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

[JorgeStolfi]

ok you've got my intention there, this suggest that you have most of the issues figured out, how do you think we will solve:
1-The Block size limit when the number of transaction/minute is 100 times higher than today.
2-The block chain size when it exceeds 200GB or 1TB ? most users or services will have to use clusters of storage, if the adoption rate picks up this has to be fixed really fast.
3-The energy waste, it has been known that when the price goes up mining becomes more profitable and more resources are brought online...resources that most of us consider wasted, as of today the hashrate is more that 250 Petahash/s, assuming that the worst chip on the network consume 0.5w/ghs (which is way too optimistic) this means that at this point miners consume way more than 125 hourly Megawatts... just FYI a typical nuclear plant produce from 500-2000 hourly Megawatts.
4-DDOS attacks: when Bitcoin become bigger, there will be Big services that run the Bitcoind in order to offer their services, organized groups can run denial of service attacks against these services, you can read more about how they can do it in that wiki I provided before.
5-Malleability issue, and don't tell me it is not an issue, because it really is, and it is not fixed yet, they just found some work around it.
6-Double Spending, even if you don't have 51% of the network you can perform double spending with as little as 25% of the network,
7- The 51% attack, we all know what it is, it is achievable, any government can achieve it if they want to kill Bitcoin, even at this point.
8-man in the middle or packet sniffing, also described in that wiki.
There many more issues, but these are the one that concerns me for now. now I would like to hear your solutions.

Two more:
9- The average wait time for 1 confirmation is about 10 minutes; and, in a significant fraction of cases, can be 30 minutes or more.  That is too much even for internet payments, and is unacceptable for shopping at brick-and-mortar stores.  (In contrast, verification and payment with a chip-enabled credit card, which is the standard here in Brazil, takes less than 1 minute.)

10- There is no way to correct mistakes (like sending bitcoins to the wrong address) or to recover stolen coins.

There is also the question of security against theft, but I am tired of arguing the obvious there... 

[inca]

Without watching all of that, Jim Rickards tends to be very dismissive of BTC. Has he changed his opinion now?

I didn't see him mention it at all. He is concerned about central banks having huge balance sheets and being over leveraged. I didn't see a convincing argument why it does matter that central banks are technically insolvent. After all they can magick new funds and buy assets onto there balance sheets at will (see 2008 - now). What is to stop them simply doubling down (again) and printing currency to make up for private credit?

[inca]

ok you've got my intention there, this suggest that you have most of the issues figured out, how do you think we will solve:
1-The Block size limit when the number of transaction/minute is 100 times higher than today.
2-The block chain size when it exceeds 200GB or 1TB ? most users or services will have to use clusters of storage, if the adoption rate picks up this has to be fixed really fast.
3-The energy waste, it has been known that when the price goes up mining becomes more profitable and more resources are brought online...resources that most of us consider wasted, as of today the hashrate is more that 250 Petahash/s, assuming that the worst chip on the network consume 0.5w/ghs (which is way too optimistic) this means that at this point miners consume way more than 125 hourly Megawatts... just FYI a typical nuclear plant produce from 500-2000 hourly Megawatts.
4-DDOS attacks: when Bitcoin become bigger, there will be Big services that run the Bitcoind in order to offer their services, organized groups can run denial of service attacks against these services, you can read more about how they can do it in that wiki I provided before.
5-Malleability issue, and don't tell me it is not an issue, because it really is, and it is not fixed yet, they just found some work around it.
6-Double Spending, even if you don't have 51% of the network you can perform double spending with as little as 25% of the network,
7- The 51% attack, we all know what it is, it is achievable, any government can achieve it if they want to kill Bitcoin, even at this point.
8-man in the middle or packet sniffing, also described in that wiki.
There many more issues, but these are the one that concerns me for now. now I would like to hear your solutions.

Two more:
9- The average wait time for 1 confirmation is about 10 minutes; and, in a significant fraction of cases, can be 30 minutes or more.  That is too much even for internet payments, and is unacceptable for shopping at brick-and-mortar stores.  (In contrast, verification and payment with a chip-enabled credit card, which is the standard here in Brazil, takes less than 1 minute.)

10- There is no way to correct mistakes (like sending bitcoins to the wrong address) or to recover stolen coins.

