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Thread: Bitcoins are officially donkdown

  1. #2001
    100% Organic MumblesBadly's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sanlmar View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by MumblesBadly View Post

    San,

    Most foreign currency trades are speculation-driven by traders working for banks or hedge funds, but those traders watch the real economy activity for signs of strengths and weaknesses in currencies.

    http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312e.pdf
    I haven't traded BTC for 6 months now. I ain't the only one who has moved on. Honestly, do you really believe banks & hedge funds are trading this? I don't.
    I didn't say that banks and hedge funds are necessarily trading Bitcoin. I mentioned how the most active traders in currency markets are *speculators*. With conventional currencies, those traders usually work for banks (including investment banks) and hedge funds. The important take away is that one can't use the fact that Bitcoin trading is dominated by speculators to say that the market prices of Bitcoin aren't reflecting changes in expectations about real economy uses of this currency. This is due to the fact that speculators, as a whole, are reading the news about expected real economy Bitcoin activity and trading on it.

    But perhaps you meant to say that Bitcoin enthusiasts, who, like Micon, are more than likely deluded about the potential of Bitcoin, have been dominating trading. If so, as they folks run out of money buying into the down movements, the market price should tumble. Just like how the Chinese stock market couldn't be saved from tumbling by the Chinese government trying to prop up prices through a state-owned company.

    As predicted in this article from last month:
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/billcone...ket-will-fail/

    And mentioned in this recent Bloomberg article:
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...ebate-idr2sxku
    _____________________________________________
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    I actually hope this [second impeachment] succeeds, because I want Trump put down politically like a sick, 14-year-old dog. ... I don't want him complicating the 2024 primary season. I just want him done.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Were Republicans cowardly or unethical not to go along with [convicting Trump in the second impeachment Senate trial]? No. The smart move was to reject it.

  2. #2002
    100% Organic MumblesBadly's Avatar
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    Just read this article from earlier this year, which discusses the challenge of determining the "real" price of Bitcoin.
    http://www.ofnumbers.com/2015/03/05/...ce-of-bitcoin/

    Has anyone else seen it? And if so, do you have any comments on what it discusses?

    Thanks in advance.
    _____________________________________________
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    I actually hope this [second impeachment] succeeds, because I want Trump put down politically like a sick, 14-year-old dog. ... I don't want him complicating the 2024 primary season. I just want him done.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Were Republicans cowardly or unethical not to go along with [convicting Trump in the second impeachment Senate trial]? No. The smart move was to reject it.

  3. #2003
    Plutonium Sanlmar's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MumblesBadly View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Sanlmar View Post

    I haven't traded BTC for 6 months now. I ain't the only one who has moved on. Honestly, do you really believe banks & hedge funds are trading this? I don't.
    I didn't say that banks and hedge funds are necessarily trading Bitcoin. I mentioned how the most active traders in currency markets are *speculators*. With conventional currencies, those traders usually work for banks (including investment banks) and hedge funds. The important take away is that one can't use the fact that Bitcoin trading is dominated by speculators to say that the market prices of Bitcoin aren't reflecting changes in expectations about real economy uses of this currency. This is due to the fact that speculators, as a whole, are reading the news about expected real economy Bitcoin activity and trading on it.

    But perhaps you meant to say that Bitcoin enthusiasts, who, like Micon, are more than likely deluded about the potential of Bitcoin, have been dominating trading. If so, as they folks run out of money buying into the down movements, the market price should tumble. Just like how the Chinese stock market couldn't be saved from tumbling by the Chinese government trying to prop up prices through a state-owned company.

    As predicted in this article from last month:
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/billcone...ket-will-fail/

    And mentioned in this recent Bloomberg article:
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...ebate-idr2sxku
    The important take away is that one can't use the fact that Bitcoin trading is dominated by speculators to say that the market prices of Bitcoin aren't reflecting changes in expectations about real economy uses of this currency. This is due to the fact that speculators, as a whole, are reading the news about expected real economy Bitcoin activity and trading on it.
    I feel bad. Two years of posts and nothing has been learned. I actually enjoy your posts but you now sound like a book smart guy.

    News about real economic use? You think this is what people were trading? Traders trade price action. Traders (who make money) mute CNBC (euphemism for news) and study price. You never have all the news.

    Bitcoin is an extreme example. Bitcoin was running from $100 - $1200 in a parabolic fashion and everyone just wanted to jump in and make money (fiat). No one gave a fuck about what Bitcoin was. Maybe we bought some random drugs. It was get rich quick.

    Even Druff took a taste or two and it wasn't because of the fundamentals.

    Later, as the price deflated, traders gamed (shorted) the ride down and the played the failed retracements (Fibonacci). No one gave a shit wether this was Pokemon cards, beanie babies or a new financial instrument.

    We are at $226 because that is the lifecycle of this bubble. Nobody is buying shit with this thing. Everyone from FTPjesus, the Chinese, to the Winkelvii are bidding this thing as a vehicle for speculation. Interest is waning. That's just how this shit plays itself out.

