Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 18982. (Read 26608633 times)

A late good afternoon Bitcoinland.

Still recovering so I slept pretty much all day but I see we haven't moved much.

The price doesn't seem to want to stray far from $416. Coil, coil.

Bitstamp will be adding ETH soon, a source (a credible one) told me yesterday that the implementation is done and they are just testing and tweaking things at the moment... you know what is funny, I posted this on /r/ethtrader daily discussion and I got so many down votes, one went so far telling me I am trading my books this just gives you a hint about people trading position.

http://bitcoin-daytrading.com/pantera-capital-renewed-interest-ethereum/
https://panteracapital.com/about/

Big money isa coming

Bitstamp will be adding ETH soon, a source (a credible one) told me yesterday that the implementation is done and they are just testing and tweaking things at the moment... you know what is funny, I posted this on /r/ethtrader daily discussion and I got so many down votes, one went so far telling me I am trading my books this just gives you a hint about people trading position.

Being able to drop your bank and use an international currency that has a finite amount...I'd say that's quite a bit.

Can I do that with ethereums?

wow, full-on troll mode has been enabled ... haven't seen it this bad in a while, they must be getting desperate.
If they can't break this flag to the down side the big bull gets the green light and its all on ... desperate shorts will get bulldozed.

Signatures or witnesses play an important role and are essential to the tx. They just don;t need to be permanently stored and thus can be pruned off to save space.


Separating out spam and non spam is a subjective task. Segwit seeks to impose higher fees on tx which burden the network by increasing the UTXO set , but those txs aren't necessarily spam(right now many are likely in this attack). Segwit seeks to more accurately assign a cost to tx's by discounting behavior which doesn't burden the network which in turn indirectly allows the network to handle more tx's , have healthier node, be more secure, and discourage spam. Ultimately it is futile to differentiate the difference between spam and non-spam and we really shouldn't care as long as certain behaviors aren't externalizing costs.


No, segwit doesn't attempt to discriminate between spam and non spam, merely allows the network to more accurately consider the externalities in a fee market. miners can still decide to include tx with no fees with segwit. Example -

Many Classic supporters have indicated that Segwit is an "Artificial Limitation" that is imposed by developers instead of the free market of miners and users determining what the fees should be . This may seem correct on the forefront , but only because their version of a free market doesn't consider the costs and externalities by such a system. It is akin to Allowing anyone to pollute the environment without considering the health of the ecosystem as a whole and the true costs of polluting the environment and how the costs are amortized and diffused accross everyone.

not yet...

That is correct. We have just a handful of chips right now and all are used for R&D and profiling including occasional rapid unscheduled disassembly as we look for the limits of the chip . We are expecting the engineering lots in a few weeks time. Luckily our schedule was not affected by the recent Taiwan earthquake.

Our total hash power has increased due to our Gldani immersion cooling datacenter getting to full capacity.

Being able to drop your bank and use an international currency that has a finite amount...I'd say that's quite a bit.

Can I do that with ethereums?

Fixed.
Let's be careful out there, Gentlemen.

A convoluted way to use a debit card and Amazon coupons. I hope BTC has more going for it than that.

or at least separates some of the non-value transmissions and information from the main secure financial segment of the blockchain (which currently has a 1 mb limit).  

After segwit, the current 1mb limit of the blockchain remains the more important portion of the transactions because it secures financial value, and the parts that are separated from the main secure blockchain are less valuable/important because they are not securing value (at least not financial value).  

Accordingly, since segwit is separating value from non-value, does such technical abilities of segwit also cause more abilities to separate spam from non-spam in the financial portion of the blockchain?  

Part of the definition of spam seems to be that those are transactions (transmissions) that are placed on the blockchain that are not paying any fees.. some of them may be valid, but some are not and accordingly, their priority is less important than the financial portion.  If the answer to what I am asking above is in the affirmative, then it seems likely that segwit could potentially go a long way towards removing spam attacks on the secure portion of the blockchain, no?, and free up additional space because seg wit will be separating out non-fee transactions (that may well include spam).  Can you or anyone else explain this better or let me if I am misunderstanding what seg wit could potentially bring to bitcoin?

That could work too.


It doesn't go that way.

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitfury-unveils-fastest-bitcoin-mining-chip-ever-created/

Let's assume the article is generally correct.
Let's assume that in the year 2015 all bitcoins are mined by 28nm bitfury chips
Let's assume that the entire 2015 network made up of 28nm bitfury chips gave us 100 petahash.

Going to 2016:

Let's assume 40% of the miners have upgraded to the 16nm bitfury chips which are 4x faster for the same watts.

Now, when the 40% upgraded their mining operations, their 40 petahash became 160 petahash for the same watts.

The other 60% which did not upgrade, still have their ....60 petahash.

So in this scenario, the "to-be-retired" hardware will represent only 60 out of a total 220 petahash - even though they are 60% of the machines.

To make it more factual: All this hashpower that has been added in the last few months, well... it ain't from crap equipment.

