Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 818. (Read 2032266 times)

shucks, my laptop with my charting program went dead.

looks like the gold reversal DOWN is well underway.  from memory, both GDX and GDXJ, have broken below their consolidation points.  that's not good.  in retrospect, they were leading.

also, my prediction of a Dow Theory non-confirmation is looking good and is firmly on the table and in play as a major hint that we may be entering a period of severe volatility and perhaps recession as a bear cycle may be settling in.  we'll see how the next few days behave.

not looking good for btc charts... LTC doesn't want to hit target and is sending BTC lower... we might get a chance to buy some really cheap BTC.

i also don't think this can be arbed away.  it's reasonable to think scBTC would start off lower than BTC from being new and less secured with MM.  if the whale can force this to flip with the price of scBTC rising faster than BTC at the very least this will cause volatility.  some BTC holders and especially the speculators may be convinced the SC has a chance to take over and will follow encouraged by the risk free put.  miners may then switch to the SC too and start MM BTC instead.  yes, arb in the middle of a big picture transition can keep prices relatively equal.  but if a true transition is really happening to the SC becoming dominant, the BTC price should start to drop below that of scBTC as realization sets in that BTC is going to lose and BTC itself becomes the 60% MM'd chain with the SC as the mainchain.

so in essence, last out the door will lose.

wow.

Pigs are flying, Greenspan said Gold is a safe place to store wealth.

Former Fed Chief Greenspan Worried About Future of Monetary Policy
Fed Chief From 1987 to 2006 Says Fed’s Bond-Buying Program Fell Short of its Goals
http://online.wsj.com/articles/former-fed-chief-greenspan-worried-about-future-of-monetary-policy-1414597627
(Google the title to get a link outside the pay wall)

you touched on something i'm very worried with SC's the other day:  a speculative attack.

assuming a SC failure is a long tail unlikely event as from a bug, the 2 way peg and scBTC is acting like a "risk free put".  therefore a whale could pump large amts of BTC thru the peg driving up the #scBTC and eventually its price with a reasonable confidence that he won't be hurt as he could always reverse back into BTC. the problem is other BTC holders might be forced to follow for fear of the SC taking over as the mainchain and the merge mining % flipping. in other words, MM for Namecoin is about 70% that of Bitcoin currently.  assuming a SC is initially MM'd, say at 60%, if a superior SC can flip this around by making Bitcoin 60% MM'd with the SC becoming the main chain, those left behind in BTC will lose value or may lose everything.  the problem is that BTC holders may not be able to differentiate an unfolding superior SC from that of a Sidescam.

i see a very high likelihood of this attack that at the very least will cause volatility in the entire ecosystem. and that would be bad for the BTC and the scBTC price.

trendline well intact:

If a SC is open source and the bridge is secure, then what's the problem?

Yes, to be sure many sidechains will be scams.  And highly regarded and trustworthy 'overlords' lending credibility to the basic idea of sidechains will be very welcome to those intending to use the mechanism for scammery.

It needs to be made very clear to users that just because something leverages the sidechains principles (or claims to) this is no reason to drop due-diligence and common sense.  Use only sidechains which can be thoroughly analyzed and have a theoretical basis in the principle that the sidechains manager can at the very worst lose value...NOT take value.

if the $DJI pauses today, which it looks like it well, you'd better look the hell out tomorrow.

not that i'm aware of.

but he admits that our current system has favored the 0.1% elite with assets due to the political influence they wield and that politicians favor creditors over savers.  he validates Piketty's thesis.  he also believes we haven't recovered from 2008 and wealth disparity has increased but offers no solutions except more of the same.

Is there a transcript or synopsis? I really can't listen to economists.

Krugman just validated all the pessimisms you've ever had over the last 5yrs:

http://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts/masters-in-business/

I, for one, welcome our new ScamChain overlords.

Bitcoin competitors don’t eat away at Bitcoin dominance, the alts that innovate - do something Bitcoin isn’t capable of doing, - they add to the ecosystem, the others that just come and go in a flash, help distribute bitcoins, they represent growth in the network  as scam coins get sold for bitcoins.

AltCoins as part of the coin market cap are not correlated with the overall success of Bitcoin’s growth in market cap, they are just a High-Beta reflection of market sentiment and innovation opportunity in the Bitcoin space.

