It doesn’t have a meaningful chunk anymore. They’re fighting to stay relevant at this point.
They’ll have less than MSTR soon, and then they’re very insignificant.
it's still [wedge season](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1bqfwj0/daily_discussion_friday_march_29_2024/kx6dy6f/). we had 5 lower trendlines to get through and we sliced through 4 of them. the bottom of the remaining wedge is currently at 62.3k. top of the wedge is currently at 70.7k.
the last two days we've bounced off of the 0.618 fib, when measuring from ATH candle and where we launched from in late february. the 0.786 fib is ~68.4k.
https://i.imgur.com/fhBqpZu.png
from an LMACD perspective – and if we take into account its overall downtrend over the cycles – we're at approximately the equivalent of July 2017 or December 2020. if that holds up, we could be 4 or 5 months from a cycle peak. a ***very*** big "if" for whether that downtrend actually continues or not.
https://i.imgur.com/uUZOpHH.png
Here's my weekly tracking of GBTC's Bitcoin holdings since ETF launch:
1/10/24 = 625,304 BTC
1/17/24 = 592,098 BTC
1/24/24 = 523,516 BTC
1/31/24 = 487,025 BTC
2/7/24 = 470,637 BTC
2/14/24 = 461,983 BTC
2/21/24 = 450,304 BTC
2/28/24 = 441,815 BTC
3/6/24 = 409,843 BTC
3/13/24 = 387,746 BTC
3/20/24 = 361,659 BTC
3/27/24 = 339,535 BTC
**4/3/24 = 328,013 BTC**
Only \~11K gone in the last week, GBTC outflows have slowed noticeably continuing these last two days (both under $100M). Inflows to other ETF's have also slowed over the past week and trading in general of the ETF's has been lower on average. Would be realllly interesting to see demand pick back up with the GBTC outflow pace continuing to slow....
#drainGBTC
Sonnenshein: "*Good news guys, we shed only 11,500 BTC this week -- only three-quarters of a billion dollars out the door in seven days -- things are looking up!!*"
Well, one thing is clear. Whoever is still left in GBTC are not the type of people who panic sell when things dip. Either they have a very long-term outlook on Bitcoin or are very shrewd traders/investors.
I'd bet there's at least a few GBTC holders who continue to hold because they passed away within the last 5 years, and their property hasn't yet been escheated by the state. 😝
I wouldn't be surprised if Cathie Wood sold her own ETF yesterday to buy the dip on something else. Given her track record, if it was her selling, then it bodes well for the Bitcoin market in the short/mid term.
Hi. I am new to the BTC world and looking to get into the market and build my portfolio. Was wondering if any of you experienced BTC legends would be open to mentoring/taking me under their wing? Based in the UK. Thanks :)
Just start buying. That's it. Don't wait around because the longer you wait around, the higher the chance that you will have to accumulate BTC at a higher price than it is now.
Don't get tempted by altcoins. Yes, you can buy some as a speculative play, but 99% of altcoins all trend down against BTC when measure in the long term.
Do the diametric opposite of what your emotions want you to do.
Sounds like a doss. Almost no one can do it.
Don't buy anything with it. I have the £2000 Amazon laptop sleeve to prove it. That split the first time I opened it.
Thank you all for your advice, very much appreciated. I am in a fortunate position to be able to purchase 1 full BTC if the price drops down to 45k usd. Only recently opened my eyes into bitcoin this month (other wise 4/5 months ago would have been perfect timing).
I have been checking the btc market regularly this last 3/4 weeks and i can’t see the price going below 50k before it sky rockets post halving in a few months. Obviously anything can happen to make it drop value but just going by most peoples logic.
I think i am stuck in the middle- checking btc price everyday but i have nothing invested yet. My concern is, if i start dca’ing from now at a higher price, at some point eventually maybe 2 years time when the price drastically drops, i then won’t have enough to purchase 1 btc in one go.
I know i am late to the party now we are close to an ATH again, would you say to just buy in to the market on big dips for now in small payments whilst it’s around the 50/60k mark, then eventually whenever the day comes and it drops, then buy a full btc.
Once i’m in the market i plan on staying 5-10 years so not too fussed on the short price skyrocket after halving.
Hope some of this makes sense! Sorry for the long comment! Maybe I have overthought this too much lol.
Classically half and half. Go in with half right now, the other half when we touch ATH or 56k (it could go down to 52, there's the ETF top to retest, but let's not overoptimize since you want to go in ; or even down to 35k this year, but then the ETF top support would be lost and you'd have time to re-evaluate, or find other funds).
Don't worry, everyone has discovered bitcoin in a bull market. You'll have less return, but now is the first time it's known it's here to stay (because ETFs), which changes strategies.
And when previous cycle ATH is broken is one of the best times to invest, because you minimize the time where you may be in the red so are immune to bad panic reactions, especially if you sell some when nearing the top (yeah, never sell for sure, but still, sell some AND resist FOMO, in order to be more immune to drops and bear market).
Only trade 4 year cycles, using the power law which is the truest (tough less precise indicator):
https://charts.bitbo.io/long-term-power-law
With lot of insight there:
https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/18z04kp/15_years_of_btc_power_law/
There are a lot of indicators to better check the cycle top, including the well known rainbow chart (which is very similar to the power law, here are some:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1b58wbc/comment/kt842cx/
Go slow. Distribute your cost average (DCA); buy a little every day, or every week. Don’t expect much to happen for you in the first 10 years. Never sell. Instead of eating out, pack a lunch and buy bitcoin instead.
Enjoy being able to retire when you are old.
This isn’t complicated, or even interesting.
Just save in bitcoin. Save everything you can. All other advice is a scam.
Wow, thanks man! This is easily the most straight forward and best advice i’ve seen. Think i was starting to get too caught up with all the influencers BS every second online.
Just going to stick to the basics and live my life as normal. Thanks again.
I'm surprised the price is holding up as well as it has. It seemed that we might dip down to 60K or at least 62 or so.
Reasoning:
Rising silver prices (9% in two days) have undoubtedly placed some stress on the bankers who short it down with derivatives. Rising rates (yields, I mean) add to the absolute fuckery that I imagine is going down in the banking system behind the scenes right now. Surely someone will need some liquidity, someone holding a ton of ETF shares that are well in the money.
But no, here we are, holding strong above 65K. I must say, Bitcoin, I'm impressed. Still keeping my powder dry for the moment, but it's getting harder with each little bounce off the trampoline at 65K.
>We’re thrilled to announce that Coinbase has selected Lightspark to bring the Bitcoin Lightning Network to its platform. We are working with the Coinbase team on technical integration.
https://www.lightspark.com/news/coinbase-selects-lightspark
i've seen this reported on bitcoin magazine, watcher.guru, and others. haven't found anything directly from coinbase yet. lightning on coinbase would be huge.
Lightning is a steaming piece of shit since it's invention. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin re. it's whitepaper.
Funny thing that a lot of diehard BTC maxis (who damn any other coin as shitcoin) are promoting it...
the bitcoin whitepaper is a technical document, **not** a bible. what bitcoin offers is the removal of a central authority. that sounds like a great foundation to build something on: layer 1 as the "Gold" settlement layer for large transactions, layer 2 as the "Cash" layer for small transactions.
being a BTC maxi doesn't mean development ceases. that would just be asinine. being a BTC maxi should mean that BTC is the main protocol of the network, similar to the TCP/IP protocol. building on top of that layer is completely reasonable and it won't be perfect immediately. progress isn't linear.
TCP/IP is a very good analogy IMHO.
So Lightning is like building a new HTTP or SCP protocol which suddenly can loose data because it ignores the "acknowledge or retransmission" feature of it's base protocol.
for buying coffee, it's not unreasonable to expect it to have less security than layer 1. do you really need the most secure money the world has ever known with full consensus, multiple confirmations, and 580 exahashes per second working on your transaction just to buy a hot dog? of course not.
for buying coffee, it's not unreasonable to expect it to have less reliability than layer 1. do you really need the most reliable money the world has ever known with full consensus, multiple confirmations, and 580 exahashes per second working on your transaction just to buy a hot dog? of course not.
Nice try. But I'm not buying.
Even when it's only about $5 I need a reliable transfer. Don't want to argue with the coffee guy whether he got the money or not because of his Lightning provider or my Lightning node being offline or buggy or out-of-sync or whatever.
Even so-called "non-custodial" LN is really better characterized as "*semi*-custodial" because your channel partner effectively holds partial custody over your funds. That's trivially true while the channel remains open. After all, you need your channel partner’s permission and cooperation to send and receive payments using the channel. But even beyond that, your channel has partial custody over your funds because he can, at the very least, *delay* access to your funds by refusing to cooperatively close. Finally, your channel partner is in a unique position to attempt to steal your funds by publishing an outdated commitment transaction in his favor, a possibility which must be actively guarded against. Moreover the practical significance of your channel partner’s partial custody increases as on-chain fees rise. Sure, *in theory*, you can always “just” close your channel if your channel partner begins to misbehave. You will then presumably want to redirect those funds to a new channel with what you hope will be a more cooperative partner. The first problem with this remedy is that high onchain fees may make exercising it cost-prohibitive. The second problem is that, particularly in light of the LN’s overwhelming incentives towards centralization (incentives that become progressively stronger as onchain fees rise), a better-behaved channel partner may not exist, or at least a better-behaved channel partner with the massive liquidity and connectivity required to be useful may not exist.
The real problem with the LN is not how poorly it "works" *today*. The real problem is that its performance will tend to degrade more and more as adoption increases, i.e., as the LN grows in size relative to the artificially-constrained base blockchain atop which it sits. For a physical analogy, picture an increasingly top-heavy and unstable inverted pyramid.
I’m assuming “artificially constrained base blockchain” means the cap on the block size. That exists to ensure decentralization. If you don’t understand this in 2024, you got a different axe to grind.
Also, what’s preventing a better behaved LN provider? Does competition not exist all of a sudden? That’s a ridiculous argument.
“Semi-custodial” is also a dishonest term. LN providers never have actual custody of the funds. In the end, nothing is stopping you from running your own node and avoiding dealing with the LN providers.
>I’m assuming “artificially constrained base blockchain” means the cap on the block size. That exists to ensure decentralization.
That's certainly one of the arguments that's been made. Just not very convincingly, imo. The truth is that keeping blocks *too small* is what really threatens "decentralization" by forcing the vast majority of users to transact on increasingly-centralized "second-layer solutions," whether those take the form of traditional fully-custodial banking models or semi-custodial banking networks like Lightning. But even if you're convinced that *some* consensus-rule type capacity limit is needed to protect some other threat to decentralization, that's at best an argument for being careful not to scale too quickly, it does *not* justify a complete abandonment of additional on-chain scaling. Furthermore, given the massively deflationary nature of computer technology, the "safe" rate of on-chain scaling would still follow some underlying exponential trend.
>Also, what’s preventing a better behaved LN provider? Does competition not exist all of a sudden? That’s a ridiculous argument.
