rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;)

[romneymoney]

Everyone and their hairdresser is now aware of bitcoin...

I ask at least one cab driver every week whether they have ever heard of bitcoin, and have done for the past year.  Keep in mind that these people are overwhelmingly recent immigrants who make regular remittances to family overseas, a first-order use case for bitcoin, which would save them as much as 10% on transfers of thousands of dollars each year.

Exactly one has ever heard of bitcoin.

Regular Joe wont go to bitcoin because of fear to be hacked. Unless one will create way to keep bitcoins safe from bad guys and easy system how to pay for goods and services, mainstreamers will stay away from BTC. Myself I'm tech guy and even I cannot sleep at night because of fear being hacked. Imagine someone not that techy, family with kids who use that computer to play games, install screensavers with all the viruses and keylogers. I dont see adoption without 100% security solution.

sorry, I have to reference the trezor everytime I read about this (supposed) problem. It can now be solved with $120.

ftfy, was a bad link (no tld)
trezor

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[flipperfish]

sorry, I have to reference the trezor everytime I read about this (supposed) problem. It can now be solved with $120.

It's still not an easy solution for the average person.  If I handed a trezor to a Regular Joe off the street (or gf, grandma, boss, non-tech colleague, etc.), the first thing he/she would ask is "How do I get bitcoins to and from that thing?". 30 seconds into the explanation what it is, how to even set one up, much less how to use it, and they would have tuned me out already and walked away.

Second thing they would say is, "I have to buy that thing for $120, when a credit card is basically free with my bank account?  No thanks."

A trezor may work today for us Bitcoin geeks.  But for Regular Joe mass adopters, trezor like devices need to be even easier to set up and use, as well as so ubiquitous that they are basically free devices, given away perhaps by bitcoin wallet services providers like Circle, BitPay, or CB.

There's also Peter R's Sigsafe: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=610453.0
It looks like it's even easier to use than a trezor and also cheaper. It communicates via NFC and the same device can be used with a mobile or a vendor terminal. As I see it, the answer to the question "How do I get bitcoins to and from that thing?" would be as simple as "Just tap it to your mobile!". However, it's still in development.

[windpath]

There's also Peter R's Sigsafe: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=610453.0
It looks like it's even easier to use than a trezor and also cheaper. It communicates via NFC and the same device can be used with a mobile or a vendor terminal. As I see it, the answer to the question "How do I get bitcoins to and from that thing?" would be as simple as "Just tap it to your mobile!". However, it's still in development.

That SigSafe is very cool, but until NFC readers are used in regular commerce applications, kind of pointless...

[calim]

$120 for a wallet?  And it requires specific hardware set up.  Doesn't really solve 1 of the 3 problems I mentioned without adding to it.  Try again. 

I'm not saying these things aren't coming down the pipe, I'm saying that as of today, the seamless way of getting BTC, managing a wallet and then using BTC is not yet here.  There is a setup cost that non-technical people just won't pay to get rolling with it.  It just has to be simpler for the masses.  I think Bitcoin will get there, and sooner rather than later.

[molecular]

$120 for a wallet?  And it requires specific hardware set up.  Doesn't really solve 1 of the 3 problems I mentioned without adding to it.  Try again. 

I'm not saying these things aren't coming down the pipe, I'm saying that as of today, the seamless way of getting BTC, managing a wallet and then using BTC is not yet here.  There is a setup cost that non-technical people just won't pay to get rolling with it.  It just has to be simpler for the masses.  I think Bitcoin will get there, and sooner rather than later.

ok

[SlipperySlope]

Here is an interesting chart comparison between the great bubble of June 2011 and the November 2013 bubble. The general shape is that of a dampened oscillation. Because 2013 was a year in which two bubbles occurred, perhaps the November 2013 bubble will have a longer period of collapse than the April 2013 bubble.

This is the weekly chart from Mt. Gox from the 2011 bubble . . .



And here is the current weekly chart from Bitstamp . . .

[JayJuanGee]

And more - many are ready to invest, but think they are so smart as to be able to catch a bottom. Sometimes they manage pretty well, cf. my first buy at $3 after my decision to invest was already made before the spike to $32 but the price just wasn't right for several months.

Did you sell and buy back in again after the spike when the price was in the $20s or $30s? or did you just ride it out and then sell later... I recall you sold at various points maybe in the $100s and in the $600s, no?

[rpietila]

And more - many are ready to invest, but think they are so smart as to be able to catch a bottom. Sometimes they manage pretty well, cf. my first buy at $3 after my decision to invest was already made before the spike to $32 but the price just wasn't right for several months.

Did you sell and buy back in again after the spike when the price was in the $20s or $30s? or did you just ride it out and then sell later... I recall you sold at various points maybe in the $100s and in the $600s, no?

I thought about investing a few months, and when decided to invest, the high price delayed it an additional few months. Bought in starting at $3 and made my first meaningful exit at $675, trading here and there.

Currently I am more interested in Monero, though. Monero makes me feel like Bitcoin in 2010, tons of potential and a $6MM market cap. I actually was there so I can compare the feeling. It will become really big, 1000x gain just to match what Bitcoin is now.

[JayJuanGee]

sorry, I have to reference the trezor everytime I read about this (supposed) problem. It can now be solved with $120.

It's still not an easy solution for the average person.  If I handed a trezor to a Regular Joe off the street (or gf, grandma, boss, non-tech colleague, etc.), the first thing he/she would ask is "How do I get bitcoins to and from that thing?". 30 seconds into the explanation what it is, how to even set one up, much less how to use it, and they would have tuned me out already and walked away.

Second thing they would say is, "I have to buy that thing for $120, when a credit card is basically free with my bank account?  No thanks."

A trezor may work today for us Bitcoin geeks.  But for Regular Joe mass adopters, trezor like devices need to be even easier to set up and use, as well as so ubiquitous that they are basically free devices, given away perhaps by bitcoin wallet services providers like Circle, BitPay, or CB.

Yes, instead of giving you a free $10 deposit with the opening of the account, give you a proprietary connected device, such as a trezor...   so long as you maintain at least a certain balance of a certain quantity for a certain period of time.

[Wekkel]

Here is an interesting chart comparison between the great bubble of June 2011 and the November 2013 bubble. The general shape is that of a dampened oscillation. Because 2013 was a year in which two bubbles occurred, perhaps the November 2013 bubble will have a longer period of collapse than the April 2013 bubble.

This is the weekly chart from Mt. Gox from the 2011 bubble . . .

...

And here is the current weekly chart from Bitstamp . . .

I see no increased volume in the uptick. Things still look pretty weak to me.

[rpietila]

I see no increased volume in the uptick. Things still look pretty weak to me.

I think his point was not to argue that. Things do look weak, and the point was to say that it may take one more year before turning better.

But the downside is so little that it still makes sense to be fully invested. Every week the adoption/infrastructure gets stronger, so you're on the winning side. Personally I don't think it'll take a year, rather a month. Meanwhile Monero is doing a really good job and looks much stronger if BTC looks weaker - a hedge, that is

[EuroTrash]

In regards to Monero: I don't see any sign of real development on GitHub, exception made for a few sporadic backports from bytecoin. Also the client is a memory hog (because it still loads the whole block chain in RAM) and in my opinion if they don't change that (like RIGHT NOW ffs) then in a few months it will be unusable even on a decent machine.

Rpietila, what makes you think that Monero is getting stronger every day? What am I missing?

[2dogs]

Everyone and their hairdresser is now aware of bitcoin...

I ask at least one cab driver every week whether they have ever heard of bitcoin, and have done for the past year.  Keep in mind that these people are overwhelmingly recent immigrants who make regular remittances to family overseas, a first-order use case for bitcoin, which would save them as much as 10% on transfers of thousands of dollars each year.

Exactly one has ever heard of bitcoin.

Regular Joe wont go to bitcoin because of fear to be hacked. Unless one will create way to keep bitcoins safe from bad guys and easy system how to pay for goods and services, mainstreamers will stay away from BTC. Myself I'm tech guy and even I cannot sleep at night because of fear being hacked. Imagine someone not that techy, family with kids who use that computer to play games, install screensavers with all the viruses and keylogers. I dont see adoption without 100% security solution.

Fear of being hacked.  An easy to use and nearly unhackable wallet.  An easy to use and nearly unhackable means of obtaining bitcoin.  These are all still hurdles for the regular joe.  I had a 50 year old programmer co-worker on coinbase, trying to set up an account so he could start buying BTC.  The process was long enough and complicated enough that he got bored and put his money he was going to buy BTC with into a semi-legal online poker site.  Yes, he wasn't the guy that was going to send us to tha moon, but if someone who is technical can't figure out one of the currently easiest means of getting BTC, a non-technical person still has no shot.  Those things need to come out from the companies doing that work, and then we will see greater adoption rates.  

Regular Joe Six-Pack doesn't have the disposable income to buy bitcoin.  Between rent/mtg, fuel and food for starters, there isn't much left to "play" with - to put into some scammy-sounding-techno-hackable unknown that doesn't give instant gratification (see programmer co-worker story above). In addition, it is a PITA/expensive to convert from fiat and back again.

Now if Joe was paid in bitcoin, and paid his groceries in bitcoin, then we could imagine mass adoption and demand as possibilities.

But not now.  Joe Six-Pac is overwhelmed and clueless, and lacks the critical thinking skills to even ask the right questions.

ETA:  Just my .0001BTC

[rpietila]

Rpietila, what makes you think that Monero is getting stronger every day? What am I missing?

Well I am in active IRL & chat contact with many of the devs. They have convinced me that things are going on well, yet they are careful not to give me information that is not publicly accessible because we have a mutual feeling that my "adoption" of this coin is not what is actually happening and therefore should not be marketed as such.

But it is true that I see the enormous potential, even to replace Bitcoin, as the team in Monero is stronger, and the tech corrects the most glaring flaw of Bitcoin.

- As a result of Bitcoin trying to have a rudder (foundation), it was left entirely without one.

- A short time ago, people generally thought using Bitcoin keeps their finances private. Well, that's pretty far from the case.


I am not here (yet) to make convincing arguments why everyone should buy. The day will come, when the coin is ready. Short list:

- Best team

- Fairest launch of all coins

- Very good emission schedule

- Killer attribute (anonymity with ring sig)

Quite easy really. The coin will deliver if it can be transacted anonymously. Nothing else needed. And it can. But it is too difficult now.

[JimNastics]

Rpietila, what makes you think that Monero is getting stronger every day? What am I missing?

Well I am in active IRL & chat contact with many of the devs. They have convinced me that things are going on well, yet they are careful not to give me information that is not publicly accessible because we have a mutual feeling that my "adoption" of this coin is not what is actually happening and therefore should not be marketed as such.

But it is true that I see the enormous potential, even to replace Bitcoin, as the team in Monero is stronger, and the tech corrects the most glaring flaw of Bitcoin.

- As a result of Bitcoin trying to have a rudder (foundation), it was left entirely without one.

- A short time ago, people generally thought using Bitcoin keeps their finances private. Well, that's pretty far from the case.


I am not here (yet) to make convincing arguments why everyone should buy. The day will come, when the coin is ready. Short list:

- Best team

- Fairest launch of all coins

- Very good emission schedule

- Killer attribute (anonymity with ring sig)

Quite easy really. The coin will deliver if it can be transacted anonymously. Nothing else needed. And it can. But it is too difficult now.

Hasn't AnonyMint proved that Monero is not truly anonymous, certainly not to a "killer attribute" level? I've seen him tear it apart in a thread on here, and stayed away for that reason.

[Wexlike]

Rpietila, what makes you think that Monero is getting stronger every day? What am I missing?

Well I am in active IRL & chat contact with many of the devs. They have convinced me that things are going on well, yet they are careful not to give me information that is not publicly accessible because we have a mutual feeling that my "adoption" of this coin is not what is actually happening and therefore should not be marketed as such.

But it is true that I see the enormous potential, even to replace Bitcoin, as the team in Monero is stronger, and the tech corrects the most glaring flaw of Bitcoin.

- As a result of Bitcoin trying to have a rudder (foundation), it was left entirely without one.

- A short time ago, people generally thought using Bitcoin keeps their finances private. Well, that's pretty far from the case.


I am not here (yet) to make convincing arguments why everyone should buy. The day will come, when the coin is ready. Short list:

- Best team

- Fairest launch of all coins

- Very good emission schedule

- Killer attribute (anonymity with ring sig)

Quite easy really. The coin will deliver if it can be transacted anonymously. Nothing else needed. And it can. But it is too difficult now.

Hasn't AnonyMint proved that Monero is not truly anonymous, certainly not to a "killer attribute" level? I've seen him tear it apart in a thread on here, and stayed away for that reason.

Uhm no, his concerns were about a potential blockchain bloat issue because of the ring signatures and a potential scaling problem in the next 1-2 years. On the other hand, the anonymity technology is bleeding edge and working.

[fluffypony]

Hasn't AnonyMint proved that Monero is not truly anonymous, certainly not to a "killer attribute" level? I've seen him tear it apart in a thread on here, and stayed away for that reason.

He proved that it is truly anonymous, in that he agrees that transactions are both cryptographically untraceable and unlinkable. He thinks that our decision to use i2p as a low-latency mixnet to disguise traffic is no going to prevent a determined attacker with lots of resources from ascertaining whether an individual (as in an IP address) is using Monero, but on that point we disagree. That notwithstanding, he does not fault the cryptography or the implementation behind Monero's transactional and address privacy.

[fluffypony]

In regards to Monero: I don't see any sign of real development on GitHub, exception made for a few sporadic backports from bytecoin. Also the client is a memory hog (because it still loads the whole block chain in RAM) and in my opinion if they don't change that (like RIGHT NOW ffs) then in a few months it will be unusable even on a decent machine.

The Github repo is staging - dev doesn't get pushed to it until it's been tested, and even then the staging branch is not for production (that's what tagged releases are for). It would be absolutely insane to push commits straight into the staging branch, most especially because there ARE exchanges / miners / people who build straight off that branch, and if it contains bugs and falls apart we would lose credibility big time.

A month ago there were a handful of minor backports from Bytecoin, but there's nothing on the entire first page of commits that are anything but our work.

If you want to see the ongoing development, a good starting point is the Dev Diary in the weekly Monero Missives. A quick summary of the ongoing work would be:

• Abstraction of blockchain functions in preparation for moving the blockchain to an embedded database instead of all in RAM:
  https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/bc2 (was: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/blockchain, moved to allow for refactoring)
• rpcwallet to replace simplewallet's rpc mode for all environments that use automation (exchanges, merchant systems, gambling sites, faucets etc.):
  https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/rpcwallet
• unit tests for RPC functions:
  https://github.com/jakoblind/bitmonero/tree/rpc_wallet_test
• Proper backgrounding/forking for the daemon and rpcwallet (fork on *nix, service on Windows):
  https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/tree/daemonize
• Move from VS2013 to mingw64 / msys2:
  https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/tree/mingw and https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/tree/rfree_mingw_test2
• Overhaul of CMakeLists to speed up build times and allow selective building of binaries and/or test suite:
  https://github.com/rfree2monero/bitmonero/tree/pr-20140808-rfree-cmake
• Replacement of all logging functions with OT logging system that allows for compartmentalisation of logs among other things:
  https://github.com/rfree2monero/bitmonero/tree/pr-20140808-rfree-otshellutils
• Complete overhaul of parts of the low-level networking code, adding QoS and bandwidth control to the daemon:
  https://github.com/rfree2monero/bitmonero/tree/dev-rfree
• New GUI developed from scratch -> wireframes -> mockups -> actual Qt interface. The interface is around a few weeks away from completion, then integration can start.
  http://imgur.com/a/ERheR

[cbeast]

Not to derail the thread, but this discussion about Monero is merely a distraction to Bitcoin's adoption. People are overly concerned about anonymity. Don't keep all your wealth in Bitcoin. I think it's speculators wanting anonymity. If you want to invest in businesses that improve your community, then you don't want anonymity anyway. Bitcoin and gold are enough privacy.

[Jungian]

Not to derail the thread, but this discussion about Monero is merely a distraction to Bitcoin's adoption. People are overly concerned about anonymity. Don't keep all your wealth in Bitcoin. I think it's speculators wanting anonymity. If you want to invest in businesses that improve your community, then you don't want anonymity anyway. Bitcoin and gold are enough privacy.

I'd say with the mass surveillance going on, people are less concerned about anonymity than they should be. You don't know what all this information will be used to. It's not out of they question that they will hunt you down to confiscate your wealth or in other ways try to frame your for making various kinds of transactions that they deem unlawful.