SC as AltCoins would not have the same impact, their innovation potential is either limited to that of PoS or Bitcoin’s existing PoW as a merge mined coin.  Growth with trust free SC AltCoins is growth alongside Bitcoin that doesn’t reflect back market value to the miners and the mining equilibrium that has powered Bitcoins growth in mining and value.

In practice SC are a new investment opportunity for those who want to leverage bitcoins foothold in success. SC Alts are likely to attract wealth that goes into the SC coin that doesn’t go into Bitcoin but uses the existing wealth invested in Bitcoin as a hedge.  

Corrected above. I remembered that ratio was historically high but completely failed on the number.

I miss the banter about gold...

BTW a good sidechain thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/pegged-sidechains-pdf-whitepaper-831527 

LTC actually peaked around 1 billion marketcap -> http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/litecoin/#charts. Agree with the rest of your statement. BTC-E alts' ratio also peaked around november.

Of course not, that is historical fact, although for a short time I think it was somewhat higher. LTC peaked at about $200m, and BTC at about $12b, so that's around 16%, or perhaps 20% for alts in total] $1b, and BTC at about $12b, so that's around 8%, or perhaps 12-15% for alts in total. (I'm not sure of the exact total during that peak, so this is a guess.)

What I'm saying is that if you look at the value fluctuations within that range, the correlation is not consistent with the theory that growing alts gravely threaten Bitcoin. It is not statistically insignificant either, it is highly significant. But it is possible, as I mentioned, that this observation only holds within the historical range and would break down at some higher range. I see no evidence for it, but I can't rule it out.

If I had to guess I'd say it is possible the Crypto Apocalypse theory only holds if Bitcoin were itself to reach a much higher valuation first. Given that all crypto is currently embryonic, factors contributing to the overall success dominate, and benefit all viable cryptos (including Bitcoin) as potential participants in that overall success. This includes even direct competing alts showing Bitcoin how to do things better, or pushing it to do so. To tie this into the current conversation, to the extent that side chains are a reaction to alts, and side chains make Bitcoin better, than alts have helped Bitcoin!


I don't dismiss the theory at all, I merely question it.

I think it is possible for a better crypto to dethrone Bitcoin without invalidating the entire concept, just as Bitcoin dethroned previous failed or aborted attempts at cryptocurrency and far surpassed their success. If something far surpasses Bitcoin's success, then Bitcoin will turn out to be just as irrelevant as those earlier efforts, except that all are relevant as stepping stones that lead to the next. Given that roughly a factor of at least 1000 separates Bitcoin from fiat, there is a lot of room at the top.

Quite possibly none will ever exist, or doesn't exist now, so this is not intended as an endorsement of any current or even foreseen alt. I just acknowledge the possibility and question the theory that anything challenging or surpassing Bitcoin invalidates the entire concept. In fact it could very well take the concept to a far greater level of success, just as Bitcoin did.

I'm talking whole pie. Crypto gets bigger or smaller as a whole; fraction of ecosystem collectively occupied by alts roughly stays the same.




Same point as above. Alt portion of pie stays the same. I don't really care how many there are. If there were fewer alts than before, I wouldn't really be able to say "alts compete with other alts", and maybe that's mostly what you're taking issue with. That's fine. I draw that conclusion from the bigger picture I'm seeing to date, and it's by no means a statistically significant sample set.



Again...in aggregate. Again, are you contesting that the alt-marketshare as a whole has not been a fairly consistent 5-10% of bitcoin's mcap over the past few years?



I agree that alts serve as incubators for new ideas, and further, that there *are* niches for them which bitcoin will likely never serve. Monero is an obvious example.

But if you're not seeing the theoretical threat to crypto-scarcity (somehow trying to refute the idea of the threat with scant statistically insignificant data?), that's just odd. FWIW, I don't think alts will *actually* dethrone bitcoin and trigger the crypto apocalypse you reference, just that I think it's rational to consider that the scarcity argument for bitcoin/crypto would indeed be threatened if alts gained too much ground (and, no, I don't have a magic threshold number in mind). I really don't see how you can dismiss the theory, unless, again, you're drawing linear conclusions from small amounts of data.