rpietila Calling the Bottom

[Adrian-x]

The number of unique daily addresses used does measure a degree of economic activity, making it a fundamental measurement rather than a technical trading measurement. The amount of new money coming in is unfortunately proprietary information kept by exchanges.  The importance of the two fundamental indicators of adjusted transaction quantity and daily unique addresses, as calculated by Blockchain.info [ ... ]

However, since both new addresses and transactions are free, users and programmers have no reason to use them sparingly.  A substantial and variable fraction of those counts could be "fake" transactions, between addresses owned by the same person -- such as tumbling, hotwallet/coldwallet motion, software testing, etc..  Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals at the exchanges should also be counted as "fake" in this sense.  The blockchain traffic may also include testing of new altcoins or services built on top of bitcoin. 

Unfortunately there is practically no reliable and meaningful data on the bitcoin economy.

To correct a few assumptions: there is a small transaction cost as well as a management cost in handling many private keys and an escalating risk in dealing with more keys than one can comfortably secure. (If this is happening and I'm sure it is on a small scale, it is a practical case of big wallets subdividing, to represent growth that has already happened)

Tumbling addresses as I understand are not part of the final count as they end up empty. And deposits at an exchange are most often pooled often in identified address, and wouldn't add a significant count. (I've done a few purchase lately with bitpay and found they even reuse address that end up empty so that doesn't add either. I think exchange withdrawals are a legitimate addition to the total as those are the final unique address holding coins that are counted.  

While the measurements may not be accurate I feel confident they are magnitudes more accurate than the tools to manage existing monetary policies.

As things stand this metric is waiting validation, and manipulation doesn't prove anything or give anyone a quantitative competitive advantage just yet.

[rpietila]

This is September. Last September I sold BTC2000+. Now,

"I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month."

 

[seventhgear]

This is September. Last September I sold BTC2000+. Now,

"I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month."

 

Would be nosense selling at this low price, maybe we won't see a bubble in few weeks like the last year, but I don't think we are going to hit lower values.

[ensurance982]

So, analyzing the current situation... Who thinks we've reached a bottom and are now back on our way up? I think it is much too early to tell and we may very well re-test the $350s I hope we don't go below that, though...

We won't know wether we are on bottom or not until we re-rise to the same level before the fall, or we fall to another botTOM.

That 350 on btc-e was not a bottom, it was some whale panic dump. Say otherwise would be the same to say we tested the 100's due to the Mr102

But we've been to $370 or something back in April. I think it was April 13 or so... Don't recall that exactly! But a strong bear market could push us below that. I hope though that we'll stay above that forever and start to climb again.

[JorgeStolfi]

Tumbling addresses as I understand are not part of the final count as they end up empty.

I am assuming that this graph counts addresses that appear in the blockchain (as output addresses) for the first time on each day, and does not subtract addresses that have become empty on that day.  Is this second assumption incorrect?

(Sigh, blockchain.info should have explained more precisely what is being shown in each chart...)

In the extreme tumbling scenario I just described, there would be 150'000 new addresses created every day, and all would be non-empty at the end of the day.

deposits at an exchange are most often pooled often in identified address, and wouldn't add a significant count. (I've done a few purchase lately with bitpay and found they even reuse address that end up empty so that doesn't add either. I think exchange withdrawals are a legitimate addition to the total as those are the final unique address holding coins that are counted.

Exchange deposits and withdrawals may contribute little to the new address count, but they may be a substantial part of the <transactions per day> and <total output volume per day> plots.  After MtGOX, exchange clients are advised to keep their balances to a minimum.

It does not seem right to count those BTC transfers as real use: although the input and output addresses have distinct owners, the coins in the exchange logically belong to the clients, so they are not "payment" for anything.  It would be like counting cash deposits and withdrawals at banks as part of the GDP.

The blockchain traffic from Chinese bitcoiners, for example, must be almost 100% exchange deposits and withdrawals; its use for e-payments is probably very small.

While the measurements may not be accurate I feel confident they are magnitudes more accurate than the tools to manage existing monetary policies.

Banks and businesses are required to report their activity to their government, for tax and other purposes, and there are many thousands of people whose full-fime job is to extract useful statistics from that raw data.  For example, the published numbers on credit card usage are probably accurate to 2 digits, at least; and we know the subtotals by country and purpose.  Ditto for total salaries, total company income, etc.

