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1001  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 07, 2014, 07:39:43 PM
I always knew deep down Jorge was a Berkeley hippy.

Indeed, I wish I had chosen Berkeley; Stanford was nice but too right-wing.

(But I have never smoked, pot or tobacco, if that is what you mean.  I even got laughed at by my colleagues, not long ago, because I could not recognize the smell coming from certain corners of our campus.  Cheesy)
1002  Economy / Speculation / Re: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) on: November 07, 2014, 06:21:48 PM
I am making a historical comparison with 2011 situation when bull market resumed ONLY after the network hashing rate declined ~50%-you can check the charts-they are uncanny.

Price obviously affects total hashpower, but I cannot see how hashpower could influence price.   The number of new coins mined per day is pretty much independent of hashpower (except momentarily, between difficulty adjustments).  While miners desperately wish the BTC price to go up, they have no means to influence it.

My reading of what happened in 2011 is: a new large market (drug users? Thailand?) opened in Apr/2011, and, as it adopted bitcoin, the demand caused the 2011 bubble, pushing the price from ~0.6$ to ~14$ in Jul/2011.  But that market then closed (Thailand banned bitcoin?), and its members gradually sold its coins; so that the price started to drop towards the pre-bubble level (~0.6$).  However, in Nov/2011 -- when the price was still at ~2.2$, or +1.6$ above the floor, but still dropping -- another market opened, and its demand bumped the price to ~6.6$ (a +4.5$ increase).  Meanwhile, the first market continued to shrink; by the end of Feb/2012 its demand had vanished, eliminating the remaining +1.6$ overprice and bringing the price down to 5.0$.  Thus the the second market, alone, was responsible for the overall increase from ~0.6$ in Apr/2011 to ~5.0$ in Mar/2012.

The situation now seems to be indeed similar to that of Nov/2011. The Chinese speculators who were responsible for the Nov/2013 bubble seem to be losing interest and selling their coins, and this loss of demand is driving the price down to the pre-bubble level (~140$).  However, in order to get a recovery similar to that of Nov/2011, one would need a similar cause -- namely, another new market of sufficient size.
1003  Economy / Speculation / Re: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) on: November 07, 2014, 05:38:51 PM
Those Spondoolies boxen must be stuffed with accelerants...
Even plastics that are "non-flammable", like PVC and circuit boards, will release flammable gases when thrown into a fire.  Ditto for painted metal. Maybe the fire started in some flammabe material (such as the roof insulation) but was then sustained and amplified by those gases.
1004  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 07, 2014, 03:58:55 PM
Well, this thread seems to allow nearly any topic anyhow, so may as well speculate herein about the whereabouts of Adam. 

He wrote some about his personal affairs a while back.  I don't think we would help him by discussing them here.
1005  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 07, 2014, 03:10:39 PM

Tossing a cupful of shredded steel wool over a computer's motherboard may have a similar effect.  Cheesy
1006  Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: BFL fucked us over again on: November 07, 2014, 02:18:11 PM
Basic difference the Canadian consumer expects protection from the government and businesses are cognizant of the fact. Also the bureaucracy in Canada is a lot more "professionally" run as compared to the larger and less responsive entities like the FTC. In a nutshell Canadians get a lot more from their tax dollars than do Americans especially in terms of the level of professionalism within Canadian government agencies. We spend more of our taxpayers money per capita on things other than defense. I could go on but really that is how I see it. Also in general Canadians have a lot stricter laws on advertising and a lot better consumer education. I believe Canadians are less likely to be prone to BFL like scams. I'd have to do more research but that is where I would put my money given what I know about both countries and consumer fraud.

Thanks.
1007  Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: BFL fucked us over again on: November 07, 2014, 01:18:22 PM
I'm Canadian and we have consumer protection laws that do not require such an entity like the FTC. Like healthcare we are miles ahead you Yanks on that score as well. The Office of Consumer Affairs of Canada does very well.

What is the difference? (Honest question, I do not know much about either).
1008  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 07, 2014, 01:14:16 PM
I mean seriously, folks complaining about a criminal drug dealer getting arrested. Maybe you never had a relative die from addiction.
+1

I have seen "drugs" ruin the lives of several young guys and their families.  "Drugs" meaning, to be explicit, those "friends" who push people into drug addiction, and the drug dealers who then exploit their addiction and push them into crime to support it.

I am all for legalizing pot and decriminalizing drug use.  But still I hope that Shrem, Ulbricht, Benthall, and all otehr people in the drug traffic "industry" will spend a good part of their lives in jail.
1009  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 07, 2014, 12:56:40 PM
By the way, the absence of Adam starts to be worring.

I guess (and hope) he has just taken a vacation from bitcoin trading.
1010  Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: BFL fucked us over again on: November 07, 2014, 12:47:05 PM
I pity the FTC officers who have to read through hundred of pages of adolescent obscenities in this forum to gather the bits of information relevant to their case.

I hope that there is a special medal for that kind of heroic service.  Or perhaps they can claim monetary compensation for mentally unhealthy job conditions.  Cheesy
1011  Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question. on: November 07, 2014, 09:37:06 AM
can I still have the bacon sandwich OP posted?
The sandwich you requested was offered on "December 26, 2011, 04:18:38 AM"; you sure you still want it?
Depends; was 2011 a good year for bacon sandwiches?

