Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 20719. (Read 26610315 times)

Do you rely on Western Union for every transaction (your morning coffee, etc., etc.)?

You must be unfamiliar with responsive web design, another exciting development that only emerged in the last 10 years or so.  Those "mini-profiles" appear where resolution allows to display post content at full width and there's room left for other things.  If you're viewing that site from a phone, the profiles (or the sidebar) don't appear.  It's a true joy to use compared to 1990s design of this site.  But maybe you don't own a smartphone or a tablet, in which case, it's irrelevant to you.

And don't get me started on the human eye-brain.  Since I actually work in publishing, I get to work with researchers who study the very minutia of people's reading habits on the web, such as eye and neck strain and eyeball tracking.  There IS such a thing as optimal width for reading text, and most websites that use industry-standard column dimensions already take that into account when implementing sidebars.  

If you have two meters of horizontal space available, that doesn't mean you should use that whole width to spread your paragraph over just two lines of text.  There is a balance between forcing the reader's eyeballs and neck to move left and right versus moving to the next line, and at some point, the latter is less work and causes less strain and fatigue.  We have a couple of millennia of publishing behind us, so this isn't exactly uncharted territory.

This is terribly incorrect.  Sidebars get tons of usage, especially when they display links to other content (in the case of a forum it can be recent posts or newest threads).  

Hiding that information within a drop-down menu would be just about as illogical as it gets and a disservice to the readers, who would be forced to scroll all the way up, hover over a drop down, select the correct link, and click on it.

I believe they are working on the yellow links, which other users have commented on.  But the issue is kind of moot because the ad styler allows each user to have his own color palette.  

Again, compared to Bitcontalk, the new Bitcoin forum is about 2 light centuries ahead, both in design, the way feedback from users is collected and paid attention to, and the way the forum is run overall (I'm not even talking about collecting a million dollars in user donations and spending half of it on a site redesign that somehow evaporated along the way).  I am posting this from a smartphone and am afraid of going blind by the end of this post.

And of course, all the pretty design in the world will not make up for quality content, which this site has been sorely lacking since the degenerates have taken over in the past few months.

The Greek 'crisis' was only delayed once more. What's now imminent is infinitely bigger. And considering that there are no safe places left for who has not the means for pro asset protection, and that no one can go anywhere with significant amount of precious metals given the ubiquitous metal detectors, not to speak about the incoming war on cash, and the last bailin regulations in europe (where depositors became bank savers of last instance), I see a nice expanding market niche for BTC.

And if it takes 20 bucks for a tx, so be it. How much does Western Union or banks take for international wires with no privacy at all and questionable safety?

Passive-aggressive, to boot
@adam, why the preoccupation with the FED?  Aren't you Canadian?

if a subtle change is deemed "good for bitcoin" by everyone, then it is implemented and we are all happy things are moving along. price rises.

everyone agreed, what's the problem?

now explain to me why the FED doesn't just print 4 billion dollars a month and use that money to prop up the US stock market?
edit: oh wait ay they are a private centrally controlled entity and CAN do that if they so choose

Wouldn't it be vastly preferable if the good professor were to formalize his thoughts and publish them in a scientific journal, where his ideas could be subjected to all due academic rigor by his peers?

Dr. Stolfi is an academic who, according to his signature, at least, has an 'academic interest in Bitcoin' - and there now exists an academic journal created precisely for such academics.

I, for one, would much rather see Dr. Stolfi's support his ideas re: Bitcoin in a more formal atmosphere than to read yet another eight-paragraph opinion from yet another opinionated poster on this thread, wouldn't you?

I think we should all encourage Jorge to publish.  I would be interested to see if he actually has ideas with academic merit or not.

Coin
Explanation

Then the price should be zero right now, because the tot 4 Chinese miners can do a coup (e.g. by imposition of the Chinese government). 

Why is it not zero? Because bitcoiners have rationalized that problem away, claiming that it is the "economic majority" that matters and that everybody would commit financial seppuku if the miners (rather than the Core devs) tried to change the protocol in any way, therefore the miners will never do it.

Neither of those claims is grounded in evidence or common sense.  What is more likely is that a subtle change in protocol imposed by the miners (such as a postponement of the next halving, without changing the 21 M cap) would be rationalized as "harmless" or even "good for bitcoin"; and the "economic majority" would just submit to it.  (BIP100 is going that way: it says that the Core devs should "decide" the blocksize issue by handing over the decision to the miners. No wonder that the miners like it...)


Did it? When was that?  How big was the crash?