There is no such data for bitcoin.  We don't know how much of the traffic shown in the blockchain.info plots are payments for goods and services.  It could be 10% or 90% -- and the fraction could vary substantially from month to month.

In fact, the shape of those plots over the last couple of years suggests that most of that traffic is NOT commercial payments.

manipulation doesn't prove anything or give anyone a quantitative competitive advantage just yet.

Inflation of the blockchain traffic would obviously benefit all bitcoin enterprises, especially bitcoin invstment funds.  For example, I have seen a couple of articles recently claiming that bitcoin has already passed PayPal in volume of payments --- using the blockchain.info <total output volume> as the bitcoin number.

[oda.krell]

[...]
Anyway, those blockchain.info plots are rather strange.  They don't show increasing adoption.  I don't know what they are showing.

1) Transactions cost money. There is a hypothetical incentive for a hypothetical manipulator to "pad" the growth (e.g. a miner intending to sell at inflated prices), but the cost of faking those transactions is substantial, and would probably require a concerted effort that no evidence exists for, to my knowledge. Hence, the conclusion based on the least assumptions is that the data is not fake, until evidence to the contrary is presented. (and, "the data doesn't look like commercial adoption" is no such evidence).

2) The no. of transaction graph roughly matches total USD volume transferred roughly matches the no of addresses graph roughly matches the hash rate graph. If the data suggests (even though it is no guarantee for) exponential growth along several dimensions, the most likely conclusion, in the absence of contrary evidence, is that some underlying variable does undergo such growth in fact.


Myself, I'm skeptical towards extrapolation from such data (a point that you made yourself often enough, citing Worldcom stock price as an example, IIRC), but that's a different point: the question whether exponential growth is going to continue or not. Looking at the blockchain data however and questioning whether there was exponential growth until now is a stretch.


EDIT: Added the most pertinent graph. From 100 transactions a day to almost 100k transactions a day, over the course of 5 years.

[nicepumper]

Incredible graph! but no matter how many graphs you have, all these fuds like fallling will not shut the fuck up 

[An amorous cow-herder]

1) Transactions cost money.

Well, if you dont mind the transaction taking longer setting the fee to zero works as well.

[RoadStress]

This is September. Last September I sold BTC2000+. Now,

"I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month."

 

Please sell so we can have another liftoff! Please sell so we can have another liftoff! Please sell so we can have another liftoff!

Why not sacrifice 2k BTC for a bigger wealth? I would If I had at least 4k BTC!

[JayJuanGee]

This is September. Last September I sold BTC2000+. Now,

"I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month."

 

Please sell so we can have another liftoff! Please sell so we can have another liftoff! Please sell so we can have another liftoff!

Why not sacrifice 2k BTC for a bigger wealth? I would If I had at least 4k BTC!

One of the ONLY reasons to sell 2k BTC at this time, for a large BTC holder, would be to attempt to manipulate BTC prices downward, which should NOT be something that some one like Rpietilla should be suggesting as a possibility..   In this case, his aspiration would likely be to buy in at a lower price and then to have 2400 BTC rather than 2000 BTC... good for him (if it works) , but NOT good for the many smaller time holders who do NOT have such manipulation abilities..

Some may suggest that 2000BTC is NOT enough to downwardly manipulate the market, and that could be correct - except to the extent that there may be some coordinating with other dumps or dumpers.

[dakota neat]

Who is that rpietila guy anyway?

[RoadStress]

This is September. Last September I sold BTC2000+. Now,

"I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month."

 

Please sell so we can have another liftoff! Please sell so we can have another liftoff! Please sell so we can have another liftoff!

Why not sacrifice 2k BTC for a bigger wealth? I would If I had at least 4k BTC!

One of the ONLY reasons to sell 2k BTC at this time, for a large BTC holder, would be to attempt to manipulate BTC prices downward, which should NOT be something that some one like Rpietilla should be suggesting as a possibility..   In this case, his aspiration would likely be to buy in at a lower price and then to have 2400 BTC rather than 2000 BTC... good for him (if it works) , but NOT good for the many smaller time holders who do NOT have such manipulation abilities..

Some may suggest that 2000BTC is NOT enough to downwardly manipulate the market, and that could be correct - except to the extent that there may be some coordinating with other dumps or dumpers.