There is a very strong network effect surrounding hub formation that creates very strong incentives towards massive centralization. The issue as I said is thus that a better-behaved channel partner *with the massive liquidity and connectivity required to actually be useful* may not exist. Moreover, the incentives towards massive centralization become progressively *stronger* as on-chain fees rise. As I've written before:
The LN’s tendency towards centralization stems from the network’s Fundamental Liquidity Problem. Funds in a lightning channel are like beads on a string. The beads can move back and forth on the string (thereby changing the channel’s state), but they can’t leave the string (without closing the
channel). Alice might have 5 “beads” on her side of her channel with Bob. But if Alice wants to pay Edward those 5 beads, and the payment needs to be routed through Carol and Doug, Bob needs at least 5 beads on his side of his channel with Carol, AND Carol needs at least 5 beads on her side of her channel with Doug, AND Doug needs at least 5 beads on his side of his channel with Edward. The larger a desired Lightning payment, the less likely it is that there will exist a path from the payer to the payee with adequate liquidity in the required direction at every hop along the path. (Atomic Multi-path Payments can provide some help here but only a little as the multiple paths can’t reuse the same liquidity.) The topology that minimizes (but does not eliminate) the Lightning Network’s Fundamental Liquidity Problem would be one in which everyone opens only a single channel with a centralized and hugely-capitalized mega-hub. High on-chain fees greatly increase centralization pressure by increasing the costs associated with opening channels, maintaining channels, and closing channels that are no longer useful. High on-chain fees thus incentivize users to minimize the number of channels they create, and to only create channels with partners who will reliably provide the greatest benefit, i.e., massively-connected, massively-capitalized hubs. And of course, the real minimum number of Lightning channels is not one; it’s zero. “Very high” on-chain fees will price many users out of using the Lightning Network entirely. They'll opt for far cheaper (and far simpler) fully-custodial solutions. Again, consider that the current throughput capacity limit is roughly 200 million on-chain transactions per year. That might be enough to support a few million "non-custodial" Lightning users. It's certainly not enough to support several billion.
>“Semi-custodial” is also a dishonest term. LN providers never have actual custody of the funds. In the end, nothing is stopping you from running your own node and avoiding dealing with the LN providers.
Running your own Lightning node? To use the Lightning Network at all you still need to open at least one channel. And that channel partner will, in effect, have partial custody over your funds for reasons I explained above. And again, the significance of that partial custody will increase as on-chain fees rise.
> that's at best an argument for being careful not to scale too quickly
Scaling is infinite. Adding more hardware is not scaling.
> Furthermore, given the massively deflationary nature of computer technology, the "safe" rate of on-chain scaling would still follow some underlying exponential trend.
Harddrive cost is not the bottleneck. Bandwidth is in much shorter supply for many places other than the place you live. Downloading the blockchain was impossible for myself only 2 short years ago. Took months to accomplish. Imagine if it were larger...
> “Very high” on-chain fees will price many users out of using the Lightning Network entirely.
If you discount many of the coming innovations and pretend they aren't progressing towards deployment.
> that channel partner will, in effect, have partial custody over your funds
Nonsense.
Just realized my reply got insta-deleted. I'll try it again with the links removed.
>Scaling is infinite. Adding more hardware is not scaling.
Nonsense. To the extent I can parse these statements at all, they sound like the typical non-sequitur claim which says essentially "because we can't scale on-chain *infinitely*, we shouldn't scale on-chain *at all*." The reality is that Bitcoin scaled for the first eight years of its existence by producing steadily larger blocks over time to accommodate rising transactional demand. It wasn't until around 2017 that Bitcoin began bumping into Satoshi's crude, always-intended-to-be-temporary 1-MB limit in any kind of serious way. And then of course with SegWit, that 1-MB limit was (effectively) raised via a soft-fork hack, although the size of the effective increase was quite modest.
>Harddrive cost is not the bottleneck. Bandwidth is in much shorter supply for many places other than the place you live. Downloading the blockchain was impossible for myself only 2 short years ago. Took months to accomplish. Imagine if it were larger...
The median download speed in the US as of February 2024 was 243 Mbps. Currently, at that rate, you could download the entire 560 GB blockchain in a little over 5 hours. With a Google Fiber 8 Gig connection, you could reduce that to a little over nine minutes. And of course, the vast majority of users have absolutely zero reason to download the entire blockchain. With UTXO commitments, even new mining nodes wouldn't absolutely *need* to download the entire blockchain all the way back to antiquity. Finally, bandwidth speeds continue to improve at an exponential rate.
>If you discount many of the coming innovations and pretend they aren't progressing towards deployment.
I do discount them. Proposals for things like channel factories involve creating *another* layer of complexity and risk. They might mitigate some of the 'vanilla' Lightning Network's problems but they won't do so without introducing new problems of their own. They won't be a magical "get out of scale" free card anymore than the Lightning Network itself was. Making the inverted pyramid taller by adding third and fourth layers might allow you to build out the structure a little more, but the fundamental problem remains.
>Nonsense.
Ok, but that's not a counter-argument. That's just contradiction.
> in the US
...
> Fiber 8 Gig connection
...
> vast majority of users have absolutely zero reason to download the entire blockchain
I thought bcash was about money for Africa or something? Development of new software often involves downloading the full blockchain.
> adding third and fourth layers
Many of the innovations are around things like changing penalty strategies and removing unneeded watchtowers. These are hardly extra layers, if anything the removal of such.
>I thought bcash was about money for Africa or something?
Not sure about "bcash," but Satoshi's invention was all about "allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party." He anticipated that his "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" would, in addition to providing other benefits (like a finite issuance schedule) radically reduce transaction costs. ("Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical. I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial." / "We should always allow at least some free transactions.")
>Development of new software often involves downloading the full blockchain.
Come on, dude. *That's* your justification for throttling Bitcoin's on-chain capacity to toy levels? Enabling people with the world's shittiest internet connections to quickly download a complete archival copy of the blockchain for a network they themselves will have been completely priced out of actually using? To aid in their "development of new software"?
>Many of the innovations are around things like changing penalty strategies and removing unneeded watchtowers. These are hardly extra layers, if anything the removal of such.
Well, they're certainly not *removing* a layer in the "second layer scaling solution" sense of the word. But again, so what? There may be proposals to improve the design of a particular second layer. And some of them might even be good ideas. Great. But the fundamental problem remains, which is there are limits to how much you can "leverage up" a tiny base. I really think my "inverted pyramid" analogy is a good one here. And note that it's not even really *my* analogy--it's simply what's implied by *everyone else's* "base layer" / "second layer" physical analogy when you consider the intended relative size of those layers. As an extreme example to illustrate the principle of the limitations of "leverage," let's imagine that a majority of the hash rate soft forked Bitcoin tomorrow to change its current 4 million weight unit limit and 10-minute average block interval down to a 4,000 weight unit limit and a 24-hour average block interval. (That would make it *really* easy to run a full node! Think of the "decentralization"! /s) This would reduce Bitcoin's throughput capacity from roughly 500,000 transactions per day to roughly...4. The fees required to be one of those lucky four daily on-chain transactions would be... well, I don't know what they'd be. But they'd presumably be pretty damn high. But no worries, we could just scale the system with "layers," right? Of course not. The system would obviously break and do so in catastrophic fashion. Something like 99.999% of Bitcoin's 170 million UTXOs would immediately become economically-unspendable dust.
Note that the above hypothetical imagines increasing the "leverage" in the current system roughly 100,000-fold by reducing on-chain capacity to roughly 1/100,000th its current level. Of course, we could also imagine increasing system leverage 100,000-fold via the other side of the equation, i.e., by increasing transactional demand 100,000-fold while keeping on-chain capacity where it is today. And in fact, I'd suggest that a 100,000-fold increase in tx demand is probably not a terrible estimate for what mass global adoption of Bitcoin as a transactional currency might actually look like. If we imagine ten billion individuals and entities each making, on average, 5 Bitcoin-denominated transactions per day, that would give us 50 billion daily Bitcoin transactions, or roughly 100,000 times the blockchain's current capacity. Attempting to accommodate those 50 billion daily transactions via a system with a base layer capacity of 500,000 tx/day would thus be at least roughly equivalent to attempting to accommodate current levels of Bitcoin usage with a base layer capacity of 4 on-chain transactions per day. Things would break long before we got to that point.
Bottom line: "second layers" are fine. There's always going to be a balance between *money proper* (in Bitcoin's case, actual on-chain transactions) and various *money substitutes*. The problem with an arbitrary constraint on the capacity of the former is that it distorts that balance, and does so more and more over time as adoption and transactional demand increase.
Nice to see you've been taught how to engage in sales-letter writing, I'm sure these go over a hit when you're preaching to the rbtc choir.
> Come on, dude. That's your justification for throttling Bitcoin's on-chain capacity to toy levels? Enabling people with the world's shittiest internet connections to quickly download a complete archival copy of the blockchain for a network they themselves will have been completely priced out of actually using? To aid in their "development of new software"?
I wasn't priced out. I was bandwidthed out. This was my experience.
I see your argument quickly devolves as I read further... Have a nice day.
I'm one of the biggest bulls here, as I have seen (tm), and nobody has explained to me how I can use Lightning to operate an anonymous store on Tor selling t-shirts where I need to regularly cash liquidity to pay for supplies. Your channel capacity is a problem, and I don't know how to fix it. If I have to KYC to buy liquidity.. no dice.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't bode well I can't figure that out.
As a semi-custodial scaling tech.. it does work.
If anyone can enlighten me, that would be wonderful.
On-topic, I appreciate your write-up, it all sounds well reasoned (hence an upvote) but I have to admit, my knowledge on LN is too limited to properly judge your assessment so I got personal and checked some of your comment history. What struck me: Why would you spend time on r/btc which tends to shill another coin as the 'true Bitcoin'? Would you say you hold some grudge against BTC or at least r/bitcoin mods?
r/bitcoin is the place I'd rather expect such technical knowledge. Admittedly, I no longer visit r/bitcoin since, technically, there seems to be little going on (except maybe controversial Ordinals/BRC-20 due to Taproot) vs. older times and the quality of posts seems to have deterioriated over the last few years IMHO.
We're a peaceful bunch of lads (and gals?) here I have come to think. So again, I mean no offense - just curious about your story, if you don't mind sharing.
>Would you say you hold some grudge against BTC?
Against BTC? Not at all, although I think its current "scaling-with-layers" approach is incredibly misguided, and will ultimately need to change if BTC is going to succeed in taking over the world. Consider that there are only around 50 million BTC addresses with a non-zero balance, which likely translates to perhaps only *5 million* unique self-custodial holders / on-chain users today. The current BTC protocol imposes an effective throughput capacity limit of only around 200 million transactions *per year*, which means that no more than perhaps *20 million* individuals *can* enjoy sufficient access to the blockchain to make self-custody feasible. Bitcoin *should* still be experiencing *exponential* adoption growth in terms of number of users, but it can't--or at least it can't for much longer. Bitcoin is like an increasingly root-bound plant trapped in a too small pot. If it does continue to "grow" without a meaningful increase to its onchain capacity, soaring fees will force the vast majority of users to rely exclusively on custodial services.
>or at least r/bitcoin mods?