Mar 18 2016   165,496,835,118   4.46%   1,184,672,491 GH/s
Mar 04 2016   158,427,203,767   -3.10%   1,134,066,098 GH/s
Feb 19 2016   163,491,654,909   13.44%   1,170,318,852 GH/s
Feb 07 2016   144,116,447,847   20.06%   1,031,625,717 GH/s
Jan 26 2016   120,033,340,651   5.89%   859,232,121 GH/s
Jan 13 2016   113,354,299,801   9.12%   811,421,684 GH/s
Dec 31 2015   103,880,340,815   11.16%   743,604,444 GH/s
Dec 18 2015   93,448,670,796   18.14%   668,931,642 GH/s
Dec 06 2015   79,102,380,900   8.77%   566,236,898 GH/s
Nov 24 2015   72,722,780,643   10.44%   520,569,941 GH/s
Nov 11 2015   65,848,255,180   5.77%   471,360,171 GH/s
Oct 29 2015   62,253,982,450   2.25%   445,631,364 GH/s

We've gone 3x in hashpower in just 5 months. These two thirds of the current hashpower that have added 800mn GH/s over the 400mn that we already had, are not from obsolete equipment that will go offline post-halving.



The point was that these large mega-dredges don't need separate bulldozers, rock trucks, loaders, excavators, sluice plants etc etc. They just process the dirt on the spot, thus eliminating tremendous fuel costs. They process a lot of yards and do so more economically. And as fuel costs go up, so can the savings increase.

Based on historical prices, I would guess that the floor price of gold (due to demand for jewelry, decoration, and industrial uses) is less than 400 USD/oz.  If that is correct, gold's current market price of ~1200 USD/oz is at least 3-4 times its floor price, due to demand for speculative trading (people buying it expecting to make money when its price rises) and for hedging or value storage (people buying it because they think that other investment options are more likely to lose their value).    

Demand for speculative trading and hedging is dependent on people's feelings and beliefs about the future of the economy, and therefore very fragile -- as shown by the crash of the gold price from the peak of ~1800 to ~1000 USD/oz in 2013--2015.  The overpricing is sustained by intensive marketing by the likes of Max Kaiser, Peter Schiff, ZeroHedge, etc.

Bitcoin's floor price would be due to demand for use as a currency.  The number unknown, but very low; most estimates put it below 10 USD/BTC, and there is no reason to expect it to grow very quickly. (Indeed, if the network's capacity is not lifted, it is unlikely to rise at all.)  So bitcoin is far more overpriced than gold.  As in the case of gold, the overpricing is due to demand for speculative trading and (to a much lesser extent) hedging and value storage; and is sustained by marketing by Antonopoulos, Ver, Andreessen, Silbert, etc..


Scarcity by itself does not make an item valuable; for this one also needs demand that is large compared to the supply.  Tickets for last year's lottery, Soviet Trabant cars, and the hairs on my head are all very scarce, and have a hard cap on future supply; yet are not very valuable.

Moreover, an item is not effectively "scarce" if there is an abundance of adequate substitutes.  Gold has no adequate substitutes for jewelry, and its possible substitutes for certain industrial applications are even more scarce.  In contrast, one can create an infinite number of cryptocurrencies that are equivalent to bitcoin, or even better than it.  

The only advantage of bitcoin over litecoin and other altcoins is its popularity, its "brand recognition".  (It has more hashpower than the altcoins, but that is because it is more profitable to mine, which is because its coins sell for a higher price; which is again because of its popularity.)  Popularity that is not rooted in an fudamental quality is very fragile; it  could be quickly destroyed by bad news, bad management, or by good marketing of the alternatives.


Only fools and criminals will "invest" by hoarding a currency, whether it is dollars or bitcoins.  Thus, comparing gold to dollars as store of value is a red herring -- a misleading argument that sleazy gold peddlers use all he time.  Good investments are things that will have real value due to expected real demand, not conventional value or value inflated by speculative demand; and, even better, that create real wealth.  Stocks, real estate, tools, shops are examples of such wealth-creating things that are automatically protected against inflation.  In many countries there are also bonds, issued by banks or the government, that pay back a value adjusted for inflation plus a small interest.

The term "inflation" can mean two things.  Popularly, it is any drop in the purchasing value of a currency.  Technically, it is a drop that is caused by an increase in the amount of currency in circulation, following the printing of new cash or the creation of more virtual money through easing of bank credits etc..  Bitcoin has a controlled and ultimately finite amount of the latter, so technically its inflation will decrease and eventually end.  In the popular sense, however, bitcoin's inflation  neither bounded nor temporary. The drop from ~1200 USD/BTC on 2013-11-28 to ~220 in Jan/2015 (a loss of 80% of purchasing power) was not due to the issuance of new coins.

Bigger pig farm = better performance.

>the equipment that ultimately shuts down represents a smaller hashrate.
Doesn't follow at all. Let's say the majority of mining gear today is mining 1 BTC @ cost of .7 BTC.
When teh Halvening cometh, that majority will [likely] shut down*

Again, what is different? The gold miner without a staked claim (exclusive rights to the spot he mines), is subject to poor godless savages swarming in & mining the shit out of his spot. That is the case for Bitcoin -- everyone is competing for the same *cough* "digital gold"

This attack isn't possible with the way segwit is constructed and comes from a lack of understanding . If the witness root hash doesn't match what is in the coinbase the block will be rejected by the node. At no point will each individual tx be requesting witness data .

Additionally , If we are going to speak more broadly about pros and cons segwit remove all malleability attacks which is huge.

Segnet 4 rolled out (getting closer to segwit final RC), spin up a node and test away--

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-March/012595.html

The exciting thing is it now supports LN app deployment and testing .