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

[aminorex]

I have offered in the past to add religion to the topics discussed on here but everyone seemed untied against that!  

Jesus is awesome!

Dyslexics of the world, untie!

Best use of "awesome" in a sentence during this millenium.

P.S.  I put the "sexy" in dyslexia.

P.P.S.  I am completely out of tasteless dyslexia jokes.

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[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[keewee]

I have offered in the past to add religion to the topics discussed on here but everyone seemed untied against that!  

Jesus is awesome!

Dyslexics of the world, untie!

Best use of "awesome" in a sentence during this millenium.

P.S.  I put the "sexy" in dyslexia.

P.P.S.  I am completely out of tasteless dyslexia jokes.

lol

[JorgeStolfi]

(3) Bitcoin's only intrinsic value is its utility as a method of payment.  Its value as an investment depends entirely on that utility.

No, this is not true. A significant portion of bitcoin value comes from its utility as a storage of value: an asset that is scarce, non-confiscatable, exceptionally carriable (cf. gold), pseudonymous, uncorrelated to any traditional asset, and more.

Those properties do not suffice to make an asset into a reliable store of value. (The last one is in fact a defect.)

Consider real estate on Pluto, and suppose that the UN created a body to manage its property register, with an open reliable market, and everybody trusted them to be up and honest for the next 100 years.  If, on some day, the market price of 1 square km on Pluto were 1 M$, would you invest that money into it?  How would you know that the market price of that land would still be 1 M$ the next day, and not 10$?

By the way, bitcoins CAN be confiscated if the government knows that you have them -- and it will be very hard to invest a significant fortune in bitcoins without the government knowing it.

[BitChick]

I have offered in the past to add religion to the topics discussed on here but everyone seemed untied against that!  

Jesus is awesome!

Dyslexics of the world, untie!

Best use of "awesome" in a sentence during this millenium.

P.S.  I put the "sexy" in dyslexia.

P.P.S.  I am completely out of tasteless dyslexia jokes.

lol

Ok.  United.  Still trying to avoid talking about religion?

[ShroomsKit]

Since when Wall Observer thread became Politics & Society?

Fuck the wild capitalism.

I have offered in the past to add religion to the topics discussed on here but everyone seemed untied against that!  

Jesus is awesome!

I think the last thing this thread needs is more religious nutters like you.

[aminorex]

it will be very hard to invest a significant fortune in bitcoins without the government knowing it.

But it is amazingly easy to invest an insignificant fortune in bitcoin, and subsequently spend a significant one.

Suppose that I were to use a threat of torture to compel you to trade all of your gold for false analogies, invalidate all contracts payable in gold, and demand that you pay me false analogies on a recurring basis, when I had previously arranged for the establishment of a lender of false analogies who was the only source of false analogies you could tender without being tortured by me, and who lent out false analogies at a rate of interest set by my sock puppet.  Suppose further that I issued an arbitrary number  of false analogies to a few of my friends at zero interest - several orders of magnitude larger than would be required to purchase all real property in the entire land - and required that all sales of real property be conducted in false analogies, on penalty of torture.  Then suppose that I took some of the false analogies that I had extorted from you, and hired an army of useful idiots to impress upon everyone that only false analogies were of any real value, and everyone should donate all of their labor to people who have more false analogies than they do, in hopes of getting a few here and there, and another army of sycophants to indoctrinate your children in the cult of false analogies.  Then I hired an army of army to bomb anyone, anywhere in the world, along with up to a million of their countrymen at a go, who threatened to trade oil in gold instead of trading oil in false analogies.  And every once in a while, I shipped a literal cargo jet loaded with literal palettes of 100 false analogy notes to some distant occupied land, administered by a friend of mine, who lost track of a few billion false analogies this way.  Then I promised you could have healthcare if you made me Emperor, and when you did, I doubled the charges (made on threat of torture) payable in false analogies each month.  Meanwhile I indexed your income in false analogies to the price in false analogies of irrelevant luxury goods, which consistently carried negative against the increasing price, in false analogies, of food, energy, fuel, housing, medicine, and education.