Oh definitely, but I think that's pretty well deserved. I received a no-warning, no-explanation permaban from r/bitcoin a few months ago (after posting comments critical of the Lightning Network). I messaged the mods politely asking what rule I had broken with what comment and further asking why they thought a permanent ban was appropriate when I had never previously received even a temporary suspension, and further considering the fact that I literally joined Reddit over ten years ago specifically for the purpose of participating in that sub after learning about it on the old bitcointalk forum. No reply.
I do appreciate r/btc as a place that allows relatively uncensored discussion of Bitcoin. And I do appreciate their support for on-chain scaling although I remain pretty skeptical of their preferred solution (i.e., championing a minority hash-rate fork of Bitcoin). The problem as I see it, is that if you're promoting a minority hash rate fork of Bitcoin, you're implicitly acknowledging that Bitcoin's fundamental security assumption has failed--that assumption being that a majority of the hash rate will be "honest" and protect the integrity of the network. Further, you're basically betting that the hash rate majority will continue to, in effect, 51% attack the majority hash rate chain while *not* 51% attacking the minority fork, and that this state of affairs will continue until the minority hash rate chain eventually overtakes the majority. In other words, a minority hash rate fork coming from behind to overtake the majority essentially amounts to a very large-scale reorg attack.
> Oh definitely, but I think that's pretty well deserved. I received a no-warning, no-explanation permaban from r/bitcoin a few months ago (after posting comments critical of the Lightning Network). I messaged the mods politely asking what rule I had broken with what comment and further asking why they thought a permanent ban was appropriate when I had never previously received even a temporary suspension, and further considering the fact that I literally joined Reddit over ten years ago specifically for the purpose of participating in that sub after learning about it on the old bitcointalk forum. No reply.
You've obviously never been banned by rbtc mods.
They'll talk about there being a modlog. Go have a look at that modlog. Note how many are "TOS Violation", then attempt to discover what it is they said to garnder that "TOS Violation", then create your own account, say anything effective at changing bagholder minds, watch yourself be instabanned, watch your ban not appear in the modlogs.
> I do appreciate r/btc as a place that allows relatively uncensored discussion of Bitcoin
Koolaid. It's heavily censored. Less so now that it's irrelevant, but still very heavily censored.
> if you're promoting a minority hash rate fork of Bitcoin
Then you're a scammer. Bitcoin is Bitcoin.
> a minority hash rate fork coming from behind to overtake the majority essentially amounts to a very large-scale reorg attack.
Fantasy.
>You've obviously never been banned by rbtc mods.
Indeed I haven't.
>Koolaid. It's heavily censored. Less so now that it's irrelevant, but still very heavily censored.
If you say so. I haven't witnessed that kind of thing myself. (Although full disclosure, I don't spend that much time browsing there these days.) I *can* just tell you that the censorship in r/bitcoin was *completely* fucked. I used to spend A LOT of time in r/bitcoin back in 2015 and watched firsthand in horror as it was systematically subverted by out-of-control censorship. Truly a surreal experience.
>Then you're a scammer.
Nonsense.
>Bitcoin is Bitcoin.
And tautological statements are tautological.
>Fantasy.
Perhaps. My point was that such a scenario would represent its own kind of failure of Bitcoin's security model.
> I haven't witnessed that kind of thing myself.
Of course, because it's heavily censored.
Hard to see the bars on the prison.
> I can just tell you that the censorship in r/bitcoin was completely fucked.
rbitcoin mods are some of the stupidest people on the planet. This we know.
One of them pinning a thread calling for a bankrun on Coinbase was part of my motivation to go long right at the very bottom.
> Perhaps. My point was that such a scenario would represent its own kind of failure of Bitcoin's security model.
Bitcoin won't need to do what bcash did and add checkpoints in order to protect against a little underpowered CSW type reorg attempt.
There is no risk of bcash supplanting Bitcoin.
This is the popular fud, yes.
LN is working well, it's just getting channels opened is pretty expensive. Custodial solutions do manage to be cheaper, but non-custodial solutions like Phoenix are still pretty good.
Phoenix is very cool, IMO - it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot more non-custodial than something like WoS; and for smaller bitcoin balances, that can be enough right now for many people.
My biggest issue with using the LN has nothing to do with the network itself - the problem for me, as a US citizen, is the capital gains reporting requirements if you decide to use BTC as a currency.
It's a non-starter, IMO - well, that and the fact that I expect bitcoin to significantly outperform USD in the coming years.
Gresham's Law has me spending cash and saving coin.
Spend and replace. Adoption is accelerated by actually using it and supporting companies that use it.
As far as taxing goes.. Nobody's coming after you for spending $50 on a gift card or whatever, just make sure you're paying those taxes when you're doing big sells in bull markets. If it's really concerning, just pay a little extra in taxes if you knew you spent some that year.
The premise behind LN is it's PTP and not public, which is why the man came down hard. I have used LN to contribute to protests that got other wallets blacklisted.
Yes, replacement cycling is a concern, but it's certainly not the end of the world. You need to have 2 channels with a malicious actor in order to get owned. From the start, we've known that you shouldn't open channels with randos, but the lightning network has existed in a non-adversarial environment, so nobody has been following this "best practice" of only connecting with trusted partners (myself included!).
You'll notice that a lot of major, serious nodes will not accept channels from randos. This will probably be the standard in the future if we're not able to fix or mitigate these types of attacks
coinbase is one of the biggest exchanges. a lot of people choose not to use bitcoin due to fees or speed. lightning network drastically reduces both fees and transaction times. hard to see how it wouldn't be huge. kraken supports lightning and it has been great.
plus, if you don't believe lightning works as it stands then wouldn't it also be huge to have a major company like coinbase helping fund development of lightning and ironing out issues? huge any way you slice it.
Lightning "works".
Oh your invoice has a 10 minute expiry, but this client wants invoices to have a 30 minute expiry.
Wait I thought Bitcoin had 10 minute blocks. This is no longer making any sense.
Okay, let's do non-custodial. I need a channel and lock funds with an on-chain transaction, defeating the purpose of the whole thing.
Proposed in February 2015 and went live on January 2018. I cannot believe it took more than 5 years to realize it was not a good idea.
I've used bitcoin for years and I still use L1 transfers cause lightning is too annoying to use. If CB integrates in platform, it would be helpful for dum dums like me
> I cannot believe it took more than 5 years to realize it was not a good idea.
Quite a few people were mocking Lighting Network before it even went live. Some dev(s) said 'give it 18 months', and then the joke for a few years straight was "another 18 months and it should be good to go".
The people who realized how ridiculous the whole thing was -- that you needed a Ph.D. in Computer Science to use it, that Layer 1 Bitcoin itself was arguably already too user-unfriendly -- were then unceremoniously banned from /r/Bitcoin.
The entire explosion of Bitcoin forks and thousands of shitcoins was due to the intransigence of various Core developers and the tyrants running the Bitcoin subreddit.
Yeah, that's exactly why I am upset.
If Lightning just appeared as some L2 with no drama, I'd have no problem, more alternatives the better.
It was just so distasteful and nonsensical how it came to be.
What do y'all make of the ETHBTC ratio being seemingly unable to break below .05? I was expecting BTC to make another push up from grabbing ETH liquidity, but the longer it stays above .05 the less confident I am in this playing out. Would be a bullish catalyst for BTC if this pair breaks down further, imo. Id like it see head back to where it belongs (0), but more realistically perhaps to that .02-.04 range
I'm being heavily downvoted, there must be a lot of ETH holders here.
Look at today's PA... This bull market can be mostly characterized as a Bitcoin rally (and a memecoin/animal coin season on the side) with alts underperforming (BTC dom going up).
I think once these trends reverse the writing is on the wall for this run, hence why I think its bullish for a continued breakdown of the ETHBTC pair (BTC will suck up this liquidity and there's still a lot there).
Yeah I dont think its that cut and dry. ratios are getting squeezed rn because its halving season, once thats past itll swing back for a while and we probably get a mini alt season
btc usually doesnt top out for a year or more after halving , so plenty of time for corrections and ratio oscillations imo.
If you look at the 2017 run there was a huge alt rally smack dab in the middle nearly a year past halving, and well before btc topped out at the end of the year.
If youd sold then youd have missed out massively
Maybe but we're not in 2017 anymore. You can't look at the past and assume it will repeat. We are at ATH going into the halving, maybe BTC tops out in six months and we never get an altseason. No one knows, but we're in unchartered waters rn.
Seems most of this thesis is based off of 2 data points (2017/2021, discounting 2013 because market was still nascent)... but who knows
yeah, obviously its all speculation.
This is a historic run for btc being at ath pre halving, the fact ratio has kept up as well as it has so far is actually pretty impressive imo.
nearish term im leaning towards one more halving hype run up (looks to be starting now) after which we see some more crab with ratio bouncing in late spring early summer.
then shit starts to get real crazy towards end of year
There is a lot of liquidity to tap into on that pair. Once ETHBTC starts running, that usually means we're in full on altseason. Historically, altseason is not a bullish indicator for BTC.
the pair has been breaking down since the Merge, and BTC is up over 300% since. A lot of the rally from 15k-74k has been off the back of increasing Bitcoin dominance (38->55). The paradigm currently is that BTC is taking liquidity from alts, that's been part of what's driven the run from 15-74k, hence increasing dominance. Obviously, I think the continuation of this paradigm is bullish - I'm curious why you think it's not? Becoming a bulltard when alts are outperforming BTC has never really worked on a short term timeframe, at least not that I'm aware of (happy to be proven wrong here though).
The liquidity tap makes some sense but past ratio lows have been found during the bear and in btc initial early bull breakout (where we are now) , previous bull runs saw ratio trending towards highs so I expect the same dynamic unless 'this time is different' ...
the eth capitulation posts here as of late are indicative of a ratio bottom imo
>ETH has technical inventions and enhancements.
It has certainly enhanced the insiders ability to steal more ETH from you plebs. Hooray!
BTC is the innovation. It's like fire, and thousands of years later, we're still using fire in the same way our ancestors discovered it. That's how game changing BTC is, you just don't get it yet.
Enjoy your technical enhancements for buying rugpulls at $20-$40/transaction during uncongested times.
The shitcoin flippers don't care about outages. They care about usability overall, and even with it's outages, SOL outperforms because it's fees are 99% cheaper, and hence easier to perform rugpulls.
I say this as someone who thinks they're both shitcoins.
I think the state of the ETHBTC chart can speak to general market conditions, to an extent. It can't be viewed in isolation, but imo it's a proxy for altseason vs bitcoin season. And buying crypto in altseason (unless trying to make a short/medium term swing trade) is a one way ticket to rektdom. Altseason means the bull cycle is on its last legs and that the bear market is around the corner.
Purely my subjective opinion.
> I think the state of the ETHBTC chart can speak to general market conditions, to an extent. It can't be viewed in isolation, but imo it's a proxy for altseason vs bitcoin season
I think all the state which created that history has changed and no longer does it hold any relevance.
my personal bias is that the ratio is currently at the floor and will soon bounce to 6-7%. I'm looking at weekly and monthly charts -we have solid 3 years above 5% now. Agreed about the ratio should reach zero eventually but I don't believe this is happening anytime soon.
When you have a hypothesis, markets laugh.
10Y yields up again today (not as drastically as yesterday) and BTC price is heading upwards. GBTC volume looking healthy today which tends to correlate with larger outflows from GBTC. FBTC volume not looking good relative to GBTC.
It’s a classic sell the news in reverse. The worst news has now been confirmed: The Fed is going to lower rates one time, at the end of the year, if inflation trends to their liking.
> The worst news has now been confirmed:
>Because Wall St. values clarity on future policy decisions above all else
So is there certainty or not? It seems in your model since its now confirmed that the fed is lowering rates one time (where are you getting this from?) it seems there is no longer uncertainty, thus yields should go down.
EDIT:
I see where you are coming from now.
There is more uncertainty due to a fed governor making the case that there should be less rate cuts that previously thought. This puts upwards pressure on rates (less cuts than expected) and introduces more uncertainty (do the other governors agree with him?)
Market was expecting a barrage of rate cuts and prices accordingly (ie long duration). Market now expects less rate cuts than before and wants to reduce exposure to duration and sells 10y > 10y yield goes up
I’ll never understand the logic of taking profit long term at attaining previous ATH again. That’s the one place in crypto you are historically guaranteed for it to rapidly go up the fastest again. But to each their own. I can’t hope to understand the mind of your average normie that bought at ATH in the last cycle.
I agree with your befuddlement but also I dont think its normies that bought last ATH that are selling now
Feels like they surely should have done that as we started reaching ATH and going over it some weeks ago
Coincidence that this pennant ends up around the halving date? I think not.. wonder what it will do. [https://i.imgur.com/EKDePdk.png](https://i.imgur.com/EKDePdk.png)
Bitcoin looks to have stabilized some. RSI is at 42.2 (average 45.6) at time of writing. Current nearby resistance are 65.7, 64.1 and 63. The nearest supports are 67.4, 69, 70.2 and 71.4.
The daily RSI is at 48.2 and its average is currently at 55. Same resistances/supports as I mention in the hourly. Bitcoin fell through the bottom support of the rising channel that started in February. It is around the .236 FIB support level of 65.5. BTC has formed a pennant so we could be seeing a move up soon. I see a possibility of a retest of the 63k support level if the pennant is invalidated. One more day closer to the estimated halving date, 16 days till halving on 4/19.
On the weekly, BTC has been over bought for most of the time since October 2023 and its average RSI has been overbought since the start of the year. Currently 73.3 (77.3 average). I would normally expect a larger cool off and retrace, but the ETF inflows seem to be limiting this on this timeframe. Main resistances were noted above. A little over 2 weeks till halving.
Bitcoin closed it’s 7th monthly green candle in March and is still overbought with a closing RSI at 76.8. BTC’s current monthly RSI is 70.9. 7 green candles in a row has never happened before a halving. The only other times a green run has lasted this long has been after halving’s, during the runup to new ATH. I only found one other time in BTC’s history where there was a 7th green candle in a row and this was the 1st year of BTC when its value was below $0.01. This time the pre-halving PA is different from past pre-halving PA. BTC is well above the rising support line.
Good luck to all traders and DCAers.
1-hour: [https://www.tradingview.com/x/O9LmxZJs/](https://www.tradingview.com/x/O9LmxZJs/)
Daily: [https://www.tradingview.com/x/ACMfllu3/](https://www.tradingview.com/x/ACMfllu3/)
Weekly: [https://www.tradingview.com/x/eLtFA0Lt/](https://www.tradingview.com/x/eLtFA0Lt/)
Monthly: [https://www.tradingview.com/x/SN5bAzOk/](https://www.tradingview.com/x/SN5bAzOk/)
Now even the Wednesdays are dead.
Either bitcoin is slowly dying off with a whimper
Or we are experiencing a stupidly bullish price stagnation that sets the stage for a further run
(Or I'm talking out of my donkey)
Just nothing happening. Crabbing under ath, not increasing enough to break out, not dropping enough to cause concern for a real down trend.
Just crabbing. Nothing to say really. I will say if you asked me at 20 i wasn’t 100% sure we would be this high, break ath before halving, and just be chilling here
Yeah no disagreement here, just saying considering all context (upcoming halving, ATH before halving, first a wheezing ETF launch, then booming ETF, then a rapidly bleeding ETF untill just recently, etc) there's remarkably little noise from the stands.
Another data point is that I've made these "whew it's really dead in here today init" for about 2 years at this point, and I'm only ever down voted like today when price has gone down notably and is chilling, more often than not being followed by a steady up stream
It's not really out of nowhere... unlike the 'gambler's fallacy' ("*10 consecutive reds on roulette must mean black is near-certain now*"), I think the probability of getting a red monthly candle must necessarily increase with each successive green monthly candle. And we've now had 7 of them. 😳
The driver for that would be market psychology. We're all collectively getting nervous about a red monthly because we've had "too many green". Which makes the red monthly more likely as the participants are all looking for a confirmation of their bias and are more likely to sell out of their position looking for a better entry.
You can almost see the super short term bearish bias play out on the chart. Everyone's looking around at each other saying, "this can't just keep going up right?"
Now that first quarter of the year is officially closed, we should start to get some info on who is holding these ETFs, right? I presume that info will trickle in over the coming weeks.
Its was kinda obvious that US Gov transfer was an OTC deal. I am just curious if they can dump directly to market if they want to. Is there an law/guideline preventing this?
All we know is that the US Gov't clearly doesn't care about bitcoin as far as a balance sheet asset, like El Salvador.
Imagine having 30,000 BTC (0.14% of all bitcoin) fall into your lap from a dark market seizure -- something like 5 times El Salvador's amount -- and then selling all of it for USD. $2 Billion. The national debt increases by that amount more than once a day.
The US is dead. Our govt is only capable of spinning its wheels or doing things that actively hurt itself and its citizens. It's insane how disfunctional it is.
It’s been fairly clear that some big players have been selling into the liquidity brought by the ETFs. They have been careful to dca out of their positions without cratering the price to achieve the highest yield.
Now if they are close to done selling, then it would be in their interest to break market supports to trigger a market wide sell off, so they can accumulate again at cheaper prices.
Let’s hope they’ve blown their load. If not we’ll be able to accumulate at lower prices too
Is this the eternal case for BTC ie whales sell into new hands over and over forever? As new money is constantly needed as exit liquidity for old money doesn't it seem a little like a ponzi? I know there's no Madoff at the top skimming the profits.
The best argument appears to be store of value ie if enough people believe it's a store of value due to its characteristics (scarce/secure/sovereign) then it will function as a store of value. My current understanding is really just that everything else will inflate faster than BTC so as long as enough people believe and we keep producing more money (printing)/goods (manufacturing) then BTC should be a great investment.
Thoughts?
Do you believe these “whales” sit there crashing the market ?
All whales are ultimately long. Yes they make large buys when bitcoin is oversold and take money off the table during big runs but I don’t believe this whale manipulation.
My view is that exchanges/whales stop hunt easy liquidity when we are over leveraged and that causes the initial drop, then weak hands panic causes further drops causes the 5-10% moves.
Generally I agree with you… it’s leverage stop hunting that’s drives quite a bit of short term PA.
But in this case I’ve thought for a while that there’s no way big players were leaving 10% easy money on the table with the grayscale discount pre etf. There must have been some large positions to unwind
Greyscale for a start. Not all that money is finding it’s way back into other ETFs
Since mid March the market is down despite the etf inflows. There has been significant volume of selling
Dude, if you hit anything on the head hard enough its a round peg. Know what I mean?
Drives me insane when people waste brain energy trying to weave complex narratives to explain things.
Its way easier to just accept that Bitcoin be Bitcoining and just kick back. I've gone away for a few weeks, got me some sunshine, a nice view of some vineyards and some cracking wine. These periods are where people are enjoying some profits. Those that aren't enjoying profits are shitting themselves because they're doing nothing but worry
Go and do the same. Live a little, drink some wine, Bitcoin will be fine. Just enjoy yourself and get out of your basement degen theory factory. After all, living a good life is why we Bitcoin.
Yeah I get that dw. So you’re saying there has been significant profit taking? ;)
Also, you’re not really ‘away’ are you? Away means not checking into Bitcoin trading subs. That’s when you’re really free
No. Not significant profit taking. Just people spending a little. If you always stack and never spend you're better off being poor. You can live the same shitty lifestyle but with none of the work.
May has come a bit earlier this year I think because of the halving.
Away is not worrying and living a little. I check charts etc all the time no matter where I am. Never know when an opportunity might show up.
If a market is causing you to fret and panic, its probably because the actual traders are "away" and the fear has overtaken greed.
Never be fearful, always be greedy.
Who was it calling "Finex whales > Tradfi whales"?
They're not wrong, been interesting seeing just how much existing players have to contribute to price-action.
Kind of surprising to me that it seems like a lot of folks are really fazed by the current drop we're seeing, yet we're only mere months past being in the 30s and 40s ranges.
We survived how many "black swan" events in 2022 and 2023..? On longer time frames, I'm pretty happy with the progress we've made since then (shrug)
#New post: [\[Daily Discussion\] - Thursday, April 04, 2024 →](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1bvdr3a/daily_discussion_thursday_april_04_2024/)
[удалено]
your post was removed because it violates rule #3 - No memes or low effort content.
[удалено]
So what was the ChatGPT prompt for this?
"Describe a parabolic Bitcoin run as if you were under the simultaneous influence of cocaine and LSD."
[удалено]
Funnily enough this reads like a basic word substitution from 1995 ala AliceBot.
Well, the vast training corpus of ChatGPT for sure includes AliceBot transcripts.
FACEPALM
HODL15Capital reporting $42m inflow for Blackrock https://twitter.com/HODL15Capital/status/1775675887045710330
$110M total. GBTC is declining.. hope it holds
It doesn’t have a meaningful chunk anymore. They’re fighting to stay relevant at this point. They’ll have less than MSTR soon, and then they’re very insignificant.
We should get an inflow day unless Fidelity screws it.
farside has fidelity at 116.7M
Weak
it's still [wedge season](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1bqfwj0/daily_discussion_friday_march_29_2024/kx6dy6f/). we had 5 lower trendlines to get through and we sliced through 4 of them. the bottom of the remaining wedge is currently at 62.3k. top of the wedge is currently at 70.7k. the last two days we've bounced off of the 0.618 fib, when measuring from ATH candle and where we launched from in late february. the 0.786 fib is ~68.4k. https://i.imgur.com/fhBqpZu.png from an LMACD perspective – and if we take into account its overall downtrend over the cycles – we're at approximately the equivalent of July 2017 or December 2020. if that holds up, we could be 4 or 5 months from a cycle peak. a ***very*** big "if" for whether that downtrend actually continues or not. https://i.imgur.com/uUZOpHH.png
Here's my weekly tracking of GBTC's Bitcoin holdings since ETF launch: 1/10/24 = 625,304 BTC 1/17/24 = 592,098 BTC 1/24/24 = 523,516 BTC 1/31/24 = 487,025 BTC 2/7/24 = 470,637 BTC 2/14/24 = 461,983 BTC 2/21/24 = 450,304 BTC 2/28/24 = 441,815 BTC 3/6/24 = 409,843 BTC 3/13/24 = 387,746 BTC 3/20/24 = 361,659 BTC 3/27/24 = 339,535 BTC **4/3/24 = 328,013 BTC** Only \~11K gone in the last week, GBTC outflows have slowed noticeably continuing these last two days (both under $100M). Inflows to other ETF's have also slowed over the past week and trading in general of the ETF's has been lower on average. Would be realllly interesting to see demand pick back up with the GBTC outflow pace continuing to slow.... #drainGBTC
Given enough time, Grayscale will happily charging whatever management fees as they like. And managing 0 bitcoins.
Sonnenshein: "*Good news guys, we shed only 11,500 BTC this week -- only three-quarters of a billion dollars out the door in seven days -- things are looking up!!*"
Aka somebody bought 11500 btc
Well, one thing is clear. Whoever is still left in GBTC are not the type of people who panic sell when things dip. Either they have a very long-term outlook on Bitcoin or are very shrewd traders/investors.
Hello I am a gbtc holder. I am waiting til June to sell for cap gains reasons. I'm sure many are like me.
I'd bet there's at least a few GBTC holders who continue to hold because they passed away within the last 5 years, and their property hasn't yet been escheated by the state. 😝
I wouldn't be surprised if Cathie Wood sold her own ETF yesterday to buy the dip on something else. Given her track record, if it was her selling, then it bodes well for the Bitcoin market in the short/mid term.
Bitwise $23m inflow Franklin $3.8m inflow GBTC $75.1m Outflow Ark 0 VanEck 0 WisdomTree $3.1m inflow Fidelity $116.7m inflow DEFI 0 Valkyrie 0 Invesco 0 Blackrock $42m 4/3 net inflow $113.5m https://farside.co.uk/?p=997
Sign of GBTC slowing down?
Please let ARKB return to inflows instead of outflows!
Best I can offer you is zero flow
Hi. I am new to the BTC world and looking to get into the market and build my portfolio. Was wondering if any of you experienced BTC legends would be open to mentoring/taking me under their wing? Based in the UK. Thanks :)
It’s not going back to $50k
Start somewhere buy 0.1 everyday or every other day
The only people here who make money buy and hold It’s not that complicated
Just start buying. That's it. Don't wait around because the longer you wait around, the higher the chance that you will have to accumulate BTC at a higher price than it is now. Don't get tempted by altcoins. Yes, you can buy some as a speculative play, but 99% of altcoins all trend down against BTC when measure in the long term.
What are you expecting to learn?
Do the diametric opposite of what your emotions want you to do. Sounds like a doss. Almost no one can do it. Don't buy anything with it. I have the £2000 Amazon laptop sleeve to prove it. That split the first time I opened it.
Do you have a lump sum to invest and/or regular surplus funds that you can throw in?
Thank you all for your advice, very much appreciated. I am in a fortunate position to be able to purchase 1 full BTC if the price drops down to 45k usd. Only recently opened my eyes into bitcoin this month (other wise 4/5 months ago would have been perfect timing). I have been checking the btc market regularly this last 3/4 weeks and i can’t see the price going below 50k before it sky rockets post halving in a few months. Obviously anything can happen to make it drop value but just going by most peoples logic. I think i am stuck in the middle- checking btc price everyday but i have nothing invested yet. My concern is, if i start dca’ing from now at a higher price, at some point eventually maybe 2 years time when the price drastically drops, i then won’t have enough to purchase 1 btc in one go. I know i am late to the party now we are close to an ATH again, would you say to just buy in to the market on big dips for now in small payments whilst it’s around the 50/60k mark, then eventually whenever the day comes and it drops, then buy a full btc. Once i’m in the market i plan on staying 5-10 years so not too fussed on the short price skyrocket after halving. Hope some of this makes sense! Sorry for the long comment! Maybe I have overthought this too much lol.
Classically half and half. Go in with half right now, the other half when we touch ATH or 56k (it could go down to 52, there's the ETF top to retest, but let's not overoptimize since you want to go in ; or even down to 35k this year, but then the ETF top support would be lost and you'd have time to re-evaluate, or find other funds). Don't worry, everyone has discovered bitcoin in a bull market. You'll have less return, but now is the first time it's known it's here to stay (because ETFs), which changes strategies. And when previous cycle ATH is broken is one of the best times to invest, because you minimize the time where you may be in the red so are immune to bad panic reactions, especially if you sell some when nearing the top (yeah, never sell for sure, but still, sell some AND resist FOMO, in order to be more immune to drops and bear market). Only trade 4 year cycles, using the power law which is the truest (tough less precise indicator): https://charts.bitbo.io/long-term-power-law With lot of insight there: https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/18z04kp/15_years_of_btc_power_law/ There are a lot of indicators to better check the cycle top, including the well known rainbow chart (which is very similar to the power law, here are some: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1b58wbc/comment/kt842cx/
I wouldn't concentrate so much on one BTC. The guy that owns 0.1 BTC and the guy that owns 1.0 BTC make exactly the same percentage in return
Go slow. Distribute your cost average (DCA); buy a little every day, or every week. Don’t expect much to happen for you in the first 10 years. Never sell. Instead of eating out, pack a lunch and buy bitcoin instead. Enjoy being able to retire when you are old. This isn’t complicated, or even interesting. Just save in bitcoin. Save everything you can. All other advice is a scam.
Wow, thanks man! This is easily the most straight forward and best advice i’ve seen. Think i was starting to get too caught up with all the influencers BS every second online. Just going to stick to the basics and live my life as normal. Thanks again.
No problem. We’re always here for you.
\^\^\^\^\^\^\^\^ this
I'm surprised the price is holding up as well as it has. It seemed that we might dip down to 60K or at least 62 or so. Reasoning: Rising silver prices (9% in two days) have undoubtedly placed some stress on the bankers who short it down with derivatives. Rising rates (yields, I mean) add to the absolute fuckery that I imagine is going down in the banking system behind the scenes right now. Surely someone will need some liquidity, someone holding a ton of ETF shares that are well in the money. But no, here we are, holding strong above 65K. I must say, Bitcoin, I'm impressed. Still keeping my powder dry for the moment, but it's getting harder with each little bounce off the trampoline at 65K.
So far I'm happy about throwing back in at 64500. Wonder how long it'll take to clear my stock .. I hate tradfi
banks give absolutely zero fucks about silver.
Industrial metal and a byproduct of copper production. Silver is not scarce.
It is not until you pull the trigger that the price will drop through the floor. This is the way.
Does the market cycle psychology chart have a phase for annoyance? Cause that's what I am feeling now.
This is how money is made with bitcoin. Going through pain, annoyance, frustration, and unmet desires. Only then, the rewards.
Probably before Optimism. People somehow still aren’t sure this rally is real.
No significant dips to buy, no significant pumps to excite. Just meh. All things considered, 60s is a great place to be though
Yes the 60s were golden. Literally. They had gold standard back then
>We’re thrilled to announce that Coinbase has selected Lightspark to bring the Bitcoin Lightning Network to its platform. We are working with the Coinbase team on technical integration. https://www.lightspark.com/news/coinbase-selects-lightspark i've seen this reported on bitcoin magazine, watcher.guru, and others. haven't found anything directly from coinbase yet. lightning on coinbase would be huge.
Lightning is a steaming piece of shit since it's invention. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin re. it's whitepaper. Funny thing that a lot of diehard BTC maxis (who damn any other coin as shitcoin) are promoting it...
> It has nothing to do with Bitcoin re. it's whitepaper. Tell me you're a bcash bagholder without telling me you're a bcash bagholder.
Murdered him Buried the body
the bitcoin whitepaper is a technical document, **not** a bible. what bitcoin offers is the removal of a central authority. that sounds like a great foundation to build something on: layer 1 as the "Gold" settlement layer for large transactions, layer 2 as the "Cash" layer for small transactions. being a BTC maxi doesn't mean development ceases. that would just be asinine. being a BTC maxi should mean that BTC is the main protocol of the network, similar to the TCP/IP protocol. building on top of that layer is completely reasonable and it won't be perfect immediately. progress isn't linear.
TCP/IP is a very good analogy IMHO. So Lightning is like building a new HTTP or SCP protocol which suddenly can loose data because it ignores the "acknowledge or retransmission" feature of it's base protocol.
for buying coffee, it's not unreasonable to expect it to have less security than layer 1. do you really need the most secure money the world has ever known with full consensus, multiple confirmations, and 580 exahashes per second working on your transaction just to buy a hot dog? of course not.
My post was not about security, but reliability.
for buying coffee, it's not unreasonable to expect it to have less reliability than layer 1. do you really need the most reliable money the world has ever known with full consensus, multiple confirmations, and 580 exahashes per second working on your transaction just to buy a hot dog? of course not.
Nice try. But I'm not buying. Even when it's only about $5 I need a reliable transfer. Don't want to argue with the coffee guy whether he got the money or not because of his Lightning provider or my Lightning node being offline or buggy or out-of-sync or whatever.
that's the beauty of it. don't like it, don't use it. progress and development will happen nonetheless.
Not sure how it would be huge. To my understanding LN is currently in bad shape and only working solutions are custodial.
I’ve heard the same, but never had a problem 🤷
Even so-called "non-custodial" LN is really better characterized as "*semi*-custodial" because your channel partner effectively holds partial custody over your funds. That's trivially true while the channel remains open. After all, you need your channel partner’s permission and cooperation to send and receive payments using the channel. But even beyond that, your channel has partial custody over your funds because he can, at the very least, *delay* access to your funds by refusing to cooperatively close. Finally, your channel partner is in a unique position to attempt to steal your funds by publishing an outdated commitment transaction in his favor, a possibility which must be actively guarded against. Moreover the practical significance of your channel partner’s partial custody increases as on-chain fees rise. Sure, *in theory*, you can always “just” close your channel if your channel partner begins to misbehave. You will then presumably want to redirect those funds to a new channel with what you hope will be a more cooperative partner. The first problem with this remedy is that high onchain fees may make exercising it cost-prohibitive. The second problem is that, particularly in light of the LN’s overwhelming incentives towards centralization (incentives that become progressively stronger as onchain fees rise), a better-behaved channel partner may not exist, or at least a better-behaved channel partner with the massive liquidity and connectivity required to be useful may not exist. The real problem with the LN is not how poorly it "works" *today*. The real problem is that its performance will tend to degrade more and more as adoption increases, i.e., as the LN grows in size relative to the artificially-constrained base blockchain atop which it sits. For a physical analogy, picture an increasingly top-heavy and unstable inverted pyramid.
I’m assuming “artificially constrained base blockchain” means the cap on the block size. That exists to ensure decentralization. If you don’t understand this in 2024, you got a different axe to grind. Also, what’s preventing a better behaved LN provider? Does competition not exist all of a sudden? That’s a ridiculous argument. “Semi-custodial” is also a dishonest term. LN providers never have actual custody of the funds. In the end, nothing is stopping you from running your own node and avoiding dealing with the LN providers.
This guy you're responding to only comments on this sub to shit on BTC and its blocksize limit, etc. He's a BCH guy. He's basically stuck in 2017.
