Bitcoin returns are very impressive [Archive] - The Project Avalon Community Forum

View Full Version : Bitcoin returns are very impressive

mgray

23rd May 2017, 11:16

If you can stomach $200 plunges you can be rewarded with spectacular returns. I run the numbers here (https://grayseconomy.com/2017/05/23/bitcoin-has-a-400-return-over-last-12-months/).

Ernie Nemeth

23rd May 2017, 22:49

Intriguing.

Is there a link or advice how to get in the game?

Why $200?

ThePythonicCow

23rd May 2017, 23:01

If you can stomach $200 plunges you can be rewarded with spectacular returns. I run the numbers here (https://grayseconomy.com/2017/05/23/bitcoin-has-a-400-return-over-last-12-months/).

Past performance is no guarantee of future results :) :).

(said by someone who wishes they had put more into Bitcoin <grin>.)

A Voice from the Mountains

23rd May 2017, 23:13

The more you invest the better, short of some unforeseen worldwide catastrophe. A complete financial collapse would also be an interesting wild card, in which gold or silver may or may not have been a better investment.

Japan just made Bitcoin legal currency. That alone will send prices through the roof.

Big money influences in finance are getting behind it too, investing millions.

CurEus

24th May 2017, 00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAk5UIJS_PU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAk5UIJS_PU)

The Dollar Vigilante has been discussing bitcoin and crypto currencies for a few years. He is "anarcho-capitalist" and libertarian. I wouldn't be surprised if he is a member here :)
The link is his recent talk explaining things. I believe you can join his website for $1 for a week and read all of his reports back to 2013 his you tube videos are free and worth watching
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAk5UIJS_PU

A Voice from the Mountains

24th May 2017, 00:22

The CoinDesk website has good news articles on Bitcoin.

If anyone is serious about investing in Bitcoin, start monitoring its price fluctuations (going up or down by hundreds of dollars a day is fairly routine), study a bit what it is and how it works, and start reading the recent news headlines about Bitcoin from a website like CoinDesk.

Investing in Bitcoin can be as easy as going to Coinbase.com and signing up, but the best way to handle your Bitcoin is to put them into cold storage on a secure computer using an encrypted wallet or something like that, but you have to know what you're doing because scams and hacking are common. I recommend using Linux. :)

I sunk $300 in Bitcoin just since it was $1500 and up, and already made $130 profit on the investment so far. I'm not selling anything though, because big, big moneyed interests are getting behind Bitcoin to try to co-opt it and turn it into some nightmare world digital currency that they can track. Already the "crypto" aspect of Bitcoin is essentially compromised, and even public universities are mapping out exchange networks and gathering intel from the metadata in the blockchain.

Also when quantum computing becomes more available there may be security problems, but that's months/years off still.

mgray

24th May 2017, 04:15

CoinDesk does have good primers on digital currencies. The $200 drop was yesterday's market moves. It was followed by a $180 rise so the volatility can be roller coaster like. But the trend for now has been up.

The why is the more interesting part. I am looking into the Chinese connection. More later on that.

Morbid

24th May 2017, 05:29

just an fyi. coindesk is behind driving the market. bitcointalk forum has gotten worse in rescent years but if you can filter the information it can be accurate in terms of where those invested in it stand. lots of fud & spam there so be warned.

mgray

25th May 2017, 11:57

ThePythonicCow

25th May 2017, 20:27

ThePythonicCow

27th May 2017, 04:56

The numbers in my opening post -- while just three days old -- are dated. Bitcoin is up $1,000 over the last week and I try to put some perspective on it here (https://grayseconomy.com/2017/05/25/bitcoin-soars-1000-in-week-as-wall-st-firms-take-notice/).

I wouldn't have expected Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, to be the one posting the following, but it seems he is. Mike's article, DO THE MATH: Here’s the rational analysis why 99% of current Bitcoin owners will never be able to sell Bitcoins for anything close to its imagined current value (http://newstarget.com/2017-05-24-do-the-math-heres-the-rational-analysis-why-99-of-current-bitcoin-owners-will-never-be-able-to-sell-bitcoins-for-anything-close-to-the-imagined-current-value.html), does an excellent job of explaining why Bitcoins are another Tulip Mania.

