(06-20-2017 12:27 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 12:22 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Here's an interesting article that describes a new bill that would require the declaration of crypto currencies at the border.

http://www.investopedia.com/news/congres...-security/

Such a law seems quite speculative, and it seems a bit unclear how it would be enforced - for example are you carrying a device that allows you access to private keys, or do you have coins stored in some location that you can access from anywhere in the world... seems a bit invasive because there does not currently seem to be any requirement to declare all the assets that you own in various bank accounts, only to declare what you are actually carrying. Furthermore it could be argued that you are never carrying crypto currencies - you are only carrying the private keys, because the actual crypto currencies are "in the cloud" and not on the device - even though the device may hold the private keys that allow you to access the actual coins. It may be a few years before something like this has some meaningful way of enforcing?

The key line is this:

"Because digital currencies technically accompany a holder anywhere that he or she goes"

This is 100% wrong.

Hahahahaha..

Thanks for pointing that out. I had noticed the language, but it kind of slipped me to mention and frequently legislators are so retarded anyhow, when it comes to tech, that sometimes there are just too many stupid and impractical things that are built into their legislative assumptions, but now that you highlight it, makes more sense to me about how retarded they can be.

I pointed this out in the slack, but the bill seems to require this for any instrument, including blank checks and debit cards, not just cryptocurrency.

If I take my debit card or checkbook across the border as written it would require me to state the full amount of my bank accounts.

(06-20-2017 12:39 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  I pointed this out in the slack, but the bill seems to require this for any instrument, including blank checks and debit cards, not just cryptocurrency.

If I take my debit card or checkbook across the border as written it would require me to state the full amount of my bank accounts.

Seems a bit much to me.. like it is not going to pass the 4th amendment regarding unreasonable search.


In one sense, it is not too uncommon for legislators to make certain proclamations that are NEVER going to end up in the final bill, so in that regards, we have to see how it plays out, and if some of these terms would end up going into a final bill that ends up getting signed into law.

(06-20-2017 12:28 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  This article seems to describe the latest of a kind of segwit2x that causes segwit to be first and then a 2x hardfork would only happen upon testing 2mb increase and 95% consensus regarding that portion.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/chinese-...-segwit2x/

I am little bit unclear if this proposed way forward, meaning the seg wit portion of it, only requires 80% or would also require 95% support?

Seems that folks are excited about this potential resoltion that allows seg wit first.

Here's an article that explains the making of the various segwit2x proposals compatible.... and seemingly with a goal of achieving more than 80% of hashing power supporting the compromise before August 1 - which would cause the August 1 trigger of the BIP 148 UASF to be no longer relevant.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bip...oin-whole/

(06-20-2017 02:47 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 12:28 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  This article seems to describe the latest of a kind of segwit2x that causes segwit to be first and then a 2x hardfork would only happen upon testing 2mb increase and 95% consensus regarding that portion.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/chinese-...-segwit2x/

I am little bit unclear if this proposed way forward, meaning the seg wit portion of it, only requires 80% or would also require 95% support?

Seems that folks are excited about this potential resoltion that allows seg wit first.

Here's an article that explains the making of the various segwit2x proposals compatible.... and seemingly with a goal of achieving more than 80% of hashing power supporting the compromise before August 1 - which would cause the August 1 trigger of the BIP 148 UASF to be no longer relevant.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bip...oin-whole/

If this really pans out (I'm still a little skeptical), your prediction of $4-6k just might come true.

(06-20-2017 03:25 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 02:47 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 12:28 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  This article seems to describe the latest of a kind of segwit2x that causes segwit to be first and then a 2x hardfork would only happen upon testing 2mb increase and 95% consensus regarding that portion.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/chinese-...-segwit2x/

I am little bit unclear if this proposed way forward, meaning the seg wit portion of it, only requires 80% or would also require 95% support?

Seems that folks are excited about this potential resoltion that allows seg wit first.

Here's an article that explains the making of the various segwit2x proposals compatible.... and seemingly with a goal of achieving more than 80% of hashing power supporting the compromise before August 1 - which would cause the August 1 trigger of the BIP 148 UASF to be no longer relevant.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bip...oin-whole/

If this really pans out (I'm still a little skeptical), your prediction of $4-6k just might come true.

Yeah, but I would still be somewhat wrong about how this is unfolding, because my $4-$6k thinking was considering a mini-bubble before August 1st - and my $4-6k thinking was assuming that no agreement was going to be reached before August 1, but in the end, maybe by September or October or even late 2017 or early 2018 and agreement would be reached that would cause phase two of a more meaningful bubble.

If a much earlier agreement is reached, then probably I would have to rethink my own thinking, and I still am not sure if there is some kind of trick in this current seeming compromise situation.

I am still a bit unsure about a lot of what all of this means and whether there is a possible disruption of governance by making consensus too easily or if there would be some kind of forced hardfork, which doesn't really seem like a good thing unless there is clearly above 95% consensus.. and therefore, weighing the likelihood of some kind of segwit first kind of resolution actually playing out prior to August 1. .. and is it the full-fledged seg wit or some kind of watered down version?

At the moment, it is looking pretty optimistic and like the compromise has decent chances of going through - however, I have been tricked by before concerning my understanding of some of the terms of what is being proposed, and currently, I am a bit sceptical about whether if even some kind of a softfork at 80% for segwit would be consensus sufficient - because it could be that if 80% is achieved in a rather expedited manner (which seems to be what is going on right now) then getting to 95% might not be that much more difficult - especially if the resolution seems to be 1) allowing a full version of seg wit to go into effect, 2) is not forcing some kind of meaningful change in governance because it is causing a softfork rather than a hardfork 3) and the hardfork to 2mb is only subject to passing testing and also reaching sufficient consensus of 95% - and accordingly, I am not sure if there are going to be some folks who are wanting to put up a fight between 80% and 95% consensus in regards to the first part implementation of seg wit or thereafter the second part implementation of a 2mb hardfork.

So, anyhow, this whole current dynamic and the various ways of possible resolution is throwing me off to some extent because I am still struggling to figure out how it is going to play out and if it feels like there are tricks - even though it generally feels more bullish than not... so currently, I am very cautiously optimistic and taking all of these ongoing and varying resolution descriptions with a bit of a grain of salt.

By the way, you guys saw the way that coin dance is depicting the blocks?

https://coin.dance/blocks

In essence the orange bar that is way into the 75% territory is a future projection of where the blue bar is expected to be in about seven days if today's mining level were to continue at the same rate for the next 7 days. So in 1 week or so, the hashing power could be achieving the 80% consensus goal.. possibly.

I'm of mixed minds on this August 1st thing. I spent an hour talking with another member about it on the phone today, and I have two pages of notes that I crossed out and wrote "MESS" on.
It feels like an utter disaster in the making.

On the other hand, everybody can see that if they fuck up the gravy train, everyone, including they themselves, is screwed. This is the first potential crash we've had since the invention of the alt-coin market, right? (Serious crash, ala the Mt. Gox disaster, not correction that will be forgotten within a week.) If Bitcoin shits the bed hard enough, and there are some serious bed-shitting outcomes being tossed around, there's the potential for another alt-coin to steal its crown. I'm not saying this WILL happen, but the possibility is there, and if I'm thinking about it I know that the guys with heavy-duty mining rigs which have earned them god knows how many bitcoins are thinking about it too.

Also, Bitcoin has a good track record of using game theory to encourage good behavior. The system only has value if people think they're not going to get screwed, which encourages you not to fuck other people over even if it's in your short term interest. Nobody wants to be the guy holding 70% of all the coins for a completely worthless, abandoned cryptocurrency. In fact, there was at least one instance of a potential hardfork before (I believe it was due to a programming error, I ran into it while reading Digital Gold tonight and was struck by its resemblance to the current situation.

Furthermore, given the inherent technical complexity of this, I'm not convinced that most of the parties involved understand what they stand to lose or gain under a compromise. They understand "this is the miner's proposal and I'm a miner so I support it" or "fuck those miners for being greedy and making shadowy deals in back rooms, I'm going with the UASF." but I don't know that they can really do a serious cost-benefit analysis of the compromise. There's way too much uncertainty. Under this environment, people might jump at a compromise, because it's not a loss for them and it offers the promise of keeping that sweet sweet outside investor money rolling in.

There are two uncertainties I see, though. The first relates to the Segwit2x Code itself, which is being cobbled together FAST, according to a lot of commentary I'm seeing. Segwit was the product of a lot of testing over a year by some very good programs, this compromise is being cobbled together by people under the gun of a hard deadline, with a 43 billion $ market riding on them not fucking it up. That's a lot of pressure. i'm concerned there may be a technical problem.

My other concern is that I don't know enough about the community, particularly the miners, who seem to be Chinese, to know which way it's likely to go. Also, how many people have a mining rig set up in their parent's basement that they don't touch? How much mining is being done by botnets and other things that aren't easily updated? In other words, what proportion of the mining community actually has a sentient human who's paying attention to this controversy, and how much of it is just on pure autopilot, and won't be participating in any compromise or going either way regardless?

JuanGee, you're the local bitcoin expert, so your opinion on this would be appreciated.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  I'm of mixed minds on this August 1st thing. I spent an hour talking with another member about it on the phone today, and I have two pages of notes that I crossed out and wrote "MESS" on.
It feels like an utter disaster in the making.

On the other hand, everybody can see that if they fuck up the gravy train, everyone, including they themselves, is screwed. This is the first potential crash we've had since the invention of the alt-coin market, right? (Serious crash, ala the Mt. Gox disaster, not correction that will be forgotten within a week.) If Bitcoin shits the bed hard enough, and there are some serious bed-shitting outcomes being tossed around, there's the potential for another alt-coin to steal its crown. I'm not saying this WILL happen, but the possibility is there, and if I'm thinking about it I know that the guys with heavy-duty mining rigs which have earned them god knows how many bitcoins are thinking about it too.

i am not sure why I continue to get the sense that I am reading some kind of spin attempt with your posts. You are framing various black and white scenarios with bitcoin and zero sum game type scenarios of winners and losers, and there are all kinds of folks who are involved in bitcoin, but a large number of them are not playing black and white. A large number of folks in bitcoin put portions of their investment here and there and they hedge their bets in various ways and they also have other things going on in life, so you cannot really predict with any kind of precision in terms of generalizing categories of people involved in bitcoin because they run the gamut - and maybe in the end, you are not really doing that but sometimes it seems like an attempt to narrow the categories too much in order to reach dire conclusions that you want to reach.. like a mess.. well life is a mess, no?

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Also, Bitcoin has a good track record of using game theory to encourage good behavior.

Bitcoin is decentralized, so there is not Bitcoin employing anything such as game theory.

Yeah, there are people who act within bitcoin and try to move the conversation and the price and the development, but there is a lot of freemarket going on too, even though the bitcoin price can be manipulated, somewhat because the bitcoin market is not very big - but in the end, there are more than 150 exchanges now as compared to less than 10 in 2013. In other words, it is harder and harder to manipulate bitcoin prices and bitcoin conversations and bitcoin developments even though various players have greater influence than others and are able to play various games more than others, but in the end, we have a lot of free market going on in bitcoin, too.

bitcoin is very diversified and expanding into almost all countries, with some countries having bigger parts and other countries smaller parts.. and still with so much room to grow and only less than 1% of the population involved.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  The system only has value if people think they're not going to get screwed, which encourages you not to fuck other people over even if it's in your short term interest.

Overall, right now, people seem to be more bullish about bitcoin than they were in 2015 and 2016. Just think about experiencing a year worth of dumps in 2015 and just an ongoing questioning if the bull market would continue in 2016.. but overall the confidence is pretty high in bitcoin right now - and that is part of the reason that we have pretty sustainably high prices throughout the past 6 months and growth is modest compared with previous bubbles in 2013 and earlier bubbles that were even more exponential in part due to significant corrections in the price along the way, a more mature bitcoin market, more avenues to short bitcoin, yet in the end and througout this bull run from $250 to $2600, buying support seeming to have continued to haver been following any of the corrections in order to make it very difficult for bears to push prices down further.

You can see the market and you can see bears trying to push down BTC prices and at a certain point, they cannot push any lower.

And, furthermore, currently, there is price battle that is continuing to go on since the beginning of 2017 with fairly high trade volume - and such high trade volume is even more apparent in the past 8 weeks, too.. kind of solidifying that in retrospect we can conclude that the whole year has added up high trade volume, and not stopping.. any time soon..

sure the trade volume could dry up, but I am not witnessing any drying up.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Nobody wants to be the guy holding 70% of all the coins for a completely worthless, abandoned cryptocurrency.

You seem to be wanting to refer to bitcoin here in a kind of hypothetical sense?

You are referring to dire scenarios that are not likely to play out.. sure they can play out, but it is not likely, especially when we have feasible and reasonable ways forward that are bullish. Of course, there are some folks that are still out there that are engaging in sabotaging methods, greed and gaming, but some of those folks are losing credibility, too.

So preoccupying yourself with less likely scenarios that bitcoin is broken or going to break or is on the cusp of disaster does not seem a good use of time and energies, but if you are worried about bitcoin failing, for example, then you just attempt to hedge your bets with other investments and other coins, the best that you can or even minimize your investment in bitcoin, while also realizing the risk that you might miss the upwards explosion, if you hedge out of bitcoin too much and it ends up going up rather than down

So one thing is planning for yourself and another thing is attempting to persuade other guys, and guys have to make their own choices about how they want to hedge, and hopefully based on facts rather than emotions or fears, while still attempting to reasonably account for better and worse case scenarios that could play out.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  In fact, there was at least one instance of a potential hardfork before (I believe it was due to a programming error, I ran into it while reading Digital Gold tonight and was struck by its resemblance to the current situation.

I don't recall all the facts of the prior hardforks either, but there have been one or two hardforks in bitcoin's history, but they were early on, without much of any contention and you are correct that they were due to technical glitches. Only relevant in a very small ways to today's situation because besides the contentious nature of today's hardfork proposal situation, you also have a lot more value at play and even the involvement of bigger players and likely more disingenuous players, too. and even distorting of issues to attempt to change governance rather than just changing technical matters.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Furthermore, given the inherent technical complexity of this, I'm not convinced that most of the parties involved understand what they stand to lose or gain under a compromise.

Are you trying to influence the direction or just go with the direction?

Is this thread meant to put guys into action to take one side or another?

I see my own role as just attempting to identify what I am going to do for myself and invest accordingly.

Yes a lot of the contention and confusion in bitcoin has to do with people engaged in propaganda efforts to try to change bitcoin governance while describing technical issues when they have the hidden agenda about attempting to change bitcoin governance.

A compromise could be bullish for bitcoin and bearish for alts? or maybe alts will continue to flourish, even if bitcoin takes considerable steps towards resolving scaling issues.

If you read anything meaningful about segwit, it is an absolutely amazing implementation, and if segwit goes through, there are likely going to be a lot of ways to build on top of it in order to remove a lot of criticism from bitcoin regarding fees and transaction times.... Sure there may still be room for alts, especially in the interim - but there will also be ways that alts could become sidechains of bitcoin, too - because of some of the tools of seg wit are going to facilitate coordinating off chain and onchain transactions through lightning network, etc.

I don't really know how it is going to play out, but also, I believe that we don't have to get into speculating about whether people are adequately informed to understand what they are getting into. People can decide for themselves, and to get all worked up about those kinds of things regarding what other people think or that other peol e might be confused seems like a waste of energies.

A lot of people in the space have a pretty decent idea where they stand, especially if they are a vender, or a developer or a miner or some other bitcoin service, and regular consumers probably don't give a ratt's ass, as long as they can use bitcoin.. I mean we are talking about much less than 1% of the world's population that has any kind of stake in bitcoin.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  They understand "this is the miner's proposal and I'm a miner so I support it" or "fuck those miners for being greedy and making shadowy deals in back rooms, I'm going with the UASF." but I don't know that they can really do a serious cost-benefit analysis of the compromise. There's way too much uncertainty. Under this environment, people might jump at a compromise, because it's not a loss for them and it offers the promise of keeping that sweet sweet outside investor money rolling in.

Sounds like you are generalizing too much here. If there are developers in the space or industries, they already have technical people that help them out and they are preparing for a variety of scenarios, and they will feel more secure if they are more certain about the scenario for which they are preparing plays out.

Seg wit has been tested and has been around for nearly a year, so technical folks in the industry affiliated with bitcoin services already have decent technical ideas in regards to implementing seg wit.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  There are two uncertainties I see, though. The first relates to the Segwit2x Code itself, which is being cobbled together FAST, according to a lot of commentary I'm seeing. Segwit was the product of a lot of testing over a year by some very good programs, this compromise is being cobbled together by people under the gun of a hard deadline, with a 43 billion $ market riding on them not fucking it up. That's a lot of pressure. i'm concerned there may be a technical problem.

You seem to be combining too many ideas here. Of course, there will be some glitches and issues with anything in regards to seg wit implementation, but like you said, it has already been tested, and it is not likely that $43 billion is going to be on the line because of such a hypothetical glitch.

I will grant that the 2mb aspect has not been tested, but according to what I am reading the 2mb is not going to be implemented until after it is tested, and seems to require a 95% consensus, at least at this time in order to be added to the implemention.

Currently, I don't see any code being forced on anyone, and even the seg wit code has already been tested and some folks are already running it, and that is why they are signaling 75% for segwit2x.. it went from signaling 35% to signaling 75% in a matter of days, so lots of folks are already ready for that part. So, why make the situation any more complicated? If more signal for segwit2x, then more are ready, or at least they think that they are ready for the segwit portion.. and we just go from there to see whether 2mb will follow later down the road... and whether that is a hardfork or a softfork and whether it affects bitcoin governance.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  My other concern is that I don't know enough about the community, particularly the miners, who seem to be Chinese, to know which way it's likely to go. Also, how many people have a mining rig set up in their parent's basement that they don't touch? How much mining is being done by botnets and other things that aren't easily updated? In other words, what proportion of the mining community actually has a sentient human who's paying attention to this controversy, and how much of it is just on pure autopilot, and won't be participating in any compromise or going either way regardless?

I don't know that much about mining demographics either, and I doubt that it matters too much. you have miners all over the world and mining is very decentralized. You don't really know the details, but is mining going to break btc? Should we exaggerate fears based on unknowns, and do we know enough to assert that it is likely less of a problem than it is made out to be?

Yeah, we can attempt to find a conspiracy in anything and there is some data out there, even though there are a lot of unknowns too, because not all of the miners are known, as you indicated. But so what? That is not any worse of a position than we were 1 year ago or 2 years ago or 3 years ago? I think that there is evidence that mining is much more decentralized than it was 2 or 3 years ago, so sure there are potential problems, but there are ways to react too, especially if some miners attempt to make rogue attempts to fork or take over the network or to sabotage, but some of those attempts have already been going on in the past years without success..

Also, you noticed that in recent days spamming on the blockchain went way down, too.. What a coincidence that some folks have found it less of an incentive to spam the bitcoin blockchain in recent days... after about a month straight of spamming and jamming the bitcoin network... what a coincidence, what a coincidence. The spammers were probably finding it somewhat expensive to keep up their spamming and maybe even questioning the purpose and utility of such ongoing sabotage attempts.

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  JuanGee, you're the local bitcoin expert, so your opinion on this would be appreciated.

Thanks for requesting my input, but really I don't really feel like any kind of expert - except maybe just following the space for so long, and having quite a few opinions that I revise, repeat and revive on a regular basis.

I think that a lot of RVF guys are learning more about the space recently, and hopefully they will continue to engage, and attempt to sort through facts and fiction.

One theme that I think comes out of your questions and assertions of issues, Samuel, seems to be that you are still framing some of these matters as zero sum games between bitcoin and alts, as if you are betting on some of the alts and remain of the position and belief that bitcoin's troubles are going to profit alts and your investments in those alts. In that regards, you are assuming reverse correlations of alts and bitcoin, and I question how much utility comes from attempting to spin versus just attempting to identify issues and calling them.

i continue to assert that I am not trying to spin anything in regards to bitcoin or alts, but instead merely attempting to call the various issues and to predict to the best of my ability - while preparing for either price direction and tweaking on the margins on a regular basis.

(06-20-2017 06:29 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  "One theme that I think comes out of your questions and assertions of issues, Samuel, seems to be that you are still framing some of these matters as zero sum games between bitcoin and alts, as if you are betting on some of the alts and remain of the position and belief that bitcoin's troubles are going to profit alts and your investments in those alts. In that regards, you are assuming reverse correlations of alts and bitcoin, and I question how much utility comes from attempting to spin versus just attempting to identify issues and calling them. "

I think you're reading me wrong, though this may be that I wrote the post at 2:00 AM, because I'd been thinking about it for 2 hours straight and was tired, and wasn't explaining myself really well.
A lot of the things you claim are an attempt by me to spin in favor of alt-coins are points in FAVOR of BTC. I don't know how you can accuse me of making dire predictions when over half the post is why I think a compromise is likely to be reached!

My fundamental understanding of the August 1st situation is that failure to meet a compromise = potential crash, compromise = continued success for bitcoin. This echoes cleanslate above. Note that I said POTENTIAL crash. Between the two, the compromise is certainly the safer scenario. Is this incorrect?

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  On the other hand, everybody can see that if they fuck up the gravy train, everyone, including they themselves, is screwed. This is the first potential crash we've had since the invention of the alt-coin market, right? (Serious crash, ala the Mt. Gox disaster, not correction that will be forgotten within a week.) If Bitcoin shits the bed hard enough, and there are some serious bed-shitting outcomes being tossed around, there's the potential for another alt-coin to steal its crown. I'm not saying this WILL happen, but the possibility is there, and if I'm thinking about it I know that the guys with heavy-duty mining rigs which have earned them god knows how many bitcoins are thinking about it too.

You called this a "dire conclusion" and I don't understand why. This is a point in FAVOR of Bitcoin reaching a compromise, and therefore becoming more valuable. Before the alt-coin market, there was more incentive to allow bitcoin to crash, because you'd still have your tokens even after a correction, and if you believed the coin would be valuable in the future you might be willing to risk it. But if you're a miner or one of the other parties involved in this compromise, now there's a risk that ETH or something else might just make all those bitcoin tokens you hold completely worthless, which is an outcome you obviously don't want. So you'll compromise, and thereby make Bitcoin more valuable.

(06-20-2017 06:29 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Bitcoin is decentralized, so there is not Bitcoin employing anything such as game theory.

I meant that Bitcoin uses game theory in the same way that bitcoin uses blockchains. It was designed to encourage good behavior on the part of all players, and encourage them to come to compromises. That's why it's been so successful for so long.

(06-20-2017 06:29 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Nobody wants to be the guy holding 70% of all the coins for a completely worthless, abandoned cryptocurrency.

You seem to be wanting to refer to bitcoin here in a kind of hypothetical sense?

Correct. Again, this is a point in favor of the success of bitcoin. Nobody wants to be the guy holding 70% of all the coins for a completely worthless, abandoned cryptocurrency. Therefore they will compromise, and bitcoin will be more successful.

(06-20-2017 06:29 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Furthermore, given the inherent technical complexity of this, I'm not convinced that most of the parties involved understand what they stand to lose or gain under a compromise.

Are you trying to influence the direction or just go with the direction?

If I wanted to influence the direction I sure as hell wouldn't be posting in the lifestyle section of RvF. I'd be on Reddit or /biz/ or something. Again, this is a point in favor of a compromise. Because many of the players understand what they have to lose by not compromising if things go bad, but what they have to gain exactly in any particular scenario, they're more likely to compromise, because while a miner might gain less under Segwit 2x than he would under the best-case scenario, it's not clear how much less he'll gain, but it's VERY clear how much he'll lose if things go bad.

Quote:One theme that I think comes out of your questions and assertions of issues, Samuel, seems to be that you are still framing some of these matters as zero sum games between bitcoin and alts, as if you are betting on some of the alts and remain of the position and belief that bitcoin's troubles are going to profit alts and your investments in those alts. In that regards, you are assuming reverse correlations of alts and bitcoin, and I question how much utility comes from attempting to spin versus just attempting to identify issues and calling them.

I don't think this at all. I think a BTC crash would mean a crash for the whole market. We saw that last week when BTC and ETH went down simultaneously. I thought there was a scenario where people jumped to ETH in order to stay in the market, but now there's USDT. I think people would just jump to USDT, or maybe just leave the market altogether. I want the compromise to happen and bitcoin to be successful. I got into this game very late, so I don't have 10x investment gains riding on ETH. It's more like 10%. 10% in the short time I've been doing this is an astonishing return, at least to me, and I'm very happy, but at the amount I'm invested in, it's enough to maybe buy me a really, really great dinner somewhere, not retire.

I'm watching this compromise carefully, and will be shifting some portion of my ETH assets to BTC if it looks like it's going to succeed, possibly during the upcoming EEA meeting where ETH is likely to spike.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 06:29 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  "One theme that I think comes out of your questions and assertions of issues, Samuel, seems to be that you are still framing some of these matters as zero sum games between bitcoin and alts, as if you are betting on some of the alts and remain of the position and belief that bitcoin's troubles are going to profit alts and your investments in those alts. In that regards, you are assuming reverse correlations of alts and bitcoin, and I question how much utility comes from attempting to spin versus just attempting to identify issues and calling them. "

I think you're reading me wrong, though this may be that I wrote the post at 2:00 AM, because I'd been thinking about it for 2 hours straight and was tired, and wasn't explaining myself really well.
A lot of the things you claim are an attempt by me to spin in favor of alt-coins are points in FAVOR of BTC. I don't know how you can accuse me of making dire predictions when over half the post is why I think a compromise is likely to be reached!

I have no intent to make any of these kinds of matters personal. We are just talking about a topic, and surely sometimes our tone or our way of expressing something can cause a certain message. In that regard, I apologize if I am misreading any of your points, because that is not my intent.

At the same time, I have no desire to go back and analyze and parse because it is understandable that each of us are writing on whim and about our opinions and sometimes there will be miscommunications that can be clarified as we go, that is if there is some kind of issue regarding whatever substantive point that we were making..

Sure we agree on several points, but we might have different ways of communicating actually occurring dynamics and even speculation about how those dynamics might play out in different scenarios. I don't take any of this personally or want to make it personal, even if I might be attacking some of my reading of your ideas - even if I may have gotten part of my understanding wrong.

Having said that I think that there are all kinds of ways that these matters can play out, and it is not going to be the end of the world or the end of bitcoin... including the fact that a compromise is not necessary in order for bitcoin to continue to be greatly valuable. Sure a compromise is nice and a compromise is bullish, but I don't agree with any implications that bitcoin is broken or that a compromise is necessary for bitcoin to be successful in a large number of ways.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  My fundamental understanding of the August 1st situation is that failure to meet a compromise = potential crash, compromise = continued success for bitcoin. This echoes cleanslate above. Note that I said POTENTIAL crash. Between the two, the compromise is certainly the safer scenario. Is this incorrect?

Maybe I am just disagreeing with some of the phraseology rather than the various conclusions?

Like I already mentioned, sure it is bullish for a compromise to be considered and to become likely, but there are many other bullish routes or quasi-bullish routes, and failure to reach a compromise is not dire to bitcoin.

Yes, on a regular basis, we have some news that is more bullish and other news that is bearish, but in the end, these are not make or break - and many of us understand the principle of buy the rumor and sell the news, which indicates that sometimes markets will react greatly to something that has not happened yet and will not happen, but if the market thinks it is going to happen, then it can be bullish and then it could become unnecessarily bearish if it does not happen.

I just think that we just gotta take all these situations with some stride because they are not black and white, and there continue to be a lot of unknowns and sometimes the market will purposefully be manipulated the opposite direction on a piece of news if manipulators have enough ammunition to accomplish such.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  On the other hand, everybody can see that if they fuck up the gravy train, everyone, including they themselves, is screwed. This is the first potential crash we've had since the invention of the alt-coin market, right? (Serious crash, ala the Mt. Gox disaster, not correction that will be forgotten within a week.) If Bitcoin shits the bed hard enough, and there are some serious bed-shitting outcomes being tossed around, there's the potential for another alt-coin to steal its crown. I'm not saying this WILL happen, but the possibility is there, and if I'm thinking about it I know that the guys with heavy-duty mining rigs which have earned them god knows how many bitcoins are thinking about it too.

You called this a "dire conclusion" and I don't understand why. This is a point in FAVOR of Bitcoin reaching a compromise, and therefore becoming more valuable.

My reference to dire conclusion seems to be more about the framing of situations as black and white, and we have a lot more going on besides whether a compromised is reached - even though we all seem to understand that if such a compromise plays out, that can be quite upwardly explosive for bitcoin and bitcoin prices.. although, I would caution about putting too many eggs in the direction of upwards explosive, because it remains a probability rather than a certainty.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Before the alt-coin market, there was more incentive to allow bitcoin to crash, because you'd still have your tokens even after a correction, and if you believed the coin would be valuable in the future you might be willing to risk it.

The alt coin market has always been there. You mean before the recent outrageous pump of the alt coin market that is likely quite far from being over?

Again, the impact of the alt coin market plays out in all kinds of ways, and sure some money goes into the alt coin market that would have otherwise gone into bitcoin, but it is not really clear how much bitcoin is prejudiced by such movement. Yeah, it is spun all the time, but remains unclear regarding the relationships between bitcoin and various alts as they play out or future relationship on various possible scenarios.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  But if you're a miner or one of the other parties involved in this compromise, now there's a risk that ETH or something else might just make all those bitcoin tokens you hold completely worthless, which is an outcome you obviously don't want. So you'll compromise, and thereby make Bitcoin more valuable.

Sure on the margins there are all kinds of factors that affect behavior, yet if you try to encapsulate incentives too much, you are likely to go down all kinds of weird paths. We can likely agree that there are a whole lot of influential players in the space and miners is one thing and ethereum is another, but there is a lot more, so attempting to boil too much down to the behaviors of one group or another seems to confuse matters because even miners don't act in any kind of unison way and they are also frequently wearing multiple hats that may affect their behavior on the margins.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 06:29 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Bitcoin is decentralized, so there is not Bitcoin employing anything such as game theory.

I meant that Bitcoin uses game theory in the same way that bitcoin uses blockchains. It was designed to encourage good behavior on the part of all players, and encourage them to come to compromises. That's why it's been so successful for so long.

I don't know where you are getting this information.

Bitcoin is built on assumptions that people are going to act greedy - in other words trustless, and if each person acts in their self interest, then the system works. Maybe the system does not play out exactly as anticipated because scenarios regarding governance comes up, but it can be argued also that bitcoin is built on making it difficult to reach consensus in order that the system cannot be changed easy. So if all the compromise falls through, bitcoin will still be what it was. If the bitcoin system ends up being changed and governance is changed to make it easy to upgrade bitcoin, then that would likely be a problem for bitcoin to take away decentralization and make it like any other system - and therefore no longer any more distinguishing characteristics. In other words, if bitcoin becomes easy to change, then it is no longer as valuable. So it seems inaccurate to characterize bitcoin as being designed for compromise.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 06:29 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Nobody wants to be the guy holding 70% of all the coins for a completely worthless, abandoned cryptocurrency.

You seem to be wanting to refer to bitcoin here in a kind of hypothetical sense?

Correct. Again, this is a point in favor of the success of bitcoin. Nobody wants to be the guy holding 70% of all the coins for a completely worthless, abandoned cryptocurrency. Therefore they will compromise, and bitcoin will be more successful.

I think I get what you are saying, yet people will act how they perceive bitcoin, and they will invest if they believe the direction to be valuable. Sure a compromise, in this situation seems to be helpful, but like I already said, it is not a necessary thing to happen right now, and there is no emergency - even though there is pending uncertainty and compromise routes forward has very bullish effects at the moment.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 06:29 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 04:44 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Furthermore, given the inherent technical complexity of this, I'm not convinced that most of the parties involved understand what they stand to lose or gain under a compromise.

Are you trying to influence the direction or just go with the direction?

If I wanted to influence the direction I sure as hell wouldn't be posting in the lifestyle section of RvF. I'd be on Reddit or /biz/ or something.

I am not trying to argue with you, and maybe I just get a bit bothered when there are battles in attempting to define what bitcoin should be rather than just accepting what it is.

So in that regard, posts can take on various sentiments that are trying to prescribe path 1, 2 or 3 as preferrable and to suggest that bitcoin is dead if they do not do x...

