Topic: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) - page 43. (Read 907212 times)

It would be fruitless because Bitcoin could just fork off to evade. If Bitcoin ultimately needs to be private by default, it will become that way (and if it can't hard fork that in, it can spin off an anonycoin...but the market won't accept this prematurely).

This is a best TA thread,
rpietila ty

The name of the thread since inception has been rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread where the smiley in the end is very relevant. It was founded after the Adam's Wall Observer occasionally turned into pages after pages of hatespeech towards me. I also remember forecasting $400 when it was unthinkable in early 2014 and promised to only come back in the thread after the prediction materialized, and needed to have another thread to continue discussion meanwhile.

So yes, this one is a lounge where Bitcoin TA is allowed but at the same time it is both an imitation and a parody of the "original" thread.

Rpietila, this topic is being sold as the 'Quality TA Thread', yet for days on end I encountered almost no TA at all . Are you  guys planning to turn this into a Wall Observer V2, yet with some quasi-philosophical mumblings as a distinctive feature? This topic is one of the last strongworks of mostly reasonable people, which makes me rather sad to see so little TA.

I think I calculated that there will never be even 1 million people with 1 whole bitcoin (unless the bitcoins forcibly are collected and redistributed to achieve this exact distribution, which of course theoretically is possible).

So yeah, if you go for the long term, buying 30 bitcoins makes much sense, you can sell one here and there and still make sure that you own the precious one in the end, making you in the 1 million jetset.

Good advice. I will stick to my original plan and keep doing what I am doing.

Yup. It's a beast of a decision but your present comfort zone is far more important than a theoretical future.

30 BTC puts you far ahead of most people posting here already. If it does seep across the world there'll likely never be more than 5-6 million people who can own more, probably considerably less when lost/Satoshi/whale coins are taken into account. That's a fine place to be.

I could get to 100 coins myself but I'm not doing it because that might compromise future possibilities if it does go totally wrong. I figured out what I was comfortable with and stuck to it even though the urge is strong to go deeper. You gotta resist it.

Thanks for that. I haven't only asked Mr Pietila. In the past I have listened to many opinions.

It's definitely a tricky one!

No one can answer this and you shouldn't be listening to a single person who claims that they can tell you how this is going to pan out.



It looks like you've answered your own question right there.

The only thing to do is put in an amount that you feel comfortable with right now if it was set on fire. It's an oldie but a goldie but it sure beats spending every second of the next few years willing something to go up so it can 'save' you.

Forces beyond the control of almost everyone here will decide where it ends up. Hitch a ride by all means but be sure you can leave it without being consumed with regret.

If it becomes a global fixture 30 BTC will be a ludicrous amount to own. If it goes flying down the toilet most people can recover that type of money within a few months.

It's always wonderful to have more. It's a warmer feeling to know life will go on regardless of what direction it goes in.

I'm not saying that Monero will be left unregulated when Bitcoin is being regulated with black- and or whitelisting. It's even possible that Monero will be illegal in some countries. Although, this would make it even more stealth (people would ony use it with I2P f.e.)

The public ledger makes it possible that miners comply with the rules. In Monero, you can't see what you are processing. At least you have "plausible deniability". Government would only have the choice between banning monero completely, or allowing it (with a possible requirement to share your viewkey if they ask; but there is still plausible deniability about how much monero accounts you own )


No, that is possible. But (some) pools will probably comply because a lot of miners will just want to mine at a pool that complies.
(these miners are not willing to take the risk of comitting a criminal offence while they are just in it for the mining profit, not caring about fungibility)

They don't have to uncover the identity of all miners, merely a few of the biggest - and they can't hide.  It might be what breaks up the big mines/pools in future, who knows. Of course that opens the door to TPTB creating and controlling their own large farms to force their agenda.  Better to be private from the start.

In a scenario where miners are banned from processing "many to many" transactions, what happens to anonycoin miners? Are you saying there is something about Bitcoin miners that makes them unable to anonymize themselves? (If so, who is Satoshi? )

read my post above, what if "many to many" transactions are banned by the miners because of "potential money laundering"

Actually it's important to note that BTC are fundamentally fungible, in that UTXO are indistinguishable, even in principle, once they are part of a many-to-many transaction. It's just that it's not super-convenient to do that with Bitcoin in a systematic way (for now; it could be argued that it will never be feasible enough to avoid chainalysis, but I haven't seen such an argument*).

*And if we go down the conjectural road this slingshots back to the "anonymity coins" because how sure can you really be of their complete anonymity? It remains up in the air whether there is any advantage until we experience an attack by an entity wanting to de-anonymize people who are actually using each coin's anonymity options to their fullest.

The problem with BTC transparency:
Basically it comes down to 2 possible scenario's: blacklisting and whitelisting

Government could on one hand through “whitelisting” obligate bitcoin users  to identify themselves when they purchase bitcoins (this is already happening) and ask them to whom they are transferring these bitcoins (the American website Coinbase is already asking this for some transactions). In the future this could lead to a situation in which only “identified” bitcoins would be spendable at regulated payment processors (bitpay?). As a result, your anonymous bitcoins would only be spendable if you match them to your identity through a regulated authority.

A more aggressive approach is “blacklisting”. This is a system whereby the government obligates the big mining pools (which are verifying and recording transactions in the blockchain) to not sustain certain transactions. As a result, coinjoin-transactions and transactions coming from mixers could be blacklisted whereby it would be very difficult to still perform these kind of transactions. If only a few miners process these kind of transactions, they would at least be very slow. But if the regulated pools decide to not accept blocks with mixed transactions in them, you can’t even use anonymized bitcoins! Also, other (private) miners could be incentivized to enforce the regulation, even if they are not known to the government:
if it is illigal to build on a block with a "blacklisted transaction" and if some big pools would comply, it doesn't really make sense to built on this illigal chain... If you don't comply, this big pool will not build on your chain and you will loose your reward!
edit: I expect a lot of pools to comply, because the individual miners in a pool which does not comply with blacklisting, could be considered doing "money laundering" because part of the reward they receive comes from the transaction fees!

In essence this could lead to three kinds of bitcoins:
-White bitcoins: bitcoins that satisfy the obligation of identification.
-Grey bitcoins: bitcoins that are not yet identified, but which are not actively anonymized.
-Black bitcoins: bitcoins that are banned by miners.

The consequence? Bitcoin will not be fungible anymore: you can’t just use a grey or black bitcoin to buy something from a webshop. If the government is able to discover that you possess black bitcoins or process blacklisted type transactions, you could even be seen as a someone committing a criminal offence.

Rpietila, do you think it's possible for people getting in to Bitcoin now to make big profits in the future ... Or should I say have great purchasing power using btc in let's say 5-10 years time?

I know that thousands of btc is not an option anymore and even owning 100 bitcoins for most is near on impossible so for the average family man (ie, me) what do you feel would be a good amount to hold?

My personal goal is to reach 30 btc before it reaches over the $300 mark which I am aware could happen in a blink of an eye as could $150.

I only invest what I can afford to lose and I am lucky as I am in a fairly decent position to be able to do this.


I must also add that I am sure there is a number of btc most people don't want to hold over just yet. Let's say I have 5 btc, that's roughly $1200. I wouldn't be too bothered losing that as it wouldn't affect me too much.
If I had 100btc would I be brave enough to keep holding it? I mean that's about $24k and I'd be pretty upset if Bitcoin failed and I lost the lot!


There are some brave people here but I do believe very much in high risk could bring high reward! Not many get rich playing Mr safe.

I'm a Bitcoin-ledger "maximalist," but not a Bitcoin-protocol maximalist

Aren't you worried about your favored altcoins being spun off? You don't need to be able to hard fork ring sigs into Bitcoin-the-protocol, only spin off the feature into Bitcoin-the-ledger.

After all, if one accepts the premise that every time a better protocol comes along we should start a bran new ledger, there can be no long-term investment value in any coin, since it is bound to be replaced by something better in a few years.

This leads to the idea that we should hop around collecting little chunks of all the "promising" altcoins, but under this Pascal's Wager argument it is very hard to determine what is really promising, and there are eventually an intractable number of such wagers to have to both evaluate and invest small amounts into (making the total a big amount).

In contrast with this what seems to me rather tortured logic, we have the simplicity and elegance of spin offs. Change the protocol without changing the ledger. Even keep many protocols at the same time, each with their own Bitcoin-ledger where if you own 1% of all BTC you always by default own 1% of each of the other coins. Instead of the onus being on the Bitcoin investor to ferret out all the possible good altcoins, the investor is an investor in everything by default, and only would investigate the newcomer-protocols for the purpose of selling off the obviously un-promising ones for extra money.

In addition to all this, to discard the ledger upon protocol upgrade also seems to ignore the economic importance of the ledger.

As a rare expression of moderator activity in the thread, please keep Monero-specific discussion contained, because there are a host of threads in the altcoin section dedicated for that matter.

Monero cannot be tracked to any particular transaction; each is equal and indistinguishable from the others.  Whereas  bitcoin is minutely identifiable  and traceable,  leading to 'blacklisting' which is the reverse of fungible.

Can someone briefly explain it like I'm 5 how Monero solves fungibility? 
 
I keep reading wheat and chessboard squares explanations that confuse me. 
 
Are you saying there's not a satoshi unit currently for Monero?  How does that work again?