retail is sufficiently coming to bitcoin or not (again devolving into a kind of irrelevant comparison to various shitcoins/shitcoin projects).  

In other words (my point here, not yours), fuck retail.. if they do not want to come into bitcoin now (or soon^tm), they can come later. either later in this cycle or in the next one or two cycles.. just going to cost them more.. king daddy gives no shits, so why should mostly HODLers like us give any shits if retail is not seeing the light in spite our ongoing varying efforts to let them know.. it's not like many of us are holding back information or trying to be secretive about the bitcoin thingie-ma-jiggie that "retail" seems to be failing/refusing to see and/or appreciate for what it is.... It seems to me that even various ongoingly active members in this thread who say that they are NOT going to help all the dumb fucks anymore, they still end up coming back to the thread with stories about the various ways that they had tried to continue to help normies to better understand bitcoin, and many of us still cannot stop talking about bitcoin even when we might have to spend a decent amount of effort going back through some basics with normies.  Surely we will also get energized in our bitcoin discussions if we run into people who have spent at least a small amount of time trying to look into the matter rather than just jumping to various wrong conclusions and don't even be seeming to try beyond accepting various mainstream narratives.  

On a personal level, I am not holding back bitcoin information from various normies when the topic comes up, and it seems to me that on a fairly reasonable ongoing basis I am more than willing to share bitcoin related information with various normies in the place that they are at.. sure, each of us still have limitations in how much time or work that we are going to want to do to "help" others to see the light, but still I am not going to give up completely even though sometimes it can be frustrating in regards to how much normies sometimes see to want to get spoonfed.  

Just the other day, I had a "friend" ask me why the BTC price went down so much in the past days, and I asserted that there were too many people gambling and it created an incentive for other BIGGER people to come in and to punish them for their gambling.. so that's what you get when you engage in leverage trading and trying to get rich faster than you should be or that you are capable of handling.  The friend then said that she did not understand, and I spent a bit of time repeating and overviewing the concept of leverage and margin trading and the creation of incentives for bearwhales to come in and to liquidate various positions (to cause those people to sell at a time that was other than their own choosing because they choose to gamble and the BTC price moved against them).. She continued to say that she did not understand, and I said that she needed to study about the topic.  She said that she wanted me to spoon feed her (she did not use that term), and I said that she has to take more responsibility over her own learning including to look into matters that are interesting to her. I said that there are probably more basic and important things to learn, but if she is interested in how trading and price movement works, then so be it.. she can look into whatever interests her about bitcoin.  

Of course, she is largely refusing to look into her own transitory questions in her mind about bitcoin price movements and she wants information to be spoon fed to her, as if I have 24/7 to be explaining bitcoin to her merely because I have spent 1,000 of hours studying it, so therefore in her mind, supposedly I have some kind of obligation to break it down more for her than I already did and she continues to NOT to want to put in even a faction of the amount of time to bring herself up to a higher level to both ask better questions and to take the knowledge that I had already given to her in order to direct herself into attempting to learn more about the area that is supposedly of interest to her (at least she was interested in the topic for about 10 minutes and then she decided to think about some other topic, such as whether she should paint her nails red, pink or green)?  We can only do so much.. and I am more than willing to help people out, but they also need to be willing to do some of the work themselves too.. I am not going to spoon feed people.  Ain't nobody got time for that, even yours truly.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[Richy_T]

 Also, to take us back a few pages, they stopped using beef tallow because it is high in saturated fats and the scientists were telling us that saturated fats are bad for us.
  Why do they taste to good!?

I believe the vegetarians were making a bit of a fuss as well. Also worth noting that the fillet 'o fish mentioned above used to use lard in the buns.

[cAPSLOCK]

Hmm.  This little surprise Liquid adventure has REALLY had me thinking.  And again it is amazing to me how on point i believe Blockstream is in growing their business model.  They are positioning themselves to be an important player in the future.  They are building what will be a large Bitcoin financial services provider and are WAY ahead of most other folks (Strike, and CashApp are a couple others).

Just thinking about how important decentralized finance service providers are going to be in the very near future.  What we are seeing is the birth of a new MASSIVE business sector.  All the foolishness with "DeFi" and NFTs and all that stuff will be such a joke in the future.  The difference between the DeFi we have seen over the last year and what companies like the above are doing is the difference between people making a thing for a problem that does not exist, and people making the answer to a question most do not yet know they will be asking.

It is equivalent to the difference between ZERO and ONE.

Even those of us with the wherewithal to be our own banks (tm) etc will need various financial services in this new world.

Just ask Bob... not even all of us are going to run our own lightning nodes.  That itself is something that clever people are working out in real time right before our eyes.

Some people can see further into the future than others.  And I have AGAIN underestimated the power that gives.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[JayJuanGee]

There is one major difference between Bitmex and Binance. Bitmex owners are well known scammers, who were often accused of foul play against their customers. I haven't read anything similar for Binance owners, which doesn't mean they are alright, of course. Surely there are all kinds of manupulations on most of the exchanges. But I think that the main force which is restraining the prices and causing sporadic dips and crashes is the irrational volume of long liquidations in Binance. I've been watching the liquidation data closely and each time there is a 2-3% dip there are 5-10x more long liquidations, compared to short liquidations during a 2-3% price increase. This shows that the shorters are more cautios this year, while the longers are quite reckless.