Did somebody say bacon?
Who said its bacon?
Are we now playing six degrees of separation?
You mean, from Kevin Bacon, 23rd Earl of Sandwich, Illinois?
1012  Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question. on: November 06, 2014, 09:16:10 PM
can I still have the bacon sandwich OP posted?
The sandwich you requested was offered on "December 26, 2011, 04:18:38 AM"; you sure you still want it?
Depends; was 2011 a good year for bacon sandwiches?
1013  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 06, 2014, 06:54:11 PM
... (Otherwise he could have pre-mined a few thousand blocks in advance, in secret, and use them later to steal other people's bitcoins.) ...
hhmmm? and how on Earth would he do that ?
He posts the genesis block of the secret chain, without the headline, mines a million bitcoins, and spends them all to buy a pizza and a coke.  The pizza parlor waits, say, six confirmations before delivering the pizza.  At that time the chain is N blocks long.  Then he posts the first N+1 blocks of the secret blockchain, according to which his million coins were not paid to the parlor, but just moved to another address of his own.  This chain is adopted by the network, since it is one block longer than the legitimate one.  Now he has a pizza and a coke, and still has all of his million bitcoins; whereas the parlor's address is now  empty.
That is an altcoin.

No: if it starts with the same genesis block, and is longer, that blockchain is bitcoin, by definition; and the blocks in the other (legitimate) branch are orphan blocks, ignored.

And even if you were right, the earthlings community would figure a way around this problem if it would pop up.

I was explaining why there is a newspaper quote in the genesis block.  It was put there precisely to prevent this problem -- to prove to everybody that no one could have been pre-mining a secret chain before the genesis block was posted.
1014  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 06, 2014, 03:35:57 PM
No there aren't. Dig under the surface and you can find government intervention everywhere. Take Microsoft for example. It is far from a monopoly even in the Operating system space, but Bill Gate's wealth is largely dependent on taxpayer-supported copyright, patent and trademark enforcement "intellectual property".  MS even has a lobying firm on K street in Washington D.C. to make sure copyright enforcement is built into trade treaties. Gates isn't even a good technologist. He's the son of a lawyer who re-marketed some crap he bought for a few thousand dollars called "Quick and Dirty Operating System" to IBM and  the government did most of the rest.

Quite correct.  Indeed there cannot be monopolies in a free market, by definition of the terms.

The confusion is that libertarians read "free" as "unregulated" (or "laissez-faire"), whereas it means "where suppliers and customers can freely enter the market and choose each other".   Unfortunately, unregulated markets quickly degenerate to monopolies or oligopolies, because the dominant suppliers will use their economic power (including by buying governments) to exclude competition and lock their customers in.

Microsoft is a good example: in the absence or regulations requiring open document format and interoperability, they were able to lock billions of users into their proprietary format.

1015  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 06, 2014, 01:48:32 PM
Spondoolies fire:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=521520.msg9451926#msg9451926
1016  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 06, 2014, 01:43:31 PM
2- after 6 confirmations from other parties, your precious premined blocks are useless and won't be accepted anymore by the blockchain, never, ever ? Unless you're trying to say that he would make some sort of 51% attack forcing his blocks in the chain, publicly ruining the whole project for the gain of a pizza ...

That is what I meant.  By mining in secret before publishing the genesis block, he could later post a longer blockchain and invalidate all transactions up to that point, even those in the second block.

It is equivalent to a 51% attack, but limited to the first few weeks or months.  (An entity with 51% of the total hashrate could pull the same trick starting at any block, since it could grow an alternative blockhain from that block faster than the rest of the network, and then their doctored chain would prevail on the legitimate one.)

Without the headline in the genesis block, the other collaborators would have to trust him -- namely, that he cared more about an experiment (that he just started) than about a pizza.   But the whole point of bitcoin is that one is supposed to trust the system without having to trust any authority, including Satoshi.
1017  Economy / Speculation / Re: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) on: November 06, 2014, 01:23:25 PM
mining is no work to pay taxes.. Its a hobby! Grin

Beware: AFAIK, if you are in the US, the IRS wants you to pay income tax on what you mine (or receive from a pool).  I believe the equivalent is true in most other countries.
1018  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 06, 2014, 12:55:12 PM
... (Otherwise he could have pre-mined a few thousand blocks in advance, in secret, and use them later to steal other people's bitcoins.) ...
hhmmm? and how on Earth would he do that ?
He posts the genesis block of the secret chain, without the headline, mines a million bitcoins, and spends them all to buy a pizza and a coke.  The pizza parlor waits, say, six confirmations before delivering the pizza.  At that time the chain is N blocks long.  Then he posts the first N+1 blocks of the secret blockchain, according to which his million coins were not paid to the parlor, but just moved to another address of his own.  This chain is adopted by the network, since it is one block longer than the legitimate one.  Now he has a pizza and a coke, and still has all of his million bitcoins; whereas the parlor's address is now  empty.
1019  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 06, 2014, 12:38:14 PM
It seems you were too late for the get-filthy-rich-quick scheme party and are now butthurt, but hey, you can still have an academic interest.

Yes, I was too late for that, but I could have joined the lose-half-your-life-savings party.  I missed that too, unfortunately.  Grin
1020  Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion on: November 06, 2014, 12:34:12 PM
If you see the quote about bank bailouts in the genesis block, then clearly satoshi has political/ economical motives.  I strongly disagree about the finite supply being only important for the late speculators as well.

"Clearly" to you, perhaps, not at all for me.

The purpose of including a newspaper headline in the genesis block was merely to prove that the block was created on that date, and not earlier. (Otherwise he could have pre-mined a few thousand blocks in advance, in secret, and use them later to steal other people's bitcoins.)

The headline of The Times on that day happened to be about bank bailout.  Did he choose that newspaper and that day on purpose?  I have seen no evidence that he did so.  And that quote seems to be the only "proof" that Satoshi's motivation to develop bitcoin was to rid the world of banks.

(Bitcoin will not get rid of banks or bank bailouts.  Their main business is to lend money that they don't quite have, and people will still want that service, even if money means bitcoin instead of dollars.)
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