You didn't get it. When he sold 2kBTC last year the price went to the moon. I want to repeat the same experience this year too.

Who is that rpietila guy anyway?

A guy that bought a castle with money from bitcoin.

[JayJuanGee]

This is September. Last September I sold BTC2000+. Now,

"I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month. I will not sell 2000 BTC this month."

 

Please sell so we can have another liftoff! Please sell so we can have another liftoff! Please sell so we can have another liftoff!

Why not sacrifice 2k BTC for a bigger wealth? I would If I had at least 4k BTC!

One of the ONLY reasons to sell 2k BTC at this time, for a large BTC holder, would be to attempt to manipulate BTC prices downward, which should NOT be something that some one like Rpietilla should be suggesting as a possibility..   In this case, his aspiration would likely be to buy in at a lower price and then to have 2400 BTC rather than 2000 BTC... good for him (if it works) , but NOT good for the many smaller time holders who do NOT have such manipulation abilities..

Some may suggest that 2000BTC is NOT enough to downwardly manipulate the market, and that could be correct - except to the extent that there may be some coordinating with other dumps or dumpers.

You didn't get it. When he sold 2kBTC last year the price went to the moon. I want to repeat the same experience this year too.

If that is what you want to believe that he meant, then that is your choice.    I do recognize that as a possible reading, and maybe that was his intent...

I sufficiently understand the circumstances around Rpietila's sale last year.... Prices had been hovering around $100 all summer, and then he sold 2K btc at $600-ish... half way to the top rather than at the top.

I think that it would be fair if he was suggesting that BTC prices could skyrocket at any moment but that he was exercise additional self-restraint to make sure that he does  NOT sell too early... I actually have NO real problem with big holders taking profits as the price raises and attempting to find the top.. those are signs of a healthy market and healthy investor behaviors... just that different people are going to conclude differently regarding their estimates of the top.

[rpietila]

September was not half-way. Price was about $120 then.

If it now rises to $660, many are tempted to sell.

DON'T.

[JayJuanGee]

September was not half-way. Price was about $120 then.

If it now rises to $660, many are tempted to sell.

DON'T.

I agree with you about the "not half-way" comment, but I believe that I was otherwise fairly accurate in my description..... because half way was a mere vague referent.. rather than an absolute technical term.. and maybe even describing that BTC prices nearly doubled after $660 (at least they went up approximately another 75% thereafter).


O.k... now, you seem to be misapplying this year's scenario, a little bit because "half way" in the rocket this year, is NOT going to be around $660 but instead somewhere around $2000 to $5000 - b/c likely the next all time high is likely to be quite northward of $3k...

The question still remains when to sell, exactly and if to sell and has the rocket come to a close?  and in what proportions of our BTC portfolios are we gonna sell and each of us will come to differing conclusions in this regard.... some of us will sell some BTC in the mid-$600s... or some other point that we determine to be the top, but it ends up being somewhere "half-way" or some other percentage of the way.

[BitChick]

September was not half-way. Price was about $120 then.

If it now rises to $660, many are tempted to sell.

DON'T.

I agree.

However, I remember being worried when the price hit the ATH at around $266 last November thinking everyone would panic and sell off but we just kept on going up without any hesitations.

I would like to think that would happen again on the next run up.  Will we stall at $1200 or just keep on going?  That is the bigger question I have.

So if the price rises to $1200 and you are tempted to sell,  DON't!  

(of course I say all this knowing that I have a trip to India to finish paying for very soon here.  So I am actually praying for a price increase soon.  It is way too painful selling coins at this low of a price, even the coins that have been so generously donated by a kindhearted benefactor!  I have even put things on a no interest credit card this past month so I haven't had to sell any.  Crazy I know. But selling at this price seems even crazier!!)

[JorgeStolfi]

Incredible graph! but no matter how many graphs you have, all these fuds like fallling will not shut the fuck up  

Noblesse oblige...  

[...]
Anyway, those blockchain.info plots are rather strange.  They don't show increasing adoption.  I don't know what they are showing.

