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

[cbeast]

where do you come up with this stuff?

why do you feel compelled to tell us we can't possibly make bitcoin work because not everyone agrees with it?

when will you realize we are here by choice and don't care what you say?

When will you realize that there are people who understand bitcoin but honestly do not believe in it?

Why do some of you feel compelled to insult the non-believers, just because they don't believe? 

What is there to believe or not believe in?  You want to make it sound like a religion.

Study it hard enough and you'll realise that it all boils down to cryptography, economics, applied game theory, information theory and lots of mathematics. Either you get it or you don't. Money is a value information technology, not voodoo. Abstracting the analysis away from your politics and emotions is the most difficult part. Begin at the beginning.

Exactly. For me it was the solution to a problem I've been looking at for years.

[edwardspitz]

I got only one friend interested in Bitcoin after going mental on Facebook during bubble and he bought 4.5 at 800$  

He bought them from me though 

That made me lol

[sickpig]

I'm quite amazed where these huge sellers get their coins from.

Remember those 850.000 bitcoins "lost" on the MtGox? Somebody has the private keys of those BTC. Ask yourself what would you do if that was you. Would you hold all of them, or would you convert some to the fiat?

my guess is that if one was smart enough to steal this amount of coins he/she is also smart enough to sell them off exchange.

if it was me, selling them via a verified exchange account would be the last thing i would do.

And I don't even mv the btc, I'll just give away the private key.

Then the buyer will move them, unless they trust you 100% (unless the buyer is you that is).

Sure you're right. I just wanted to shift the risk of making some mistakes during the transaction to the buyer entirely (I'm risk really averse). my purpose wasn't about covering the track left by tx by not performing it in the first place.

Now that I think about it to really cover one's trail maybe using a stealth address is the way to go (I'm not sure, thoughI'm a bit rusty on that matter).

[Brewins]

I got only one friend interested in Bitcoin after going mental on Facebook during bubble and he bought 4.5 at 800$  

He bought them from me though 

That made me lol

That made me think that is true the advice of never buy during bubbles(or giant rises, whatever you want call it).

Buy when there is blood on the streets and an army of fallllings saying we are going nowhere but down

[sickpig]

I'm quite amazed where these huge sellers get their coins from.

Remember those 850.000 bitcoins "lost" on the MtGox? Somebody has the private keys of those BTC. Ask yourself what would you do if that was you. Would you hold all of them, or would you convert some to the fiat?

my guess is that if one was smart enough to steal this amount of coins he/she is also smart enough to sell them off exchange.

if it was me, selling them via a verified exchange account would be the last thing i would do.

And I don't even mv the btc, I'll just give away the private key.

Yes, and ideally to as many persons as possible :-).

Yep a lot of trust involved here :-)

[marcus_of_augustus]

Brazil needs to help Russia, India and China "buy all the bitcoins"

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2eff0b/bitcoin_swift_and_the_brics/

.. it is a cheap shot with low risk, so it will probably happen at some point ... S. N.

[JorgeStolfi]

Do you agree with the points below?

Digital currencies, as presently designed, carry both risks and benefits. As explained in the companion piece to this article, digital currencies do not currently pose a material risk to monetary or financial stability in the United Kingdom, but it is conceivable that potential risks could develop over time. [...] The total stock of digital currencies is at present too small to pose a threat to financial stability [ ... ] Digital currencies do not currently pose a material risk to monetary or financial stability in the UnitedKingdom. Should they achieve limited adoption as a payment system, they are unlikely to undermine the Bank’s ability to achieve monetary stability.

Yes.

By the way, "too small to bother" was the answer of the Brazilian Central Bank, back in January or whereabouts, when someone asked them to regulate bitcoin.

The distributed ledger is a genuine technological innovation which demonstrates that digital records can be held securely without any central authority.

Yes.  (But, as the BoE noted, the cost of Satoshi's solution is way too high.)

but further increases [ in the stock ] cannot be ruled out and it is conceivable in time that there could be an asset price crash among free-floating digital currencies that had the potential to affect financial stability. Potential risks to monetary stability would only be likely to emerge once digital currencies had achieved substantial usage across the economy. If a subset of people transacted exclusively in a digital currency, then the Bank’s ability to influence demand for this group may potentially be impaired. The incentives of existing digital currency schemes pose considerable obstacles to their widespread adoption, however. [ ... ] While that could, in theory, change if sterling were abandoned in favour of an alternative currency for a significant fraction of the economy, such a scenario is considered extremely unlikely at present. A variety of potential risks to financial stability could emerge if a digital currency attained systemic status as a payment system, most of which could be addressed through regulatory supervision of relevant parties.