In short summary - Bitcoins are like a closed-end fund (Jim Willie's analogy in his latest interview http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/podcast/8359/three-days-jackass) ... a major problem with them being that they "collapse quickly" (Jim Willie's phrasing) in the end. Mike Adams doesn't use the comparison to a closed-end fund, but he does spell out in detail why Bitcoin will almost surely collapse quickly in the end, losing 99% of their market cap with most Bitcoin investors unable to exit. I mention Jim Willie's "closed-end fund" analogy here because (1) it makes sense to me (2) since you're a financial guy, mgray, it might make sense to you, and (3) it fits well with Mike Adam's more detailed explanation of why he expects Bitcoin to collapse quickly in the end.

In the other corner (a boxing or wrestling metaphor) we have Clif High, who today posted another clear defense of why he expects that Bitcoin and other such cryptocurrencies will make generational fortunes for those holding major investments in them: may 26 2017 wujo - cryptos no bubble, temporal markers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIRCvIrz4Dw), though Clif warns that the cryptocurrency markets will be volatile, and advises those speculating in them to subscribe to his Wealth reports.

Supporters of current cryptocurrencies say that cryptocurrencies are unlike other monetary systems, in that they are not controlled by or controllable by the elite. This idea forms a key basis for the claim that cryptocurrencies are different this time and almost certainly won't crash in the end. This claim is in my view deeply false: The elite continue to control (financially, legally, and if you try to run a nation without a BIS-member central bank, militarily) all major market exchanges, both between different denominations of money, and between any such form of money and any real good, service, resource, or product.
They can lock (or as now, open) the doors between Bitcoin and Dollars (or any other such pair) on a whim.
They can overwhelm the computational power of any independent, privately held, network of crypto currency miners or exchange operators (thus gaining the real control of any such blockchain network.)
They can infiltrate, destroy or shutdown any major cryptocurrency exchange on a whim.
The current cryptocurrencies have way too small a global market cap, and are based on a technology that can not (contrary to Clif High's claims) and never will directly support a major portion of the world's financial transactions on a single global blockchain.

I love listening to Clif High, and can't take much of Mike Adams. But in this case, I am left wondering if Clif High is serving as a mouth piece for the elite (or perhaps he's just trying to sell his Wealth reports), and Mike Adams is the one who has nailed this. I recommend Mike's DO THE MATH: Here’s the rational analysis why 99% of current Bitcoin owners will never be able to sell Bitcoins for anything close to its imagined current value (http://newstarget.com/2017-05-24-do-the-math-heres-the-rational-analysis-why-99-of-current-bitcoin-owners-will-never-be-able-to-sell-bitcoins-for-anything-close-to-the-imagined-current-value.html).

... none of this is to deny that "blockchain technology" won't end up serving as an important basis of financial and contract transaction database systems that are distributed across the networks and computers of large (100's or even 1000's) pools of cooperating, but not necessarily mutually trusting, corporations and governments.

... but blockchain technology is not suitable as the basis for a world-wide transaction system running on a few billion smartphones, and (unlike the lower level TCP/IP protocol) never will be.

There are a couple of cryptocurrencies that might have a future, unlike (in the view of Mike Adams, Jim Willie and myself) Bitcoin. These two are:

Antshares (https://bravenewcoin.com/news/antshares-sets-out-to-be-the-peoples-digital-asset-blockchain), and
Zengold (http://www.zengold.org/index.html)

Antshares is designed to handle the efficient, secure, and distributed transfer and exchange of contracts, documents, and monetary quantities between participants in a loose collective of mutually untrusting networked server operators. I have not yet looked closely at Antshares myself, but it's on my short list to consider.

Zengold.org had their Initial Coin Offering (ICO) (https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/zengold-ico-announcement) today, 26 May 2017 (as I write this.) I had intended to buy a few Zengold myself today, using some of the tiny fraction of one Bitcoin that I own, but I didn't set my alarm clock early enough, and by the time I checked online, the entire ICO, which had been scheduled to take two weeks, had already been 100% sold out. The design of Zengold is that it intends to be backed, at a fix rate, by vault stored gold. If I understand correctly, Zengold plans to be allow its holders to convert their cryptocurrency to that actual gold, for reasonable shipping fees.

Both Zengold and Antshares are predominantly Chinese efforts, one going after the potential for blockchain technology to serve as a trusted "distributed database" between a loose consortium of participants, and the other to serve as blockchain transferable calls on vault stored gold.