In general, what happens in derivate exchanges stays there. But Binance is an exception - it is simultaneously a derivate and a spot exchange. So what happens there has a real impact on the price. The volume above 40K bitcoins each day is beyond the power of a single whale. And the liquidation data confirms  that there are millions of longers losing ~100$. It is like a new Tortuga attracting all kind of wastrels and seekers of treasure. They refuse to invest and hope to get lucky, not caring about Bitcoin or the odds of winning. And if they claim here the odds are good, then they are surely applying proudhon's math and science  .

I cannot resist but to send you an smerit ivomm on the above-cited post because you make a lot of very decent points regarding fair inferences that can be made and then also some dynamics behind various entities including that we might not know everything but we can make reasonable working inferences regarding what we believe is happening based on what we see as the various pieces of evidence.

I do continue to believe that several of your seemingly negative assertions towards Bitmex are a wee bit unfounded and perhaps based on wrong data and/even that you are drawing wrong conclusions from the data, such as your seeming conclusion that Bitmex (was/is) filled with scoundrels, crooks or peeps with bad/greedy intentions).  Anyhow, I do not feel like going down that road too much with you, and I also do get some senses that sometimes you are giving a wee bit too much weight to some of your behind the scenes manipulation theories... based on some things that are not really knowable, even though I am not going to presume that various kinds of manipulations are not happening.. .For sure, we have varying levels in which some exchanges/third party bitcoin operators are acting completely outside of the grasps of regulation, while at the same time we have some of them dancing around some kinds of regulations or trying to avoid government regulations/overreach.  

Surely, some behaviors of some institutions and individuals is clearly within reasonable parameters, but then some governments might still consider some of their behaviors as either hostile or threatening, and surely sometimes it might not really pay off when some of the actors try to work within regulations and then we have various kinds of resentments and battles - like we had been seeing with some of Coinbase's public proclamations regarding their public statements that they felt that they had been cheated.. and even Grayscale is threatening to sue the SEC for having had approved future bitcoin ETFs and not approving their petition for a spot ETF... Seems pretty interesting that Grayscale might have a pretty decent case against the SEC under the APA (administrative procedures act) which surely places obligations on US federal agencies to have at least some kind of articulable rational basis for rules that they make which would likely include their approval of futures based ETF and not spot based ETF.

Anyhow... maybe part of my point about perspectives regarding what is illegal versus not illegal and what is fair play versus not, and if some of the institutions (or players within) are acting ethically or legally can have a vast array of interpretations - even the fact that some of them might be able to get away with some kinds of manipulation behind the scenes and whether their conduct is legal or not might not even be clear without some kind of investigation, but merely because some government agencies might be putting out negative information of one entity (or individuals therein) or another might not even be enough of a cause to conclude that the entity was necessarily guilty of the conduct that they were accused of.. We don't always know... so we do our best to sort through the information and misinformation.. and surely this thread can sometimes be helpful to help us to highlight some things that might be going on that might be different from the stories (information, facts, logic) that we are getting from other sources (whether mainstream media or some other threads in which some of the information might not be challenged/vetted).

[cAPSLOCK]

It would be difficult to overstate the brilliance of Dahlia Malkhi. She should really be among the probable candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto.  In fact I wonder if the main reason her name has not come up that she is a woman.  Possible.  And a great trick if she happens to be he.  But she is one of the worlds most important researches on distributed systems, and decentralized models for computing, consensus and even finance.

She even wrote a book about the Byzentine Generals problem back in the 90s I think!

But recently she TORE into Ethereum and attacked it fairly strongly:

I think proof-of-stake is fundamentally vulnerable. You're giving authority to a group to call the shots [...] In my opinion, it's giving power to people who have lots of money.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/03/02/vulnerable-ethereums-casper-tech-takes-criticism-at-curacao-event/

It's good that not everyone is fooled.

[El duderino_]

Winter is coming.
Llama writes every day now.
Dude say, this is fine.

[eXPHorizon]

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[El duderino_]

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[JimboToronto]

 Also, to take us back a few pages, they stopped using beef tallow because it is high in saturated fats and the scientists were telling us that saturated fats are bad for us.
  Why do they taste to good!?

I believe the vegetarians were making a bit of a fuss as well. Also worth noting that the fillet 'o fish mentioned above used to use lard in the buns.

You mentioned lard, one of the healthiest fats, but you've got to be careful where you source your lard.

Supermarket lard is almost always hydrogenated to keep it solid at warmer room temperatures. That kinda defeats the health benefits of eating lard.

If you can't render your own lard from pork fat, try to find an ethical supplier. I get both my lard and my tallow from a neighborhood family butcher who renders by boiling cubes of fat which he then bakes crisp to sell as snacks to his South American clientele. His pure rendered and filtered lard and tallow are almost a by-product which he sells cheap. Another benefit is that his steaks and chops are very well trimmed.

[savetherainforest]

is that billboard real?     ...     ... the world just got a little more f%^cked up in the marketing perspective of things.

Maybe it works. But I'm not sure that many will understand at first. Maybe at first they will hate on the BTCiTcoin rich, and then they will try to understand. You know....... grabs pitchfork first and then asks questions later.      

[AlcoHoDL]

Good one! I'll repeat it in big & bold, for clarity, in case the WO resident trolls/retards still don't get it:

THANKS FOR
ALL THE
CHEAP SATS,
YOU WEAK
ASS PAPER
HANDS
BTC

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[eXPHorizon]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj8kMmUxkSE

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation