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Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

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Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#211
post #207

For tech’s sake in this cryptoeconomy PhD thread, working with Bitfinex API was a pleasure. A simple websocket protocol with concise deterministic event packets and clear documentation. The only limitation is $1k barrier even for testing purposes, but no big deal. These guys know their ropes. Opposed to say Bitmex, which rolled out a braintrashing overengineered differential update protocol, so hard to scratch that w…

Agreed very much. I want to add that Bitfinex is making huge parts of their code open source: https://github.com/bitfinexcom/

Paolo Ardoino (CTO) basically pushes code every day: https://github.com/prdn

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin would be the ~20th largest company in the S&P by market cap. Hardly a penny stock.

Market cap is an absurd metric for cryptocurrencies. If print a billion tokens and sell you one for a dollar, it’s a billion dollar market cap.

there is an old adage I recall in trading.. "volume justifies price". so if you can sell your shiny new coin for a dollar a token with a billion such tokens outstanding & you can do it with any significant volume then yeah it would be a billion dollar cap coin.

Nice strawman though!

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#213
post #207

For tech’s sake in this cryptoeconomy PhD thread, working with Bitfinex API was a pleasure. A simple websocket protocol with concise deterministic event packets and clear documentation. The only limitation is $1k barrier even for testing purposes, but no big deal. These guys know their ropes. Opposed to say Bitmex, which rolled out a braintrashing overengineered differential update protocol, so hard to scratch that w…

Can you point me to the $1k limit?

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#214

Crazy use for Bitcoin: mine Bitcoin in satellites with giant solar arrays, at a capacity that makes it cheaper than terrestrial mining. Since terrestrial mining no longer economical, it ceases altogether resulting in reduction of energy consumption. I.e. space Bitcoin mining captures solar energy in space and sends it to earth in the form of coin, which is much safer than beaming the energy itself. I'm sure there are…

Instead of launching solar panels into space and getting free energy there, they could be placed on Earth to save the launch costs and get free energy here. Let's ignore that because the following is far more interesting ;)

To give you an idea of the scale of the problem that such an enterprise would be dealing with: the ISS has a cooling capacity of less than 100kW and current mining infrastructure has a power consumption in the order of gigawatts. This energy ends up as waste heat that needs to be dumped into space at the same rate. So for every gigawatt, there is 10000 times the cooling capacity of the so-far largest human-made object in space required.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#215
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly listening to the wrong people. It's usable for sure, but that doesn't mean billions of people can (nor want) to use it now. I'm using it just fine.

It's less usable than it's parent blockchain!

That's subjective. It's a lot cheaper and fast to send money.

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#216
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet didn't support millions of users after a decade either. Is the internet a scam? I'm not sure why you are saying all efforts go into a flawed second layer? a) Dozens of teams are working on other efforts. b) Many do not consider lightning flawed.

The Internet was always at capacity. Until we had the pervasive networking we have today, there were always more people wanting to have Internet access more persistently and with more performance than what was available. Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would. As a result, enormous advances in technology were made to implement today’s pervasive networking. New use cases manifested immediat…

> Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would.

I'm too young to have experienced this. But I've seen countless of clips and interviews of people claiming they would never use the internet because they can send post and use a telephone instead. "Computers are for geeks", etc.

> New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them.

It took a dotcom bubble to find the use cases we actually use today. Would you have not said the exact same thing back then about the internet?

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin as designed is technically incapable of being in widespread use for payment, due to a severe lack of network capacity, and a complete lack of interest in ever changing this. Instead, all effort is going into a building a flawed second layer that is theoretically unsound and a usability nightmare.

Eh, there's Stellar, Nano, whatever. There are solutions, the important thing is that cryptocurrencies start having uses other than speculation. It doesn't matter which one is useful as long as one is, and I'd rather use Bitcoin now than use Visa because of a theoretical fear that Bitcoin might not scale to millions of people.

> Eh, there's Stellar, Nano, whatever.

Exactly. That's why only 0.001% people chose to hang onto cryptocurencies - no scarcity whatsoever...

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#218
post #168
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's backed by collateral locked in Ethereum smart contracts. https://makerdao.com/en/whitepaper#overview-of-the-dai-stabl...

That doesn't explain how it's pegged to the dollar.

It is laid out pretty well in the link you got how it is not pegged to the US dollar (which I don't think anyone claimed either).

Re: Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says

#219
post #207

For tech’s sake in this cryptoeconomy PhD thread, working with Bitfinex API was a pleasure. A simple websocket protocol with concise deterministic event packets and clear documentation. The only limitation is $1k barrier even for testing purposes, but no big deal. These guys know their ropes. Opposed to say Bitmex, which rolled out a braintrashing overengineered differential update protocol, so hard to scratch that w…

Can you point me to the $1k limit?

Time passed since then, but this is it: https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/243 I don’t remember dates exactly, maybe we entered with $10k even, because I worked with it around Mar 2018.
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