Conceivable, sure.  But I don't believe bitcoin adoption will get to the point of threatening the "old economy".  On the other hand, I expect there will be regulation that will substantially hamper its adoption.

Ultimately every transaction involving a financial asset must be recorded and most of these records are digital. The structure of the broader financial system is similar to payments in that these records are held by centralised third parties. The application of decentralised technology to this platform of digital information could have far-reaching implications, other industries whose products were digitised have been reshaped by new technology. The impact of the distributed ledger on the financial industry could be much wider than payments.

Could ... maybe ...

The approach used in the modern banking system, which emerged as a computerised replication of earlier paper-based records, is for specialised entities (usually banks) to maintain master ledgers that act as the definitive record of each individual’s money holdings. In turn, they hold accounts recorded in the ledger of one central body (typically the central bank). Those holding the ledgers have the ability to prevent any transaction they deem to be invalid. In order to use the system, people must trust that these centralised ledgers will be maintained in a reliable, timely and honest manner. An alternative approach is to implement a fully decentralised payment system, in which copies of the ledger are shared between all participants, and a process is established by which users agree on changes to the ledger (that is, on which transactions are valid). Since anybody can check any proposed transaction against the ledger, this approach removes the need for a central authority and thus for participants to have confidence in the integrity of any single entity.

This is just a statement of the idea of distributed digital currency.

[JorgeStolfi]

Why do you feel compelled to spend so much time on a forum dedicated to Bitcoin if you aren't interested in how you can use it to your advantage?

He writes articles about Bitcoin, including paid ones. Being here makes him and others think he is specialized in Bitcoin, or something like that

(1) I am a prof of computer science and I am supposed to understand computer things.  (2) I am really bothered by people "selling" bitcoin to ordinary folk as an hedge against inflation, fantastic investment, etc..  I view such marketing as a scam, and I consider to be within the obligations of my job to alert the public (who pays my salary) against that scam.  (Fortunately, that marketing does not seem to have had much result yet, and seems to have become more discrete.)

I do not write paid articles.  On the other hand, most of what one finds in the net and other media about bitcoin, if it is not just press releases, is written by bitcoin owners, who have an obvious vested interest in pushing bitcoin.     

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[findftp]

Why do you feel compelled to spend so much time on a forum dedicated to Bitcoin if you aren't interested in how you can use it to your advantage?

He writes articles about Bitcoin, including paid ones. Being here makes him and others think he is specialized in Bitcoin, or something like that

..... (who pays my salary)....

....I do not write paid articles....

I smell a contradiction here

[solex]

Why do you feel compelled to spend so much time on a forum dedicated to Bitcoin if you aren't interested in how you can use it to your advantage?

He writes articles about Bitcoin, including paid ones. Being here makes him and others think he is specialized in Bitcoin, or something like that

(1) I am a prof of computer science and I am supposed to understand computer things.  (2) I am really bothered by people "selling" bitcoin to ordinary folk as an hedge against inflation, fantastic investment, etc..  I view such marketing as a scam, and I consider to be within the obligations of my job to alert the public (who pays my salary) against that scam.  (Fortunately, that marketing does not seem to have had much result yet, and seems to have become more discrete.)

I do not write paid articles.  On the other hand, most of what one finds in the net and other media about bitcoin, if it is not just press releases, is written by bitcoin owners, who have an obvious vested interest in pushing bitcoin.     

So on which forums are you relentlessly warning people off "investing" in Brazilian Reals? As far as I can tell they are bigger and worse "scam" than bitcoin, by your own logic.

MoA - Absolutely right. JS deserves a medal for packing the most errors and twisted half-truths ever into two paragraphs.

Anyone  selling bitcoin has to buy it first. Bitcoin is 50% computer science and 50% economics. Bitcoin has been relentlessly attacked on the net by many writers, JS should slum it out with the buttcoiners instead of here.