    Now at some point, after the miners quit, this thing will have some nominal value. What number? I think the chart says $20-$60. We have a ways to go.

    Hope this has been helpful.

  4. #2004
    Diamond BCR's Avatar
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    Even btc enthusiasts seem to have lost their passion from my casual observation. It seems we're down to the hardcore base at this point. You've had Greek economic instability, China getting wrecked, worldwide instability in markets over the past weeks/month, all the South American petrol-based economies getting raped, yet it seems the wealthy in all those places are no longer hedging their currencies with btc. I don't see how anyone can reasonably convince themselves that they're months away from $1000btc at this point. All the things that once created fast runups have almost 0 effect at this point, or a negative effect.

    I actually hope it eventually stabilizes lower, finds increased utility, and eventually booms and this thread becomes something btc enthusiasts bump for mockery. I love the concept, but I think most who got in after Micon have a really long wait until that time, if it ever happens. I've always been simply a casual observer and far from an expert, but it just seems the days of kids getting worked up about some random retailer using btc, or some random mall installing a btc ATM are over outside of reddit subforums.

  5. #2005
    Plutonium sonatine's Avatar
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    the day that a single person can provide a rational response to "why are bitcoins worth anything more than the cost in energy to mine them" is the day the world changes.
    "Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky

    "America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs

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    One Percenter Pooh's Avatar
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    The top of the market was pretty obvious. It's when those winkletool twins said publicly it was going to 40k per.

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    Plutonium sonatine's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pooh View Post
    The top of the market was pretty obvious. It's when those winkletool twins said publicly it was going to 40k per.

    all btc roads lead to the wink twins. all day.


    and then they moved on to snuff films or white slavery or whatever they are into now and the long slow deflation to zero began in earnest.
    "Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky

    "America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs

  8. #2008
    Canadrunk limitles's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sonatine View Post
    the day that a single person can provide a rational response to "why are bitcoins worth anything more than the cost in energy to mine them" is the day the world changes.
    money-laundering...ftw

    1.5 words

     
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      MumblesBadly: And there will always be a demand for a way to do so!

  9. #2009
    100% Organic MumblesBadly's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sonatine View Post
    the day that a single person can provide a rational response to "why are bitcoins worth anything more than the cost in energy to mine them" is the day the world changes.
    The cost of mining an additional Bitcoin does not determine it's market value. This notion is what is meant as the "Labor Theory of Value" in the article I linked above.

    For example, like Bitcoin, gold serves as a store of wealth and means of exchange. And its price is usually higher than the marginal cost to mine and refine the next (Troy) ounce. And while the cost of producing gold may affect the market price, that cost does not equate to a maximum value.
    http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL3N10115D20150721

    Alternately, the uncertainty here is just how much real economic activity is expected to be conducted with Bitcoin within the investment horizons of Bitcoin speculators. If the enthusiasts are correct, and Bitcoin is adopted by substantially more people, the current market price could be reasonable. But if not, they will be the crypto versions of wampum.
    http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-03/peterson/
    _____________________________________________
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    I actually hope this [second impeachment] succeeds, because I want Trump put down politically like a sick, 14-year-old dog. ... I don't want him complicating the 2024 primary season. I just want him done.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Were Republicans cowardly or unethical not to go along with [convicting Trump in the second impeachment Senate trial]? No. The smart move was to reject it.

  10. #2010
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sanlmar View Post
    News about real economic use? You think this is what people were trading? Traders trade price action. Traders (who make money) mute CNBC (euphemism for news) and study price. You never have all the news.
    The best traders use both technical (e.g. price and volume) and fundamental analysis (e.g. "news").
    https://beta.dailyfx.com/forex/educa...ndamental.html

    Nobody is buying shit with this thing.
    How much people are currently using Bitcoin for real economic activity isn't really important. Fundamental market price is driven the expected future real activity. That is why the market price of Tesla is so much higher than anything supported by current earnings.
    http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TSLA
    _____________________________________________
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    I actually hope this [second impeachment] succeeds, because I want Trump put down politically like a sick, 14-year-old dog. ... I don't want him complicating the 2024 primary season. I just want him done.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Were Republicans cowardly or unethical not to go along with [convicting Trump in the second impeachment Senate trial]? No. The smart move was to reject it.

  11. #2011
    Plutonium sonatine's Avatar
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    The thing that bothers me about you Mumbles is this;

    You totally understood my point but decided to act like youre too stupid to understand it so you can vomit the same tired half assed academic drivel youve been spouting since you got here.

    Because if you simply acknowledged the point I was making, it would deprive you of that opportunity.

    And thats not conversation or discourse or the sharing of viewpoints, its just the lowest form of self adoration; you're a fart cupper holding an entire forums attention hostage.

    You're what happens right before online communities disintegrate, people like you slither in and pick over the corpse before the audience moves on. We've seen it before, you're not fooling anyone, and although I dont expect you to stop, I want you to know we see through your bullshit.