ThePythonicCow

29th May 2017, 06:12

The numbers in my opening post -- while just three days old -- are dated. Bitcoin is up $1,000 over the last week and I try to put some perspective on it here (https://grayseconomy.com/2017/05/25/bitcoin-soars-1000-in-week-as-wall-st-firms-take-notice/).

I love listening to Clif High, and can't take much of Mike Adams. But in this case, I am left wondering if Clif High is serving as a mouth piece for the elite (or perhaps he's just trying to sell his Wealth reports), and Mike Adams is the one who has nailed this. I recommend Mike's DO THE MATH: Here’s the rational analysis why 99% of current Bitcoin owners will never be able to sell Bitcoins for anything close to its imagined current value (http://newstarget.com/2017-05-24-do-the-math-heres-the-rational-analysis-why-99-of-current-bitcoin-owners-will-never-be-able-to-sell-bitcoins-for-anything-close-to-the-imagined-current-value.html).

... none of this is to deny that "blockchain technology" won't end up serving as an important basis of financial and contract transaction database systems that are distributed across the networks and computers of large (100's or even 1000's) pools of cooperating, but not necessarily mutually trusting, corporations and governments.

... but blockchain technology is not suitable as the basis for a world-wide transaction system running on a few billion smartphones, and (unlike the lower level TCP/IP protocol) never will be.
Ah - after listening to another Clif High video today on cryptocurrencies (as posted here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?97313-The-Truth-about-Corey-Goode&p=1155920&viewfull=1#post1155920)), I think I was missing a key point ... a couple of key points.

The elite bastards have no intention of running the world's finances on Bitcoin -- with every cup of Seattle Starbucks and bowl of Thai rice paid for on the particular blockchain known as Bitcoin. Of course not. That totally would not work, from a technical perspective.

Nor do they intend to have the Bitcoin market collapse and all holders of Bitcoin and other such cryptocurrencies left staring longingly at their now worthless computer bits, as if nothing ever happened.

Rather the elite bastards do intend to get us all on digital money, and the lure of these early profits in Bitcoin and other such cryptocurrencies as one of the motivators (some carrots, and some sticks) to get us there. Of course the various problems with Bitcoin in particular will be used to justify more Draconian state control, world-wide, of cryptocurrencies. These problems include fraudulent theft (e.g. Mt Gox), association with "bad" stuff such as the Silk Road, and the frequent use of Bitcoin to collect ransomware payments. These problems will have to be "balanced" with incentives, such as obscene profits.

Now I am thinking that the key to owning and trading Bitcoin will be to be "nimble", just as was the case in the Dotcom boom, when the key was getting out of the early hot stocks such as Pets.com, eToys, and Webvan, and into the long term chosen winners, such as Amazon and Google, once the chosen ones became apparent. The "chosen" ones are deeply in cahoots with the intelligence and financial powers.

Similarly the chosen ones in cryptocurrencies and other such blockchain applications will no doubt serve their real masters well.

Now this is making more sense to me in this regard -- Mike Adams is seen from this perspective as helping to create more volatility in the crypto currency market in the short term, which may well serve our Overlord's short term initiatives, and Clif High is seen as offering a reasonably intelligent perspective on how to benefit from this pump phase of cryptocurrencies, a quite volatile phase, with plenty of opportunities to make and lose small fortunes.

I continue to build up my skills with various ways to exchange cryptocurrencies with each other, and to buy and sell them for cash or goods. As with dotcom stocks in the 1990's, the way to ride out the rough waters and rapids is with a multi-hulled boat, such as a trimaran. In this case, that means never having more in any exchange or in any cryptocurrency, than you're willing to instantly kiss good-bye to. Keep adding small (whatever "small" is, for one's financial situation) amounts and stay nimble. Get some sort of idea of how big the pump phase should be, and start pulling out regular amounts, rather than still adding them, when the market seems to be reaching that size. Also, in those months where one has spectacular profits, if one's initial investments have gotten anywhere close to one's "still sleeping comfortably at night level", take some off the top.

One nice property of cryptocurrencies -- one can diversify fairly well with just a few hundred dollars capital -- unlike most assets.

Once a sizable portion of the world's people have at least made a few purchases with cryptocurrencies, then that's my idea of how bit the pump phase needs to be. Then the elite can "blow up" these early cryptocurrencies (except for the few chosen ones) and use the disaster to justify a global "Patriot Act" for cryptos. This resembles the Dotcom boom, which went bust once a sizable portion of the world had clicked on a web page or some such.

Of course, except for a few "lottery ticket winners" gross profits in the long run will be far, far, short of what one could have made with a perfect crystal ball. But one should have good odds at some quite nice profits.

(But for heavens sake, don't extrapolate the profits of a few "good" months into some anticipated income stream for decades to come and take out a massive mortgage on a palatial estate and a Rolls Royce .. until one has made one's profits and moved them to safer ground, they can be quite ephemeral.)

Meanwhile, never let the conspiracy theorist sleep at night ... the "elite" are not doing this for our good. They are doing it for their good, to give "birth" to the monetary and financial system for the next century, over which they will have world-wide control, down to the smallest detail.

mgray

29th May 2017, 11:17

Paul, while the elites may or may not have a devious design on the use of cryptos, we are still in the infancy. To use an American baseball analogy we are in the bottom of the 1st inning.

I do not think it is a time to be nimble, which I assume you mean to get in and out on price fluctuations. It's a buy and hold and forget about it for the time being.

I am only speaking of bitcoin here since it has the "longest" track record of all the new cryptos.

Let's just say for argument sake, if 0.0001% of the world knows of bitcoin and 0.00001% actually own a bitcoin, then upside is tremendous. With each paring of a zero after the decimal point price jumps should be expected.

I think the biggest hurdle facing bitcoin is Wall Street and London getting involved as I wrote (http://nypost.com/2017/05/28/why-investors-arent-giving-up-on-bitcoins/) in a column on Sunday in The New York Post on Sunday.

The SEC is again looking at an ETF linked to bitcoin, so if that goes through later this year, then we will also soon after that get a bitcoin options market and true price discovery will go the way of gold and silver.

If the ETF goes through, then I would become a seller on any pullback as the manipulation would be on.

ThePythonicCow

29th May 2017, 15:42

I do not think it is a time to be nimble, which I assume you mean to get in and out on price fluctuations. It's a buy and hold and forget about it for the time being.

I am only speaking of bitcoin here since it has the "longest" track record of all the new cryptos.
Ah - I see that my trimaran analogy didn't work :).

By nimble I didn't mean shifting quickly in and out of Bitcoin, between Bitcoin and "cash". Rather I meant having a relatively stable overall amount in several cryptocurrencies, and in several wallets and exchanges, and shifting over time between them, adding and removing which cryptos and which exchanges or wallets, hold portions of ones investment.

In other words, don't put all one's eggs in one basket, but don't spend much time trying to anticipate short term price moves either as that's usually a fool's game.

===

Our common language for cryptocurrencies seems to me to be getting all of us in a bit danger (meaning excess risk and confusion.)

Discussions of cryptocurrency often tend to confuse "Bitcoin" with "cryptocurrency", and often tend to speak of "The Blockchain", as if there was really just one blockchain (that mattered anyway.)

There are, and will continue to be, many cryptocurrencies and even more blockchains (as blockchains provide a useful "distributed database" mechanism, useful for more than just currencies.)

The business models that succeed immensely in the future, a decade or two from now, will make use of blockchains, both for currencies and other tasks. The key for their success will be that they have found and leveraged "choke points", opportunities to gain near-monopoly positions in a few essential points in the evolving infrastructure. Likely, and unfortunately, a few "Godfathers" at the top of the food chains in intelligence and financials will play key roles in picking these winners, so that they can leverage these choke points for their own nefarious (in my cynical view) ends.

===

So "nimble" didn't mean for me "rapidly moving eggs in and out of the Bitcoin nest", so much as it meant "keep several nests and several eggs, shifting between them over time". In other words, "nimble" didn't mean "day trading Bitcoin", but rather "running one's own itsy-bitsy crypto mutual funds diversified in both multiple accounts/wallets and in which cryptos one is currently holding."

ThePythonicCow

29th May 2017, 15:59

The SEC is again looking at an ETF linked to bitcoin, so if that goes through later this year, then we will also soon after that get a bitcoin options market and true price discovery will go the way of gold and silver.

If the ETF goes through, then I would become a seller on any pullback as the manipulation would be on.
I'm more cynical :).

I doubt that there was ever true price discovery in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, not even back in the "beginning of time" when Satoshi Nakamoto released the bitcoin software on Sourceforge on 9 January 2009.

I figure that this is all a (semi-)controlled release of digital contract, monetary, banking, and financial market infrastructure technology, to largely surplant the institutionally controlled accounts running on "mainframes" with their payment cards, ACH and wire transfers, ATM networks, checks, cash and "stove pipe" web portals and computing. Each bank or broker I use has its own website and data processing, largely separate from the others, both at the front end, and at their back ends, with a variety of arcane interconnects between institutions.

leavesoftrees

29th May 2017, 21:20

One disadvantage to investing in bitcoin.. Ouch

I threw away $4.8 million in Bitcoin

Five years ago, I threw away a hard drive. An utterly generic 250GB portable hard drive, already a few years old, with a couple of dings and scratches in its shell and with the beginnings of an audible click that would have eventually killed it.

It had a data file containing 1400 Bitcoin on it. No big deal, at the time.

Today, those few kilobytes are worth more than $4 million.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/i-threw-away-48-million-in-bitcoin-20170528-gwf4jz.html

ThePythonicCow

31st May 2017, 17:49

Here's another computer nerd, with more years in distributed databases and in financial software than I'll ever have, with whom I agree in someways about Bitcoin, but not in other ways.

His name is Tom Gleason, and he posted his analysis on his Gleason Report (http://www.gleasonreport.com/) three days ago, in a report entitled An Analysis of Bitcoin’s Potential as a Digital Currency (pdf) (http://gleasonreport.com/emails/2017-05b-tgr.pdf)

I whole heartedly agree with Tom Gleason that the distributed database schema update algorithm used by Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies is fundamentally too slow for high transaction volumes. Visa, for example, handles about 2000 transactions per second, whereas Bitcoin handles about 7 transactions per second. As Gleason says:

Bitcoin requires frequent cross-database updates (replication) to maintain data integrity of the
blockchain. Bitcoin is using the wrong database schema and I don’t see how it can work with a
high transaction volume. Updating the blockchain will always be slow because of all the
network checks it must do with every transaction.

I also agree with Gleason that if and (likely when) a Bitcoin ETF fund is opened, this will allow for greater manipulation of the $US price of Bitcoin, just as happened with the GLD fund and gold.

However I disagree with Gleason that this means that the Bitcoin price will necessarily be manipulated down.

In the year 2004, when the GLD fund was opened, gold closed at $435/oz.
In the year 2008, when GLD became publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol GLD, gold closed at $869/oz.
In the year 2012, at gold's peak, gold closed at $1664/oz.
Now, in the middle of 2017, gold is at $1273/oz.

So much for ETF manipulation of a "commodity" meaning that the commodity will go down. In the eight years following the opening of GLD, the price in $US of gold doubled, and doubled again.

Manipulation means that the manipulators get a say in the price, not just a "free and open market."

TargeT

31st May 2017, 19:03

Bitcoin requires frequent cross-database updates (replication) to maintain data integrity of the
blockchain. Bitcoin is using the wrong database schema and I don’t see how it can work with a
high transaction volume. Updating the blockchain will always be slow because of all the
network checks it must do with every transaction.

I read:

limitation: bandwidth & computing power

And I think...

Bandwidth and computing power is about to become exponentially better (next 5-10 years? maybe FAR FAR less?) (http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-just-sent-a-quantum-message-almost-2km-setting-a-new-record)

Those seem like surmountable problems to me.

ThePythonicCow

31st May 2017, 19:51

Bandwidth and computing power is about to become exponentially better (next 5-10 years? maybe FAR FAR less?) (http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-just-sent-a-quantum-message-almost-2km-setting-a-new-record)

Those seem like surmountable problems to me.

We'd need two or three orders of magnitude reduction in latency to make distributed computations, such as used by Bitcoin in cross-database updates, in order to make the distributed update algorithm of Bitcoin handle Visa style transaction rates and speed. Since that's lightspeed limitation, that means we'd need communiation 100 to 1000 times the speed of light. But if we had that, we'd surely have improvements in the computational speed of an individual computer sufficient to send the current Bitcoin cryptography into the dustbin of history, along side Germany's World War II Enigma Machine.

Things get faster -- thousands of times faster in the span of my career in computing. But long haul network communication always remains thousands of times higher latency than local memory access, primarily due to the time needed to send a signal a long distance. A PDP 11/30 that I wrote a small operating system for, back in the late 1970's, cycled at about 1 MHz. The overclocked Intel Sandy Bridge that I am typing into right now, some 40 years later, cycles at about 4 GHz, 4000 times faster. That's the kind of increase we'd need in long haul data transmission latency (delays, not so much bandwidth, matter most here) to make the Bitcoin algorithm able to handle Visa transaction rates. But those kinds of increases almost certainly will NOT happen without corresponding improvements in local computing power, by which time Bitcoin in its current form will be obsolete.

(... and the tantalizing opportunity for improved secrecy in long haul network communication using quantum physics, as described in the article you linked, is still a laboratory curiosity, and so far as I can see, doesn't address the Bitcoin problem anyway.)

Computer performance increases are not magic that makes any architecture workable and competitive in short order. Rather architectures can and do fail, sometimes in a spectacular fashion, because they are fundamentally orders of magnitude slower than competitive architectures, regardless of whether you're using vacuum tubes and telegraph lines, or liquid nitrogen cooled super computers and fiber optic lines.

Chuck

6th June 2017, 05:46

ThePythonicCow

6th June 2017, 18:54

For information only...

New currencies like Ripple, had the ability to process 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) are now at 50,000 TPS, clearly competing with the likes of VISA for efficiencies and settlements.

Rather than every computer on the network processing each transaction, the scaled blockchain figures out how many computers (nodes) are necessary to validate each transaction and divides up the work efficiently. These are done in clever ways using shards like Etherium is considering this year as a hard fork (change in direction) with Casper or something like it. This relies on a 'Proof of Stake' (PoS) protocol instead of 'Proof of Work' (PoW)... or perhaps even a blend of the two. Etherium currently processes 7-15 TPS. In the evolved state it will have capabilities of 100,000 TPS!

Clearly, banks will not survive as they currently exist. In my view, they will have to 1) evolve using blockchain technologies and 2) require regulations to protect them.

Yes - I also expect that some evolution of blockchain technology will be a major part of our future financial infrastructure. However the notion that this will be a financial infrastructure freed from the dominance of the hidden hands of the "big guys" and the "deep state" will go by the wayside.

We had similar dreams and similar limitations early in the development of personal computers, such as the Atari and the IBM Personal Computer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer), Commodore PET (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET), Atari 8-bit family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family), Apple II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II), Tandy's TRS-80 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80), and various CP/M (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M) machines.

Those PC's seemed too limited to fulfill the dreams we had for them, but they had (seemed to have) the potential to free us from the big corporate bondage of IBM and the seven dwarfs (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/IBM-vs-7Dwarfs.html). Around about 1970, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, inside Bell Labs, used a tiny (by the standards of the day) PDP-7 minicomputer (http://www.soemtron.org/pdp7.html) to escape from the big corporate operating system world of Multics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics) and give birth to the Unix/Linux operating systems that I have been working with since I joined Bell Labs in 1978.

Now it's Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google (with their Android), Amazon (with their cloud), and some Asian manufacturing giants who are dominating the scene, and 99.9+% of all desktop, laptop, smartphone and tablet users are held captive to whatever is provided to them by a few big corporations, while a tiny fraction explore outside these walled gardens, using such tiny computers as the Rasberry Pi (https://www.raspberrypi.org/), and a somewhat larger fraction of us continue to develop and contribute to what's now called "Open Source" software (I manage only a handful of takes to public projects on Github every few years now.)

I anticipate a similar evolution for blockchain technology as we have had for so many other new, ground breaking, technologies in my lifetime.

Chuck

7th June 2017, 00:31

Thanks Paul. My post was mostly meant to address the scalability that you address for Bitcoin. You are correct; it suffers from extreme lack of scalability. That is also its charm.

The 2nd generation of cryptocurrency however, like Etherium will have 100,000+ TPS. This is 2 orders of magnitude faster than VISA. Why?

Because they are going global and preparing for cashless.

