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

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[touhonoob]

Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn discusses Bitcoin at the 2014 Evernote Conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__wSaqmti9E#t=1654

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[ejinte]

I'm getting some PIGGY on Adams recomendation. Thanks. 

[JorgeStolfi]

Those transactions pay fees. You think people just move money around for no reason? If you don't like the metric, then claim that it needs to be weighted, not discounted. I would conservatively guess transaction volume about 20% as actual transactions because businesses report actual sales in bitcoins.

Currently, transaction fees are negligible (~13 BTC total per day; on average, less than 0.08 USD per transaction, or less than 0.01% of the BTC volume excluding change-backs). For many kinds of non-payment transactions (tumbling, moving between hot and cold wallets, depositing and withdrawing from exchanges and other "bitcoin banks", over-the counter bitcoin purchases, etc.) those fees are not a deterrent.

And fees are not yet mandatory, is that correct? 

Moreover, there are many people (such as fund employees) with motivation to generate "fake" traffic in order to give the impression of usage. 

My guess is that payments for goods and services are no more than 5% of the blockchain transaction volume.  The justification is that the latter does not vary with BTC price as one would expect.  If that is the case, then one cannot use the traffic as a measure of adoption, even with a 0.05 weight, because the proportion of payment to non-payment traffic may vary a lot.

You are the one claiming that people use Metcalfe's Law to describe Bitcoin growth. That model is too simple for my tastes. I never read anything about Metcalfe's Law being fractal where you could zoom in and out to see the same patterns. It seems to me it's not really a predictive model and that there are many variations. Your argument is a strawman, because you haven't specified exactly which variant is "used in bitcoin."

I am not claiming that Metcalfe's law describes bitcoin growth; on the contrary, I was disputing that claim, that was made by someone else.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[cbeast]

Those transactions pay fees. You think people just move money around for no reason? If you don't like the metric, then claim that it needs to be weighted, not discounted. I would conservatively guess transaction volume about 20% as actual transactions because businesses report actual sales in bitcoins.

Currently, transaction fees are negligible (~13 BTC total per day; on average, less than 0.08 USD per transaction, or less than 0.01% of the BTC volume excluding change-backs). For many kinds of non-payment transactions (tumbling, moving between hot and cold wallets, depositing and withdrawing from exchanges and other "bitcoin banks", over-the counter bitcoin purchases, etc.) those fees are not a deterrent.

And fees are not yet mandatory, is that correct? 

Moreover, there are many people (such as fund employees) with motivation to generate "fake" traffic in order to give the impression of usage. 

My guess is that payments for goods and services are no more than 5% of the blockchain transaction volume.  The justification is that the latter does not vary with BTC price as one would expect.  If that is the case, then one cannot use the traffic as a measure of adoption, even with a 0.05 weight, because the proportion of payment to non-payment traffic may vary a lot.

I'll concede the uselessness of Metcalfe's Law as a predictor, that is for academic discussion. I don't believe Metcalfe's Law even applies to Bitcoin, because it is not a network. It doesn't need a lot of nodes, only a lot of decentralized miners.

You call yourself an academic, yet you do nothing but criticize and offer nothing constructive. Your criticisms are weak and add little to the discussion. If you can't contribute something constructive, then you aren't putting in much effort and are resting on your laurels.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[FNG]

That buy wall on Huobi 

Chinese Bull Whale spotted

[nanobrain]

Those transactions pay fees. You think people just move money around for no reason? If you don't like the metric, then claim that it needs to be weighted, not discounted. I would conservatively guess transaction volume about 20% as actual transactions because businesses report actual sales in bitcoins.

Currently, transaction fees are negligible (~13 BTC total per day; on average, less than 0.08 USD per transaction, or less than 0.01% of the BTC volume excluding change-backs). For many kinds of non-payment transactions (tumbling, moving between hot and cold wallets, depositing and withdrawing from exchanges and other "bitcoin banks", over-the counter bitcoin purchases, etc.) those fees are not a deterrent.

And fees are not yet mandatory, is that correct? 

Moreover, there are many people (such as fund employees) with motivation to generate "fake" traffic in order to give the impression of usage. 

My guess is that payments for goods and services are no more than 5% of the blockchain transaction volume.  The justification is that the latter does not vary with BTC price as one would expect.  If that is the case, then one cannot use the traffic as a measure of adoption, even with a 0.05 weight, because the proportion of payment to non-payment traffic may vary a lot.