    So knock yourself out champ, give that quote function the workout it deserves, but your next stop should be an impassioned declaration of how us 'old timers' are afraid of 'new blood' or something, thats the usual runbook here.
    "Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky

    "America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs

  12. #2012
    Plutonium Sanlmar's Avatar
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    Mumbles. Don't be too quick to write off Sonatine's irritation.

    Your lecture on mining in response to his derisive post might have been informative to the pimply faced freshman at state.

    This thread has tracked Bitcoin since sub $100. This forum prolly caught wind much earlier. I will contend that anyone who has been here the past 3 years are much better schooled on this subject than you.

    Guys here have mined it. Traded it. Been Goxed. Gone to Silk Road and back. Watched and chatted in real time during some of the epic moves and blow offs.

    This thread will be used by some kid writing his thesis years from now. Is there any better history in real time out there that has been saved?

    As Druff points out this is a veteran (elderly) group of degens and our fascination with financial flim flam is who we are.

    A little credit. TIA.

    This ain't the first time these guys have seen this but I thought I'd share again.
    Name:  image.jpg
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      MumblesBadly: Thx

  13. #2013
    Canadrunk limitles's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sonatine View Post
    The thing that bothers me about you Mumbles is this;

    You totally understood my point but decided to act like youre too stupid to understand it so you can vomit the same tired half assed academic drivel youve been spouting since you got here.

    Because if you simply acknowledged the point I was making, it would deprive you of that opportunity.

    And thats not conversation or discourse or the sharing of viewpoints, its just the lowest form of self adoration; you're a fart cupper holding an entire forums attention hostage.

    You're what happens right before online communities disintegrate, people like you slither in and pick over the corpse before the audience moves on. We've seen it before, you're not fooling anyone, and although I dont expect you to stop, I want you to know we see through your bullshit.

    So knock yourself out champ, give that quote function the workout it deserves, but your next stop should be an impassioned declaration of how us 'old timers' are afraid of 'new blood' or something, thats the usual runbook here.
    So what was your point fucktard?
    Last edited by limitles; 08-30-2015 at 10:06 PM.

  14. #2014
    100% Organic MumblesBadly's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sanlmar View Post
    Mumbles. Don't be too quick to write off Sonatine's irritation.

    Your lecture on mining in response to his derisive post might have been informative to the pimply faced freshman at state.

    This thread has tracked Bitcoin since sub $100. This forum prolly caught wind much earlier. I will contend that anyone who has been here the past 3 years are much better schooled on this subject than you.

    Guys here have mined it. Traded it. Been Goxed. Gone to Silk Road and back. Watched and chatted in real time during some of the epic moves and blow offs.

    This thread will be used by some kid writing his thesis years from now. Is there any better history in real time out there that has been saved?

    As Druff points out this is a veteran (elderly) group of degens and our fascination with financial flim flam is who we are.

    A little credit. TIA.

    This ain't the first time these guys have seen this but I thought I'd share again.
    Name:  image.jpg
Views: 816
Size:  66.1 KB
    Samimar,

    I wouldn't bother commenting in this thread if there weren't smart folks like yourself. Here's the thing: Based on how I've seen "Donkdown" used here, the title of this thread implied that the price of Bitcoin should be zero really soon. That was over two years ago. And I could see how there was a bit of bubble/crash action going on just before then. (See first graph). And the chart you provided could have been used to predict that Bitcoin was going to crash further because people were near the beginning of the "capitulation" phase.

    But what has happened since? Bitcoin blew up (in the good sense), and despite mostly crashing back, has seemingly settled about 30-50% higher than when Sonatine's started this thread. Hopefully a bunch of you made money trading the second bubble. (See second graph)

    But I get the sense that folks like Sonatine are emotionally committed to their predictions of Bitcoin's sooner-rather-than-later demise, despite fundamental signals that suggest that it is here to stay longer than the doomsday predicting title of the thread. And any mention of why Bitcoin's price may be sustainable in the interim substantially above zero is derisively dismissed out of hand, your comments being the exception.

    Bottom line? You guys are smart, know a lot about Bitcoin, but some louder ones clearly exhibit overconfidence bias in their prediction about Bitcoin's demise. And my impression is that it is likely due to what you mentioned that I bolded above. Meaning that your stated "fascination" is significantly biasing downward your assessment of Bitcoin viability.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    I actually hope this [second impeachment] succeeds, because I want Trump put down politically like a sick, 14-year-old dog. ... I don't want him complicating the 2024 primary season. I just want him done.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Were Republicans cowardly or unethical not to go along with [convicting Trump in the second impeachment Senate trial]? No. The smart move was to reject it.

  15. #2015
    Plutonium sonatine's Avatar
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    Bitcoin obv being torn apart internally by competing philosophies, basically Micon's apocalypse scenario.

    From NYT..:

    A terrific rumpus broke out in the world of Bitcoin last week, when veteran developers Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn published Bitcoin XT, a competing version of Bitcoin Core, the open-source program that generates new bitcoins, verifies all transactions, and records them on the massive distributed ledger known as the blockchain. Andresen is Bitcoin’s most senior developer, and has been the project’s de-facto leader since 2011; Hearn is a pioneer in the development of Bitcoin wallets. According to an explanation Hearn posted on Medium, they released XT because “the decision-making process in Bitcoin Core has broken.” The real crisis, as this suggests, is less about Bitcoin’s code than about the power structure that governs it.