Would you finally consider yourself, then, a free and dignified human being, well-served by the servants of the public, who merit your confidence?

[aminorex]

I have offered in the past to add religion to the topics discussed on here but everyone seemed untied against that!  

Jesus is awesome!

I think the last thing this thread needs is more religious nutters like you.

So, you're saying BitChick makes you feel complete?

[BitChick]

Since when Wall Observer thread became Politics & Society?

Fuck the wild capitalism.

I have offered in the past to add religion to the topics discussed on here but everyone seemed untied against that!  

Jesus is awesome!

I think the last thing this thread needs is more religious nutters like you.

As I expected, you are getting "untied" by my comment.


Being persecuted must mean I am doing something right

[BitChick]

it will be very hard to invest a significant fortune in bitcoins without the government knowing it.

but it is amazingly easy to invest an insignificant fortune in bitcoins, and subsequently spend a significant one.

So true.  This is what fuels the bubbles.  People throw a little in for "fun" then when the price rises as quickly as it does (or can) they are shocked at how much their "little fortune" has grown.  Of course governments will what their piece of it but if governments make some money off the investments they will be happy to let people use it. 

[seleme]

Jeez, you're still discussing same old stuff with Trolfie.

[BitChick]

Jeez, you're still discussing same old stuff with Trolfie.

I tried to change the topic to religion.

[Torque]

(3) Bitcoin's only intrinsic value is its utility as a method of payment.  Its value as an investment depends entirely on that utility.

No, this is not true. A significant portion of bitcoin value comes from its utility as a storage of value: an asset that is scarce, non-confiscatable, exceptionally carriable (cf. gold), pseudonymous, uncorrelated to any traditional asset, and more.

Those properties do not suffice to make an asset into a reliable store of value. (The last one is in fact a defect.)

Yes they do.

Consider real estate on Pluto, and suppose that the UN created a body to manage its property register, with an open reliable market, and everybody trusted them to be up and honest for the next 100 years.  If, on some day, the market price of 1 square km on Pluto were 1 M$, would you invest that money into it?  How would you know that the market price of that land would still be 1 M$ the next day, and not 10$?

You wouldn't.  But you wouldn't know that with any other piece of land on Earth either.  On Earth things like earthquakes, floods, and fires happen, rendering a once valuable piece of land worthless overnight.  Market value is only what people are willing to pay, not what some ledger says.

If you want to debate properly, you need to stop making silly troll remarks.

And from what I understand you don't even own any bitcoin.  So tell me why you are here again, day in and day out, enlightening us with your trolldom?

[JorgeStolfi]

Huob's volume yesterday (Jul/22 UTC) was only 7.8 kBTC, the lowest on record since Nov/02.

The second-lowest volume in that interval was May/17 (9.3 kBTC), part of a three days' pause before the rise that took the price from ~450$ to ~650$.

At the same time, the price is extremely stable -- even though it is ~12:30 in China, the chart is as flat as it has ever been in the late night hours.  And today's volume promises to be even lower than yesterday's.

This may be another "calm before the storm" like May 17-19.

Or it may be that Huobi is slowly dying, and its clients are perhaps moving to the new BitVC.  One hint that it may be the case is that the volume has been shrinking gradually for a couple of weeks, whereas the May 17-19 "calm" was preceded by normal volume (~35 kBTC/day)

[jl2012]

Putting money in bank account may protect you from ordinary theft, but it allows the bank and the government to rob you, LEGALLY.

We are talking of assets of an investment fund (or some other enterprise) that are to be insured against theft.  Some of your comments about paper wallets etc. apply to personal funds,  I have said that safety there is "solved problem" in theory.

I can't think what could be a "legal theft" of a company's assets by a bank.  Loss of deposits due to bank failure is a definite risk, but insurers presumably know how to evaluate that.  And funds should not leave their assets in bank accounts anyway.

"Legal theft" of a fund's assets by the government must be seizure because the fund did something wrong.  In that case they can seize bitcoins just as easily. (Refusing to hand over the keys to legally seized cois would be stealing government's property.)  Or are you thinking of "haircuts" on bank deposits? Again, funds should not leave their assets there.