I recall that there was much affliction among the people in the know, but BitFury promptly removed themselves from GHash.io and the problem was quickly forgotten.

Can you not imagine a scenario in which maximizing [long term] BTC value is not in the best interest of the miners?
*need a hint?

Thats right, that is the beauty of Bitcoin, they wouldnt dare.

Or else they loose money.

can you explain to me the reason why miners would form a cartel to destroy bitcoins value?

It's like the idea that the manufacturer of the ship would go against the design and put holes all over the ship and expecting the buyer to buy it happily.

Wrong, in the attempt of a miner/pool coup, the coin would just drop to 0 as trust in the (trustless) system would be seriously hampered.

May I remind you how BTC's price reacted when Ghash.io had 50% of the network? It crashed.

Hence, this is what the decentralized consensus mechanism implies: no one, from the devs to the nodes and miners (businesses being irrelevant) shall succeed going rogue or ultimately the users dump it all.

Looking at the 1d charts, I see a bubble from ~230 to ~290 that started when many bitcoiners believed that the Greek would rush to bitcoin as a way to escape devaluation /  confiscation / currency controls / etc.  That bubble neatly and completely deflated, bringing the price back to ~230, when the crisis got resolved and it became clear that the Greek wanted euros, not bitcoins.

I bet that very few bitcoiners -- probably less than 50'000 -- are aware of the block size war, and even fewer understand the issue and/or see it as a risk factor for the price of bitcoin.  I bet that the proportion is even smaller among the day traders who set the price.  (How many of the gold fund speculators are aware of the state of the gold mining and recovery industries?)

EURO

That is the conventional argument that is used to dismiss that problem.  It is like the Captain "defeating" a sailor''s mutiny by taking off in a small lifeboat and declaring it to be "the real ship"...

The Core developers would have to convince all bitcoin users to get into that small boat with them and discard the coins that they have on the carte's branch of the chain. Good luck on that...

I enjoyed your take on the "religious schism" between Core and XT playing out in fast motion...the inquisition...the banishing of the heretics...etc etc.  What I would love to see--although it would be difficult and perhaps infeasible at this point in time--is a scholarly article addressing the politics of Bitcoin governance.  How do we come to consensus?  What does "consensus" really mean in the context of Bitcoin?

The "user mini-profiles" on the left-hand column force every response to consume ~2 inches of screen space, even if it is just one line long.


Yes, it seems that that Swiss school had quite an impact on the web.  

As I wrote, most sidebars out there are read and used by readers only once every solar eclipse.  Displaying that information all the time is distracting and inefficient.  Most sidebars could be made into pull-down menus or separate pages, freeing screen estate for the information that readers are actually looking for.  The list of  "other languages" in Wikipedia is a good example.


You are right about animated gifs, my mistake (There is an "online now" green dot on the avatars that does some silly anmation when the mouse wanders over it; but that is tolerable.)

As for grey on grey, I was being too terse.  The general problem is using low-contrast font-background pairs, like white on yellow or gray on tan; there are several examples of that on that forum.  

The human eyebrain uses only the brigtness ("black and white") color channel to recognize outlines of things; it ignores hue and saturation.  So, when choosing fg/bg colors for text, one must be aware of their brightness.  

Besides the first 16 digits of Pi and the name of that New Zealand town, people should also memorize this table:

White 1.0
Yellow 0.9
Cyan 0.7
Green 0.6
Magenta 0.4
Red 0.3
Blue 0.1
Black 0.0

The brightness of other colors is complicated a bit because of a thing called "display gamma", but, to a very rough approximation, mixing or adding colors has the same effect on their brightness.

When choosing a text fg/bg combination, one should try to maximize the difference between their brightnesses.  (Relative difference is more important than absolute, but reflection of ambient light on the screen raises all values so that absolute matters too.)  

From that table one can see why blue/black is a terrible choice, and white/yellow is worse still.   Even green/white is bad.  Good choices are black/white, blue/white, blue/yellow, black/yellow, etc..  Red/white and magenta/white are still OK. If other colors are to be used, one should mix enough white or black to ensure a large brigtness contrast.

Some combinations (like red text on the right shade of dark green background) can be totally unreadable, even though the colors are quite distinct.  Looking at such text is a bizarre experience: you can tell that there is text written there, but you cannot make out a single letter.

(You may notice that eye clinics have a fondness for blue lighted displays.  Besides blue/black being harder to read, blue is also the color channel that gets the least "localized" by the brain; that makes such signs look maximally blurry.)

Coin
Explanation