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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

#191

Post by Balgair »

dang wrote: post #160
Balgair wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the info. To me, just about any HN post about XYZcoin is a minefield these days. The sentiments seem to all be unrealistically positive and the derision of the glaringly insane XYZcoins are just swamped in whataboutism and thread-derailing. I know it's a hot market and there is a lot of stuff going on, so these threads themselves are warranted, yet the comments in them are just clownshoes.

There have been a lot of low-quality comments posted on both sides of this hot topic. That's because hot topics attract low-quality comments. It's certainly not true that "the sentiments" are all positive, and I guarantee you that people who hold the opposite views to yours see "the sentiments" here as all the other way. We really need a name for this cognitive bias. Also, "whataboutism" has become the worst internet…

Thanks for the reply dang.

Upon further reflection, maybe it is just the 'top' comments in a thread that have the unrealistically positive sentiment. Yes, down-threads do tend to be more nuanced, but those also tend to have less comments and sub comments. I don't have the data, and I do have my own biases of course, but I feel that I see large comment blocks of thread derailing and bickering at the top. The more 'reasonable' comments then get shoved to the bottom (in XYZcoin threads).

The bias is the Semmelweis reflex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex)

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

#192

Post by sarajevo »

zmk_ wrote: post #133
thisisit wrote: post #23

Wow, this paper's conclusion is delayed by 3 years. Willy and Markus bots are old news for anyone who has been following bitcoin closely. The source of all these allegations was this blog appearing in 2014: https://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-repor...

This is how research in economics works. It can take even 5 years to get a paper published, although these guys seem to have written the paper quite recently. Turnaround was quick for them... Pre-publication version of the article is available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2977479

SSRN charges for access to the file ($5) - the three links below have a free version (the first link is the site where the file got originally published)

>- WEIS - The Workshop on the Economics of Information Security http://weis2017.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2...

>- Semantic Scholar: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c592/1dd0d1176278a644d06d1f...

>- archive.is - Webpage Archiving Tool http://archive.is/jRZw0

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

#193

Post by qbrass »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #186
qbrass wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't be Google. Google survived the bubble by staying a small private company that bigger companies didn't see as worth acquiring. It saved them from dying with those companies when the bubble popped.

I don't remember Yahoo or AOL dying in the bubble. (They died later)

AOL had been slowly dying since it's 2000 merger with Time Warner. It's just so large that it's been flailing about for almost two decades.

I'll give you Yahoo. While their current demise may have been related to wounds from the dot com bubble, I think they could have been fine had they not overexerted themselves trying to return to glory. I can't blame them for trying, though.

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

#194

Post by module0000 »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #187
module0000 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP to your question, but I observe what you are asking about each day. Here are the steps that can facilitate your example. If you are imagining stocks(instead of futures), replace the word "contract" with the word "share" in the example below. 1) The last trade price is $9950 2) Alice calls Bob, confirming she wants to close 500k long contracts by selling them to Bob 3) Bob bids up the price to $9999 4)…

How does Bob raise the price $49 without actual paying a lot of people and creating a real new price? Or is that the entry price of the scam? And the profits come from everyone else willing to buy at 10k (instead of 9950) because they are placing market orders and don't know what the real price is? Seems like this "scam" is just taking money from people who have no idea what price they want, which gets us back to wha…

No one is really getting scammed in the example. Bob buys whatever liquidity is available between 9950-10000. Keep in mind, Bob's goal is to buy at 10k. If he is able to get 100-200 of those contracts on the way up to 10k, he's buying at a lower price than he intended, which is a great deal for Bob.

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

#195

Post by JeremyBanks »

lawlessone wrote: post #176
JeremyBanks wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*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

and BitCoin Core is corrupt and broken. Pick your poison.

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

#196

Post by qubex »

stephen_g wrote: post #183
qubex wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s comfortingly close to fractional reserve banking (which unfashionably I’m a big fan of).

It’s worth noting that ‘fractional reserve’ isn’t really how banks work anymore. That model implies that banks require reserves to lend money, but they actually don’t (except in the countries that have a reserve requirement, for compliance reasons). The central bank does need to ensure that enough reserves exist in the system to have enough liquidity for banks to transfer money between them, but the banks tend to hol…

Yes, I'm a macroeconomist, I dabble in these matters all day every day (actually not really, I run the family company nowadays, but anyway, this stuff is my bread and butter, supposedly)... I know that current western systems are better characterised as being endogenous money systems rather than fractional reserve (though the two are not mutually exclusive, as if the reserve ratio is not mandatory but flexible then banks can be doing fractional reserve while the central bank simultaneously does not have any control over the size of the money supply... which isn't that bizarre either because as one progresses up the hierarchy of money supplies (M0, M1, M2, M3...) one pretty quickly gets far from anything central banks can legiferate about and into the domain of “assets agents are willing to accept as valuable and as suitable for exchange”, such as cigarettes, art, or prime real estate.

I'd argue that the endogenous money model most definitely isn't applicable to any cryptocurrency currently out there because maximum amounts are fixed, and thus (eventually) would be come unresponsive to market needs (and more technically, their derivative, the ‘speed’ with which money is introduced or removed, does not depend on the needs of the underlying economy and instead on technical aspects of the size of the mining network & cetera).

Sorry I didn't answer earlier I didn't see your comment.

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

#197

Post by AboutTheWhisles »

gizmo686 wrote: post #171
AboutTheWhisles wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a generalization that is meaningless without the context of what the bottleneck actually is. Bandwidth works, processing blocks 1,000 times bigger works, what exactly do you think would be the problem? 1GB every 10 minutes is 1.6MB/s. The DOCSIS 3.0 standard goes higher than 100MB/s and anyone can rent a VPS with a gigabit connection for $15 - $20 USD per month.

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

#198

Post by gizmo686 »

AboutTheWhisles wrote: post #197
gizmo686 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a generalization that is meaningless without the context of what the bottleneck actually is. Bandwidth works, processing blocks 1,000 times bigger works, what exactly do you think would be the problem? 1GB every 10 minutes is 1.6MB/s. The DOCSIS 3.0 standard goes higher than 100MB/s and anyone can rent a VPS with a gigabit connection for $15 - $20 USD per month.

https://youtu.be/LDF8bOEqXt4?t=4722

The bottleneck is propagation time. Also "The propogation time did not depend strongly on the network bandwidth for the given nodes"

Keep in mind that it is not sufficient for each node to have the bare minimum amount of bandwidth to download 1 block every ten minutes. When a node mines a block, we need that block to propagate across the entire network (~11,000 nodes [0]). Further, we want this propagation time to be relatively trivial; otherwise the number of orphan blocks would increase giving an advantage to large mining clusters and reducing the overall security of the network.

[0] https://bitnodes.earn.com/dashboard/

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

#199

Post by dlwdlw »

It's interesting to imagine this being "good" from the chains point of view. It is "using" predictable human greed to create a situation where it absorbs more and more value. The game Go's complexity cascades from very simple rules and has a "life" to it sustained by human energy. Blockchain's may be the first of games that are tied into reality via economic effects. Games do this already, but not at these levels of global mindshare and value.
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