Sure, it may be a matter of tone rather than actual disagreement, here.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Again, this is a point in favor of a compromise. Because many of the players understand what they have to lose by not compromising if things go bad, but what they have to gain exactly in any particular scenario, they're more likely to compromise, because while a miner might gain less under Segwit 2x than he would under the best-case scenario, it's not clear how much less he'll gain, but it's VERY clear how much he'll lose if things go bad.

Again, you seem to be framing the situation as compromise or die.. compromise or be threatened by other worse scenarios.

This particular compromise seems to be potentially valuable and potentially bullish because there seems to be a route forward in which there are no guns to the heads of anyone, and it does not seem to be forced - in this regard, there is general support for segwit, and folks are voluntarily signaling support for seg wit. The hardfork aspect and the 2mb upgrade are contingent upon other factors being fulfilled, including testing and including consensus.

So the current perceived possibility of success of this particular compromise situation is that it seems to be allowing for a kind of voluntary jumping on board to the less controversial aspect, which is soft forking seg wit.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

Quote:One theme that I think comes out of your questions and assertions of issues, Samuel, seems to be that you are still framing some of these matters as zero sum games between bitcoin and alts, as if you are betting on some of the alts and remain of the position and belief that bitcoin's troubles are going to profit alts and your investments in those alts. In that regards, you are assuming reverse correlations of alts and bitcoin, and I question how much utility comes from attempting to spin versus just attempting to identify issues and calling them.

I don't think this at all. I think a BTC crash would mean a crash for the whole market. We saw that last week when BTC and ETH went down simultaneously. I thought there was a scenario where people jumped to ETH in order to stay in the market, but now there's USDT. I think people would just jump to USDT, or maybe just leave the market altogether.

Just because we see short term correlation in price movements, price movements can play out in a lot of ways in both the short term and in the longer term. The extent to which there is price correlation depends on a large number of factors, and yeah we could spend hours and hours going over various scenarios, but what good would that do?

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  I want the compromise to happen and bitcoin to be successful. I got into this game very late, so I don't have 10x investment gains riding on ETH. It's more like 10%. 10% in the short time I've been doing this is an astonishing return, at least to me, and I'm very happy, but at the amount I'm invested in, it's enough to maybe buy me a really, really great dinner somewhere, not retire.

Well, there are a variety of ways to come at investing, and sure when you get in, you gotta go with what you know at the moment.

I have always attempted to approach this whole matter in longer term scenarios, meaning holding coins that I mostly believe in the long term and that is risky because in the short term, it may take a lot of time. I had more than 2 years of being in the red on my bitcoin investment, but I stuck with my strategy mostly because I had invested money that I was willing to commit to the long term and to lose if it plays out that way. It took me more than a year, to establish my initial stake in bitcoin, and sure I have been building that stake since then, but in the first year, I was not preoccupied about whether I was profitable or not but instead was investing for a longer time frame... but yeah, if I had been profitable from the start, then that would have been icing on the cake and good, but I was not looking at short term, just having a plan that was suitable to my finances, my risk profile, my timeline and other personal things.

(06-20-2017 10:54 AM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  I'm watching this compromise carefully, and will be shifting some portion of my ETH assets to BTC if it looks like it's going to succeed, possibly during the upcoming EEA meeting where ETH is likely to spike.

It may all work out for you, but markets sometimes do not do what is expected, so it is good to prepare for either direction in your allocations and in your psychology... and try to be as realistic as you can be about both the upside and downside potentials.

Here are a couple of bitcoin bullish links to articles:

1) More doors open to bitcoin in India:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/suddenly-...l-in-india



2) Max Keiser is a regular bullish BTC predictor, but there is also some substance in this article, too... I mean that the substance is outlining why there continues to be ongoing buying pressures.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-p...max-keiser

Here's a pretty decent rendition of the benefits of segregated witness:

I had not previously seen this write-up, and it goes into a pretty organized and detailed explanation that is meant to be non-technical.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

What ever happened to your stance that "BTC shouldn't be forked.....ever"? It is the way it was designed to be.....

Have a change of heart only 2 months later? This is odd.

(Yesterday 12:09 AM)Armogan Wrote:  What ever happened to your stance that "BTC shouldn't be forked.....ever"? It is the way it was designed to be.....

Have a change of heart only 2 months later? This is odd.

Gosh.. you must have gotten me there - because I do not claim to be any kind of proclaimer about what bitcoin ought to be. I just accept bitcoin for what it is.

I think regarding hardforks, I think I asserted that they are not problematic as long as they are not controversial - so if there is 95% or more support, for example, then it is pretty likely that they are not controversial.

So, I am not sure that I am advocating anything here in terms of a hardfork, am I?

I am still trying to wrap my head around this whole situation, but in essence there seems to be a kind of path forward in current bitcoinlandia that involves an initial softforking of segwit, and then a subsequent hardfork of 2mb blocklimit size increase that is contingent upon testing and reaching consensus - which I assume to be 95% consensus, so I am not for any hardfork that would either be contentious or require less than unambiguously high levels of consensus, such as 95%.

Does that clarify my evolving mindset on this topic?

I disagree with JJG that it is not a compromise or die situation.

The way I read this situation is that there's no way to interpret it as anything but.

And what no one seems to mention is that if bitcoin goes down, it will take most alts with it. Of that, I'm 99% certain.

(Yesterday 12:37 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  I disagree with JJG that it is not a compromise or die situation.

The way I read this situation is that there's no way to interpret it as anything but.

And what no one seems to mention is that if bitcoin goes down, it will take most alts with it. Of that, I'm 99% certain.

What do we do then?

Are you saying that this is going to go through, and therefore the current situation is bullish?

or are you saying that there are people who think like me, and they are not going to take the situation seriously enough and therefore they are going to put bitcoin and 99% of the alts in peril?

What are you doing?

Are you waiting and seeing? Are you buying or selling?

I'm thinking in the next few days we may get back up to test $3k, but at this point, I am still very unclear about what are the odds of going above $3k.. I'm kind of in a bit of a turmoil myself trying to get some kind of gauge on the situation.

Sometimes, we will get another dump before a pump too, so I am not really in the mindset to bet anything substantial on the short term price situation.

Teeth gritting, no?

or nail biting?

Or maybe popcorn eating for those who are not invested?

(Yesterday 12:31 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  

(Yesterday 12:09 AM)Armogan Wrote:  What ever happened to your stance that "BTC shouldn't be forked.....ever"? It is the way it was designed to be.....

Have a change of heart only 2 months later? This is odd.

Gosh.. you must have gotten me there - because I do not claim to be any kind of proclaimer about what bitcoin ought to be. I just accept bitcoin for what it is.

I think regarding hardforks, I think I asserted that they are not problematic as long as they are not controversial - so if there is 95% or more support, for example, then it is pretty likely that they are not controversial.