    The dispute centers on a fast-approaching computational bottleneck. The blockchain is composed, as you might guess, of “blocks,” each consisting of a list of recent bitcoin transactions, time-stamped and verified by one of the network’s “miners”—computers that secure a block’s inclusion on the chain by solving a computational puzzle called a proof of work. The first computer to win this computational race “mines” a reward of twenty-five bitcoins, and then competition recommences for the next block.

    According to a Bitcoin Foundation post by Andresen, Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, imposed a maximum block size of one megabyte in 2010, in response to some denial-of-service attacks.* This cap effectively restricts the number of bitcoin transactions to about seven per second, since it takes a certain number of characters to record a given transaction, and only so many fit in a megabyte. (Visa, by contrast, routinely handles thousands of transactions per second, and claims a capacity of more than twenty-four thousand transactions per second.) Hearn anticipates that Bitcoin transaction volumes will blow past the seven-per-second limit by 2017, at the latest, creating backlogs, settlement delays, and perhaps even mass outages. The primary goal of Bitcoin XT, then, is to increase the size limit of each block to eight megabytes.

    Prior to the release, a block-size debate had been blazing for months on Bitcoin forums. Opponents of an increase argued, for instance, that mining larger blocks would require more computing power, thereby discouraging small operators in favor of the massive mining farms that have gradually concentrated the network into fewer and fewer hands. It was widely feared, as well, that a serious disagreement among the core developers might further destabilize public faith in Bitcoin. Those in favor of an increase contended that “forking”—creating a competing version of a program in response to diverging aims—is the very essence of open-source software development.

    Such decisions stand to affect millions of participants in the bitcoin economy, but ultimately lie with a very few people. Theoretically, any user of an open-source program is free to create, adopt, or reject any alterations he pleases; in practice, software shared on networks or between users requires painstaking standardization. This means relying on decision-makers with “commit access,” who have the right to amend a software project directly, on their own. This status represents a high level of developer control, and of user trust.

    Andresen told me that, to his recollection, when Nakamoto withdrew from the project (and from public view), in 2011, only he, Nakamoto, and possibly one other person had commit access to Bitcoin’s software. Andresen eventually granted this level of access to four additional developers, for a total of five “core devs.” In April, 2014, Andresen decided to devote more of his time to other projects, and named one of the core devs, Wladimir van der Laan, to succeed him as lead developer. Even today, only van der Laan and Andresen can grant commit access to other developers of Bitcoin Core.

    “Right now,” Andresen added, “just Mike and I have commit access to Bitcoin XT.”

    The publication of XT threw the Bitcoin forums into turmoil, with partisans duking it out in what has amounted to an old-fashioned flame war. Some of the public debate was constructive, though. Roger Ver, a Bitcoin investor and evangelist famously nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus,” tweeted, “If you run a full node, and support bigger blocks so more people around the world can use bitcoin, install XT today.” Nick Szabo, a respected cryptography expert whom some believe to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto (whose identity and location remain mysterious), publicly stated his opposition to XT, tweeting, “A rapid block-size increase is a huge security risk: a reckless act to be performing on a $4 billion system.”

    One of the most vocal critics of XT has been Gregory Maxwell, one of Bitcoin’s five core developers. Aside from the many other enhancements he has made to Bitcoin Core, Maxwell is a developer of “sidechains,” a clever proposal for scaling Bitcoin by processing transactions partly off the main blockchain. But he and fellow core dev Pieter Wuille have faced criticism, during the recent debate, over an apparent conflict of interest: both are co-founders of Blockstream, a startup venture, capitalized to the tune of twenty-one million dollars in a recent seed round, that is experimenting with a number of scaling options, including sidechains. Should any of Blockstream’s proprietary innovations become essential to Bitcoin, the company could make a fortune. On Reddit, a user with the handle yumein observed as much, suggesting, in imperfect English, that preventing the move to a larger block size might one day force Bitcoin users to adopt Blockstream. “Nothing against Blockstream,” he wrote, but, “might be a big reason why this gentlemens stand against bigger blocksize, isn’t it?”

    Adam Back, another co-founder of Blockstream and a pioneering cryptographer in his own right, maintains that his company only wants what is best for the system as a whole. “We really want and need Bitcoin to function well, in terms of its security and scale and safety,” he told me. I asked Back, who strongly opposes XT, why he thought that Andresen and Hearn had released their software independently of the other core devs. “I’m a little confused about why that is,” he replied, adding that he had spoken with Andresen and met with Hearn for several hours in the weeks before XT was published. “I think the tech community was expecting and hoping that Gavin would work within this process . . . and see which [proposal] is accepted.”

    “Why did that not happen?” I asked.

    “You would have to ask Gavin that,” he said, laughing a little ruefully.

