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

[God27]

1 Ripple = 0.0175 USD.

Is it worth spending a couple of hundred dollars on Ripple incase it explodes?

Ripple consesus algo is faulty should be very careful

That's stellar's not ripple's.  Jed changed some code when he forked it....

The blogpost of stellar says something else though.

Is this the post you are referring to? The last page shows the changes he did.

https://stellartalk.org/topic/6698-jeds-technical-explanation-of-the-ledger-fork/#entry67108

[JimboToronto]

BTC already exploded 2 years ago... oh and a year ago....

Don't forget the biggest explosion (bubble?) of them all, 3.5 years ago, the one to which the smaller bubbles of 2013 pale in comparison.

[NotLambchop]

The relative lack of interest by whales, compared to small fish, seems bearish too.

Why do you think whales are any different than small fishes? Psychology behind is the same - they will start buying after new uptrend starts. Whales are not any smarter or less afraid of falling prices. People are attracted to raising prices and not to falling prices regardless if you are millionaire or not. Simple fear and greed control markets and nothing else - fundamentals are bullshit, people were buying tulips, collecting baseball cards and similar shit.

It's not so much that the whales are smarter than plankton (though they generally are), but that they're not interested.
Bitcoin's beaux mondes have fallen on explaining away the clear dearth of interest in their cult with "Big money is secretly accumulating our coin off exchanges, to prevent slippage."
Lack of whale investors shows the absurdity of such notions, confirming the sad fact that permabuls' fantasy life is far richer than they'll ever be

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[criptix]

1 Ripple = 0.0175 USD.

Is it worth spending a couple of hundred dollars on Ripple incase it explodes?

Ripple consesus algo is faulty should be very careful

That's stellar's not ripple's.  Jed changed some code when he forked it....

The blogpost of stellar says something else though.

Is this the post you are referring to? The last page shows the changes he did.

https://stellartalk.org/topic/6698-jeds-technical-explanation-of-the-ledger-fork/#entry67108

I was referring to this:
https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_tolerance_consensus_choice/

If you have more information i would appreciate to read it

[ssmc2]

She-lamby is back

[JorgeStolfi]

Why do you think whales are any different than small fishes? Psychology behind is the same - they will start buying after new uptrend starts. Whales are not any smarter or less afraid of falling prices.

I don't know, really.  I would have though that whales are more likely to be money-smart because (a) they managed to get more money than the small fish, (b) they can afford to buy more information and hire good analysts, and (c) they have better connections to other whales and thus are better informed about their sentiment and gossips.

But there are also many rich people who know nothing of finance, and even financial geniuses make mistakes, I suppose...

How does the suicide rate on your university compare to others? Is it higher?

Among profs, you mean? I have not heard of any suicide cases.  Some have died in car accidents, most die of natural causes.  Profs here have good salaries, adjusted yearly for inflation, and retire on full pensions, so they don't have many reasons to kill themselves.  Many have side income from consultant work or research grants, or own second homes and get some rent revenue from them.

I know one prof who had sold his house in order to buy another one, and got his money frozen in the bank by the monetarist Collor government in the late 1980s; but he did not kill himself, and eventually got the money out.  No prof that I know has put his savings into bitcoin, so that motive does not apply either.  (In fact, all the profs I have mentioned bitcoin to are even more skeptical than I am, and  do not care to hear about it.)

[NotLambchop]

She-lamby is back

[God27]

1 Ripple = 0.0175 USD.

Is it worth spending a couple of hundred dollars on Ripple incase it explodes?

Ripple consesus algo is faulty should be very careful

That's stellar's not ripple's.  Jed changed some code when he forked it....

The blogpost of stellar says something else though.

Is this the post you are referring to? The last page shows the changes he did.

https://stellartalk.org/topic/6698-jeds-technical-explanation-of-the-ledger-fork/#entry67108

I was referring to this:
https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_tolerance_consensus_choice/

If you have more information i would appreciate to read it

This is bias from Joyce, I'd rather read what the community is agreeing on.