The central banks of China, Japan, North Korea and Russia (just to name a few) are already on board ... gives one an idea right there of the war between factions... and what is in store for the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Anyway, some might suggest to buy a couple (ETH or BTC), hold them and sell them before they get regulated in order to buy ones freedom ... or whatever is left of it.

mgray

7th June 2017, 02:18

All you need to know is that Blythe Masters -- of JPMorgan silver manipulation -- is now running a block chain development firm to run a version of the technology for the bulge bracket banks.

Chuck

7th June 2017, 03:25

ThePythonicCow

7th June 2017, 07:04

All you need to know is that Blythe Masters -- of JPMorgan silver manipulation -- is now running a block chain development firm to run a version of the technology for the bulge bracket banks.

mgray, what do you mean by that?

Blythe Masters is a high profile winner, taking lead positions for the "big boys". She doesn't take losing positions.

mgray

7th June 2017, 09:49

Masters was the driving force behind the silver price suppression when she ran commodities for JPMorgan. She was forced out as the collusion between Deutsche Bank, HSBC and JPMorgan to control silver prices was made public.

Given her previous role, now she is working on block chain technology, which may lead to insight into controlling BTC prices.

ThePythonicCow

25th June 2017, 20:24

...

I whole heartedly agree with Tom Gleason that the distributed database schema update algorithm used by Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies is fundamentally too slow for high transaction volumes. Visa, for example, handles about 2000 transactions per second, whereas Bitcoin handles about 7 transactions per second.
Here's a clue how some of this might go down.

An MIT Technology Review article (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608088/chinas-central-bank-has-begun-cautiously-testing-a-digital-currency/?set=608153) posted a couple of days ago begins:

China’s Central Bank Has Begun Cautiously Testing a Digital Currency

The People’s Bank of China has developed a digital currency that’s designed to scale to the number of transactions made every day across the country.

by Will Knight June 23, 2017

China’s central bank is testing a prototype digital currency with mock transactions between it and some of the country’s commercial banks.

Speeches and research papers from officials at the People's Bank of China show that the bank’s strategy is to introduce the digital currency alongside China’s renminbi. But there is currently no timetable for this, and the bank seems to be proceeding cautiously.
Further down in the article, it quotes Yao Qian, deputy director of the Technology Department of the People’s Bank of China, as expecting that the blockchain will not be used to directly handle the transaction load in real time, but rather as the more permanent distributed ledger maintained by the participating banks to determine the permanent record of who has what.

Quoting from further down in the above linked MIT article:

One of the main concerns voiced by other central banks looking at digital fiat currencies is that they could undermine the commercial banking system by making it possible for anyone to have an account with the central bank.

China’s digital currency is designed to avoid this problem. In a paper published in Tsinghua Financial Review, an academic journal, and posted online recently, Yao Qian, deputy director of the Technology Department of the People’s Bank of China, wrote that a digital currency could be integrated into the existing banking system, with commercial banks operating digital wallets for the central bank’s currency.

And while other countries have proposed following Bitcoin’s architecture and many of the largest banks in the world are experimenting with it, the currency developed by the People’s Bank of China is also different in design.

Yao writes that the currency would only use a distributed ledger in a limited way. A blockchain might not be used to process transactions, as this could prove an insurmountable bottleneck for a currency with such a huge transaction volume as the renminbi. But such a distributed ledger might be used to periodically check who owns what. “The ownership of digital currency can be verified directly by the issuing bank, so as to realize peer-to-peer cash transaction[s],” Yao writes.
In terms I would use, I'd guess that this implies something such as:

Customers, large and small, would have digital wallets with the banks where they held accounts.
Transactions between parties having accounts at different banks would happen near instantly.
Later (in the hour or day?), these transactions, including those between accounts at different banks, would be be batched and permanently recorded on a distributed blockchain maintained by the participating banks.
This makes more sense to me.

Callista

26th June 2017, 18:09

this from Joseph P Farrell:

CHINA BREAKS ENTANGLEMENT RECORD, AND SOME HIGH OCTANE SUSPICIONS

If you've been following the development of crypto-currencies, cyber-security, quantum entanglement, or financial clearing, you'll want to take notice of these articles shared by Mr. T.M. and Mr. J.K., for China has crossed another threshold on the path toward satellite-based quantum entanglement communications systems, and therefore, toward a much more secure means of financial clearing:

read more...
https://gizadeathstar.com/2017/06/china-breaks-entanglement-record-high-octane-suspicions/

Chester

31st July 2017, 00:00

Hi Paul... happen to know anything about this Bitcoin "split" thing that's supposed to be happening?