    Problems of governance have beset Bitcoin from its inception. Notably, there have been mass resignations from the Bitcoin Foundation, the cryptocurrency’s standards body. Furthermore, some of its most prominent members have been in trouble with the law: Charlie Shrem is serving a two-year sentence on money-laundering charges, and Mark Karpelès, C.E.O. of the bankrupt MtGox bitcoin exchange, is being held in a Tokyo jail on suspicion of fraud. In the absence of institutions capable of implementing clear standards, it’s plain that Andresen and Hearn decided to take matters into their own hands. XT is above all a path toward establishing new leadership. I asked Andresen whether, if XT were to achieve full acceptance, he would then include all the earlier Bitcoin core devs in the new XT team. He replied that “[XT] will have a different set of developers. Part of the reason for forking is to have a clear decision-making process for the software development.”

    Just before Nakamoto released Bitcoin, in January, 2009, he authored a post at the P2P Foundation. “With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless,” he wrote. Six years in, the total value of all extant bitcoins is roughly three and a half billion dollars. You can now pay for your Dish subscription and buy gifts from 1-800-FLOWERS or plane tickets from Expedia using bitcoin. Nearly a billion dollars in venture capital has been invested in Bitcoin-related businesses. But Nakamoto’s predictions regarding trust, security, and effortlessness have failed, repeatedly and dramatically.

    It will take several months, at minimum, to learn whether or not Bitcoin XT will prevail, because Andresen and Hearn designed the code to require a kind of vote before the block-size increase takes place. For the moment, XT is very nearly identical to Bitcoin Core, and is writing to the same blockchain. But Bitcoin XT identifies each newly mined block with a version number that acts as a sort of polling device; those miners whose blocks are signed by XT are thereby signalling their approval of increasing the block size. After January 11, 2016, if (and only if) seventy-five per cent of the thousand most recent blocks are signed by XT, a waiting period of two weeks will kick in, during which miners will have time to adopt XT in advance of a true “hard fork.” Absent a rapprochement between the two camps, the ledgers will then begin to diverge, with larger blocks appearing on the XT blockchain but not on the Core one. This could give rise to problems, such as the same bitcoins being spent twice, once on each ledger.

    Andresen seems fairly certain that sufficient consensus will be reached, at least to preclude diverging ledgers. He wrote in an e-mail:

    I’m not sure what will eventually happen to XT and Core. If the history of other open source software projects is any guide, most likely they will each continue along their merry way, both implementing the same bitcoin protocol (there WILL be consensus on the protocol level, one way or another—either XT will conform to Core, Core will conform to XT, or both will conform to whatever consensus arises). It is possible XT and Core will merge back into one project, and also possible one or both will die.
    Within days of its publication, the first blocks signed by Bitcoin XT were recorded to the blockchain. “I think there’s a very good chance XT will eventually reach 75% of miner support,” Andresen wrote, adding that he expects this to take six months or more. The number of new XT nodes was being recorded at xtnodes.com, which soon found itself targeted by denial-of-service attacks and flooded with false statistics via “pseudo-nodes”; it is still hopelessly messed up.

    On Monday, a letter signed by the chief executives of eight leading Bitcoin companies, among them Stephen Pair of BitPay, Peter Smith of Blockchain, and Jeremy Allaire of Circle, threw some significant weight behind XT, pledging philosophical and technical support for a block-size increase (though not explicitly for XT, versus, say, a redesign of Core). These eight firms represent enormous technical expertise and experience, and are vested with a massive amount of venture capital—well over a hundred million dollars, in all. Unless the dissenting core devs manage to build a better mousetrap very quickly, it’s quite possible that Bitcoin XT will achieve the target adoption level and emerge as the dominant system. But one might be forgiven for supposing, if the wild ride of the last six years is any guide, that there are more surprises in store between now and January.

    Andresen seems to think so, too. I asked him about Bitcoin’s checkered past—the rise of mining pools, the implosion of MtGox, the Silk Road debacle, and the huge number of irrecoverable bitcoin thefts from individuals and businesses—have all these disasters altered his thinking about the future of Bitcoin, and about the blockchain?

    “No,” he replied. “I think if you go back and look at even my earliest interviews from 2011, I was warning people to expect ‘chaos and drama.’ New technologies are always full of chaos and drama, because the startup companies that first experiment with them often fail. I still expect lots of chaos and drama over the next few years.”
    "Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky

    "America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs

  16. #2016
    Canadrunk limitles's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MumblesBadly View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Sanlmar View Post
    Mumbles. Don't be too quick to write off Sonatine's irritation.

    Your lecture on mining in response to his derisive post might have been informative to the pimply faced freshman at state.

    This thread has tracked Bitcoin since sub $100. This forum prolly caught wind much earlier. I will contend that anyone who has been here the past 3 years are much better schooled on this subject than you.

    Guys here have mined it. Traded it. Been Goxed. Gone to Silk Road and back. Watched and chatted in real time during some of the epic moves and blow offs.

    This thread will be used by some kid writing his thesis years from now. Is there any better history in real time out there that has been saved?

    As Druff points out this is a veteran (elderly) group of degens and our fascination with financial flim flam is who we are.

    A little credit. TIA.

    This ain't the first time these guys have seen this but I thought I'd share again.
    Name:  image.jpg
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    Samimar,

    I wouldn't bother commenting in this thread if there weren't smart folks like yourself. Here's the thing: Based on how I've seen "Donkdown" used here, the title of this thread implied that the price of Bitcoin should be zero really soon. That was over two years ago. And I could see how there was a bit of bubble/crash action going on just before then. (See first graph). And the chart you provided could have been used to predict that Bitcoin was going to crash further because people were near the beginning of the "capitulation" phase.

    But what has happened since? Bitcoin blew up (in the good sense), and despite mostly crashing back, has seemingly settled about 30-50% higher than when Sonatine's started this thread. Hopefully a bunch of you made money trading the second bubble. (See second graph)

    But I get the sense that folks like Sonatine are emotionally committed to their predictions of Bitcoin's sooner-rather-than-later demise, despite fundamental signals that suggest that it is here to stay longer than the doomsday predicting title of the thread. And any mention of why Bitcoin's price may be sustainable in the interim substantially above zero is derisively dismissed out of hand, your comments being the exception.

    Bottom line? You guys are smart, know a lot about Bitcoin, but some louder ones clearly exhibit overconfidence bias in their prediction about Bitcoin's demise. And my impression is that it is likely due to what you mentioned that I bolded above. Meaning that your stated "fascination" is significantly biasing downward your assessment of Bitcoin viability.
    Holly fuck that was well written. I don't remember last night that well and surely didn't read mumbles post above but if that ain't stronger stuff than any of the opposing side's bs presented then I'm not a small Asian/Latino/SiouxNationWarrior
    Last edited by limitles; 08-31-2015 at 08:00 PM.

  17. #2017
    Gold Starbucks Spunk Bucket's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sonatine View Post
    Bitcoin obv being torn apart internally by competing philosophies, basically Micon's apocalypse scenario.

    From NYT..:

    A terrific rumpus broke out in the world of Bitcoin last week, when veteran developers Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn published Bitcoin XT, a competing version of Bitcoin Core, the open-source program that generates new bitcoins, verifies all transactions, and records them on the massive distributed ledger known as the blockchain. Andresen is Bitcoin’s most senior developer, and has been the project’s de-facto leader since 2011; Hearn is a pioneer in the development of Bitcoin wallets. According to an explanation Hearn posted on Medium, they released XT because “the decision-making process in Bitcoin Core has broken.” The real crisis, as this suggests, is less about Bitcoin’s code than about the power structure that governs it.

    The dispute centers on a fast-approaching computational bottleneck. The blockchain is composed, as you might guess, of “blocks,” each consisting of a list of recent bitcoin transactions, time-stamped and verified by one of the network’s “miners”—computers that secure a block’s inclusion on the chain by solving a computational puzzle called a proof of work. The first computer to win this computational race “mines” a reward of twenty-five bitcoins, and then competition recommences for the next block.

    According to a Bitcoin Foundation post by Andresen, Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, imposed a maximum block size of one megabyte in 2010, in response to some denial-of-service attacks.* This cap effectively restricts the number of bitcoin transactions to about seven per second, since it takes a certain number of characters to record a given transaction, and only so many fit in a megabyte. (Visa, by contrast, routinely handles thousands of transactions per second, and claims a capacity of more than twenty-four thousand transactions per second.) Hearn anticipates that Bitcoin transaction volumes will blow past the seven-per-second limit by 2017, at the latest, creating backlogs, settlement delays, and perhaps even mass outages. The primary goal of Bitcoin XT, then, is to increase the size limit of each block to eight megabytes.

    Prior to the release, a block-size debate had been blazing for months on Bitcoin forums. Opponents of an increase argued, for instance, that mining larger blocks would require more computing power, thereby discouraging small operators in favor of the massive mining farms that have gradually concentrated the network into fewer and fewer hands. It was widely feared, as well, that a serious disagreement among the core developers might further destabilize public faith in Bitcoin. Those in favor of an increase contended that “forking”—creating a competing version of a program in response to diverging aims—is the very essence of open-source software development.

    Such decisions stand to affect millions of participants in the bitcoin economy, but ultimately lie with a very few people. Theoretically, any user of an open-source program is free to create, adopt, or reject any alterations he pleases; in practice, software shared on networks or between users requires painstaking standardization. This means relying on decision-makers with “commit access,” who have the right to amend a software project directly, on their own. This status represents a high level of developer control, and of user trust.

    Andresen told me that, to his recollection, when Nakamoto withdrew from the project (and from public view), in 2011, only he, Nakamoto, and possibly one other person had commit access to Bitcoin’s software. Andresen eventually granted this level of access to four additional developers, for a total of five “core devs.” In April, 2014, Andresen decided to devote more of his time to other projects, and named one of the core devs, Wladimir van der Laan, to succeed him as lead developer. Even today, only van der Laan and Andresen can grant commit access to other developers of Bitcoin Core.

    “Right now,” Andresen added, “just Mike and I have commit access to Bitcoin XT.”

    The publication of XT threw the Bitcoin forums into turmoil, with partisans duking it out in what has amounted to an old-fashioned flame war. Some of the public debate was constructive, though. Roger Ver, a Bitcoin investor and evangelist famously nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus,” tweeted, “If you run a full node, and support bigger blocks so more people around the world can use bitcoin, install XT today.” Nick Szabo, a respected cryptography expert whom some believe to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto (whose identity and location remain mysterious), publicly stated his opposition to XT, tweeting, “A rapid block-size increase is a huge security risk: a reckless act to be performing on a $4 billion system.”

    One of the most vocal critics of XT has been Gregory Maxwell, one of Bitcoin’s five core developers. Aside from the many other enhancements he has made to Bitcoin Core, Maxwell is a developer of “sidechains,” a clever proposal for scaling Bitcoin by processing transactions partly off the main blockchain. But he and fellow core dev Pieter Wuille have faced criticism, during the recent debate, over an apparent conflict of interest: both are co-founders of Blockstream, a startup venture, capitalized to the tune of twenty-one million dollars in a recent seed round, that is experimenting with a number of scaling options, including sidechains. Should any of Blockstream’s proprietary innovations become essential to Bitcoin, the company could make a fortune. On Reddit, a user with the handle yumein observed as much, suggesting, in imperfect English, that preventing the move to a larger block size might one day force Bitcoin users to adopt Blockstream. “Nothing against Blockstream,” he wrote, but, “might be a big reason why this gentlemens stand against bigger blocksize, isn’t it?”

    Adam Back, another co-founder of Blockstream and a pioneering cryptographer in his own right, maintains that his company only wants what is best for the system as a whole. “We really want and need Bitcoin to function well, in terms of its security and scale and safety,” he told me. I asked Back, who strongly opposes XT, why he thought that Andresen and Hearn had released their software independently of the other core devs. “I’m a little confused about why that is,” he replied, adding that he had spoken with Andresen and met with Hearn for several hours in the weeks before XT was published. “I think the tech community was expecting and hoping that Gavin would work within this process . . . and see which [proposal] is accepted.”

    “Why did that not happen?” I asked.

    “You would have to ask Gavin that,” he said, laughing a little ruefully.

    Problems of governance have beset Bitcoin from its inception. Notably, there have been mass resignations from the Bitcoin Foundation, the cryptocurrency’s standards body. Furthermore, some of its most prominent members have been in trouble with the law: Charlie Shrem is serving a two-year sentence on money-laundering charges, and Mark Karpelès, C.E.O. of the bankrupt MtGox bitcoin exchange, is being held in a Tokyo jail on suspicion of fraud. In the absence of institutions capable of implementing clear standards, it’s plain that Andresen and Hearn decided to take matters into their own hands. XT is above all a path toward establishing new leadership. I asked Andresen whether, if XT were to achieve full acceptance, he would then include all the earlier Bitcoin core devs in the new XT team. He replied that “[XT] will have a different set of developers. Part of the reason for forking is to have a clear decision-making process for the software development.”

    Just before Nakamoto released Bitcoin, in January, 2009, he authored a post at the P2P Foundation. “With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless,” he wrote. Six years in, the total value of all extant bitcoins is roughly three and a half billion dollars. You can now pay for your Dish subscription and buy gifts from 1-800-FLOWERS or plane tickets from Expedia using bitcoin. Nearly a billion dollars in venture capital has been invested in Bitcoin-related businesses. But Nakamoto’s predictions regarding trust, security, and effortlessness have failed, repeatedly and dramatically.

    It will take several months, at minimum, to learn whether or not Bitcoin XT will prevail, because Andresen and Hearn designed the code to require a kind of vote before the block-size increase takes place. For the moment, XT is very nearly identical to Bitcoin Core, and is writing to the same blockchain. But Bitcoin XT identifies each newly mined block with a version number that acts as a sort of polling device; those miners whose blocks are signed by XT are thereby signalling their approval of increasing the block size. After January 11, 2016, if (and only if) seventy-five per cent of the thousand most recent blocks are signed by XT, a waiting period of two weeks will kick in, during which miners will have time to adopt XT in advance of a true “hard fork.” Absent a rapprochement between the two camps, the ledgers will then begin to diverge, with larger blocks appearing on the XT blockchain but not on the Core one. This could give rise to problems, such as the same bitcoins being spent twice, once on each ledger.

    Andresen seems fairly certain that sufficient consensus will be reached, at least to preclude diverging ledgers. He wrote in an e-mail:

    I’m not sure what will eventually happen to XT and Core. If the history of other open source software projects is any guide, most likely they will each continue along their merry way, both implementing the same bitcoin protocol (there WILL be consensus on the protocol level, one way or another—either XT will conform to Core, Core will conform to XT, or both will conform to whatever consensus arises). It is possible XT and Core will merge back into one project, and also possible one or both will die.
    Within days of its publication, the first blocks signed by Bitcoin XT were recorded to the blockchain. “I think there’s a very good chance XT will eventually reach 75% of miner support,” Andresen wrote, adding that he expects this to take six months or more. The number of new XT nodes was being recorded at xtnodes.com, which soon found itself targeted by denial-of-service attacks and flooded with false statistics via “pseudo-nodes”; it is still hopelessly messed up.