[davidorentol]

 

[nakaone]

"Growing adoption" would be more people buying bitcoin for the purpose of paying for goods and services.  As has been pointed out many times, there is no reliable data on that parameter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_9XBWgO2LE

growing adoptions first and foremost means more people having bitcoins

[JorgeStolfi]

"Growing adoption" would be more people buying bitcoin for the purpose of paying for goods and services.  As has been pointed out many times, there is no reliable data on that parameter.

growing adoptions first and foremost means more people having bitcoins

I don't think that is what most people here understand by "growing adoption".  They usually mean what I wrote above, or "more bitcoins being used to pay for goods and services".

The total amount of BTC that people have is known with good accuracy (~13 M BTC now), and it does not make much difference for the price whether it is owned by a few people or by many.

[fonsie]

Why do you think whales are any different than small fishes? Psychology behind is the same - they will start buying after new uptrend starts. Whales are not any smarter or less afraid of falling prices.

I don't know, really.  I would have though that whales are more likely to be money-smart because (a) they managed to get more money than the small fish, (b) they can afford to buy more information and hire good analysts, and (c) they have better connections to other whales and thus are better informed about their sentiment and gossips.

But there are also many rich people who know nothing of finance, and even financial geniuses make mistakes, I suppose...

How does the suicide rate on your university compare to others? Is it higher?

Among profs, you mean? I have not heard of any suicide cases.  Some have died in car accidents, most die of natural causes.  Profs here have good salaries, adjusted yearly for inflation, and retire on full pensions, so they don't have many reasons to kill themselves.  Many have side income from consultant work or research grants, or own second homes and get some rent revenue from them.

I know one prof who had sold his house in order to buy another one, and got his money frozen in the bank by the monetarist Collor government in the late 1980s; but he did not kill himself, and eventually got the money out.  No prof that I know has put his savings into bitcoin, so that motive does not apply either.  (In fact, all the profs I have mentioned bitcoin to are even more skeptical than I am, and  do not care to hear about it.)

No dummy, the students from listening to your endless boring classes that you teach. I see no reason why they would be different than your posts.

[oda.krell]

bitcoin adoptoin is growing fast

We do not know that, really.

[...]

I'm not going to argue about the rest of your post. It's on a pretty shaky argumentation basis in my opinion, but more importantly: it's really rather unimportant how much exactly the individual bidders paid at the auction. It was near-ish market with high likelihood, and will only matter in the short term anyway.

I'm more interested in your claim that "We don't really know if adoption is growing". We've had a similar discussion before, iirc, but anyway, here's my argument in a nutshell:

(a) We actually can be pretty damn sure adoption is growing, unless you willfully ignore data (or start dismissing sources without any evidence to motivate that dismissal)

(b) Adoption is perhaps not growing quite as fast as some thought earlier, and the current bear market could at least be (partially) caused by that.

In support of (a), the well-known chart of no. of network transactions (excluding popular addresses). 2 years, linear scale, 7 day average. As always from blockchain.info



The data is not likely to be significantly "faked". Why? Because the faker would do a piss-poor job in that case. Took us quite a while to break the previous tx ATH from late 2013, which ties back in with claim (b) ... usage is growing, but possibly not as fast as anticipated a year and a half ago.

Here's another good one, this time not from blockchain.info. It was chodpaba who pointed out in some discussion a long time ago that effectively, trading volume is "usage" as well - the distinction between "speculative" buying and "usage" buying is (mostly) arbitrary.

Trading volume (in USD) over all USD exchanges, last 2 years:



And the same for CNY:



Yes. USD volume still below peak from late 2013. However, significantly above most of the rest of 2013. And CNY is a completely different beast anyway.

Now here's maybe one of the strongest arguments in favor of (b) - adoption / usage is growing, but slower, based on USD tx volume:
1) USD tx volume is still below the peak  which isn't such a surprise considering that it shoots up during a rally / at an ATH, but more problematic is
2) it is growing only at a rather comfortably slow pace (NB: linear chart)



USD tx volume should be a reasonably good measure of the 'medium of exchange' aspect of Bitcoin, because for most goods purchased, the unit of account in which the goods are priced is USD, so a growing USD tx volume despite falling prices is a sign there is more medium of exchange usage - but it's not exactly skyrocketing either - since the middle of this year, it's been steadily climbing up (despite falling BTC/USD), but not going through the roof exactly either.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[MistuhSoftee]

http://www.coindesk.com/questions-linger-daily-bitcoin-transactions-pass-100000-milestone/

Dont really agree, bitcoin days destroyed and mining fees are not going up per the article.  And those are harder to game

[bastilar]

a

[Davyd05]

I'm curious to know if btc will be worth it to mine once it halves...