ThePythonicCow

31st July 2017, 02:04

Hi Paul... happen to know anything about this Bitcoin "split" thing that's supposed to be happening?

They are creating a new variant of bitcoin, called Bitcoin Cash (https://www.bitcoincash.org/). Every Bitcoin (or fraction thereof) that anyone holds now will also get, automatically, the equivalent amount of this new Bitcoin Cash as well.

This new Bitcoin Cash has an 8 times larger block size, enabling the miners to keep up with the current Bitcoin transaction volume.

... so much for the idea that Bitcoins are in limited supply ... the supply is essentially about to double over night (not to mention all the alternative crypto's, such as Ethereum, Ripple, Dash, ..., which effectively also increase the total supply of cryptos.)

===

The current crypto currencies are all just experiments and early hype, to fine tune crypto currency technology, and to get early adopter humans sold on the idea.

Main line crypto currencies will end up being as deeply controlled by the elite bastards as main line Web search engines (aka Google), smartphones (aka Apple and Android), online shopping (aka Amazon and Alibaba), and social media (aka Facebook and Twitter) are controlled by the same elite bastards. Some of those main line crypto currencies will be "gold backed" ... just as paper currencies were for so many centuries ... meaning that the elite bastards hold the gold, and the masses hold the worthless, mass produced, tokens. All serious funding of personal, corporate or government activity will be debt financed ... as has also been the case for a long time.

The "big reset" of the US Dollar as the world's primary currency will result in new big government and big corporate (such as Amazon) crypto currencies, some "gold backed", but all deeply controlled and surveilled.

They're setting us up for this big reset, and have been setting us up for at least a decade now.

ThePythonicCow

31st July 2017, 02:29

They're setting us up for this big reset, and have been setting us up for at least a decade now.
... actually ... since 1988 at least, as evidenced by this well known 1988 Economist magazine cover:

https://socioecohistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/theeconomist-phoenix_get_ready_for_world_currency_by_2018.jpg

Chester

31st July 2017, 02:33

The questions then, which only history (if allowed to be told honestly) will tell, are...

"How painful to folks in the US will the reset be?"

"Will pain be felt by other countries and/or regions of the world and if so, how much?

TargeT

31st July 2017, 03:20

Anyone do a cross reference on the Wanacry ransom worm and the bitcoin spike?

Here's some data from the IT side:
https://youtu.be/B9nKEckPU1M?t=6m45s

I bet there's a pretty strong correlation.... enough to make it seem a bit suspicious.

ThePythonicCow

31st July 2017, 03:47

"How painful to folks in the US will the reset be?"

"Will pain be felt by other countries and/or regions of the world and if so, how much?
Some pain is necessary, especially for Americans, to "persuade" them to go along with some major changes, such as losing the exhorbitant privilege of living in the country that issues the world's reserve currency and that has half the world's military, intelligence, financial, and narcotics business.

The pain will vary in at least two major ways.

Those who figure out what is happening and adapt will have less pain, on average, than those who are trapped in a failed paradigm.
If the elite intend, and realize such an intention, to radically depopulate America, that will be, at this earthly level, far more painful than if they don't.

The greatest pain may already be underway, for decades now, in those foreign (outside the US) lands subject to the Imperial Overreach of the American Empire. Many in the rest of the world, once they adapt to the crises and resets, may welcome the collapse of the American Empire.

ThePythonicCow

31st July 2017, 03:51

I bet there's a pretty strong correlation.... enough to make it seem a bit suspicious.
At some level they are deeply entangled, yes. The connection might be fairly direct, with the Wannacry ransom attack driving up demand for Bitcoin. But it is at least and certainly indirect, with such crypto ransom attacks being one of the means to make crypto currencies seem (1) valuable, (2) anonymous, and (3) in need of government policing.

Eagle Eye

31st July 2017, 11:54

Just connecting some dots. First AlphaBay market goes down (they have known for years that illegal market but acting only now) than btc-e (one of the largest trading cryptocurrency) goes down too and now they announce bitcoin split, I think that the time has come for big players to seize control of cryptocurrency. It may be Bitcoin or Ethereum, I think we are slowly going for a unified global digital currency.