To prevent insider theft, the insurance company may require COIN to use an M-of-N multi-sig address. N chief officers will generate private keys privately and independently. Each chief officer will physically sign a statement like this:

I, <name>, am the generator of the private key for <public key>. The private key is stored in the vaults of <bank A> and <bank B>. Except the copies in the said vaults, there is neither physical nor digital copy of the private key.

In case a theft occurred without breaking the vaults, these chief officers would have civil and even criminal liability.

The key could be be stolen as it is generated, without the officer knowing it. (Think of N non-nerd financial managers who get their wallet software installed by the same Chief Security Officer.) Therefore the officer cannot meaningfully sign the last part of that statement.

I suppose that, each time some coins have to be taken out of cols storage, the affected addresses would have to be completely emptied, due to the risk of the private keys being captured at that time; and any remainder would then be transferred to a new cold address, previously generated.

It will be interesting to see how that works out (if we get to know it).

I think it depends on how paranoid they are. To prevent the risk of bad security officer, each non-nerd financial manager will be asked to shuffle 5 decks of 54 cards privately. The manager will use a specialized hardware wallet to transform these 5 sequences into 5 key pairs. One of these 5 key pairs, together with the hardware wallet, will be stored in the vault. The other 4 key pairs, with the card sequences, will be examined by independent security officers of the COIN and insurance company.

(EDIT: For money in a bank account, you don't need to do anything wrong to have a "legal" theft. Just look at Cyprus)

[aminorex]

(EDIT: For money in a bank account, you don't need to do anything wrong to have a "legal" theft. Just look at Cyprus)

Also, now Spain too, I hear - the difference being one of degree (and subject to revision).

[derpinheimer]

Huob's volume yesterday (Jul/22 UTC) was only 7.8 kBTC, the lowest on record since Nov/02.

The second-lowest volume in that interval was May/17 (9.3 kBTC), part of a three days' pause before the rise that took the price from ~450$ to ~650$.

At the same time, the price is extremely stable -- even though it is ~12:30 in China, the chart is as flat as it has ever been in the late night hours.  And today's volume promises to be even lower than yesterday's.

This may be another "calm before the storm" like May 17-19.

Or it may be that Huobi is slowly dying, and its clients are perhaps moving to the new BitVC.  One hint that it may be the case is that the volume has been shrinking gradually for a couple of weeks, whereas the May 17-19 "calm" was preceded by normal volume (~35 kBTC/day)

OKCoin seemed to be growing; but in periods of high volume Huobi still tended to top them. They also still have more depth. Now that Bitcoinity doesnt support OKCoin I dont know though. (That whole site seems to be turning in to ----)

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

(3) Bitcoin's only intrinsic value is its utility as a method of payment.  Its value as an investment depends entirely on that utility.

No, this is not true. A significant portion of bitcoin value comes from its utility as a storage of value: an asset that is scarce, non-confiscatable, exceptionally carriable (cf. gold), pseudonymous, uncorrelated to any traditional asset, and more.

Those properties do not suffice to make an asset into a reliable store of value. (The last one is in fact a defect.)

Yes they do.

No they don't.  

Think again about the Pluto land example.  With the premise of UN guarantee etc, it has all the qualities that you listed.  Why wouldn't it be a good investment? The problem is not that a comet may dig a crater in your plot.  The problem is that its value is not pegged to anything.  Therefore it may perfectly go from 1 M$ to 10$ at any time, without any reason.

That in fact is what has happened to Bitcoin in the last six months: its market price has changed drastically and unpredictably, because it is not supported ("yet", you may say) by its use as currency.  The demand that lifted the price at the current 620$  was entirely speculative, and there is no argument that excludes it going to 400$ or 1200$ tomorrow. We have seen it reach both.

Or consider any altcoin, no matter how stupid.  It may never be widely used as currency, but apart from that it has the same qualities that you listed above.  If those qualities were enough, then any altcoin would be just as good an investment as bitcoin.

[ShroomsKit]

Another day all about Stolfi.