They certainly had the opportunity, but the easy oil money removed the motivation.

Spain and Portugal were world powers in the 16th and 17th centuries, largely because of the gold that they plundered in the Americas and spices and such from the orient.  As a consequence, they did not develop industry either.  When they were cut off from those externas sources of wealth, they became the poorest countries in Europe -- until they joined the EU.

... which may defeat the purpose. I gather that the natural product is good only because the civet feeds exclusively on ripe berries; whereas picked berries always have a mix of ripe and unripe ones.

For the last year or two Brazil's economy suffered badly by the tumbling oil price and record droughts. And by the usual consequences of a presidential re-elction.

The droughts were nominally the effect of the El Niño cycle, but were worse than usual.  The city of São Paulo (over 10 million hab.) almost ran out of water, as the dam lakes that feed it got completely emptied; the State govt even had to install extra pipes and pumps to collect the muddy "dead volume" at the bottom.  Fortunately, this year rains have returned and those lakes are slowly re-filling.

Vast oil reservoirs were discovered some years ago in the Brazilian continental shelf, at record depths under a km-thick salt layer. Dilma was counting on the revenue from those fields, which went into production a year or two ago, for a number of ambitious social programs.  But the tumbling oil price made those extra-deep wells uneconomical.  The expected billions did not materialize, and she has been forced to make deep cuts in the budget.  (But not in the 60% of the budget that goes to the banks to service the public debt, of course).  

The low oil price was disastrous for Venezuela, whose economy has long been entirely based on oil exports and has very little domestic industry and agriculture.  That is basically why the bolivar tumbled so spectacularly in recent years.

Do you think that they are natural, rational, or complex?

Wait, that honey badger does not seem quite legit...

Thanks to the insistence of many supporters on reddit, my 90 day ban on /r/btc has just been reduced to 2 days.  I cannot think of any other explanation for the sudden price drop.  

Actually, it seems that my ban from /r/btc was just accidental; but the mods need to save their face, hence I could not be simply unbanned --- and several of my supporters were themselves banned for their protests (one of them for 600 days!).  

The irony is that /r/btc is owned by Roger Ver, self-proclaimed defensor and martyr of free speech; and was offered as a safe haven to refugees who left (or were banned from) /r/bitcoin because of theymos's ruthless censorship of any big block advocacy, a couple of months ago.

By the way, among the testimonials in my favor on /r/btc, this was my favorite:

Do you mean that porks with bells have to pay toll?

The report by those two analysts concludes that, if the Central Bank of Barbados had bought some bitcoin in 2009, it would have made a significant profit by now.  It then extrapolates the exponential growth of the past 6 years to decades in the future, with the obvious results. Based on that analysis, it advises the bank to buy some bitcoin.

RBF is the replace-by-fee queue policy, that Peter Todd implemented and added to Core for the next release.  I don't think that Roger had anything to do with it.

With this change, a transaction that is still unconfirmed will be replaced in the queues by a later transaction that spends the same inputs (even to totally different outputs), if it pays a higher transaction fee.  Howeve the first transaction must have a tag saying that it can be replaced 9at least in this version of the patch).  

This feature is useful only when there is a backlog of unconfirmed transactions: it provides a way for the user to bump the fee on a stuck transaction, to increse its priority.  It also lets a user to cancel an incorrect trasnaction, if he notices the error and reacts before the bad transaction is confirmed.

The impact of this change on payment processors and merchants is not clear, but it is certainly not positive.

EDIT: corrected Freudian slip "cancer a transaction" to "cancel".

Here is my reading.  Buttcoiny, of course.

From the AMA of Nejc Kodrič of Bitstamp

Well, I tried to post only serious stuff to /r/btc .  Perhaps I am a better bitcoiner than buttcoiner after all... 

Or perhaps, in those filtered and pasteurized forums, they feel the lack of a villain to shoot at...


It was a 90 day ban.  I don't know why.  I asked the mods but did not get any answer. 

I only made two posts there yesterday, after being absent for ~2 months.  One critic of the 21co Computer, the other explaining the new RBF and criticizing the lack of a fixed queue policy. 

Maybe the ban had nothing to do with those posts.  Probably some of my old "enemies" there just reported me as a troll based on the whole of my "work".

Or perhaps Roger Ver, the owner of /r/btc, was pissed off about some not so nice things I wrote about him elsewhere (such as taking the side of OKCoin in the dispute over bitcoin.com).

Love Song for ... you'll never guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqxNbGvNamY

Obscene BTC/CNY volume in the last three days at OKCoin.cn and Huobi (both in Mainland China). 

BTC-China, Bitstamp, and Bitfinex, on the other hand, had large but not at all exceptional volume over the last few days.

Huobi had 1.6 million BTC traded on 2015-11-26; OKCoin.cn had 1.3 million.  That is about 10x the typical daily volume since the 2013 rally to Sep/2015.  Looking at the 3d volume charts, it seems almost that they did not exist until 3 months ago.

BTC-China (in Shanghai, a Special Economic Zone) had three epochs of large volume: two modest ones in Nov/2013 and early Nov/2015 (peaking at 0.08 M BTC/day) and a much larger one from Sep/2014 to May/2015 (peaking at  0.20 M BTC/day, except two freak days 13--14 Nov/2014 with 0.58 M BTC).

Bitstamp and Bitfinex had relatively constant volume (~0.01 M BTC/day) since May/2013, except for a couple of surges. Bitstamp saw 0.03--0.06 M BTC/day in Dec/2013 and Mar/2014; Bitfinex saw such numbers in Jan--Mar/2015.  Both had a similar surges in Sep-Nov/2015, but peaking on 2015-11-03 (whereas Huobi and OKCoin peaked a couple of days earlier).  Over the last 3-4 days, they have had relatively little volume (whereas OKCoin and Huobi have surpassed their records).

So I would (still) guess that the current rally is being pulled by Huobi and OKCoin, with the others following.  The Chinese MMM ponzi and its copycats still seem to be prime suspects.  The peak on 2015-11-03, on the other hand, may have been speculative amplification of that demand, mostly at the other exchanges.

I first learned of bitcoin sometime in October or November 2013, when Rick Falkvinge (founder of the Swedish Pirate Party) tweeted that he was putting all his savings into bitcoin ("but this is not investment advice").  I did not pay attention at that time. 

Then he tweeted again about bitcoin while the big crash was in progress.  He was furious because, halfway through the crash, MtGox's ticker started replaying the same trades over and over again.  (I never found out whether it was a bug, or an intentional desperate attempt by Mark to stop the crash by posting fake prices.)  That is when I started digging into the topic in earnest.  (I had just given up on following the Fukushima accident, after i learned that the data I had been plotting and studying for 3 months was totally meaningless readings from broken instruments. Perhaps I needed some other disaster to fill the void.   )

Later still, in December 2013 or early 2014, Rick wrote that he had a six figure amount in euros locked up in MtGOX, which he was unable to withdraw.  I gather that he managed to withdraw some of it eventually, before MtGOX folded for good.  Yet, last time I checked, he was still positive about bitcoin.  There is a man of strong convictions...

Whoa, is this real?  DigitalCC was still around recently, see for example this.  The company was notable for being the only publicly owned mining company (that I know of) and therefore obliged to publish quarterly financial reports.  IIRC, their owner/CEO has been Zhenya Tsvetnenko for some time.

As others have pointed out, that is a fake PrimeDice site. (Are you shilling for them, perchance?)  If you had bothered to check their conditions, you would have seen that they require only 5 bets of 0.5 BTC -- way too little for a honest site to recover the gift via the house cut or fees.  So it may have attracted many unwary victims...

Could you please check the daily volume at OKCoin and Huobi over the past year?  And compare to Bitstamp and Bitfinex...

Thanks!

Why FUD?  I think that the MMM ponzi could lift the price to $1200 and beyond (or not). Otherwise, I don't see where else you are going to find enough fresh demand for bitcoins to do that.


One does not need to stand in the rain to be a competent meteorlogist.