Transactions cost money. There is a hypothetical incentive for a hypothetical manipulator to "pad" the growth (e.g. a miner intending to sell at inflated prices), but the cost of faking those transactions is substantial,

The total fees being paid now are only ~10 BTC/day (~5000 USD/day), which divided by 70000 tx/day gives only 0.00014 BTC/tx, or little more than the minimum fee.  If one is tumbling 680'000 stolen MtGOX coins, a loss of 10 BTC/day is nothing.  If one is expecting to sell 200'000'000 USD of fund shares, one may be willing to spend 1% of that to simulate a vigorous bitcoin economy for a year.

The no. of transaction graph roughly matches total USD volume transferred roughly matches the no of addresses graph roughly matches the hash rate graph. If the data suggests (even though it is no guarantee for) exponential growth along several dimensions, the most likely conclusion, in the absence of contrary evidence, is that some underlying variable does undergo such growth in fact. [ ...]  Looking at the blockchain data however and questioning whether there was exponential growth until now is a stretch. [ ... ] the most pertinent graph. From 100 transactions a day to almost 100k transactions a day, over the course of 5 years.

All bitcoin indicators grew enormously over those five years.  I would question whether it is appropriate to call it 'exponential growth' and then extrapolate to the future, but that is not the point.

Hence, the conclusion based on the least assumptions is that the data is not fake, until evidence to the contrary is presented. (and, "the data doesn't look like commercial adoption" is no such evidence).

Like the Metcalfe Law plot that others have posted, the above plot squeezes the data for the last year into a tiny corner region of 3 by 0.2 cm at normal resolution.  One must look closely at that corner to notice that the number of transactions has not increased substantially over the last year.  One must look even closer to notice that the tiny wiggles in that plot are swings by 40% or more.

Now look at this plot of the estimated USD transaction volume per day, for the last year:


"Estimated" here apparently means "excluding the return-change outputs" as identified by some heuristic.
Note that the daily transaction volume in USD mostly decreased from ~Jan/01 to ~Mar/07, and was approximately constant from ~Mar/23 to now, apart from a couple of peaks/bumps (~Mar/07--Mar/23, ~May/22--Jun/20) and a depression (~Apr/27--May/21).  This is quite at odds with the "increasing adoption" that was supposed to be happening during this time, which should result in steadily increasing USD volume.

The plot of  the estimated BTC transaction volume per day is perhaps more revealing:


Note that the daily transaction volume in BTC was even more constant, arount 100'000 BTC/day, from Jan/01 to this day.  (While the March peak is more striking in this plot, the other bumps and dips are somewhat smaller.)  It is puzzling, for example, that the BTC volume on Jan/01 was almost the same as on May/01, even though the price dropped by 50% in the meantime.  I take this fact as evidence that most of the traffic is not payments, but activities for which the price is irrelevant -- such as tumbling.

The plot of number of transactions per day is also strange:


Note that this quantity too is fairly constant, between ~60'000 and ~70'000 tx/day, from ~Feb/10 to this day.  (The vertical scale of this plot starts at 40'000 tx/day, so the relative variations are smaller than what they appear.)  The March peak of the other plots is here an inconspicuous bump of about 8%.  (Therfore, that peak was the result of larger transactions, rather than more transactions.)   While the increase of ~20% in January could signify increased adoption, the stagnation since then again contradicts it. (Increased adoption should cause more transactions as well as more USD volume.)

[Adrian-x]

Tumbling addresses as I understand are not part of the final count as they end up empty.

I am assuming that this graph counts addresses that appear in the blockchain (as output addresses) for the first time on each day, and does not subtract addresses that have become empty on that day.  Is this second assumption incorrect?

(Sigh, blockchain.info should have explained more precisely what is being shown in each chart...)

In the extreme tumbling scenario I just described, there're would be 150'000 new addresses created every day, and all would be non-empty at the end of the day.

I've possibly misunderstood the data I assumed it reflected the number of unique address used, as in, in use, as opposed to used up.

I think more over the network effect adds value to bitcoin, if there is no way to measure it so be it, it's my opinion this graph reflects that growth. Now that it can me manipulated because we have related it to Metcalfe's law does little to prove otherwise

While the measurements may not be accurate I feel confident they are magnitudes more accurate than the tools to manage existing monetary policies.

Banks and businesses are required to report their activity to their government, for tax and other purposes, and there are many thousands of people whose full-fime job is to extract useful statistics from that raw data.  For example, the published numbers on credit card usage are probably accurate to 2 digits, at least; and we know the subtotals by country and purpose.  Ditto for total salaries, total company income, etc.