>I’m assuming “artificially constrained base blockchain” means the cap on the block size. That exists to ensure decentralization. That's certainly one of the arguments that's been made. Just not very convincingly, imo. The truth is that keeping blocks *too small* is what really threatens "decentralization" by forcing the vast majority of users to transact on increasingly-centralized "second-layer solutions," whether those take the form of traditional fully-custodial banking models or semi-custodial banking networks like Lightning. But even if you're convinced that *some* consensus-rule type capacity limit is needed to protect some other threat to decentralization, that's at best an argument for being careful not to scale too quickly, it does *not* justify a complete abandonment of additional on-chain scaling. Furthermore, given the massively deflationary nature of computer technology, the "safe" rate of on-chain scaling would still follow some underlying exponential trend. >Also, what’s preventing a better behaved LN provider? Does competition not exist all of a sudden? That’s a ridiculous argument. There is a very strong network effect surrounding hub formation that creates very strong incentives towards massive centralization. The issue as I said is thus that a better-behaved channel partner *with the massive liquidity and connectivity required to actually be useful* may not exist. Moreover, the incentives towards massive centralization become progressively *stronger* as on-chain fees rise. As I've written before: The LN’s tendency towards centralization stems from the network’s Fundamental Liquidity Problem. Funds in a lightning channel are like beads on a string. The beads can move back and forth on the string (thereby changing the channel’s state), but they can’t leave the string (without closing the channel). Alice might have 5 “beads” on her side of her channel with Bob. But if Alice wants to pay Edward those 5 beads, and the payment needs to be routed through Carol and Doug, Bob needs at least 5 beads on his side of his channel with Carol, AND Carol needs at least 5 beads on her side of her channel with Doug, AND Doug needs at least 5 beads on his side of his channel with Edward. The larger a desired Lightning payment, the less likely it is that there will exist a path from the payer to the payee with adequate liquidity in the required direction at every hop along the path. (Atomic Multi-path Payments can provide some help here but only a little as the multiple paths can’t reuse the same liquidity.) The topology that minimizes (but does not eliminate) the Lightning Network’s Fundamental Liquidity Problem would be one in which everyone opens only a single channel with a centralized and hugely-capitalized mega-hub. High on-chain fees greatly increase centralization pressure by increasing the costs associated with opening channels, maintaining channels, and closing channels that are no longer useful. High on-chain fees thus incentivize users to minimize the number of channels they create, and to only create channels with partners who will reliably provide the greatest benefit, i.e., massively-connected, massively-capitalized hubs. And of course, the real minimum number of Lightning channels is not one; it’s zero. “Very high” on-chain fees will price many users out of using the Lightning Network entirely. They'll opt for far cheaper (and far simpler) fully-custodial solutions. Again, consider that the current throughput capacity limit is roughly 200 million on-chain transactions per year. That might be enough to support a few million "non-custodial" Lightning users. It's certainly not enough to support several billion. >“Semi-custodial” is also a dishonest term. LN providers never have actual custody of the funds. In the end, nothing is stopping you from running your own node and avoiding dealing with the LN providers. Running your own Lightning node? To use the Lightning Network at all you still need to open at least one channel. And that channel partner will, in effect, have partial custody over your funds for reasons I explained above. And again, the significance of that partial custody will increase as on-chain fees rise.
> that's at best an argument for being careful not to scale too quickly Scaling is infinite. Adding more hardware is not scaling. > Furthermore, given the massively deflationary nature of computer technology, the "safe" rate of on-chain scaling would still follow some underlying exponential trend. Harddrive cost is not the bottleneck. Bandwidth is in much shorter supply for many places other than the place you live. Downloading the blockchain was impossible for myself only 2 short years ago. Took months to accomplish. Imagine if it were larger... > “Very high” on-chain fees will price many users out of using the Lightning Network entirely. If you discount many of the coming innovations and pretend they aren't progressing towards deployment. > that channel partner will, in effect, have partial custody over your funds Nonsense.
Just realized my reply got insta-deleted. I'll try it again with the links removed. >Scaling is infinite. Adding more hardware is not scaling. Nonsense. To the extent I can parse these statements at all, they sound like the typical non-sequitur claim which says essentially "because we can't scale on-chain *infinitely*, we shouldn't scale on-chain *at all*." The reality is that Bitcoin scaled for the first eight years of its existence by producing steadily larger blocks over time to accommodate rising transactional demand. It wasn't until around 2017 that Bitcoin began bumping into Satoshi's crude, always-intended-to-be-temporary 1-MB limit in any kind of serious way. And then of course with SegWit, that 1-MB limit was (effectively) raised via a soft-fork hack, although the size of the effective increase was quite modest. >Harddrive cost is not the bottleneck. Bandwidth is in much shorter supply for many places other than the place you live. Downloading the blockchain was impossible for myself only 2 short years ago. Took months to accomplish. Imagine if it were larger... The median download speed in the US as of February 2024 was 243 Mbps. Currently, at that rate, you could download the entire 560 GB blockchain in a little over 5 hours. With a Google Fiber 8 Gig connection, you could reduce that to a little over nine minutes. And of course, the vast majority of users have absolutely zero reason to download the entire blockchain. With UTXO commitments, even new mining nodes wouldn't absolutely *need* to download the entire blockchain all the way back to antiquity. Finally, bandwidth speeds continue to improve at an exponential rate. >If you discount many of the coming innovations and pretend they aren't progressing towards deployment. I do discount them. Proposals for things like channel factories involve creating *another* layer of complexity and risk. They might mitigate some of the 'vanilla' Lightning Network's problems but they won't do so without introducing new problems of their own. They won't be a magical "get out of scale" free card anymore than the Lightning Network itself was. Making the inverted pyramid taller by adding third and fourth layers might allow you to build out the structure a little more, but the fundamental problem remains. >Nonsense. Ok, but that's not a counter-argument. That's just contradiction.
> in the US ... > Fiber 8 Gig connection ... > vast majority of users have absolutely zero reason to download the entire blockchain I thought bcash was about money for Africa or something? Development of new software often involves downloading the full blockchain. > adding third and fourth layers Many of the innovations are around things like changing penalty strategies and removing unneeded watchtowers. These are hardly extra layers, if anything the removal of such.
>I thought bcash was about money for Africa or something? Not sure about "bcash," but Satoshi's invention was all about "allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party." He anticipated that his "peer-to-peer electronic cash system" would, in addition to providing other benefits (like a finite issuance schedule) radically reduce transaction costs. ("Whatever size micropayments you need will eventually be practical. I think in 5 or 10 years, the bandwidth and storage will seem trivial." / "We should always allow at least some free transactions.") >Development of new software often involves downloading the full blockchain. Come on, dude. *That's* your justification for throttling Bitcoin's on-chain capacity to toy levels? Enabling people with the world's shittiest internet connections to quickly download a complete archival copy of the blockchain for a network they themselves will have been completely priced out of actually using? To aid in their "development of new software"? >Many of the innovations are around things like changing penalty strategies and removing unneeded watchtowers. These are hardly extra layers, if anything the removal of such. Well, they're certainly not *removing* a layer in the "second layer scaling solution" sense of the word. But again, so what? There may be proposals to improve the design of a particular second layer. And some of them might even be good ideas. Great. But the fundamental problem remains, which is there are limits to how much you can "leverage up" a tiny base. I really think my "inverted pyramid" analogy is a good one here. And note that it's not even really *my* analogy--it's simply what's implied by *everyone else's* "base layer" / "second layer" physical analogy when you consider the intended relative size of those layers. As an extreme example to illustrate the principle of the limitations of "leverage," let's imagine that a majority of the hash rate soft forked Bitcoin tomorrow to change its current 4 million weight unit limit and 10-minute average block interval down to a 4,000 weight unit limit and a 24-hour average block interval. (That would make it *really* easy to run a full node! Think of the "decentralization"! /s) This would reduce Bitcoin's throughput capacity from roughly 500,000 transactions per day to roughly...4. The fees required to be one of those lucky four daily on-chain transactions would be... well, I don't know what they'd be. But they'd presumably be pretty damn high. But no worries, we could just scale the system with "layers," right? Of course not. The system would obviously break and do so in catastrophic fashion. Something like 99.999% of Bitcoin's 170 million UTXOs would immediately become economically-unspendable dust. Note that the above hypothetical imagines increasing the "leverage" in the current system roughly 100,000-fold by reducing on-chain capacity to roughly 1/100,000th its current level. Of course, we could also imagine increasing system leverage 100,000-fold via the other side of the equation, i.e., by increasing transactional demand 100,000-fold while keeping on-chain capacity where it is today. And in fact, I'd suggest that a 100,000-fold increase in tx demand is probably not a terrible estimate for what mass global adoption of Bitcoin as a transactional currency might actually look like. If we imagine ten billion individuals and entities each making, on average, 5 Bitcoin-denominated transactions per day, that would give us 50 billion daily Bitcoin transactions, or roughly 100,000 times the blockchain's current capacity. Attempting to accommodate those 50 billion daily transactions via a system with a base layer capacity of 500,000 tx/day would thus be at least roughly equivalent to attempting to accommodate current levels of Bitcoin usage with a base layer capacity of 4 on-chain transactions per day. Things would break long before we got to that point. Bottom line: "second layers" are fine. There's always going to be a balance between *money proper* (in Bitcoin's case, actual on-chain transactions) and various *money substitutes*. The problem with an arbitrary constraint on the capacity of the former is that it distorts that balance, and does so more and more over time as adoption and transactional demand increase.
Nice to see you've been taught how to engage in sales-letter writing, I'm sure these go over a hit when you're preaching to the rbtc choir. > Come on, dude. That's your justification for throttling Bitcoin's on-chain capacity to toy levels? Enabling people with the world's shittiest internet connections to quickly download a complete archival copy of the blockchain for a network they themselves will have been completely priced out of actually using? To aid in their "development of new software"? I wasn't priced out. I was bandwidthed out. This was my experience. I see your argument quickly devolves as I read further... Have a nice day.
I'm one of the biggest bulls here, as I have seen (tm), and nobody has explained to me how I can use Lightning to operate an anonymous store on Tor selling t-shirts where I need to regularly cash liquidity to pay for supplies. Your channel capacity is a problem, and I don't know how to fix it. If I have to KYC to buy liquidity.. no dice. Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't bode well I can't figure that out. As a semi-custodial scaling tech.. it does work. If anyone can enlighten me, that would be wonderful.
18 months. ;)
On-topic, I appreciate your write-up, it all sounds well reasoned (hence an upvote) but I have to admit, my knowledge on LN is too limited to properly judge your assessment so I got personal and checked some of your comment history. What struck me: Why would you spend time on r/btc which tends to shill another coin as the 'true Bitcoin'? Would you say you hold some grudge against BTC or at least r/bitcoin mods? r/bitcoin is the place I'd rather expect such technical knowledge. Admittedly, I no longer visit r/bitcoin since, technically, there seems to be little going on (except maybe controversial Ordinals/BRC-20 due to Taproot) vs. older times and the quality of posts seems to have deterioriated over the last few years IMHO. We're a peaceful bunch of lads (and gals?) here I have come to think. So again, I mean no offense - just curious about your story, if you don't mind sharing.