..so 2.5k or something on a miner vs 2.5k in buy and hodl.. your choice but.. the miners haven't been an easy thing to jump into since ASIC's dropped.

[JorgeStolfi]

I'm more interested in your claim that "We don't really know if adoption is growing". We've had a similar discussion before, iirc, but anyway, here's my argument in a nutshell:

(a) We actually can be pretty damn sure adoption is growing, unless you willfully ignore data (or start dismissing sources without any evidence to motivate that dismissal)

I agree that adoption, in any reasonable sense, has grown between 2013 and 2014.  However, I see no clear evidence of it growing since February, and some evidence that it is not.  Given that through 2014 there was substantial increase in the factors that are supposed to push the adoption -- penetration of BitPay and Coinbase among merchants, venture capital investment, promotion in the media, etc -- that stagnation in the numbers cannot be just statistical noise. 

The evidence people usually give is the number of transactions, number of blockchain.info wallets, and the number of merchants "adopting bitcoin".  I have explained before why those data are not reliable and do not really measure adoption.  I have also pointed to the presumed BitPay.com wallet which does not show inceased inputs since February.

The [number of transactions] data is not likely to be significantly "faked". Why? Because the faker would do a piss-poor job in that case.

I don't know if someone is generating fake transactions intentionally.  However I suspect that 95% or more of the transactions are not payments, and the variation in that traffic is not related to variations the payment traffic.  So the number of transactions chart is useless to analyze actual usage. 

Moreover, note that the number of transactions has been steadily increasing through 2014 while the USD volume (minus changebacks) is stagnating.  So the average USD per transaction is falling sharply.  That seems easier to explain if most transactions are non-payments.

Here's another good one, [ ... ]  trading volume is "usage" as well - the distinction between "speculative" buying and "usage" buying is (mostly) arbitrary.

Trading volume (in USD) over all USD exchanges, last 2 years:


And the same for CNY:

Trading volume is not related to adoption.  Consider China, for example, where usage in commerce is null, and yet has many times the trading volume of the rest of the World combined.  Or note that the peaks in trading volume occur when the price is changing fast, up or down; why would that trigger a frenzy of bitcoin spending in commerce?

Now here's maybe one of the strongest arguments in favor of (b) - adoption / usage is growing, but slower, based on USD tx volume:
1) USD tx volume is still below the peak  which isn't such a surprise considering that it shoots up during a rally / at an ATH, but more problematic is
2) it is growing only at a rather comfortably slow pace (NB: linear chart)



USD tx volume should be a reasonably good measure of the 'medium of exchange' aspect of Bitcoin, because for most goods purchased, the unit of account in which the goods are priced is USD, so a growing USD tx volume despite falling prices is a sign there is more medium of exchange usage - but it's not exactly skyrocketing either - since the middle of this year, it's been steadily climbing up (despite falling BTC/USD), but not going through the roof exactly either.

Well, to me this chart does not show any growth at all in 2014.  There were some small peaks in June and in the last few weeks, but they did not reach the levels of Jan--Feb 2014, and the volume quickly returned to the baseline that has been in rule since March. 

But, anyway, even this chart does not show use in commerce; it is merely the total BTC output of all transactions (minus estimated changebacks) times the BTC price.  So it includes an unknown but large percentage of non-payment transactions.  Perhaps the USD volume of payment transactions are increasing, or perhaps it is decreasing; we cannot tell from that chart.

I insist, neither blockchain statistics nor trade volumes give us any useful insight on actual adoption as means of payment.  The traffic in the BitPay and Coinbase "wallets", as gathered by that Czech site, would be a more direct evidence (assuming the wallets were correctly identified, which I cannot tell for sure).  As I wrote, I have had a look at the Bitpay wallet, and did not see growth in 2014 either.  But please check yourself.

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation