Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[hdbuck]

The US government has nearly as much debt as the world has wealth:
http://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2014/6/10/the-us-government-has-nearly-as-much-debt-as-the-world-has-w.html

[tvbcof]

Hey look!

Dow goes up, Dow goes down,  gold goes up, gold goes down. Meanwhile;

Bitcoin goes UP!

Chart I'm looking at has BTC trending down for a month.  The bad news, though, is that the imbalance is heavy on the supply side.  At this point I'll be surprised to see a selling opportunity which works for me in 2014, and not at all surprised to seen some significant downside in the intrim.  Oh well.

[sidhujag]

Hey look!

Dow goes up, Dow goes down,  gold goes up, gold goes down. Meanwhile;

Bitcoin goes UP!

Chart I'm looking at has BTC trending down for a month.  The bad news, though, is that the imbalance is heavy on the supply side.  At this point I'll be surprised to see a selling opportunity which works for me in 2014, and not at all surprised to seen some significant downside in the intrim.  Oh well.

LTC didnt reach target for me means its dragging it all down. Physcologically we are not ready for the next uptick, for me, until that level is tested, unless we go up and then come crash down later on which is not bullish long term... anyways just what worked for me in trading forex over the years... you build up an intuition of levels that must test before the real trend resumes. Something you cant really teach.

[domob]

iirc, the utxo set takes up about 75% of RAM required to run a node.  as i run 4 nodes myself, it takes a minimum of 1GB RAM to run smoothly meaning 750MB could be estimated for the utxo set itself.  that's pretty big to be including in a block...

Not in the block, alongside the block.

Just like when people merge mine Namecoin the nmc blocks aren't included in the btc blocks.

The merged-mine implementations that don't include the memory fix: (mutable vs imutable storage) and no auxpow data in cblockindex (blocks stored in memory) will eat up alot of RAM... so far only Devcoin and I0coin are the ones that have this fix and only Devcoin is running on 0.9.2 (currently in testing) with all the other fixes that bitcoin rolled up along the way included. So for most of these incompatible alt-coins who now wish to merge-mine (because I called that they would, and the ones that dont will die) are now suffering from either memory bloat issues or incorrect implementions/bugs and its next to impossible for a general programmer to port it over because its increasingly convoluted code to keep track of.

Note that Namecoin also doesn't keep the auxpow in memory (CBlockIndex) or in the blkindex.dat file any longer.  I have removed this artefact (from times before I hacked on the code) recently.

You still need it in blnkindex.dat unless you dont care about not having any thin clients or external clients using "getheaders"

Nope.  Currently, Namecoin doesn't allow "getheaders" since no client uses it and I didn't want to leave it there completely untested.  But in a previous development version, I implemented it just fine - you can just load the full block from disk if you really need it (someone sends a "getheaders") - and optionally cache it in memory, subject to your favourite heuristics for removing the data from memory again.

[cypherdoc]

hopefully, this lull will kill off several (a few dozen) altcoins.

[cypherdoc]

the charts of all the alts look horrific.  most investors in cryptocurrencies will lose money.

[Wekkel]

Not kill, just low prices.

[cypherdoc]

stick with it, boys.

[Melbustus]

hopefully, this lull will kill off several (a few dozen) altcoins.

I think it's gonna get worse before it gets rational. The mentality in the alt-scene reminds me of of the dotcom bubble. Everyone is screaming "New Paradigm!", "Old Rules Don't Apply!". It's the same phenomenon; they're correctly seeing that this new idea of blockchain-based ledgers opens up a whole new world of possibilities, but they're then incorrectly - and sometimes even explicitly - saying that core human economic principles no longer apply and its a completely new field, even in that regard. The consequence is that valuations will be hugely distorted relative to fundamentals, and many many participants will be burned when valuations inevitably (and quickly) correct.

Anyways, I think, yeah, the lull will probably kill off a few dozen alts. But there are hundreds of scam-coins; didn't someone count over 1000 recently? And besides, the "platform" coins are only just getting going. I like the tech Ethereum is trying to do, but I think it's likely a terrible investment given their distro model, what they've raised already, and the opportunity cost of bitcoin itself. Maybe an ultimate market-crash of such a "flagship" alt will be what triggers reality in the alt market.

[cypherdoc]

Like I said,  the majority of investors even in a promising investment space will lose money. That's because scammers are inevitably attracted. 

[Wekkel]

Perhaps the hype in alts is still to come...

[cypherdoc]

A quick look at the charts show a steady decline of almost all of them.

[Melbustus]

A quick look at the charts show a steady decline of almost all of them.

Maybe I'll put together a site that charts only crypto-coins which have been around for 1yr+. Two columns: One for charts of coins that are trading for more BTC than 1yr ago, and the other for coins that are trading for less BTC than a year ago. Guess which column would be *overwhelmingly* longer... Maybe that'd make the point more obvious to some of the weaker minds out there.

Wait... Are there *ANY* coins more than a year old which are trading higher relative to BTC now vs 1yr ago?

[Adrian-x]

Like I said,  the majority of investors even in a promising investment space will lose money..... 

This is so real it makes me laugh every time I read it, it's crazy.

Still coins are distributing and that's growth, alts represent a Bitcoin distribution mechanism to the late innovators and a lesson in decentralized free markets for the people buying them.

[confirmation120]

From the OP up to now, in terms of BTC/gold the price of gold has collapsed.

Good job guys.

[Adrian-x]

A quick look at the charts show a steady decline of almost all of them.

I would have thought the same with LTC when miners started bailing out of Bitcoin after the halving. But what is happening in reality is a different segment in the global Bitcoin phenomenon, put to the extreme alts are a waste product of Bitcoin innovation  in a very dynamic environment the useful fuel for the The Rag and Bone-Men of the 21 century.

[cypherdoc]

just look at the return on the different timeframes going back to 7d.  then look at the 365d charts:

[molecular]

Some things I don't quite get, though:

• why does this require deterministic ordering of txs in mempool?
• does this require that all txs a miner includes in a block are properly broadcast beforehand?
• would this require a hardfork or can it be used off-chain (so to say) by a subgroup of willing miners?

1) This is needed to construct the merkle tree. Txs are grouped pairwise to build the nodes of the next level in the tree. The pairs are concatenated for the hashing, so the order is relevant. Currently the order is defined by the list of txs in the published block.

2) Yes, although I think the receiving miner could request missing tx(s).

3) To my understanding this does not need a hardfork, because the blocks are still built by the same rules.

Now I ask myself what happens in case of the remaining 1%? Maybe the failure rate can be reduced by publishing multiple lookup tables of the same set?

maybe the publishing miner can include the 1% explicitly (he can determine which ones are affected himself and include the remainder). This would destroy the "constant size" property, but it would lessen the propagation cost of block size by ~99%, right?

Ah, of course, this makes sense!

O(1) Block Propagation (gavin) clears up most questions I had.

The idea seems quite excellent to me now and I'm amazed by IBLT data structure. You can just subtract / add (or rather: union / complement) those in constant time. Amazing.

[cypherdoc]

Grinding higher. Trying to slip out the door... 

[STT]

This is so real it makes me laugh every time I read it, it's crazy.

Thats a normal dynamic also, inventors of a product especially a new category dont tend to be the ones making the most money.  Its the developers and those who can apply the technology to society and sell it basically, otherwise all this clever stuff is just a diamond in the dirt passed over.
Now does seem the right time for innovation to be of use even these alt coins, as we have extreme radical elements in play for global currency.   Seems one of those periods in history for change, may you live in interesting times like the Chinese say (alledgely) :p