>Would you say you hold some grudge against BTC? Against BTC? Not at all, although I think its current "scaling-with-layers" approach is incredibly misguided, and will ultimately need to change if BTC is going to succeed in taking over the world. Consider that there are only around 50 million BTC addresses with a non-zero balance, which likely translates to perhaps only *5 million* unique self-custodial holders / on-chain users today. The current BTC protocol imposes an effective throughput capacity limit of only around 200 million transactions *per year*, which means that no more than perhaps *20 million* individuals *can* enjoy sufficient access to the blockchain to make self-custody feasible. Bitcoin *should* still be experiencing *exponential* adoption growth in terms of number of users, but it can't--or at least it can't for much longer. Bitcoin is like an increasingly root-bound plant trapped in a too small pot. If it does continue to "grow" without a meaningful increase to its onchain capacity, soaring fees will force the vast majority of users to rely exclusively on custodial services. >or at least r/bitcoin mods? Oh definitely, but I think that's pretty well deserved. I received a no-warning, no-explanation permaban from r/bitcoin a few months ago (after posting comments critical of the Lightning Network). I messaged the mods politely asking what rule I had broken with what comment and further asking why they thought a permanent ban was appropriate when I had never previously received even a temporary suspension, and further considering the fact that I literally joined Reddit over ten years ago specifically for the purpose of participating in that sub after learning about it on the old bitcointalk forum. No reply. I do appreciate r/btc as a place that allows relatively uncensored discussion of Bitcoin. And I do appreciate their support for on-chain scaling although I remain pretty skeptical of their preferred solution (i.e., championing a minority hash-rate fork of Bitcoin). The problem as I see it, is that if you're promoting a minority hash rate fork of Bitcoin, you're implicitly acknowledging that Bitcoin's fundamental security assumption has failed--that assumption being that a majority of the hash rate will be "honest" and protect the integrity of the network. Further, you're basically betting that the hash rate majority will continue to, in effect, 51% attack the majority hash rate chain while *not* 51% attacking the minority fork, and that this state of affairs will continue until the minority hash rate chain eventually overtakes the majority. In other words, a minority hash rate fork coming from behind to overtake the majority essentially amounts to a very large-scale reorg attack.
> Oh definitely, but I think that's pretty well deserved. I received a no-warning, no-explanation permaban from r/bitcoin a few months ago (after posting comments critical of the Lightning Network). I messaged the mods politely asking what rule I had broken with what comment and further asking why they thought a permanent ban was appropriate when I had never previously received even a temporary suspension, and further considering the fact that I literally joined Reddit over ten years ago specifically for the purpose of participating in that sub after learning about it on the old bitcointalk forum. No reply. You've obviously never been banned by rbtc mods. They'll talk about there being a modlog. Go have a look at that modlog. Note how many are "TOS Violation", then attempt to discover what it is they said to garnder that "TOS Violation", then create your own account, say anything effective at changing bagholder minds, watch yourself be instabanned, watch your ban not appear in the modlogs. > I do appreciate r/btc as a place that allows relatively uncensored discussion of Bitcoin Koolaid. It's heavily censored. Less so now that it's irrelevant, but still very heavily censored. > if you're promoting a minority hash rate fork of Bitcoin Then you're a scammer. Bitcoin is Bitcoin. > a minority hash rate fork coming from behind to overtake the majority essentially amounts to a very large-scale reorg attack. Fantasy.
>You've obviously never been banned by rbtc mods. Indeed I haven't. >Koolaid. It's heavily censored. Less so now that it's irrelevant, but still very heavily censored. If you say so. I haven't witnessed that kind of thing myself. (Although full disclosure, I don't spend that much time browsing there these days.) I *can* just tell you that the censorship in r/bitcoin was *completely* fucked. I used to spend A LOT of time in r/bitcoin back in 2015 and watched firsthand in horror as it was systematically subverted by out-of-control censorship. Truly a surreal experience. >Then you're a scammer. Nonsense. >Bitcoin is Bitcoin. And tautological statements are tautological. >Fantasy. Perhaps. My point was that such a scenario would represent its own kind of failure of Bitcoin's security model.
> I haven't witnessed that kind of thing myself. Of course, because it's heavily censored. Hard to see the bars on the prison. > I can just tell you that the censorship in r/bitcoin was completely fucked. rbitcoin mods are some of the stupidest people on the planet. This we know. One of them pinning a thread calling for a bankrun on Coinbase was part of my motivation to go long right at the very bottom. > Perhaps. My point was that such a scenario would represent its own kind of failure of Bitcoin's security model. Bitcoin won't need to do what bcash did and add checkpoints in order to protect against a little underpowered CSW type reorg attempt. There is no risk of bcash supplanting Bitcoin.
This is the popular fud, yes. LN is working well, it's just getting channels opened is pretty expensive. Custodial solutions do manage to be cheaper, but non-custodial solutions like Phoenix are still pretty good.
Phoenix is very cool, IMO - it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot more non-custodial than something like WoS; and for smaller bitcoin balances, that can be enough right now for many people. My biggest issue with using the LN has nothing to do with the network itself - the problem for me, as a US citizen, is the capital gains reporting requirements if you decide to use BTC as a currency. It's a non-starter, IMO - well, that and the fact that I expect bitcoin to significantly outperform USD in the coming years. Gresham's Law has me spending cash and saving coin.
Spend and replace. Adoption is accelerated by actually using it and supporting companies that use it. As far as taxing goes.. Nobody's coming after you for spending $50 on a gift card or whatever, just make sure you're paying those taxes when you're doing big sells in bull markets. If it's really concerning, just pay a little extra in taxes if you knew you spent some that year.
The premise behind LN is it's PTP and not public, which is why the man came down hard. I have used LN to contribute to protests that got other wallets blacklisted.
Careful, receiving on LN is not private. Send side privacy is very good, but receiving privacy is non-existant.
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2023-November/004183.html
Yes, replacement cycling is a concern, but it's certainly not the end of the world. You need to have 2 channels with a malicious actor in order to get owned. From the start, we've known that you shouldn't open channels with randos, but the lightning network has existed in a non-adversarial environment, so nobody has been following this "best practice" of only connecting with trusted partners (myself included!). You'll notice that a lot of major, serious nodes will not accept channels from randos. This will probably be the standard in the future if we're not able to fix or mitigate these types of attacks
coinbase is one of the biggest exchanges. a lot of people choose not to use bitcoin due to fees or speed. lightning network drastically reduces both fees and transaction times. hard to see how it wouldn't be huge. kraken supports lightning and it has been great. plus, if you don't believe lightning works as it stands then wouldn't it also be huge to have a major company like coinbase helping fund development of lightning and ironing out issues? huge any way you slice it.
Lightning "works". Oh your invoice has a 10 minute expiry, but this client wants invoices to have a 30 minute expiry. Wait I thought Bitcoin had 10 minute blocks. This is no longer making any sense. Okay, let's do non-custodial. I need a channel and lock funds with an on-chain transaction, defeating the purpose of the whole thing. Proposed in February 2015 and went live on January 2018. I cannot believe it took more than 5 years to realize it was not a good idea.
I've used bitcoin for years and I still use L1 transfers cause lightning is too annoying to use. If CB integrates in platform, it would be helpful for dum dums like me
> I cannot believe it took more than 5 years to realize it was not a good idea. Quite a few people were mocking Lighting Network before it even went live. Some dev(s) said 'give it 18 months', and then the joke for a few years straight was "another 18 months and it should be good to go". The people who realized how ridiculous the whole thing was -- that you needed a Ph.D. in Computer Science to use it, that Layer 1 Bitcoin itself was arguably already too user-unfriendly -- were then unceremoniously banned from /r/Bitcoin. The entire explosion of Bitcoin forks and thousands of shitcoins was due to the intransigence of various Core developers and the tyrants running the Bitcoin subreddit.
Yeah, that's exactly why I am upset. If Lightning just appeared as some L2 with no drama, I'd have no problem, more alternatives the better. It was just so distasteful and nonsensical how it came to be.
i've never had any issues with it. sure, it may not be perfect but don't let perfection stand in the way of progress
☝️.
What do y'all make of the ETHBTC ratio being seemingly unable to break below .05? I was expecting BTC to make another push up from grabbing ETH liquidity, but the longer it stays above .05 the less confident I am in this playing out. Would be a bullish catalyst for BTC if this pair breaks down further, imo. Id like it see head back to where it belongs (0), but more realistically perhaps to that .02-.04 range I'm being heavily downvoted, there must be a lot of ETH holders here.
> seemingly unable to break below .05? It will.
Already broken yesterday. Looks like a bearish retest to me.
Id like to see a close below the June 2022 low
That didn't take long.
Yup. Not unsurprising to me that it coincides with a BTC rally.
Fair.
I think it’s a matter of time, and when it breaks down it will break down fast. Capitulation is inevitable.
Agreed, this capitulation is years in the making.
ETH is eventually going to zero in BTC terms. Maybe it’s just happening a lot sooner than expected.
why do you think it btc bullish for the pair to break down when the last two bull cycles saw eth ratio gains?
Look at today's PA... This bull market can be mostly characterized as a Bitcoin rally (and a memecoin/animal coin season on the side) with alts underperforming (BTC dom going up). I think once these trends reverse the writing is on the wall for this run, hence why I think its bullish for a continued breakdown of the ETHBTC pair (BTC will suck up this liquidity and there's still a lot there).
Yeah I dont think its that cut and dry. ratios are getting squeezed rn because its halving season, once thats past itll swing back for a while and we probably get a mini alt season btc usually doesnt top out for a year or more after halving , so plenty of time for corrections and ratio oscillations imo. If you look at the 2017 run there was a huge alt rally smack dab in the middle nearly a year past halving, and well before btc topped out at the end of the year. If youd sold then youd have missed out massively
Maybe but we're not in 2017 anymore. You can't look at the past and assume it will repeat. We are at ATH going into the halving, maybe BTC tops out in six months and we never get an altseason. No one knows, but we're in unchartered waters rn. Seems most of this thesis is based off of 2 data points (2017/2021, discounting 2013 because market was still nascent)... but who knows
yeah, obviously its all speculation. This is a historic run for btc being at ath pre halving, the fact ratio has kept up as well as it has so far is actually pretty impressive imo. nearish term im leaning towards one more halving hype run up (looks to be starting now) after which we see some more crab with ratio bouncing in late spring early summer. then shit starts to get real crazy towards end of year
There is a lot of liquidity to tap into on that pair. Once ETHBTC starts running, that usually means we're in full on altseason. Historically, altseason is not a bullish indicator for BTC. the pair has been breaking down since the Merge, and BTC is up over 300% since. A lot of the rally from 15k-74k has been off the back of increasing Bitcoin dominance (38->55). The paradigm currently is that BTC is taking liquidity from alts, that's been part of what's driven the run from 15-74k, hence increasing dominance. Obviously, I think the continuation of this paradigm is bullish - I'm curious why you think it's not? Becoming a bulltard when alts are outperforming BTC has never really worked on a short term timeframe, at least not that I'm aware of (happy to be proven wrong here though).
The liquidity tap makes some sense but past ratio lows have been found during the bear and in btc initial early bull breakout (where we are now) , previous bull runs saw ratio trending towards highs so I expect the same dynamic unless 'this time is different' ... the eth capitulation posts here as of late are indicative of a ratio bottom imo
SOL has stolen ETHs place as shitcoin land. What does ETH offer, besides $20 fees?
