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Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

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Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#171

Post by gizmo686 »

AboutTheWhisles wrote: post #155
davej wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing block size is not a sustainable solution for scaling transactions. Transaction fees are too high and BTC should move to 2MB as a short-term fix but the long-term fix is off-chain solutions like Lightning.

The Bitcoin Unlimited team has tested 1 GB blocks and presented their research and findings at conferences already. That being said, the least sustainable solution is to keep blocks at 1 MB for btc. The core group have ousted and alienated everyone who made bitcoin work originally. The fees have priced out everyone who created the ecosystem originally. It is crystal clear to anyone even slightly paying attention that…

The Bitcoin Unlimited team tested on a tiny network ; ~6 miners with a highly simplified set of transactions that made some of the statistics collected so meaningless that they explicitly left them out of the talk. Under these conditions, they found that 1GB was the point where the network broke under its own weight [0]. If you were to run the full sized bitcoin network, you would likely see problems much sooner than 1GB. As far as I recall, they did not even address the centralization argument (eg. the network may "work", but give a disproportionate advantage to large miners).

[0] This actually happened a couple of times earlier, but those were fixable with straightforward software optimizations.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#172

Post by rocho »

pessimizer wrote: post #58
diab0lic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dot com bubble analogy is fashionable right now because it serves to push the desired narrative without having to deny or provide evidence against what is clearly a bubble. I'd imagine many of the people you see perpetuating this are the same that were denying the bubble a few months ago. However that doesn't necessarily make it wrong -- I'm very skeptical but I'd have a tough time arguing that nothing useful at…

I'd argue that nothing useful is coming of it now, and that during dot com, the internet was extremely useful.

Monero is extremely useful and has a strong value proposition. RaiBlocks is another one that's good from this perspective.

I agree, most of the projects in the crypto space are just overvalued vaporware (see, very recently, TRON). But some are legit.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#173

Post by AgentME »

jcoffland wrote: post #168
hossbeast wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your work, do you champion short term solutions?

Yes, when they are easy and they get the job done. Then you move on to the long-term solutions.

Bitcoin Cash skipped activating segwit, so they seem to be on track to avoid any of the existing long term solutions which require segwit.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#174

Post by jstanley »

FabHK wrote: post #87
astund wrote: post #57

I suspect this is going on today. Cryptocurrency traders place a lot of faith in the exchanges. A bad actor at an exchange could manipulate a price upwards: - Create a ton of volume and potentially and upward trend (two bots trading with one another, increasing the price each time) - Generate hype around a coin - Let FOMO take over If things start to go south, disable withdrawals, deposits, or freeze the market until…

In aviation, the saying goes that "aviation regulations are written in blood", because for many rules, some time in the past people died in an accident, and the rule was established to prevent reoccurrence. Now, in finance, the situation is not quite so dramatic. Nevertheless, many of the banking rules that cryptocurrencies (and sometimes fintech) aim to circumvent or flout are there for a reason. Surprise!

They might be there for a reason, but that reason doesn't necessarily benefit the individual who is being harmed by them. E.g. KYC/AML.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#175

Post by peterjlee »

perseusprime11 wrote: post #135
notsrg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can see on a regular basis that South Korean exchanges are always paying 25-50% more than Western exchanges. The Bitcoin pump to 20k, the entire history of Bitcoin Cash, and recently the Ripple pump to $3 were all pumped by Bithumb, Upbit, etc. Hence the controversy with Coinmarketcap removing Korean exchanges for a second resulting in the marketcap dropping 50 billion. Even right now, almost 50% of XRP volume is…

That's interesting. Why would they buy it for more than $2? Is it because the exchange is selling for more or just problems with international currency.