There is also the question of security against theft, but I am tired of arguing the obvious there... 

FUD alert! Have you ever bought anything with bitcoin? lol.

[empowering]

[xyzzy099]

ok you've got my intention there, this suggest that you have most of the issues figured out, how do you think we will solve:
1-The Block size limit when the number of transaction/minute is 100 times higher than today.
2-The block chain size when it exceeds 200GB or 1TB ? most users or services will have to use clusters of storage, if the adoption rate picks up this has to be fixed really fast.
3-The energy waste, it has been known that when the price goes up mining becomes more profitable and more resources are brought online...resources that most of us consider wasted, as of today the hashrate is more that 250 Petahash/s, assuming that the worst chip on the network consume 0.5w/ghs (which is way too optimistic) this means that at this point miners consume way more than 125 hourly Megawatts... just FYI a typical nuclear plant produce from 500-2000 hourly Megawatts.
4-DDOS attacks: when Bitcoin become bigger, there will be Big services that run the Bitcoind in order to offer their services, organized groups can run denial of service attacks against these services, you can read more about how they can do it in that wiki I provided before.
5-Malleability issue, and don't tell me it is not an issue, because it really is, and it is not fixed yet, they just found some work around it.
6-Double Spending, even if you don't have 51% of the network you can perform double spending with as little as 25% of the network,
7- The 51% attack, we all know what it is, it is achievable, any government can achieve it if they want to kill Bitcoin, even at this point.
8-man in the middle or packet sniffing, also described in that wiki.
There many more issues, but these are the one that concerns me for now. now I would like to hear your solutions.

Two more:
9- The average wait time for 1 confirmation is about 10 minutes; and, in a significant fraction of cases, can be 30 minutes or more.  That is too much even for internet payments, and is unacceptable for shopping at brick-and-mortar stores.  (In contrast, verification and payment with a chip-enabled credit card, which is the standard here in Brazil, takes less than 1 minute.)

10- There is no way to correct mistakes (like sending bitcoins to the wrong address) or to recover stolen coins.

There is also the question of security against theft, but I am tired of arguing the obvious there...  

If you really care about the answer to questions such as these, you should probably ask in the 'Development & Technical Discussion' forum.  The people in there can answer your questions handily, and very few of them read this thread, I think.

[Richy_T]

Yeah, that's crazy talk Dump3er, you fit in so nicely.

New season of Boardwalk Empire looks a bit different.

[raid_n]

--snip--

Amusing that you say bitcoin will fail yet assume the transaction volume goes up 100 times

Don't be ignorant, when did I say Bitcoin will fail ? I said IF these issues wont be fixed then Bitcoin wont survive 20 years, and I added that TCP/IP didn't have much changes in the protocol over a decade, all you wrote above is still theoretically right, but when you get a practical solution that can be implemented we can discuss things further.

and no, I don't think Bitcoin is the greatest thing after internet... this is an insult for all the huge innovators and innovations that took place the last 20 years.

well done snipping my reply out of context as I immediately followed with a statement of you using the "if it doesn't change in 20 years" excuse.
So your argument boils down to "There are potential scalability and security issues if bitcoin is not maintained for 20 years"

IPv4 will/is running out of address space. So should I say it is a failed protocol? Should I call it useless? That issue was known for a long time.
Or even more to the point. Do the address space limitations of IPv4 directly prevent you from writing witty comments in this forum? (assuming you or your provider still run on it)
The same goes for the bitcoin protocol. Absolutely essential changes will come when needed, more is bonus.

I asked you why you believe that technically bitcoin is so flawed that it simply can't last 20 years.
The issues you posted are possible problems that may or may not be relevant.
To make such a definitive claim I would have liked to hear something along the lines of "at difficulty x the nonce is too small to guarantee that a solution can be found" (btw this is a real possibility)
That would be a real issue.

[edit] just to clarify : the nonce is 4 bytes, the block hash 32. You can vary other things like the timestamp but unless you can ensure that you have at least 32 bytes to modify you may not find a solution

Btw I agree with you that bitcoin is not the greatest thing after the internet but I think it is quite significant. Some people get carried away with their enthusiasm.

