|
241
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 07, 2015, 01:55:14 AM
|
Wouldn't there be a conflict between that FOIA request and the data protection act? Any personally identifiable information is covered by the data protection act. The bidders have the right to remain anonymous if they wish to. Regular auctions are sometimes won by anonymous bidders, and they get to remain anonymous.
I am not a lawyer, but as a citizen of Brazil I consider any "property" of the Brazilian government to be my property (and of the other 205,046,327 Brazilians). So I should have the right to know who my government sold my property to -- and especially how much the guy paid for it. That should trump his right to privacy. |
|
|
|
|
242
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 06, 2015, 09:08:30 PM
|
Does anyone have a link to who were the bidders? The quantity of bidders and any description of who they represent?
That information has never been released, and the USMS says it won't be. After the first auction, someone submitted a FOIA request to the USMS for them to release that information (FOIA = US Freedom of Information Act). The last news I read, a couple of months later, were that the request was still unanswered (thus stretching if not violating the FOIA). |
|
|
|
|
243
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 06, 2015, 09:03:53 PM
|
You're right, I thought there was a fee, but didn't read that page. I thought they charged the losing bidders at least the value of the bank transfer fee to return their deposits, but that page doesn't mention it. The Feds must pay the bank transfer fees out of all the money they got for the Bitcoins.
That is my understanding too. The bidders pay the fees for the deposits, the USMS pays the fees for the returns. The winning bidder is responsible for any wire transfer fees associated with his or her payment.
Any [bitcoin] transfer fees associated with the transfer of the bitcoins will be paid by the buyer. The buyer will be given an opportunity to select the amount of fees charged in the transfer.
...
8. How will my deposit be returned if I am not a winning bidder?
The USMS will send funds by Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfer. Please ensure that the financial institution from which your deposit was sent will accept an incoming ACH transfer before you register for the auction. In exceptional circumstances, judged on a case by case basis, the USMS will agree to send funds by wire transfer. Please know and understand the difference between these two types of funds transfers.
Your refund will be processed following the close of the auction. We will endeavor to initiate all refunds within five (5) business days following transfer of bitcoins to the winning bidder(s). Fund transfers are not immediate, as they are routed through the Department of Treasury (see paragraph below). If you provide incorrect information, it may take a week or longer to confirm that a transaction has been rejected before making another attempt. If you are sending funds from a foreign country using an intermediary U.S. bank, please be aware that receipt of refunds may take longer to process and confirm. Due to the foregoing factors, we cannot guarantee a date for you to receive your refund.
The Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996, 31 United States Code § 3716, requires the Department of the Treasury and other disbursing officials to offset Federal payments to collect delinquent debts owed to the United States, or delinquent debts owed to states, including past-due child support enforced by states. If an offset is made during an ACH transfer, the claimant will receive a notification from the Department of the Treasury at the address provided by the claimant. If you believe that your payment may be subject to an offset, you may contact the Treasury Department at the following number: 1-800-304-3107.
|
|
|
|
|
244
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 06, 2015, 08:54:49 PM
|
Bitcoin Price Goes Parabolic, But Why? http://bullbearanalytics.com/2015/11/06/bitcoin-price-goes-parabolic/Lastly, Gavin and Mike are back at it once again using scare tactics and fear mongering as a last gasp for the survival of their ill-fated BitcoinXT project. Ignore this noise, they are acting like spoiled children that didn’t get their way. Too bad, kids, you have already lost. Huh? The guy sets out to list possible explanations for the price going up to $500. The third one being "Mike and Gavin are back at it once again using scare tactics and fear mongering"? Was that paragraph a paid signature perhaps? He also dismisses MMM as a significant cause of the rally because thoughout the rally the market was still trading very technically. Institutions are the ones that know how to move price in a coordinated way across multiple exchanges. A Russian ponzi scammer, no matter how good he is at his craft, can’t. He didn't quite get it... It is not Sergei who buys the bitcoins, but the victims -- wherever they are, in any whatever market they can get. And there have been reports that the ponzi (and some copycats) was quite popular in China, so it is not strange that the Chinese exchanges were leading. Not to mention that Sergei's previous ponzis moved more money than all that has been invested in bitcoin over the last six years. And that there is no evidence that "institutions" have ever tried to "move [bitcoin's] price in a coordinated way across multiple exchanges". |
|
|
|
|
245
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 06, 2015, 04:53:17 AM
|
I'm worried with the OKcoin thing.
