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

[JayJuanGee]

Jorge retains some fantasy illusion that his posts affect the behavior of some marginal newbies

Rua Santa Ifigênia is the traditional "electronics street" of São Paulo, some 5-10 blocks with tiny to medium-sized shops selling from transistors to consumer electronics, with sidewalks lined with street merchant stalls selling all sorts of accessories, cartridges, software, etc.. A large part of it is contraband, pirated, or counterfeit (you can surely find a "legitimate" copy of Photoshop or Autocad there for a few bucks). Once in a while the police raids the place, confiscates a couple of tons of merchandise, gves out fines and maybe some arrests, just to justify their salaries; but that is all "priced in" as you might say.

Some 10-15 years ago a Ph.D. student of mine bought for her project a Sony camera that had a CD burner built-in and recorded images directly on small 3" CD-Rs.  (There was a short time window when that camera made sense, because flash memory cards had about the same capacity as those CD-Rs but were much more expensive.) She was running out of the original supply of CD-Rs, and could not find then in Campinas; so one day we happened to be in São Paulo we thought of checking at Sta. Ifigiênia.

When you buy anything in Brazil the store is supposed to give you a "fiscal note", an official serially numbered receipt, of which they keep a copy.  Those receipts are used by tax auditors to check whether the state sales tax is being paid.  Obviously street merchants and  stores selling contraband don't give no friggin' fiscal notes, especially for a small purchase like a box of blank CDs; but since we were paying with federal grant money we needed the fiscal notes, and moreover we had to pay with a check from the government account.  We had to walk the whole street, asking at half a dozen computer supply shops, until we found a store that had those 3" CD-Rs, accepted the check, and gave us a fiscal note.

While we were walking back, people started shouting "tax inspectors, tax inspectors" all over the place.  In ten minutes (no exaggeration) half the small shops in the entire street closed their doors, and all the sidewalk stalls had been hastily folded and thrown into vans that disappeared from view.   For, you see, they had spotted two odd-looking people entering random shops and asking to buy some trinket with a fiscal note -- what else could they be?

So: don't underestimate.

That's a very nice story, Jorge, and it seems to illustrate that if you engage in a pattern of behavior, then people will react (which is probably true), and I suppose you are becoming famous on this thread, too, which could be like the butterfly flapping its wings in Africa causing a hurricane in Mexico. 

Maybe 95% of us will find you incredible (or non-credible), but 5% of the readers may someday believe that you are making some kind of sense, and they will follow you.

 It's like the actor or actress that does NOT know fuck about some political topic, but when they speak, their followers follow.

[JayJuanGee]

People had very good arguments in decemeber why it would go down more so I wanted to see if anyone had the opposite argument for why it might go up.

Have you seen this?

Slippery Slope's Million Dollar Logistic Model

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=366214.0

I am rather sceptical about this. Not because it's a bad model overall, but because I suspect the amount of fiat coming in does not correlate well to adoption. Namely, over-represented speculators must have vastly over-pumped the market, so it's hard to tell where we 'should' be at this point.

I'd be interested in seeing a better model, if there is one.

Anyone can make a model and to argue why the growth curve will follow that model - so instead of having 10x growth, you could have increasingly graduated growth, such as 9X then 8x then 7x then 6.5x then 6.25x then 6x then 5x then 4x then 3.5x then 3x then 2x then 1.5x then .5x then stable .2x into infinity.  There are a lot of variations of such projected growth that could be argued as feasible.

[thezerg]

http://advivo.com.br/blog/jorge-stolfi/cuidado-com-bitcoin

It really is too bad Jorge that you will not take a more active role in Bitcoins and that you discourage your fellow Brazillians from doing so.  Bitcoin would be very useful in Brazil for visitors and Campinas is the perfect spot to start it due to its tech infrastructure.  

I have traveled to Campinas several times over the last 2 years consulting with CPqD and co-located spinoffs and I'll report that I spent a significant amount of my free time acquiring, managing and worrying about money.  The problem is I could find only one ATM that would dispense cash (HSBC) although most of them theoretically were compatible with my card.  And wandering around a foreign country punching your PIN into every available machine has got to be a pretty dumb idea...  