So, I am not sure that I am advocating anything here in terms of a hardfork, am I?

I am still trying to wrap my head around this whole situation, but in essence there seems to be a kind of path forward in current bitcoinlandia that involves an initial softforking of segwit, and then a subsequent hardfork of 2mb blocklimit size increase that is contingent upon testing and reaching consensus - which I assume to be 95% consensus, so I am not for any hardfork that would either be contentious or require less than unambiguously high levels of consensus, such as 95%.

Does that clarify my evolving mindset on this topic?

I just came across this Greg Maxwell post, and such content causes me to conclude that we are not going to get clarity exactly from the various compromising BIPS that claim to attempt to avert the August 1 forking.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/piperm...14633.html

So, maybe these various cards are played, and we still end up with softforks, hardforks, and confusion about various kinds of shitty code.

So, possibly, this whole situation is no longer so bullish?

And, maybe we will be getting that previously discussed third leg of the correction after all?



This chart of seg wit support might help to explain that segwit2x is not acceptable by many of the core folks, and businesses do not generally support it either:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support

(Yesterday 12:56 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Teeth gritting, no?

or nail biting?

Or maybe popcorn eating for those who are not invested?

Geez Gee, relax. Take a chill pill. Have a glass of water. Breathe... take a deep breath... breeeeaaathe...

You with me? Ok, good...

I have high hopes for cryptos as much as the next guy. But we have to be realistic and not overinvest, or invest beyond what we are prepared to lose.

I'm cautiously optimistic that there will be some sort of compromise, but probably not without delays. I won't be surprised if they push back the Aug 1 deadline another month or three. I expect more volatility much like the last couple months, if not more.

When we follow crypto news, we gotta sift through the bullshit (and there's lots of it), and when we do get real (not fake) news, we have to read between the lines to see what direction things are going in. Having tunnel vision towards bitcoin isn't an ideal position to take.

Sure, one with bitcoin tunnel vision could have made 5x in 1 year when it went from 500 to 2500... but if one opened his mind to other cryptos, he could have made 10x, 50x, on ETH and other alts.

I got in the alt market a wee bit too late, but I'm keeping my eyes wide open. That's all I will say as far as managing my crypto portfolio. I'm not going to reveal my trades here for the whole world to see.

Now, I wouldn't be surprised to see a massive crash in BTC price on or around August, but only such a crash will spark miners and devs into action and force them to come to the table and compromise. Only when they see what they can possibly lose if they don't, they will compromise.

Just hope they don't come to the table "a day late and a dollar bitcoin short."

(Yesterday 01:45 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  

(Yesterday 12:56 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  Teeth gritting, no?

or nail biting?

Or maybe popcorn eating for those who are not invested?

Geez Gee, relax. Take a chill pill. Have a glass of water. Breathe... take a deep breath... breeeeaaathe...

You with me? Ok, good...

o.k.

you got me there.

I gotta settle down a bit.

(Yesterday 01:45 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  I have high hopes for cryptos as much as the next guy. But we have to be realistic and not overinvest, or invest beyond what we are prepared to lose.

I agree with that overall approach - but the twist becomes a bit different when your portfolio is very large in the green.

On the other hand, when you first start investing, it is even more important to manage your level of accumulation.

With me, I made most of my initial investments in 2014, and thereafter - i have just been trading and dollar cost averaging and not really increasing my investment in any large way, beyond what is put in through dollar cost averaging and gained through trades, and just mere profit taking from gains that sits there but I may discretionarily reinvest, but I don't feel that I have to, if i prefer to take that out and to spend it.

Anyhow, a lot less pressure when there is a considerable equity cushion.

(Yesterday 01:45 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  I'm cautiously optimistic that there will be some sort of compromise, but probably not without delays. I won't be surprised if they push back the Aug 1 deadline another month or three. I expect more volatility much like the last couple months, if not more.

Even though I am reading all the fucking time about this, sometimes I am just thrown for loops, and even though I develop some pretty decent theories regarding possible avenues forward, sometimes, I just get thrown for loops too, and I think that might be part of the game theory and the difficulties, sometimes, in predicting the various moves that can be played, while at the same time giving more weight to moves that seem more likely to play out.

Sometimes, it is also apparent that some players over play their hand a bit and then have to back off.

(Yesterday 01:45 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  When we follow crypto news, we gotta sift through the bullshit (and there's lots of it), and when we do get real (not fake) news, we have to read between the lines to see what direction things are going in.

Certainly!!!

(Yesterday 01:45 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  Having tunnel vision towards bitcoin isn't an ideal position to take.

This is coming off like a personal dig.

Even though I may not read 10 white papers of various ICOs, I do quite a bit of looking at other things going on in the crypto space.

Each of us are going to see matters differently, and I feel good about my whole situation and the extent to which I involve other cryptos into my strategy - which tends to be very little.. hahahaha

(Yesterday 01:45 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  Sure, one with bitcoin tunnel vision could have made 5x in 1 year when it went from 500 to 2500... but if one opened his mind to other cryptos, he could have made 10x, 50x, on ETH and other alts.

O.k. Maybe? Maybe not?

This is a bit argumentative and even speculative.

We have to look at both the upside and the downside, and make our choices. Surely there are scenarios where you could have made way more money - but that does not mean that would have been the right move for that person, and so in that regard, that person has to decide for himself what is suitable for his circumstances.

So, yeah, one thing is knowing and not investing and another thing is not knowing and not investing and another thing is how much time does a person have to figure out and to juggle what to do and how to spend time?

It is not obvious, and I feel no need to compete against anyone regarding how much I made or whether the decision was right for me or the best decision that I could have made... I make my decisions and I live with my decisions and I build my life on my various decisions... It does not mean that I am rigid, but it does mean that I tend to be comfortable with myself and making incremental changes to the extent that I am comfortable with such changes, or if I think changes are necessary... and at the same time, bitcoin has delivered phenomenal returns for me, and it seems somewhat speculative and irrelevant that I could have made more money to buy ETH, for example,... because I would have never done it based on the information that I had and based on my then circumstances, and I do not regret it if I account for the actuality of perceptions and assessments and applying the situation to my circumstances and personality.

(Yesterday 01:45 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  I got in the alt market a wee bit too late, but I'm keeping my eyes wide open. That's all I will say as far as managing my crypto portfolio. I'm not going to reveal my trades here for the whole world to see.

fair enough

(Yesterday 01:45 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  Now, I wouldn't be surprised to see a massive crash in BTC price on or around August, but only such a crash will spark miners and devs into action and force them to come to the table and compromise. Only when they see what they can possibly lose if they don't, they will compromise.

Just hope they don't come to the table "a day late and a dollar bitcoin short."