There's a high demand in S.Korea (mostly FOMO) and it's a bit hard to transfer a large amount of money out of S.Korea for some legal reasons, which makes arbitraging hard.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#176

Post by lawlessone »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #145
fpgaminer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like that article was written on the 23rd of December. That's the same time period around which Coinbase abruptly released Bcash. That time period was a barrage of negative kerfuffles for them. Historically Coinbase/GDAX has enjoyed "inflated" BTC/USD prices because of their trustworthiness. Contrast with Bitfinex which does not serve US customers, has been hacked in the past, and is (last I heard) in debt from…

*Bitcoin Cash, not BCash. If you're not Satoshi, don't try to enforce an imaginary trademark. It looks petty and detracts from serious arguments.

it's a scam

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#177

Post by beefield »

DenisM wrote: post #128
beefield wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in theory you could run fractional reserve bank by letting your deposit customers decide whether they want or not be making deposits to you at any deposit rate you are offering. This would work if you disclosed your balance sheet and your customers were smart enough to make proper capital adequacy calculations on that. In the real world, however, I am not sure if disclosing the balance sheet matters, expected o…

Tragedy of the commons? I want all of my money lent out, but I also want the bank to have a reserve in case I need it, which means none of your money lent out. The only way out of this is for customers to bargain collectively for the proper reserve ratio.

Nowadays the bank regulation is a bit more complicated than simple reserve requirements, and the capital held in "safe" assets (central bank deposits, government issued loans etc) is not there in the case if you need it (most of the time when you "need" your money, bank actually does not pay it out, but just changed whom it ows the money i.e. makes an account transfer), but it is there for the losses bank may make in their credit portfolio.

A simple example:

Bank has 90 deposits and 10 equity. That is used to finance 80 mortgages and 20 deposits in central banks.

Now, if the deposit customers have full understanding what kind of mortgages the bank has issued, they can estimate how likely it is that more than 10 of the mortgages fail, bank goes bankrupt and the deposit holder does not get paid full.

You see quickly that there is many ways how a bank kan reduce the risk in its credit portfolio. If the bank decides to lend only 10 and store 90 in central bank deposits, the risk of the bank losing more than 10 is quite small. but of course, you get more money from mortgages than from central bank, so you want to lend as much as you can to mortgages to maximize revenue. But then you need to pay also more to the (rational) deposit holders because of increased risk. You see also very quickly that even if the deposit holders had full understanding of the balance sheet, the calculations would be so difficult that wihtout regulation, most would inves their savings to banks that are riskier than what they think -> and lose their money.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#178

Post by timq »

davej wrote: post #137
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Why does hackernews seem to be biased towards BTC over BCH? In my opinion, any honest examination of the tradeoffs between block size, orphan block rate, cost to run a non-mining node (which do not contribute to network security except indirectly via serving SPV wallets), and mining fees, will show that a 1-1.7MB block size limit is just too low for current tx volumes. The current BTC network is unu…

Increasing block size is not a sustainable solution for scaling transactions. Transaction fees are too high and BTC should move to 2MB as a short-term fix but the long-term fix is off-chain solutions like Lightning.

Then why is even a harmless increase to 2 or 4 refused? The current confirmation time and fees are beyond any worst case scenario, but yet there are still people completely brainwashed to argue that Bitcoin Core is perfectly fine.

Bitcoin Cash scale what it can scale, that is, blocksize. That's it, it is a pragmatic approach absolutely obvious for anyone with more than 2 year of experience in programming.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#179

Post by cesarb »

timq wrote: post #178
davej wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing block size is not a sustainable solution for scaling transactions. Transaction fees are too high and BTC should move to 2MB as a short-term fix but the long-term fix is off-chain solutions like Lightning.

Then why is even a harmless increase to 2 or 4 refused? The current confirmation time and fees are beyond any worst case scenario, but yet there are still people completely brainwashed to argue that Bitcoin Core is perfectly fine. Bitcoin Cash scale what it can scale, that is, blocksize. That's it, it is a pragmatic approach absolutely obvious for anyone with more than 2 year of experience in programming.

> Then why is even a harmless increase to 2 or 4 refused?

A side-effect of SegWit is a partial increase to up to 4; the average block size is already above the previous limit of 1.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#180

Post by qubex »

notahacker wrote: post #110
qubex wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, but that’s a legal requirement tacked on by governments, not an actual theoretical requirement.

Sure, but assuming Tether are lying about their instrument being fully backed it doesn't meet any of the theoretical requirements either. Fractional reserve relies on banks being strongly incentivised not to issue too many bank notes because they earn profits only on repaid loans issued to creditworthy borrowers, not from the act of printing the bank note to sell for currency. Even in the absence of regulation, centr…

I’m a macroeconomist, a disbeliever in current cryptocurrencies (because they do not allow fractional reserve banking because they have finite supply) and I absolutely agree with you. I was being facetious further up, I thought that was clear (but apparently it wasn’t).
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