To make things worse,  the one HSBC ATM that worked would only dispense about $100 USD per 24 hours.  Now, Brazil is not cheap.  The hotel is > $100 per night so using cash only is impossible.  But even using it for daily expenses was hard.  The cab ride to and from CPqD was about 20 bucks each way, leaving 60 bucks for food spread over 3 meals.  So $20 a meal is certainly doable, but not at a nice restaurant with beer, or allowing me to pay for others.  Also, I wanted to visit the ocean (6 hour drive) -- luckily I found a HSBC in Ubatuba, or I'd still be there :-).  And at the end of the trip I needed $150 for the cab ride BACK to the airport so I had to actually build that amount up via withdrawals over several days by eating dinner at the hotel.

Credit card fraud (double swipes, etc) is pretty high so I was told not to use my CC at every random store.  Also, Brazil has a couple of CC networks and the only one that worked for me was "Cielo".  But the "Cielo" reader was this handheld "mobile" device that sometimes would fail due to network connection or something... I had to pay one night hotel in cash.  Its nerve-wracking to be in a foreign country unable to speak Portuguese and wondering if your CC will work for gas already pumped or a meal already eaten.  Cash is king in these situations.

If there was a local Bitcoin exchanger it would have been easy.  I could have carried BTC in and exchanged it for a couple days of spending money.

[derpinheimer]

You cant stop like this mini-rally!! GOGOOGOGO

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

"crypto-nazis"
What the fuck??
You even know what Nazis is? National socialism...... Show me one crypto coin that is socialist?

There is a big world outside of bitcoinland, you know.  In that world "Fiat" is a car maker, and "crypto-nazi" is someone who secretly espouses nazi views (such as extreme racism) but hides them to avoid public reproach etc..

[JorgeStolfi]

Boa noite Sr Jorge Stolfi,

Send me private messages, if needed we can discuss in the Portuguese language forum.

[aminorex]

http://cryptome.org/2014/05/weev-duns-usg-28296btc.htm

I am owed 28,296 Bitcoins. I do not accept United States dollars, as it is the preferred currency of criminal organizations such as the FBI, DOJ, ATF, and Federal Reserve and I do not assist criminal racketeering enterprises.

So, would you like to speculate on his chances of actually getting his invoice paid?

If I were in charge of the FBI we would pay it.  Or maybe a little less.  $500/hr is a bit steep after all. 

[xyzzy099]

You even know what a Nazis is? National socialism...... Show me one crypto coin that is socialist?

Um. Just because they called themselves Socialists doesn't make them socialist.

They were in fact fascists, right-wingers not left-wingers.

[/politics]

Wrong.  They were socialists.

In Hitler's Germany, every citizen was guaranteed a job by the government.  Every citizen was guaranteed an education, at government expense.  Health care was not totally socialized, but it was heavily subsidized by the government.  Sound familiar?  They weren't Marxists, but Fascists really are socialists too.

I don't think you know what left-wing and right-wing actually mean.  In America, at least, these terms have become almost meaningless.  Nowadays, right-wing = conservative = republican, and left-wing = liberal = democrat.  In reality, all of these terms have distinct, useful meanings.

The left-wing/right-wing terminology originated in France after the French revolution, where those who favored the old aristocracy sat on the right side of the legislature, and those who were more egalitarian in their views sat on the left.  Thus, right-wing came to be associated with those who believed that some people (the aristocracy, in this case) were genuinely better than others by birth, and ought to rule over others based on their basic genetic superiority.  In this way, the Nazis were clearly right-wing, even though they were also socialists.  I don't think any political group in America now is really right-wing, other than fringe groups like neo-nazis and the Ku Klux Klan - but it makes Democrats feel better to associate that term with Republicans.

Look up "classical liberalism" on Wikipedia to see what the original (and real) meaning of liberalism is.  I think you will be surprised by the answer.  Spoiler:  It reads a LOT like what most of us call 'Libertarianism'.

"Conservative" historically has meant to oppose change, to favor maintaining the status quo - whatever that might be at the time.  I don't know too many American 'conservatives' who are happy with the status quo nowadays.