Sure, I am expecting some kind of bitcoin crash too.. but it still remains unclear about how much it will go up (if at all) before it goes down, and the timeline remains unclear too.. but prior to August 1s seems possible, but maybe there will be more balls in the air, too .. in order to cause even more confusion, and some folks are speculating about several simultaneous forks seems a bit bearish, overall.

(06-21-2017 03:06 AM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  This is coming off like a personal dig.

Nothing personal intended. It's all good.

I am having a bit of a difficulty considering exactly what is our current BTC price range that should be considered as sideways. There is so much going on right now in regards to the multiple forks and threats of forks... It's confusing the fuck out of me.

As you likely recall, about a week ago (or was it even that long ago?), I was considering about $2,250 and $2,650 to be the BTC trading range and that a break above $2,650 meant that we were going to be testing $3k - but then the subsequent news has kind of screwed up the price range and the seeming likely journey towards testing $3k - and even seems to have increased the possibility of a break downwards... though price still seems to be holding fairly well with fairly high ongoing trade volume, at least at the moment.

Maybe currently, we can define sideways as anywhere between $2,500 and $2,750?

Regarding the segwit2x situation, initially, I thought that news was bullish because likely the market was thinking that we would be getting segwit in some kind of meaningful and certain form and that it was not really the hardfork that it initially presented itself as - however, now, there is some lack of clarity about either getting a meaningful kind of segwit and even if some kind of watered down segwit within segwi2x might involve some inferior code that is not really equivalent to the actual segwit.... and even with all of that whether the situation is going to be able to avert some kind of hardfork?

It seems that hardly anyone is going to run untested code, so it had seemed that getting segwit was going to mean running core code that has already been vetted and tested, but now that is becoming a bit more confusing about what code is going to be run and is there some expectation of inferior code?

So, maybe the market is kind of responding to the first mistaken revelation of positive news that was based on confusing assumptions regarding what they were getting and what code was going to be adopted and seems to be turning out to be a bit more of a shit show than previously expected because there seems to be some lack of clarity regarding what code segwit is going to be implemented first and will the running of such segwit code (or watered down segwit code) be sufficient to cause a form of consensus.. or end up forking in some kind of way.

So even though currently daily signaling 83.3% for segwit2x does not mean the same thing as running a version of segwit code that allows for resolution and actual sufficient hashpower consensus.

In the coming weeks, I'm not ruling out the test of $3k resistance yet, but sideways is becoming a bit more likely than it had been.. maybe they are all a draw? 33% each for up, down and sideways?

or maybe 34.5% up 34% sideways and 31.5% down?

Why would segwit cause a downward price trend?

If it improves software weakness, wouldn't it be improving the product and causing a price increase?

(06-21-2017 05:32 PM)monster Wrote:  Why would segwit cause a downward price trend?

If it improves software weakness, wouldn't it be improving the product and causing a price increase?

I think that you are saying the same as me.

Yes, segwit should cause an upwards trend; however, the problem is that there are way too many versions of segwit that are floating out there and way too many scenarios in which it is unclear how it would be implemented, which causes uncertainty.

We know that uncertainty causes either downward price pressures or at least lessens the upwards price pressures.

Here's a good read about the invention of triple entry accounting in 1989, some history of accounting, the application of triple entry accounting to bitcoin, and some current arguments poo pooing crypto currencies.

https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-miss...0b0151c169

(06-21-2017 05:11 PM)JayJuanGee Wrote:  I am having a bit of a difficulty considering exactly what is our current BTC price range that should be considered as sideways. There is so much going on right now in regards to the multiple forks and threats of forks... It's confusing the fuck out of me.

As you likely recall, about a week ago (or was it even that long ago?), I was considering about $2,250 and $2,650 to be the BTC trading range and that a break above $2,650 meant that we were going to be testing $3k - but then the subsequent news has kind of screwed up the price range and the seeming likely journey towards testing $3k - and even seems to have increased the possibility of a break downwards... though price still seems to be holding fairly well with fairly high ongoing trade volume, at least at the moment.

Maybe currently, we can define sideways as anywhere between $2,500 and $2,750?

Regarding the segwit2x situation, initially, I thought that news was bullish because likely the market was thinking that we would be getting segwit in some kind of meaningful and certain form and that it was not really the hardfork that it initially presented itself as - however, now, there is some lack of clarity about either getting a meaningful kind of segwit and even if some kind of watered down segwit within segwi2x might involve some inferior code that is not really equivalent to the actual segwit.... and even with all of that whether the situation is going to be able to avert some kind of hardfork?

It seems that hardly anyone is going to run untested code, so it had seemed that getting segwit was going to mean running core code that has already been vetted and tested, but now that is becoming a bit more confusing about what code is going to be run and is there some expectation of inferior code?

So, maybe the market is kind of responding to the first mistaken revelation of positive news that was based on confusing assumptions regarding what they were getting and what code was going to be adopted and seems to be turning out to be a bit more of a shit show than previously expected because there seems to be some lack of clarity regarding what code segwit is going to be implemented first and will the running of such segwit code (or watered down segwit code) be sufficient to cause a form of consensus.. or end up forking in some kind of way.

So even though currently daily signaling 83.3% for segwit2x does not mean the same thing as running a version of segwit code that allows for resolution and actual sufficient hashpower consensus.

In the coming weeks, I'm not ruling out the test of $3k resistance yet, but sideways is becoming a bit more likely than it had been.. maybe they are all a draw? 33% each for up, down and sideways?

or maybe 34.5% up 34% sideways and 31.5% down?

Currently, with price moving between $2512 and $2550, we are largely within the bottom of my earlier description of the sideways price range, yet since we are at the bottom of such price range, chances become a bit greater for a further break downwards.

I am not sure whether we would call such further break downwards, if it were to occur, the third leg of the earlier correction or a new correction phase. I suppose that it could be seen from either perspective - however, a third leg would indicate that it has considerable potential of breaking quite below the low of the earlier leg (which was about $2130), yet I think that there is going to be considerable resistance along the way, so even getting to $2130, this time is going to take quite a few coins, and I have my doubts about going that low.

We could have already experienced the bottom, but I would not be too surprised to experience prices as low as $2350. On the other hand, I do think it will be a bit tougher to go below $2,350. So, consider some strategic buys, but don't get too greedy because we may not go as low as you might expect.

Oh, regarding various alts, the correction seems to be in the same general percentage arena as bitcoin, but some folks believe that the negative performance of alts could further drag down BTC - yet I remain steadfast in my perspective that such relationship is not necessarily going to correlate so much - yet I have no real ability to call this except to watch... and maybe see if there is any divergence pattern that seems to begin to be playing out.