If they are insolvent then it will be like a Gox event with steroids
What, when did this happen? (The rumors) - It's insane how many of these exchanges are scams. Ya is there any more to this OKcoin thing? Even if they were hacked, most coins should be in cold storage, hard to imagine insolvency,,, these days" They are insolvent. Roger Ver guarantees it. |
|
|
|
|
248
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 05, 2015, 11:25:07 PM
|
Didn't anyone notify this guy about the USMS auction, the EU ruling regarding Bitcoin and VAT, the BitLicense, the IRS, CFTC, SEC statements, etc. ? He may or may not be aware of those things; but, as he said, governments have been surprisingly friendly to bitcoin -- so far. Perhaps because politicians do not want to seem anti-technology: they may think that they can get more votes by suporting bitcoin than by banning it. (Or perhaps for other more sinister reasons.) But that is unlikely to last. I don't get why such red flag waving is getting so much attention, while the evidence showing its ineptness are overwhelming...  Most people wish that they could be as "inept" as he... Pr. Stolfi, is that a friend of yours ?
No, I have no love for big bankers either. My league is that of my esteemed collleague Prof. Bitcorn. |
|
|
|
|
249
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 05, 2015, 06:13:49 AM
|
Owning a bitcoin is more like owning a royalty dividend on the intellectual property of the blockchain, than owning a stock.
The more things the blockchain is used for the more your royalty payment should be worth. Value of bitcoin today = NPV of the value of all the fees on all the future transactions. Bitcoin traders are in effect speculating on future volumes of transactions and speed of adoption. One could argue that recent positive coverage and investment might significantly increase speed of adoption - which would lead to a real reason for a rising price.
That is not true at all. A bitcoin is NOT a share of intellectual property of the blockchain. If you own the copyrigt of a movie or the patent of an invention, you get royalties every time someone plays the movie or uses the invention commercially. But while you are holding the bitcoin, you don't get a single satoshi of royalties, no matter how much the blockchain is used. And anyone can build another blockchain using the same code but a new genesis block, that does not include your coins; and the miners can choose to mine that one instead of the bitcoin one -- all without paying a dime of royaties. Rather, a bitcoin is a piece of real estate on some imaginary planet. The planet has a fixed area, and its land registry is VERY secure, and property titles are easily transferred via the internet. But the value of that land depends entirely on the fancy of traders, because one cannot do anything with it except buy and sell it. And anyone can imagine an infinitude of other planets, and sell land on those... Saying that "the price of stocks too is speculative" is misleading talk of penny stock and bitcoin salesmen. Stock prices have speculative component, true; but that component has little relevance for long-term investing, because the price stays anchored on the concrete assets and products of the company. In contrast, the price of an instrument that has no backing assets and pays no dividends, being anchored to nothing, can wander randomly by orders of magnitude, according to the irrational gut feelings of traders and investors. |
|
|
|
|
250
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 05, 2015, 05:56:39 AM
|
Bitcoin so far has been adopted as a currency only by criminals and scammers. Adoption for legitimate commerce is tiny, and largely to limited to users who want to push bitcoin for other reasons than its qualities as a payment method.
Why was I so sure that this "argument" would be posted today.... You realize that the currency with the most illegal usages like money laundering, drug money, weapons etc. is the US-Dollar? Heck, if you count in the money from black labour (which is also illegal, iirc), pretty much every currency is used far more for illegal activities and scams. Btw, your pseudo argument was/is also used for the internet... "99% of the internet traffic and 90% of websites are porn sites" In retrospect, this is actually good news!  Can you see the difference between "uses of bitcoin are mostly illegal payments" and "most illegal payments use bitcoin"? One is false, the other is true. |
|
|
|
|
251
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 09:01:49 PM
|
bitcoin offers unalienable security.
1/2 hexahash decentralized P2P network remember?
Bitcoin is like a bank vault with mile-thick steel walls, that gets opened and swept by the janitor every night, after everybody left. The security of a system is not defined by the strongest component alone. You must consider the whole system, and often it is the weakest part that dominates. There are many potential security failure modes in the bitcoin system. The distributed mining network and PoW blockchain only guard against a few of them. On the other hand, many corrective measures that are available in the traditional systems (not by accident, but because they were found to be necessary) are absent in bitcoin. Bitcoin so far has been adopted as a currency only by criminals and scammers. Adoption for legitimate commerce is tiny, and largely to limited to users who want to push bitcoin for other reasons than its qualities as a payment method. Actual use of bitcoin, in practice, still requires trusting third parties -- like Blockstream, Coinbase, Bitstamp, SatoshiLabs, etc.. (BTW, 10 15 is "exa-", not "hexa-".) |
|
|
|
|
252
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 03:42:13 PM
|
no no no AAPL or WMT do not have the same potential as bitcoin.
AAPL is valued because Apple makes products that people want, so each share pays out dividends (or becomes a share of a bigger capital). AAPL is unlikely to go to 1,000,000 $/share bcause it is unlikely that Apple will make a product THAT good. One can speculate with AAPL shares, and a speculative bubble may well push the price a lot higher that their fundamental price -- but only for a while, eventually it gets corrected back. Bitcoin (sorry for repeating) has does not make any products and does pay dividends. It can be used as a currency, but so could be Litecoin or any of an infinite supply of altcoins; and the "fundamental" price supported by that use shoudl be down in the single digits. So its current price is entirely speculative. I fail to see how a financial instrument that has less productive potential than AAPL can have more chance of getting getting "to the moon" and staying there... |
|
|
|
|
253
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 03:26:15 PM
|
coinbase has 2.7 million KYC verified clients and 4.2 million accounts and they fall outside the jurisdiction of the largest bitcoin userbase. A conservative estimate would be 4-5 million minimum. https://www.coinbase.com/aboutThose are *registered* not *active* users. Coinbase (and others like them) are always ambiguous when they quote those numbers. A user may register just out of curiosity, perhaps make one or two small transactions and then give up on bitcoin. If Coinbase's active users were really growing, they would not need to run referral campaigns that paid $25 ($75 at some point) for referral of a new user who made a $100 payment through them (which would have generated $2 of revenue). Moreover, that count must include (as you say) people who use only "off-chain bitcoin" -- deposit dollars at Coinbase, buy some bitcoin, only to spend them at a Coinbase-affiliated merchant who gets dollars from Coinbase. Sorry, but those are not at all "bitcoin users". Bitcoin was about replacing dollars and getting rid of trusted intermediaries, remeber? If youdon't issue transactions for the blockchain, you are not using bitcoin. Bitcoin is to "Coinbase bitcoin" like steak is to steak-flavored corn chips. |
|
|
|
|
254
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 03:09:43 PM
|
Wences is one of the worst snake bit-oil peddlers out there. By talking about "1,000,000 $/BTC" as if it were an almost sure thing, he has definitely left the "salesman" land and crossed into "scam" territory. That's not true, he said there is a change (20%) that bitcoin will collapse Many will understand that as "an 80% change of it getting to 1,000,000 $/BTC". And he knows that. There is simply no rational way to pick probabilities of future prices. Is it possible that BTC will reach that price? Sure. Is it possible that Litecoin will do that instead? Sure, that is possible too. Is ist possible that AAPL or WMT shares will do it? Possible, yes, sure. Even the Venezuelan bolivar and the Somalian shilling could be worth that much one day. So? |
|
|
|
|
255
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 02:43:27 PM
|
Wences Casares:
''It is hard to estimate how many people on bitcoins, but it may be somewhere between 13 and 15 million people right now. If Bitcoin is successful we will see hundreds of millions of people own Bitcoin and, eventually, billions. The only way we can get to billions of people owning Bitcoin is by the price going up by several orders of magnitude, let's say $ 1 million (but this is highly speculative and risky). So, if I am right, and Bitcoin has to go from $390 to $1,000,000 the best way for it to get there without crashing irreversibly is with as much volatility as possible. If bitcoin went up a couple percentage points every week and everybody began to think about it as a "sure" thing, investing money that was destined to pay for kids colleges or for retirement, that is a disaster waiting to happen price wise. Because when Bitcoin corrects those people have to sell because they cannot take more losses, potentially creating a vicious circle which is hard to reverse.''
There are only 14 million BTC out there, so if there were 15 million bitcoiners the average bitcoiner would have less than 1 BTC. Since the distribution is highly skewed, most of those "bitcoiners" would have to own only 0.01 BTC or less. There are only ~150'000 transactions issued per day, or ~4.5 million per month. If we count as bitcoiners only those people who issue a transaction at least once a month, there cannot be more than 4.5 million. Again, most of the transactions are generated by a small number of users, so the number of bitcoiners is probably less than 450'000. Wences is one of the worst snake bit-oil peddlers out there. By talking about "1,000,000 $/BTC" as if it were an almost sure thing, he has definitely left the "salesman" land and crossed into "scam" territory. |
|
|
|
|
256
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 02:30:13 PM
|
Someone needs to do this in log form. I am curious to see the slopes for previous bubbles and this one in log form.
If the slope is lower, we're golden.
Log-scale alone will not help, because each bubble grows on top of the steady state left by the previous ones. That is, when the price P(t) is growing "eponentially" it is not growing like A*B**(t-t0), but rather A*B**(t-t0) + C, where C is (in theory) a little less than the price P(t0) at the start of the bubble. Thus, in order to turn the graph into a straight line and measure the rising slope of each bubble, you must subtract the starting price P(t0), and THEN use log scale. Here you can find my best attempt to untangle the previosu bubbles in bitcoin's price. From Jan/2014 until Sep/2015 we had several "false bubbles" where speculators bought lots of BTC because they thought that X would buy lots of bitcoin, only that X didn't. The X were Microsoft and McDonalds customers, the Greek, New Yorkers, the "3 billion euro hedge fund", etc. Those bubbles had a sharp jump instead of an exponential rise, pesumably because the speculators are all watching the bitcoin news sites and forums, so they all get the rumor at once. This time the bubble looks more "classical", with an exponential rise instead of a sudden jump. It could be explained if the primary demand is spreading through the X buyers by infection, rather than from mass media. Of course there is a lot of speculative amplification (as there was in all the previous true bubbles). |
|
|
|
|
257
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 12:27:45 PM
|
new money (MMM) doesn't care about altcoins.
Then could anyone explain why Litecoin is rising too? it went from 20 to 35 CNY (+75%) in the last week, while bitcoin rose from 2100 to 3150 (+50%). From August to mid-October the two were almost in lockstep at first. LTC seems to lag behind at times, but overall it is still tracking BTC. |
|
|
|
|
258
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 12:11:15 PM
|
The main problem is if you make it as a gif, the interstitial will make it a lot bigger. It really wouldn't be terribly hard to create an actual movie from the data though.
Would it? Animated gifs have a "frame delay" parameter, so in theory you don't need to repeat frames in order to slow down an animation. (But I do not know whether browses pay attention to it.) |
|
|
|
|
259
|
Economy / Speculation / Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
|
on: November 04, 2015, 02:26:07 AM
|
Well, I did learn *a lot* of interesting and useful things from the bitcoin project, much of it from this thread. I don't know whether it was worth the investment; but one never knows, even afterwards, what will pay out and what will turn out to have been wasted...
Given that you are a professor in the computing field, I think this falls within your remit. Yeah, I could say that if someone wanted me to account for the time I spend on it. Though you are a bit more hands-on than one might expect  Actually, most of what I learned by watching bitcoin was not about computing, but about other things. Two years ago I did not know about order books, spreads, arbitrage, TA, ETF. I had only a vague idea of what libertarianism was about, and never heard the terms "ancap", "fiat", "gold bug", "day trader". I learned about the money velocity equation and why a good currency must be inflationary. And much more. One important thing I learned is the rule "past prices do not affect future prices". Actually I first had to read tons of posts that claimed 1000% growth per year guaranteed, backed by straight red lines on exponential price charts. (Remember those? I haven't seen many of them in the last year...). Only to learn, by reading and by experiment, that they were basically all bogus. Trends in ordinary stocks may be meaningful, if they are tied to slow-varying physical phenomena liek consumer demand and overall economic activity. For purely speculative assets, like gold and bitcoin, trends are at best useful only for describing the past, but mostly useless for predicting the future. The only model that seems to work is the "log-Brownian" model, that says that the price at any date in the future is the price today, plus or minus a random (unpredictable) relative change. |
|
|
|
|
260
|
Other / Off-topic / Re: Answer the question above with a question.
|
on: November 04, 2015, 12:01:15 AM
|
are humans usually able to fly?
Do humans fly with their attention to other people and then feel excited or misserable about that persons status quo? Can a fly fly if its wings get caught in the pant's fly of a fisherman who was throwing the fly? |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