The media and the political establishment try to conflate any term that has negative connotations among their supporters with their political opposition, and thereby render good, useful words useless.

[JorgeStolfi]

If there was a local Bitcoin exchanger it would have been easy.  I could have carried BTC in and exchanged it for a couple days of spending money.

The offline generation of address/key pairs and the use of asymmetric cryptography to "sign" digital cheques are undoubtly better than centrally-stored passwords/PINs and "safety codes".  But it is only those features that make bitcoin (allegedly) safer than current credit cards against point-of-sale theft.  All the other "features" of the bitcoin protocol address other goals, and can be viewed as defects by those who do not see the goals desirabe or worth the cost.

As for your troubles here in Brazil, many of them were due to the lack or unreliability of ATMs, not to the fact that the ATMs were from banks rather than from a bitcoin company.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[greenlion]

All the other "features" of the bitcoin protocol address other goals, and can be viewed as defects by those who do not see the goals desirabe or worth the cost.

These are the exact entities that risk disintermediation, and it's just a truism that these actors would not want this system.

The cryptographic security of accounts is not even the tip of the iceberg of the benefit of this system. The benefit of this system is that its design incentivizes completely disparate actors to work to create the underlying infrastructure that then companies can build right on top of with profoundly lower cost than current proprietary and centralized systems.

True this is not attractive to the entities you describe, but the rebuttal to that is "who the hell cares?". The preferences of current rent-seeking oligarchs is only relevant as long as they can maintain control, which they can't forever.

[JorgeStolfi]

you seem somehow proud that you could scare a half street full of vendors into shutting up shop because you were waving [nota fiscal]

I just asked for the NF at the shops for the reason that I explained, and certainly did not imagine that it would cause that reaction.  In fact it took us a while to realize that we were the "tax inspectors". 

It must have been the whole street, people obviously did not know who or where those "tax inspectors" were, and did not wait to find out.

Not quite "proud" but you must agree that it was a quite memorable experience.

So you don't like crypto and you don't use fiat - you're a nota fiscal fan?

There is one idea in crypto-currency that is unquestionably good, but most parts of the bitcoin protocol are "good" only if one subscribes to the libertarian dogma that banks and governments are evils to be removed.

I have nothing against cash. I pay most of my meals and small expenses with cash, some with credit card. About 200 USD/week, which I get from ATMs on campus.  My wife manages the rest of my salary, not quite sure how.

As for being an NF fan -- no, I don't usually care to ask for it in my private purchases. Most stores do provide it anyway. Often it is just a common cash register receipt, but printed by a special printer that also prints the tax audit copy in a continuous roll.

(Although I should be an NF fan, because the budget of our university  comes specifically from the São Paulo State sales tax revenue, and stores who do not issue NFs are evading that tax.)

[rezurect]

Bitcoin: If many believe so, it is so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

[aminorex]

Bitcoin: If many believe so, it is so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Believing in bitcoin does not make it valuable.  Accepting it in trade makes it valuable.  The belief can be mere coincidence, or even be absent.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[shmadz]

Explanation

hold steady ChartBuddy, I personally would like to see the price stay as low as possible, for as long as possible.

[Syke]

There is one idea in crypto-currency that is unquestionably good, but most parts of the bitcoin protocol are "good" only if one subscribes to the libertarian dogma that banks and governments are evils to be removed.

Where do you get these crazy ideas? There's nothing in Bitcoin that is incompatible with banks or governments.

[mah87]

There is one idea in crypto-currency that is unquestionably good, but most parts of the bitcoin protocol are "good" only if one subscribes to the libertarian dogma that banks and governments are evils to be removed.

Where do you get these crazy ideas? There's nothing in Bitcoin that is incompatible with banks or governments.

what do you think about Ripple ? 2010 account ? O_o respect.

[shmadz]

There is one idea in crypto-currency that is unquestionably good, but most parts of the bitcoin protocol are "good" only if one subscribes to the libertarian dogma that banks and governments are evils to be removed.

The only thing about bitcoin that matters is that it is an accurate ledger of transactions, that it is open to the public, and that it cannot be fucked with.









(apologies to JJG, this post has been heavily edited )