    On Monday, a letter signed by the chief executives of eight leading Bitcoin companies, among them Stephen Pair of BitPay, Peter Smith of Blockchain, and Jeremy Allaire of Circle, threw some significant weight behind XT, pledging philosophical and technical support for a block-size increase (though not explicitly for XT, versus, say, a redesign of Core). These eight firms represent enormous technical expertise and experience, and are vested with a massive amount of venture capital—well over a hundred million dollars, in all. Unless the dissenting core devs manage to build a better mousetrap very quickly, it’s quite possible that Bitcoin XT will achieve the target adoption level and emerge as the dominant system. But one might be forgiven for supposing, if the wild ride of the last six years is any guide, that there are more surprises in store between now and January.

    Andresen seems to think so, too. I asked him about Bitcoin’s checkered past—the rise of mining pools, the implosion of MtGox, the Silk Road debacle, and the huge number of irrecoverable bitcoin thefts from individuals and businesses—have all these disasters altered his thinking about the future of Bitcoin, and about the blockchain?

    “No,” he replied. “I think if you go back and look at even my earliest interviews from 2011, I was warning people to expect ‘chaos and drama.’ New technologies are always full of chaos and drama, because the startup companies that first experiment with them often fail. I still expect lots of chaos and drama over the next few years.”
    I read that last week. The forking debate has been blown way out of proportion- it's just part of the maturing phase, the bitcoin network is open source and therefore flexible enough to handle everything thrown at it. Furthermore, all changes are first voted for by a majority node consensus.

    In my opinion it will take a while to get the stage of mass adoption but I think cryptocurrency will take off properly in the next few years, and bitcoin will be the most likely to do so as it has both the crowd and maturing behind it.

    Don't make me say I told ye so
    BALLIN'!!

  18. #2018
    100% Organic MumblesBadly's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Starbucks Spunk Bucket View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by sonatine View Post
    Bitcoin obv being torn apart internally by competing philosophies, basically Micon's apocalypse scenario.

    From NYT..:

    A terrific rumpus broke out in the world of Bitcoin last week, when veteran developers Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn published Bitcoin XT, a competing version of Bitcoin Core, the open-source program that generates new bitcoins, verifies all transactions, and records them on the massive distributed ledger known as the blockchain. Andresen is Bitcoin’s most senior developer, and has been the project’s de-facto leader since 2011; Hearn is a pioneer in the development of Bitcoin wallets. According to an explanation Hearn posted on Medium, they released XT because “the decision-making process in Bitcoin Core has broken.” The real crisis, as this suggests, is less about Bitcoin’s code than about the power structure that governs it.

    ...

    “I think if you go back and look at even my earliest interviews from 2011, I was warning people to expect ‘chaos and drama.’ New technologies are always full of chaos and drama, because the startup companies that first experiment with them often fail. I still expect lots of chaos and drama over the next few years.”
    I read that last week. The forking debate has been blown way out of proportion- it's just part of the maturing phase, the bitcoin network is open source and therefore flexible enough to handle everything thrown at it. Furthermore, all changes are first voted for by a majority node consensus.

    In my opinion it will take a while to get the stage of mass adoption but I think cryptocurrency will take off properly in the next few years, and bitcoin will be the most likely to do so as it has both the crowd and maturing behind it.

    Don't make me say I told ye so
    Other news stories support the "drama" interpretation versus "apocalypse scenario". Such as this, which mentions how an alternative to XT that provides a fix to the blockchain size limit is gaining support, and it won't result in a fork.
    http://www.coindesk.com/support-grow...size-proposal/

    And this, which discusses how Bitcoin developers are essentially pledging to work cooperatively to find a workable solution to the blockchain limit.
    http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-deve...k-scalability/

    As such, the recent drama may have caused a mini-panic, but Bitcoin should be tanking right now if this forking debate was a death knell roadblock to Bitcoin's further adoption.

    Mind you, I'm not saying it will become THE currency in the future, but it still has potential as a reliable enough alternative for many parties in the future other than digital geeks.
    Last edited by MumblesBadly; 09-01-2015 at 12:15 PM. Reason: Added text and link
    _____________________________________________
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    I actually hope this [second impeachment] succeeds, because I want Trump put down politically like a sick, 14-year-old dog. ... I don't want him complicating the 2024 primary season. I just want him done.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
    Were Republicans cowardly or unethical not to go along with [convicting Trump in the second impeachment Senate trial]? No. The smart move was to reject it.

  19. #2019
    Plutonium sonatine's Avatar
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    if by "many parties" you mean criminals, then im sure youre at least less hilariously wrong than you look.
    "Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky

    "America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs

  20. #2020
    Gold gauchojake's Avatar
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    He means sports bettors okay

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