I'll concede the uselessness of Metcalfe's Law as a predictor, that is for academic discussion. I don't believe Metcalfe's Law even applies to Bitcoin, because it is not a network. It doesn't need a lot of nodes, only a lot of decentralized miners.

You call yourself an academic, yet you do nothing but criticize and offer nothing constructive. Your criticisms are weak and add little to the discussion. If you can't contribute something constructive, then you aren't putting in much effort and are resting on your laurels.

The whole basis of science and the scientific community is to question and criticise; the idea that someone who criticises a hypothesis has to produce a contrary, better or "constructive" (a highly subjective term in itself) thesis is incorrect.

You've clearly never gone through peer-review but I imagine you'd find the process pretty harrowing given statements like the one above.

[hdbuck]

[touhonoob]

9K bid wall 
https://i.imgur.com/knPbfLg.png

[N12]

God bless Huobi!

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[wachtwoord]

9K bid wall 

The Chinese want back in lol

[mmitech]

why a huge bid wall is never manipulation while a similar wall in the ask side is Always manipulation and conspiracy.... this forum is full of delusional idiots.

[mah87]

why a huge bid wall is never manipulation while a similar wall in the ask side is Always legitimate and welcome.... this forum is full of delusional idiots.

yes

[wachtwoord]

why a huge bid wall is never manipulation while a similar wall in the ask side is Always legitimate and welcome.... this forum is full of delusional idiots.

It really is quite close to the price. Just try to sell into it and you'll know for sure

[JayJuanGee]

Metcalfe's "law" is used in bitcoin to "prove" that X will grow like Y squared, for some suitable quantities X and Y.  Problem is, the law does not say that Y will continue growing, that it is not being affected by MtGOX, that it will not suffer from ApplePay, that it is not determined by China, etc.

You seem to be describing interruptions to the growth of the network, but you are NOT describing the law to be invalid.... because the question becomes whether the network keeps growing or NOT and that may NOT be known while we are in the middle of the growth whether it has substantially slowed down or stopped... but after the fact, we may be able to look back and see the direction of the growth... or have better means to measure the extent of the growth... which some of those measurement systems already exist in bitcoin... but still does NOT necessarily tell us to where the trajectory is going or whether the trajectory has been materially and significantly interrupted.

There are several problems there...

For one thing, how to define the "size of the network", and how to measure it?

Total hash power is a poor measure, since over the lst couple of years the hash power is now concentrated in a few large pools.  The justification given for Metcalfe's law is that each node can interact with all the other N-1 nodes, so as N increases the number of possible interactions grows as N², and the value of the network is guessed to be proportional to that number.  But if the network, instead of adding mode nodes,  is concentrating all use in a few big nodes, the interaction actually goes down.  And, aniway, miners don't interact with each other.

I explained already why I believe that the blockchain traffic (whether measured in TX, BTC, or USD) is mostly bitcoins moving between addresses with the same owner; so it cannot be assumed to measure the size of the network, either.  In fact, we do not have any reliable data about the bitcoin economy, except the market price, the number of coins mined, and the total hash power.

In the plots that are said to show that bitcoin follows Metcalfe's law, the last year is squeezed into a tiny area a few millimeters tall by a couple centimetres wide.   But that is where most of the "weight" is.  It is like plotting some property of bodies of water, from a teaspoon to the Pacific Ocean, and having the data for all the seas and oceans squeezed into that tiny sliver of the plot.  Why should one assume that a property that holds for small bodies of water, from teaspoon-size to lake-size, will continue holding for ocean-size ones?  (And indeed we know that real oceans have many phenomena that you don't see in lakes, like currents driven by climate differences.  In particular, for all small bodies of water there are bodies that are 10x bigger; but that is not true for oceans...) If that "Bitcoin Metcalfe" plot were to be trimmed to the last 12 months and expanded to fill all the plot area, what would it show?

You are taking some arguable measurement points and arguing how these do NOT necessarily show an increase in users or transactions.... NOT very convincing to suggest that somehow bitcoin is shrinking in its importance and/or user base... especially given the fact that there are more and more businesses popping up around bitcoin.. seems like users are going to be needed to support these businesses.... and we will see, but i get the sense from the various measures on bitcoin pulse and even coinbase accounts and circle account and these other new exchanges that the bitcoin user base continues to expand at a pretty decent rate.

[noobtrader]

why a huge bid wall is never manipulation while a similar wall in the ask side is Always legitimate and welcome.... this forum is full of delusional idiots.

i have to agree with you... this is manipulation !!!
i blame the aliens