Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 26145. (Read 26710372 times)

Absolutely. As Monty Python says, now you see the violence inherent in the system.




Lots of assumptions there, not least that society needs to be managed and isn't a spontaneous system arising from the natural actions between individuals. There are several suggestions of how to do it better with varying degrees of agreement with each other. I wouldn't hope that you would ever be in total agreement with me, just that you might recognize the problems with the system as it is.

So anyway, I'm observing a wall at 517...

Heh heh.  But I did not dismiss it as bullshit, quite the opposite.  It main points are that businesses adopting bitcoin through Bitpay/Coinbase is not real adoption, and that Bitpay/Coinbase encourage sale of old bitcoins more than adoption by non-users.  These observations are fairly trivial an have been made here by several bitcoiners, not just by me.


I discussed that topic on reddit a couple of months ago:
Danish political party, Liberal Alliance, will be the first party to use the blockchain for voting internally!

Basically, the main problem of any totally-digital e-voting system is that at some point the voter's choice is stored only inside some piece of equipment, and there is no effective way to make sure that said equipment will not change the vote.   One may think of issuing a receipt that allows the voter to check whether his vote was counted, but there seems to be no practical way of (a) preventing the misuse of that receipt to coerce the voter, and (b) preventing the voter from falsely claiming that his vote was miscounted.

By the way, point (a) rules out voting-from-home right away, no matter how sophisticated the counting system.  Voting must be done in a special location, that is carefully designed and monitored to ensure that no one can see the voter's choice, not even if he wants to reveal it.   EDIT: For the same reason,  the voter must not be allowed to use his own equipment when voting. The equipment must be shared by many voters and must be such that it cannot know who is voting, and cannot leak any information other than the total,  not even the order in which votes were cast.

There may be fairly complicated ways of doing that [ secure paperless e-voting ] using cruptography.   If they can be proven to work, that would be great news.  However, I doubt that they will be better in practice than the proven medium-tech solution: besides the electronic counting, ensure a paper record of the vote, that the voter can check and the system cannot change afterwards; store that in a conventional ballot box; and count the paper ballots at the voting place, manually, at the end of voting day.  That is a solution that everybody understands and anyone can help to implement.  Cannot get more decentralized and voter-centric than that...

Moreover, I don't see why it would be a good idea to use the bitcoin protocol and blockchain, rather than a separate special-purpose protocol.   Using the bitcoin blockchain for voting sound like "how can we use a jet engine to make popcorn".  

still, coindesk is BS.

Note that JS uses Bitpay figures from last year against today's volume.  Very misleading, since the number of available businesses has gone up by a magnitude or 2 this year.

Also, I have spent $8,000 using btc in the last few months.  As far as I can tell, none of the businesses used Bitpay (Expedia, for example, uses Coinbase).

Oh chart buddy... you are so reliable... nice to see you reporting through all this FUD 

Explanation

Ok, well, if even JorgeStolfi is dismissing this report, then I have to say it must be total BS

On a totally unrelated tangent, Mr. Stolfi:  I read some where that you were involved in something to do with E-voting systems in Brazil.  What are your thoughts on the various blockchain-based voting systems, and the impact they may have on fair and honest elections?


One example:

http://www.bitcongress.org/

This is a pretty good discussion, Jorge, and I imagine what you mean by examples of public health care systems around the world, you are suggesting and indicating that they are much less profit driven and much more health care driven and much more beneficial and meaningful to people.. as compared with the stupid ass profit driven american health care system.

In other words, I believe we agree here, and maybe you should stick with NON bitcoin commentary in order to meaningfully contribute to this thread and to the world in general.   






You edited out your paragraph, about which I was complimenting you... I was complimenting you b/c more or less you were saying something meaningful... then you devolved into your fear mongering talk about the doom and gloom of bitcoin... ..
and as you know, I use the term FUD in its traditional common parlance which is the spreading of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt... that is the purpose of most of your bitcoin talk and probably what you are being paid to do... by some sponsor.... or at least you believe your participation in bitcoin talks is good for your resume to show what side you are on... the side of fiat...   whatever...

Why do you do this?    You are smarter than this, it really gets tiresome.  

Clearly the hash rate is thousands or even millions of times higher than necessary.  Its quite possible that the inflation tax (block subsidy) is actually encouraging mining farms, i.e centralization and therefore to some degree undermining confidence in the currency right now.  But it is needed to distribute currency.

At this point if the block subsidy was zero and txn fees negligible, large holders and bitcoin companies would be mining to support their other business efforts.  Just like how many companies contribute to Linux.

My first comment is that some consultant must have earned a big check by copying some trivial observations, already made many times in this forum, and pasting them into a neatly formatted report with a nice plastic cover. 

The "flat transaction profile" that they mention must be this graph, of the total daily output volume E extracted from the blockchain (according to the site, excluding the outputs that appear to be back-change).

But I have a different explanation for why the E plot is basically "flat". (I don't recall whether I posted this already, sorry if I did).  Its current value, about 100'000 BTC/day (50 million USD/day), seems way too big to be actual payments (bitcoins changing hands).  Consider that Bitpay claims to have processed only 100 million USD in 2013, when the total E volume, eyeballing from that plot, was at least 3000 million USD.  While there must be a lot of BTC payment that does not use Bitpay, the
ratio >30:1 seems excessive.

My theory is that a large fraction  of the E volume -- maybe 90% or more -- is "fake", that is, bitcoins moving between addresses that belong to the same person.  These could be mixing, hotwallet/coldwallet movements, deposits and withdrawals from exchanges, software testing, etc..

This explanation for the flatness of the E plot may be good news, because it does not exclude the possibility that actual use may be indeed increasing.   If 90% of the E volume is fake,  even a 100% increase in real usage would be quite hard to see on the E plot.

On the other hand, this theory means that the current cost of the Bitcoin Network, in proportion to actual use, is quite large.   If the E volume were 100% actual payments, each payment would have a hidden 4% fee, currently paid by bitcoin holders (as inflation tax) rather than by the actual users.   If 90% of the E-volume is fake, that hidden processing fee is 40%.

Clearly, radical adjustments in the network and the nature of the blockchain traffic will have to occur while the protocol switches from block rewards to transaction fees, if bitcoin is to remain competitive with bank transfers and credit cards.

....Meanwhile in Gotham City.....bitcoin quietly creeping up.  Shorts getting nervous yet?  Wait until we get close to 529...

I think you missed the part where it was working FINE as a free market until the government forcibly took over a large percentage of the market, and distorted that market from Capitalism to pure cronyism.


I am gonna go out on a limb here and guess that JayJuanGee is NOT a libertarian in any sense of that word.

Explanation

Medicare (and Obamacare, afaik) did not revoke that premise that health care should be left to private (profit-seeking, self-regulated) enterprise.  It merely helped private health care companies to charge even more from the public, by spreading out their inflated bills over all citizens and collecting them before the salary got to the employee.

So the US merely adopted one feature of public health care (healthy people are forced to share the cost of taking care of the sick) without adopting its goal (keeping the public healthy rather than maximizing the HMO owners' income).  With the wrong goal, that feature only made things worse, much worse.

We don't need to make hypotheses about the merits of private vs. (truly) public health care, there are plenty of examples of the latter around the world.


I understand that libertarians do not like to be told that  their new fantastic Non-Inflationary Currency is currently supported entirely by inflation tax, in the strict sense of the term.  But, unless you can point out some factual inaccuracy in what I wrote, I must assume that by FUD you mean "Facts U Dislike".

Where is the big HODL sign?

C

this is a picture i took when i went back to the future!

 

ok after a lil searching around i found the promo code


do like me and buy Buy BUY!!! and THEN make your purchase.

 

It appears that a cease fire agreement has been reached - at least for the moment.      

If you were not interested in engaging in a dialogue on these matters, why did you bother responding at all?

I never said I was smarter than you - never even suggested that.  I read what you write, then search vainly for what I wrote that inspired it.  

Suggesting that someone gets all their political opinions from some consumer news outlet is certainly insulting, demeaning, and clearly ad hominem.

I leave you now to continue believing what you believe now, and will always believe, simply because you cannot bear to believe otherwise.  Back in my early 20s, when I was working my butt off to get through school, I was pretty much a full-on Marxist, and thought I was damn clever to understand what my contemporaries were too complacent to see.  I came to understand better though, because I value the truth more than I value my own personal intuition born of ignorance.  I don't claim to know the breadth of your economic education and learning, but I suspect that there are some truths you simply have not read yet - and it's certainly true that none of us is likely to change anyone's economic outlook in this limited medium.