With regards to the above accounting accuracy of reported numbers Bitcoin is more accurate.
The metrics that I was referring to are the ones used in economic calculations like the GDP, and the CPI, the former is more favorable when we make ill use of our natural resources and create sick unhappy people, we measure that and say wow we're growing fast lets inflate the money supply. And the latter is manipulate to excluded the things the money inflation effects, mainly housing and energy, so politicians can say look we do a good job if you're unhappy it's because you're part of the 38.4 percent not taking your antidepressants we fort so hard to secure in Afghanistan.

In Bitcoin manipulating the data makes ill use of excess investment capital but it has no effect on the consumers ability to save, and has no impact on entrepreneurs who find more effective ways to distribute resources equitably.

Macroeconomics is for central planning, Bitcoin is for distributed planning, Austrian heavyweights have elegantly expected the futility in using the data to measure economic success, they give a great framework for why Bitcoin will make a more effective money. The quantitative analysis of the Bitcoin data just identifies market need more acutely, and gives one a competitive advantage in business, not in how to manipulate a centralized system.  

[twiifm]

Tumbling addresses as I understand are not part of the final count as they end up empty.

I am assuming that this graph counts addresses that appear in the blockchain (as output addresses) for the first time on each day, and does not subtract addresses that have become empty on that day.  Is this second assumption incorrect?

(Sigh, blockchain.info should have explained more precisely what is being shown in each chart...)

In the extreme tumbling scenario I just described, there're would be 150'000 new addresses created every day, and all would be non-empty at the end of the day.

I've possibly misunderstood the data I assumed it reflected the number of unique address used, as in, in use, as opposed to used up.

I think more over the network effect adds value to bitcoin, if there is no way to measure it so be it, it's my opinion this graph reflects that growth. Now that it can me manipulated because we have related it to Metcalfe's law does little to prove otherwise

While the measurements may not be accurate I feel confident they are magnitudes more accurate than the tools to manage existing monetary policies.

Banks and businesses are required to report their activity to their government, for tax and other purposes, and there are many thousands of people whose full-fime job is to extract useful statistics from that raw data.  For example, the published numbers on credit card usage are probably accurate to 2 digits, at least; and we know the subtotals by country and purpose.  Ditto for total salaries, total company income, etc.

With regards to the above accounting accuracy of reported numbers Bitcoin is more accurate.
The metrics that I was referring to are the ones used in economic calculations like the GDP, and the CPI, the former is more favorable when we make ill use of our natural resources and create sick unhappy people, we measure that and say wow we're growing fast lets inflate the money supply. And the latter is manipulate to excluded the things the money inflation effects, mainly housing and energy, so politicians can say look we do a good job if you're unhappy it's because you're part of the 38.4 percent not taking your antidepressants we fort so hard to secure in Afghanistan.

In Bitcoin manipulating the data makes ill use of excess investment capital but it has no effect on the consumers ability to save, and has no impact on entrepreneurs who find more effective ways to distribute resources equitably.

Macroeconomics is for central planning, Bitcoin is for distributed planning, Austrian heavyweights have elegantly expected the futility in using the data to measure economic success, they give a great framework for why Bitcoin will make a more effective money. The quantitative analysis of the Bitcoin data just identifies market need more acutely, and gives one a competitive advantage in business, not in how to manipulate a centralized system.  

Network effects (Metcalf's Law) has nothing to do with price.  Its only describes user adoption.  Bitcoin price is purely speculative.  It can be $1000 or $50 and still be used for for the same amount of transactions.  You have to consider velocity.

I'm not sure if I agree Austrians are proponents of bitcoin.  I was reading some bitcoin articles on Mises.org and it seems like the guys who comment who knew what they are talking about were opponents of bitcoin.  I only see more bitcoiners claiming to be Austrian & the Austrians response was that bitcoiners don't understand Austrian Economics

[twiifm]

September was not half-way. Price was about $120 then.

If it now rises to $660, many are tempted to sell.

DON'T.

Obvious pump here.  Do people take this guy seriously?  Obvious that he was a bag that he want to dump so he needs greater fools to drive the price up so he can have profit

I see this game in penny stock land all the time