Topic: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) - page 252. (Read 907227 times)

I think the last point is the most important, especially for average people but also for rich investors.

The difficulty of acquiring bitcoin will probably stay roughly proportional to its desirability.  If everyone wants bitcoin, the reasons they want it are exactly the reasons the government and banks don't want you to have it.

At bitcoin's inception, there were already barriers to entry that any competing currency would face.  But now we are seeing bitcoin-specific (or at least, cryptocurrency-specific) barriers.  If you ask me, that's a dead giveaway that you should suck it up and do what it takes to get past those barriers.  Whoever gets over those barriers first will be rewarded the most.

This is also the reason that these nutcase theories that bitcoin was invented by government to track people, is just that, a nutcase conspiracy theory.  The government is cracking down on exchanges and arresting people like Charlie Shrem, that is not the behavior of someone who wants it to be widely adopted.  They want to limit it.  They don't want you to have it because it hurts them and benefits you.

Now bring that back to quality TA please.  My breath is bated.

1. The price of electricity would rise long before we reached 100GW, thus no problem. Price always solves the problem.

2. That article assumes the genre and capital cost of the mining equipment is irrelevant. Thus with cpu-only mining, this problem will be much improved, as the both the home electricity cost per KWH and the cost of the equipment per Watt consumed are higher than for Bitcoin's specialized ASIC mining. For example, Butterfly lab's shipping 10GH/s consumes 50W and costs $349. The Intel i7 costs $329 and consumes 87W, but to build an entire system costs about double that. Also Intel has just begun focusing on power consumption reduction so this will improve at a faster rate than ASICs will.


Controlling or compensating for the morals of others is a waste of time. Masses are supposed to lose on speculation, otherwise valuation wouldn't ever converge and the masses would starve to death.

Moralists accomplish exactly the opposite of their intended result.

If you really want to help the masses, go produce some technological innovation. That is the ONLY thing that sticks.

(if you can't figure out the logic in between the lines, ask)

I suggested randomization precisely to avoid goal-seeking.


Exactly what I seek to avoid.  Fixed crossings are fine if you understand the limitations and are able to consistently maintain a suitable time-scale for all trading activity.  Whether  you would be profitable in a fixed EMA trading strategy in this particular instance, I cannot say, but it seems likely.  One can easily calibrate that likelihood empirically.  The scale of the opportunity costs implied by a strategy sufficiently disciplined to optimize that particular trade is quite vast, however.  The trading public will be bimodally distributed:  A small cohort will benefit more by paying relatively little heed to that weekly signal, without disregarding it; a much larger cohort will not be able to exercise the discipline to profit by it; the residual population is relatively smaller.


It is a blunt tool, and ineptly used.  Hence my sadness.  Sharp tools, aptly used generally cheer me up.


I don't dismiss the relationship between ATH and the market - after all, it is only lows which create long opportunities.  I see little advantage in moaning about it.  Indeed, I have mostly foresworn shorting, not because it is unprofitable -- anything but!  Rather, because I cannot bear to profit from the criminal acts of my enemies.  I may still short a strong market, but only if there is no DDOS or other, more directly observable, massive embezzlement in progress.  Sadly this means that most of my historical short gains will no longer be available, and any future shorts will be taken at much higher risk.  If the market is sufficiently mature, I may short the next bear from top to bottom, because then it would not correlate with the designs of criminal actors, or contribute materially to their enrichment.

Trading gets more complicated when you stop ignoring the moral elements.

This is nirwana, the non-world.

You ask why I brought causality? As soon as you ask 'why?', you want to know the cause of the effect.
And I answer: I brought causality because the world is either deterministic (causal) or it is probabilistic (noncausal).
In my opinion (as well as Diodorus, Spinoza, Hume, Schopenhauer et al.) the world is fully deterministic. The MWI QM interpretation is deterministic as well.

There are millionnaires and millionnaires. Someone with a net worth of USD 5 million is something very different than someone with a net worth of 500 million.
Whatever the channel, someone looking to invest say 10 millions would have difficulties to do it using something else than exchanges. I think there should be more websites for private deals (limits on localbitcoins are a joke, it takes too many time consuming transactions to trade  amounts larger than 5-10k) Why to affect the price on exchanges when a transaction can be done directly ? I think the crash of GOX is putting lots of transactions off-exchanges which could explain lower volumes on exchanges. That would mean higher demand would take more time to impact the prices that are always based on exchanges.

I also have difficulties to understand why the people controlling very large sums of fiat are not converting at least 0.5 to 1% to BTC.

