Is DickFuld debating steelhouse by trying to use logic? That's a no-win situation if there ever was one/

It's not really a debate, he's wrong and everyone here knows that I think. Given that he generally pops up in most the threads I'm active in, I've learned to only respond to him when I'm bored and don't mind taking some time to post. The things I posted aren't bad things to help others in this particular thread understand anyway.

They won't run full nodes. They'll work the same way they use MPesa trading cell phone minutes as a currency. With SMS. That's not even accounting for the more basic remittance method, where the end users don't even realize they are using Bitcoins.

Overstock is hiring six developers for a stealth project: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...e_members_for/

I think the project is related to this: http://upstart.bizjournals.com/entre....html?page=all

Thanks, very interesting.

very cool. IBM and samsung playing with block chain tech.

https://gigaom.com/2014/09/09/check-...ck-chain-tech/

interview with paul brody starts at min 22:00
https://soundcloud.com/gigaom-intern...diomp3/s-WN77d

The real question is are they building something on top of the bitcoin blockchain or something that functions outside of bitcoin's blockchain.

Additional discussion on IBM and Samsung can be found here: http://two-bit-idiot.tumblr.com/post...amsung-bitcoin

So probably not on Bitcoin.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/t...w/42635853.cms

all of you bitcoin 'investors' are going to be in for a bearish surprise by the end of this year. we will go below $350, more than likely below $300 before a bounce.

and if the winklevoss ETF doesnt happen by the end of Q1 2015, then after the bounce from $300 we will go below the previous bubble of $265.


dont drink too much of the bitcoin koolaid, it's got a long way to go.

quite possible. and yet network statistics like total hash rate, transactions/day, new addresses used/day, total non-zero addresses, etc... continue to climb exponentially.

so dont go thinking bitcoin's dead like you did in 2011.

With the hashrate growing, this whole thing of miners having to spend millions and millions of dollars on electricity just isn't going to work out. Do you realize the electricity/mining equipment costs are like a drain on the market cap of BTC? Electric companies and miner producers are the winners here.

Does anybody know how much money is spent on electricity each month?

Electricity costs are hard to quantify because miners exist globally. bucktotal has absolutely zero clue what he is saying though I'm pretty sure the whole thread knows that already. The inflationary pressure of bitcoin combined with merchant usage is a huge negative to the near term price of bitcoin and so anyone stating otherwise just outright has no idea how bitcoin works and is blindly owning bitcoin for the upside.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.0

Regarding the merchant usage, is the downward impact on the price essentially because merchants are selling nearly 100% of their bitcoins, while those purchasing in bitcoins are not re-buying bitcoins at the same rate? If customers using bitcoins for purchases always re-bought, the impact on price would be minimal, right? Or am I missing something?

I don't think bitcoin is dead but transactions/day isn't climbing exponentially. It has hardly climbed at all for a very long time:

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

The hash rate is a mining race to the bottom at the moment. I am also not sure if there is a relation between hash rates and prices. If there is then it is actually more likely to put downward pressure as miners can't pay their bills in bitcoin.

Can't find numbers for new addresses and total non-zero but judging from the transactions/day I seriously doubt it is growing exponentially.

Right now the prediction of 5000 dollar or more before the end of the year seem very unlikely and there is a bigger chance we will see 300 or lower before we see 1000 again.

number of tx/day excluding popular addresses. note what mtgox going down did to the economy at the beginning of the year. we're catching back up to the trendline and actually close to the ATH for tx/day.

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-tra...ale=0&address=

The cost of infrastructure, employees, security, electricity is exponentially higher for fiat currencies. It's not even close. No one talks about those costs affecting the market cap of fiat.

unique addresses per day:

There is a strong correlation.

Hash rate can go as high as it wants, but that doesn't necessarily mean the price of BTC will rise. The correlation is that when mining becomes super profitable, you can be assured there will be severe overhead pressure on the price of BTC as money will flow into miners and not BTC. This puts a cap on the price of BTC. The price will drop or remain constant until the mining margins become very small.

Right now it seems we are at the point of mining not being very profitable, so I would say BTC has the ability to rise a good amount from this point. Now whether it does or not is another thing.

But say BTC shot to 2k tomorrow.. it would be impossible for it to hold because people would be selling their BTC for miners until the price dropped to a point it wasn't profitable to do so anymore.

I don't think miners (the real ones, not just a person running one in his garage) look at their operation like that. They simply mine, sell a massive percentage on the spot to fund operations and income, and use a tiny piece left over to invest in new equipment. You could say miners making more money suck more aggregate dollars out of the bitcoin economy when price is higher, and then spend more on equipment to raise has rate, but there is no real beta 1 correlation between hash rate and price. Any periods of time where you see the correlation is more than likely a coincidence.

Really the fact is that even after this little intraday selloff, there are roughly 3800 coins mined per day, and at 434/coin that's still $1,645,400 per day that needs to come from new money just to break even price wise.

That is still not exponential growth. Plus they don't show what they are excluding which is strange because the gap between your graph and mine is getting smaller accounting for quite a bit of the growth.

Counterparty accounted for 3% of total bitcoin transactions yesterday. It's likely that percentage continues to climb and that total bitcoin transactions excluding popular address resumes an uptrend. I'm not saying this is only because of Counterparty, but I do think Counterparty going to help quite a bit simply because there are new transaction types and new reasons to make transactions.

So you start your argument with saying there is a strong correlation but that doesn't necessarily mean there is a strong correlation.

Hashrate is not directly correlated with the price at all. If I manage to design an ASIC with half the power consumption compared to the current ones then the hashrate can double with BTC staying at exactly the same price. My mining costs are the same but I can provide twice the hashrate.

I actually doubt that. Visa handles 2000 transaction per second. costs per transaction is much much higher for Bitcoin if you would remove the subsidy in terms of block rewards. The bitcoin network is extremely inefficient because of it's decentralised nature. That's also it's strength but it will be very hard to compete on costs in a few years.