[greenlion]

ok you've got my intention there, this suggest that you have most of the issues figured out, how do you think we will solve:
1-The Block size limit when the number of transaction/minute is 100 times higher than today.
2-The block chain size when it exceeds 200GB or 1TB ? most users or services will have to use clusters of storage, if the adoption rate picks up this has to be fixed really fast.
3-The energy waste, it has been known that when the price goes up mining becomes more profitable and more resources are brought online...resources that most of us consider wasted, as of today the hashrate is more that 250 Petahash/s, assuming that the worst chip on the network consume 0.5w/ghs (which is way too optimistic) this means that at this point miners consume way more than 125 hourly Megawatts... just FYI a typical nuclear plant produce from 500-2000 hourly Megawatts.
4-DDOS attacks: when Bitcoin become bigger, there will be Big services that run the Bitcoind in order to offer their services, organized groups can run denial of service attacks against these services, you can read more about how they can do it in that wiki I provided before.
5-Malleability issue, and don't tell me it is not an issue, because it really is, and it is not fixed yet, they just found some work around it.
6-Double Spending, even if you don't have 51% of the network you can perform double spending with as little as 25% of the network,
7- The 51% attack, we all know what it is, it is achievable, any government can achieve it if they want to kill Bitcoin, even at this point.
8-man in the middle or packet sniffing, also described in that wiki.
There many more issues, but these are the one that concerns me for now. now I would like to hear your solutions.

Two more:
9- The average wait time for 1 confirmation is about 10 minutes; and, in a significant fraction of cases, can be 30 minutes or more.  That is too much even for internet payments, and is unacceptable for shopping at brick-and-mortar stores.  (In contrast, verification and payment with a chip-enabled credit card, which is the standard here in Brazil, takes less than 1 minute.)

10- There is no way to correct mistakes (like sending bitcoins to the wrong address) or to recover stolen coins.

There is also the question of security against theft, but I am tired of arguing the obvious there... 

If you really care about the answer to questions such as these, you should probably ask in the 'Development & Technical Discussion Forum'.  The people in there can answer your questions handily, and very few of them read this thread, I think.

These sort of people would never dare post in such an area, because the opposition to their tired unsophisticated "critiques" would get completely decimated and ignored by people with any kind of subject matter expertise.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[jeezy]

Without watching all of that, Jim Rickards tends to be very dismissive of BTC. Has he changed his opinion now?

Nope, don't think so. He just says that the USD and the US market in general are fucked and will probably crash soon.

[keithers]

We have pretty much returned to "pre paypal" prices.   I still think that anywhere near $400 is a total bargain, and everyone should be adding at least a little BTC to their holdings.   As long as you can withstand possibility being down a little money over a couple of months, I think it is a no brainer.

Once there is true paypal integration and you can use it as an actual payment option within your paypal account, then we will see a real bounce in prices IMO

[ShroomsKit]

We have pretty much returned to "pre paypal" prices.   I still think that anywhere near $400 is a total bargain, and everyone should be adding at least a little BTC to their holdings.   As long as you can withstand possibility being down a little money over a couple of months, I think it is a no brainer.

Once there is true paypal integration and you can use it as an actual payment option within your paypal account, then we will see a real bounce in prices IMO

Are you really gonna repeat this 3 times a day?

[JorgeStolfi]

These sort of people would never dare post in such an area, because the opposition to their tired unsophisticated "critiques" would get completely decimated and ignored by people with any kind of subject matter expertise.

And it is exactly this sort of reply by "bitcoin experts" (the kind who claim that paying with BitPay or Coinbase is "paying with bitcoin") that keeps most people away from bitcoin.

[greenlion]

These sort of people would never dare post in such an area, because the opposition to their tired unsophisticated "critiques" would get completely decimated and ignored by people with any kind of subject matter expertise.

And it is exactly this sort of reply by "bitcoin experts" (the kind who claim that paying with BitPay or Coinbase is "paying with bitcoin") that keeps most people away from bitcoin.

trololololol!

[Richy_T]

well I think most of you Bitcoin cultists refuse to be objective, and considering the fact that most of you call Bitcoin the most important innovation after internet, I would just like to point out that TCP/IP protocol didn't change much in a decade or so.... and no, Google is very very bad example in this case, we are talking about protocols that we can build on..

I would say Bitcoin is a larger innovation than the internet really (of course it is dependent on it).