We also have to remember that since quite recently, lots of investment money is going to angel investment rather than bitcoin itself directly. Big investors see the possibility of getting higher returns than bitcoin in launching a successful bitcoin service. This was not the case in the first years where all money went to bitcoin only. Arguably, this is money that is invested in the network but it is not immediately creating higher bids for the BTC itself while increasing the NPV of BTC nonetheless.

Still it does not explain why we don't see the big numbers pouring into BTC yet.

free energy is not a myth: it's been proven and it works however as long as we are tied to petrodollar ecosystem to feed fed's debt binge tesla will be ridiculed till then...

imho, in the future, mining will stand as the way to get free energy: everybody that mine will be able to at least pay its overall energy bills with the minted bitcoins, and thats quite a fair deal

Part of that can be found from saving other energy resources. Mining equipment can also be used as heating equipment for the winter where the energy expended is simultaneously giving heat to a certain space. Thus the money, in this scenario, can be found from the money that were saved in burning gas, diesel etc.

Thing is, mining must then rotate around the globe as the mining-heater boxes are plugged in alternate sequence between the two hemispheres.

It is a way that can actually provide free heat for the masses, as they work to secure the network.

Good question.

I have seen presentations on internet power consumption and its pretty frightening.
All the spam, porn and twitter-echos add up to the same daily power usage as Germany or similar (IRCC the internet would be the sixth largest 'national' consumer if you classed it as a country).

But most here are strident climate change deniers, so it becomes a moot point.

Keep burning that coal boys*

*This message was brought to you by the Australian Department for Trade and Energy

Not really, this sort of marketplace mechanism has also been used to control pollution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

A few are buying without a doubt and probably doing so off exchanges. It's just that those few are probably a drop in the ocean..

That sounds like something out of a sci fi novel

i think millionnaires are buying bitcoin. they just do so by other channels than public exchanges and/or if they deal with the latest, they probably paid someone to sneak in at a greater profit, which could then explain such volatility: with weak hands actually selling their coins to huge whales/funds/banks/greedymillionaires without noticing it.

I suppose that a financial treaty between a sufficient number of developed countries could establish a mining pool cartel. The cartel would consist of a majority of the current mining pool incumbents. Cryptographic virtual medallions would be one-time generated and sold to the cartel. Each such virtual medallion would give the bearer the legal right to consume a certain amount of electric power for the purpose of mining bitcoin. The virtual medallions would be treated as property and could be sold. Furthermore, they could be somehow combined and divided by some mathematical mechanism.

The treaty would specify the total amount of power that could be spent worldwide for Bitcoin mining. The free market would allow the exchange of virtual medallions from one mining pool to another. I think that this could be done without forking the blockchain, provided that another shared database contains the cryptographic proof that a coinbase block was signed by a certain virtual medallion.

There are likely loose ends and various faults with this scheme, but the main idea is similar to how New York City controls the number and profitability of its taxi cabs. Because a small number of mining pools effectively control bitcoin, I believe they could reject as invalid any new blocks created outside of this medallion process.

I think the main reason the big millionaires aren't buying bitcoins:

- Not what they usually buy. They listen to people like Buffet and so they invest in stocks and bonds. Products out of their comfort zone aren't even considered.
- They listen to financial advisors and no advisor is going to be recommending bitcoin today.
- They don't know nearly enough about it to even consider buying it.
- They think it's some kind of geek fad that will never get big.
- Even if they are some what interested they have no idea how to buy it, at least not in the quantities that would mater for them.

This is what baffles me.  Waiting makes no logical sense at all.  Let's say I'm a big shot with $500 million to invest.  I can take 0.1% of that and buy BTC1000.  If bitcoin gets huge ($100k each), then I've increased my assets to $600 million (significant gain), and risked basically nothing.  And the reason I don't do this is, ostensibly, because it's small potatoes?  It makes no sense.  If their reason was they believe that bitcoin will go to zero at odds of 99.5% or greater, ok, that at least makes logical sense.  But I don't think any of them believe it will go to zero with that much certainty.

I really dont see the logic. I could pay $100k for a bitcoin today and tomorrow regardless of the mining network.

If there's not enough power, there's not enough power..... but it will still be worth while to mine if you can. machines may become more efficient, and the cost of electricity may rise to make the market more competitive.

I didn't quote your post, because I couldn't find it. I was operating on memory. And I am in a rush to go eat.


Waste of time for most wealthy in their estimation. And you are not talking to them here. You need to find a different forum to reach them.


This is the kind of comment from you that drives me crazy.

I emphatically disagree with that. It is like snake oil salesmen talk.

I will explain when I get back from eating.