If he is really bothered about something then it is far more worthy to be bothered about how the Brazilian govt is levelling the Amazon rainforest.

[hmmmstrange]

Why do you feel compelled to spend so much time on a forum dedicated to Bitcoin if you aren't interested in how you can use it to your advantage?

He writes articles about Bitcoin, including paid ones. Being here makes him and others think he is specialized in Bitcoin, or something like that

..... (who pays my salary)....

....I do not write paid articles....

I smell a contradiction here

Jorge has made a nice lump of reais off Bitcoin without ever owning any bitcoin.

[greenlion]

Just ignore Professor Chinavolume, he's not interested in real conversations, he just provokes you so he can launch into tl;dr preconceived sophomoric monologues. Very stereotypical inferiority complex behavior for mediocre professional academics filling a hole in their heart because they do not get the esteem they expected from their real life interpersonal relationships.

[mooncake]

I remembered I saw somewhere before that monitoring the increase in the number of bitcoin wallets is not a good metric to measure the rate of bitcoin adoption. But I cannot remember why that is so. Does anyone know?

[raid_n]

Just ignore Professor Chinavolume, he's not interested in real conversations, he just provokes you so he can launch into tl;dr preconceived sophomoric monologues. Very stereotypical inferiority complex behavior for mediocre professional academics filling a hole in their heart because they do not get the esteem they expected from their real life interpersonal relationships.

Sadly, I tend to agree about mr Trollfi.

Quote: " I am a prof of computer science and I am supposed to understand computer things. "

The insult here is that if you have spent just a tiny amount of time with the actual protocol code you'd know that he has in fact NOT looked at bitcoin thoroughly from a technical standpoint.
At least some of his questions/claims indicate this to me.

[edit] of course he'll say that the abstract concept is sufficient and no knowledge of details are needed.....

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[JorgeStolfi]

What is there to believe or not believe in?  You want to make it sound like a religion.
Study it hard enough and you'll realise that it all boils down to cryptography, economics, applied game theory, information theory and lots of mathematics. Either you get it or you don't. Money is a value information technology, not voodoo. Abstracting the analysis away from your politics and emotions is the most difficult part. Begin at the beginning.

Come on!  The difference between economics and religion is that religion states very clearly what you are required to believe without proof. 

The eventual success of bitcoin depends also a lot on psychology, sociology, businesses, and politics.  People have different probabilities for future events in those areas.  What is your probability that the US government will ban bitcoin?  That Monero will supplant Bitcoin?  That the largest miners will form a cartel and ruin bitcoin to maximize their short-term gain?  That PayPal will switch to Dgecoin?  That the Chinese traders, whose mood currently defines the market price of bitcoin, will get bored and dump all their holdings tomorrow?

For many believers, bitcoin certainly has become a religion, in the most literal sense.   (People in this thread are relatively pragmatic, but what I have read in some other threads is far beyond voodoo..)

[JorgeStolfi]

So on which forums are you relentlessly warning people off "investing" in Brazilian Reals? As far as I can tell they are bigger and worse "scam" than bitcoin, by your own logic.

I have been advocating also for safe electronic voting for 14 years now.

No one that I know invests in Brazlian Reals.  Or dollars, or euros.

Is that why you folks think that bitcoin is such a great investment --- because you are comparing it to "investing" in cash?

[Sandia]

Okay this constant dumping makes no fucking sense...

1.5k wall, fucking disgusting...

4k at Bfx (750 + 3250) near 475.

Edit: price tanked, 750 wall moved to 470, eaten down to 555, pulled.

[lyth0s]

I remembered I saw somewhere before that monitoring the increase in the number of bitcoin wallets is not a good metric to measure the rate of bitcoin adoption. But I cannot remember why that is so. Does anyone know?

Well in general monitor addresses isn't that useful as the more people are educated about not reusing addresses and they start using change addresses it doesn't really tell you much.

As far as wallets go, a single person can create 10 wallets on blockchain.info, the metric goes up but really there doesn't have to be any new interest for that metric to go up.

I personally think number of transactions (excluding popular addresses such as satoshi dice or pool payouts) is a better metric https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

Speaking of number of transactions....have you noticed that each "bitcoin boom" (as I like to call them) starts when the number of transactions reaches the previous bubble's?