They are both parts of a bigger whole

[edwardspitz]

We have pretty much returned to "pre paypal" prices.   I still think that anywhere near $400 is a total bargain, and everyone should be adding at least a little BTC to their holdings.   As long as you can withstand possibility being down a little money over a couple of months, I think it is a no brainer.

Once there is true paypal integration and you can use it as an actual payment option within your paypal account, then we will see a real bounce in prices IMO

Are you really gonna repeat this 3 times a day?

lol

[mmitech]

--snip--

Amusing that you say bitcoin will fail yet assume the transaction volume goes up 100 times

Don't be ignorant, when did I say Bitcoin will fail ? I said IF these issues wont be fixed then Bitcoin wont survive 20 years, and I added that TCP/IP didn't have much changes in the protocol over a decade, all you wrote above is still theoretically right, but when you get a practical solution that can be implemented we can discuss things further.

and no, I don't think Bitcoin is the greatest thing after internet... this is an insult for all the huge innovators and innovations that took place the last 20 years.

well done snipping my reply out of context as I immediately followed with a statement of you using the "if it doesn't change in 20 years" excuse.
So your argument boils down to "There are potential scalability and security issues if bitcoin is not maintained for 20 years"

IPv4 will/is running out of address space. So should I say it is a failed protocol? Should I call it useless? That issue was known for a long time.
Or even more to the point. Do the address space limitations of IPv4 directly prevent you from writing witty comments in this forum? (assuming you or your provider still run on it)
The same goes for the bitcoin protocol. Absolutely essential changes will come when needed, more is bonus.

I asked you why you believe that technically bitcoin is so flawed that it simply can't last 20 years.
The issues you posted are possible problems that may or may not be relevant.
To make such a definitive claim I would have liked to hear something along the lines of "at difficulty x the nonce is too small to guarantee that a solution can be found" (btw this is a real possibility)
That would be a real issue.

[edit] just to clarify : the nonce is 4 bytes, the block hash 32. You can vary other things like the timestamp but unless you can ensure that you have at least 32 bytes to modify you may not find a solution

Btw I agree with you that bitcoin is not the greatest thing after the internet but I think it is quite significant. Some people get carried away with their enthusiasm.

I think we are arguing about the same thing here, I agree with what you said, and yes it is still all theoretically possible, again I will repeat it or rephrase it for you: "I didn't say Bitcoin will fail today or tomorrow but in order for it to be a success and be around for the next 20 years, so many things needs to be changed"

BTW: about the IPv4 argument, this is why IPv6 was found

[inca]

These sort of people would never dare post in such an area, because the opposition to their tired unsophisticated "critiques" would get completely decimated and ignored by people with any kind of subject matter expertise.

And it is exactly this sort of reply by "bitcoin experts" (the kind who claim that paying with BitPay or Coinbase is "paying with bitcoin") that keeps most people away from bitcoin.

Don't be silly professor. Most people have never heard of bitcoin except superficially, nor do they understand it's properties or obvious advantages over fiat currency. I bought a takeaway last night from my blockchain.info wallet using my smartphone via bitpay. It was seamless, instantaneous and flawless. That is typical of the average bitcoin transaction in the future.

[mmitech]

These sort of people would never dare post in such an area, because the opposition to their tired unsophisticated "critiques" would get completely decimated and ignored by people with any kind of subject matter expertise.

don't worry about the other sub-forum, because unlike this sub-forum, people there are aware of these challenges and acknowledge them, and most of them are fairly objective and not a cultist blind speculator like you, I would like to add that most of people there come from IT careers, people that can drive their own dreams, not like some of the speculators here who trash everyone just because they didn't achieve anything in their lives so they count on Bitcoin as their only and last hope.

[ShroomsKit]

This place would be so much better if everyone would just stop quoting idiot stolfi.
It's amazing you guys still don't get it. This isn't about Bitcoin. This is about him getting attention. All you are doing is feeding his need for attention. He will keep saying the opposite of what you say just to get attention.
Why don't you people realize this?
If this thread would be closed he would find another high traffic thread about a much talked about subject. He will read it and then start posting in a way that will make a lot of people reply to him. This can be a forum about candy, seals or trees. He doesn't care. He is obsessed with getting attention and you are giving it to him.