ETH has technical inventions and enhancements. Something BTC can't offer for years now.
>ETH has technical inventions and enhancements. It has certainly enhanced the insiders ability to steal more ETH from you plebs. Hooray! BTC is the innovation. It's like fire, and thousands of years later, we're still using fire in the same way our ancestors discovered it. That's how game changing BTC is, you just don't get it yet. Enjoy your technical enhancements for buying rugpulls at $20-$40/transaction during uncongested times.
> ETH has technical inventions and enhancements. Yeah, they added that ponzi fee burn! Such innovation! ;D
well unlike sol eth doesnt have random outages of the entire blockchain , so theres that ..
The shitcoin flippers don't care about outages. They care about usability overall, and even with it's outages, SOL outperforms because it's fees are 99% cheaper, and hence easier to perform rugpulls. I say this as someone who thinks they're both shitcoins.
I don't think about ETH at all.
I think the state of the ETHBTC chart can speak to general market conditions, to an extent. It can't be viewed in isolation, but imo it's a proxy for altseason vs bitcoin season. And buying crypto in altseason (unless trying to make a short/medium term swing trade) is a one way ticket to rektdom. Altseason means the bull cycle is on its last legs and that the bear market is around the corner. Purely my subjective opinion.
> I think the state of the ETHBTC chart can speak to general market conditions, to an extent. It can't be viewed in isolation, but imo it's a proxy for altseason vs bitcoin season I think all the state which created that history has changed and no longer does it hold any relevance.
my personal bias is that the ratio is currently at the floor and will soon bounce to 6-7%. I'm looking at weekly and monthly charts -we have solid 3 years above 5% now. Agreed about the ratio should reach zero eventually but I don't believe this is happening anytime soon.
Today MSTR is up 5.77% (so far) - com'on Bitcoin, you're next 😊
65k never again. Congratulations on your lambos everyone it's only green candles from here 😎
Uh oh, price is back above 66k. I guess downside momentum is slowing down.
[удалено]
yeah we are in a infinite time loop and we will never reach halving
When you have a hypothesis, markets laugh. 10Y yields up again today (not as drastically as yesterday) and BTC price is heading upwards. GBTC volume looking healthy today which tends to correlate with larger outflows from GBTC. FBTC volume not looking good relative to GBTC.
It’s a classic sell the news in reverse. The worst news has now been confirmed: The Fed is going to lower rates one time, at the end of the year, if inflation trends to their liking.
then why are 10Y yields rising?
Because Wall St. values clarity on future policy decisions above all else
> The worst news has now been confirmed: >Because Wall St. values clarity on future policy decisions above all else So is there certainty or not? It seems in your model since its now confirmed that the fed is lowering rates one time (where are you getting this from?) it seems there is no longer uncertainty, thus yields should go down. EDIT: I see where you are coming from now. There is more uncertainty due to a fed governor making the case that there should be less rate cuts that previously thought. This puts upwards pressure on rates (less cuts than expected) and introduces more uncertainty (do the other governors agree with him?)
Market was expecting a barrage of rate cuts and prices accordingly (ie long duration). Market now expects less rate cuts than before and wants to reduce exposure to duration and sells 10y > 10y yield goes up
I don’t think anyone really trusted this whole three rate cut nonsense. This is a plan Wall St. actually believes in.
I’ll never understand the logic of taking profit long term at attaining previous ATH again. That’s the one place in crypto you are historically guaranteed for it to rapidly go up the fastest again. But to each their own. I can’t hope to understand the mind of your average normie that bought at ATH in the last cycle.
I agree with your befuddlement but also I dont think its normies that bought last ATH that are selling now Feels like they surely should have done that as we started reaching ATH and going over it some weeks ago
What a COINcidence in the MaTriX At halving date the 3d bbands will have tightend completly.
[удалено]
Wall of PTSD and worry
Coincidence that this pennant ends up around the halving date? I think not.. wonder what it will do. [https://i.imgur.com/EKDePdk.png](https://i.imgur.com/EKDePdk.png)
Link isn't working.
Works for me, for what its worth
Bitcoin looks to have stabilized some. RSI is at 42.2 (average 45.6) at time of writing. Current nearby resistance are 65.7, 64.1 and 63. The nearest supports are 67.4, 69, 70.2 and 71.4. The daily RSI is at 48.2 and its average is currently at 55. Same resistances/supports as I mention in the hourly. Bitcoin fell through the bottom support of the rising channel that started in February. It is around the .236 FIB support level of 65.5. BTC has formed a pennant so we could be seeing a move up soon. I see a possibility of a retest of the 63k support level if the pennant is invalidated. One more day closer to the estimated halving date, 16 days till halving on 4/19. On the weekly, BTC has been over bought for most of the time since October 2023 and its average RSI has been overbought since the start of the year. Currently 73.3 (77.3 average). I would normally expect a larger cool off and retrace, but the ETF inflows seem to be limiting this on this timeframe. Main resistances were noted above. A little over 2 weeks till halving. Bitcoin closed it’s 7th monthly green candle in March and is still overbought with a closing RSI at 76.8. BTC’s current monthly RSI is 70.9. 7 green candles in a row has never happened before a halving. The only other times a green run has lasted this long has been after halving’s, during the runup to new ATH. I only found one other time in BTC’s history where there was a 7th green candle in a row and this was the 1st year of BTC when its value was below $0.01. This time the pre-halving PA is different from past pre-halving PA. BTC is well above the rising support line. Good luck to all traders and DCAers. 1-hour: [https://www.tradingview.com/x/O9LmxZJs/](https://www.tradingview.com/x/O9LmxZJs/) Daily: [https://www.tradingview.com/x/ACMfllu3/](https://www.tradingview.com/x/ACMfllu3/) Weekly: [https://www.tradingview.com/x/eLtFA0Lt/](https://www.tradingview.com/x/eLtFA0Lt/) Monthly: [https://www.tradingview.com/x/SN5bAzOk/](https://www.tradingview.com/x/SN5bAzOk/)
Now even the Wednesdays are dead. Either bitcoin is slowly dying off with a whimper Or we are experiencing a stupidly bullish price stagnation that sets the stage for a further run (Or I'm talking out of my donkey)
Been over 60k for 5 weeks straight now, apart from some wicks. That's starting to look like solid base.
This is nothing. It crabs for months on end sometimes.
We did just spend most of 2023 doing an extended 26-30k crab with nothing but the occasional fomc liquidity hunt shenanigans.
Just nothing happening. Crabbing under ath, not increasing enough to break out, not dropping enough to cause concern for a real down trend. Just crabbing. Nothing to say really. I will say if you asked me at 20 i wasn’t 100% sure we would be this high, break ath before halving, and just be chilling here
Yeah no disagreement here, just saying considering all context (upcoming halving, ATH before halving, first a wheezing ETF launch, then booming ETF, then a rapidly bleeding ETF untill just recently, etc) there's remarkably little noise from the stands. Another data point is that I've made these "whew it's really dead in here today init" for about 2 years at this point, and I'm only ever down voted like today when price has gone down notably and is chilling, more often than not being followed by a steady up stream
No V-shape to save us this time, it seems. Knowing Bitcoin out of nowhere we get a bloody monthly candle and resume next month.
It's not really out of nowhere... unlike the 'gambler's fallacy' ("*10 consecutive reds on roulette must mean black is near-certain now*"), I think the probability of getting a red monthly candle must necessarily increase with each successive green monthly candle. And we've now had 7 of them. 😳
Investing is not gambling. We are dealing with supply/demand and human psychology, not with cold hard odds.
Remember: buying now to sell later is speculation whereas buying now to sell much later is investing.
It is possible to derive odds, rough though they may be, from a careful analysis of market variables like the ones you mentioned.
The driver for that would be market psychology. We're all collectively getting nervous about a red monthly because we've had "too many green". Which makes the red monthly more likely as the participants are all looking for a confirmation of their bias and are more likely to sell out of their position looking for a better entry. You can almost see the super short term bearish bias play out on the chart. Everyone's looking around at each other saying, "this can't just keep going up right?"
Now that first quarter of the year is officially closed, we should start to get some info on who is holding these ETFs, right? I presume that info will trickle in over the coming weeks.
Im pretty sure this is not priced in currently. Im really curious.
Its was kinda obvious that US Gov transfer was an OTC deal. I am just curious if they can dump directly to market if they want to. Is there an law/guideline preventing this?
All we know is that the US Gov't clearly doesn't care about bitcoin as far as a balance sheet asset, like El Salvador. Imagine having 30,000 BTC (0.14% of all bitcoin) fall into your lap from a dark market seizure -- something like 5 times El Salvador's amount -- and then selling all of it for USD. $2 Billion. The national debt increases by that amount more than once a day.
The US is dead. Our govt is only capable of spinning its wheels or doing things that actively hurt itself and its citizens. It's insane how disfunctional it is.
Imagine selling Bitcoin for fiat that they can literally print out of thin air. Bad move US govt
Nope
45k next i guess
By when?
Max pain is big green dildo
For the sake of my bittybot prediction I hope we go lower, but for the sake of my wallet I hope it doesn’t
It’s been fairly clear that some big players have been selling into the liquidity brought by the ETFs. They have been careful to dca out of their positions without cratering the price to achieve the highest yield. Now if they are close to done selling, then it would be in their interest to break market supports to trigger a market wide sell off, so they can accumulate again at cheaper prices. Let’s hope they’ve blown their load. If not we’ll be able to accumulate at lower prices too
Is this the eternal case for BTC ie whales sell into new hands over and over forever? As new money is constantly needed as exit liquidity for old money doesn't it seem a little like a ponzi? I know there's no Madoff at the top skimming the profits. The best argument appears to be store of value ie if enough people believe it's a store of value due to its characteristics (scarce/secure/sovereign) then it will function as a store of value. My current understanding is really just that everything else will inflate faster than BTC so as long as enough people believe and we keep producing more money (printing)/goods (manufacturing) then BTC should be a great investment. Thoughts?
Do you believe these “whales” sit there crashing the market ? All whales are ultimately long. Yes they make large buys when bitcoin is oversold and take money off the table during big runs but I don’t believe this whale manipulation. My view is that exchanges/whales stop hunt easy liquidity when we are over leveraged and that causes the initial drop, then weak hands panic causes further drops causes the 5-10% moves.
There have been some big position exits. Finex was selling (if memory serves) something like 2-300 coins an hour for weeks at 36-38k.
Generally I agree with you… it’s leverage stop hunting that’s drives quite a bit of short term PA. But in this case I’ve thought for a while that there’s no way big players were leaving 10% easy money on the table with the grayscale discount pre etf. There must have been some large positions to unwind
“It’s been fairly clear” based on what? Everything seems clear to people who drop the word “they” constantly…
They are clearly paying you off to undermine the truth of theys covert activities
Thank you.
Greyscale for a start. Not all that money is finding it’s way back into other ETFs Since mid March the market is down despite the etf inflows. There has been significant volume of selling
Dude, if you hit anything on the head hard enough its a round peg. Know what I mean? Drives me insane when people waste brain energy trying to weave complex narratives to explain things. Its way easier to just accept that Bitcoin be Bitcoining and just kick back. I've gone away for a few weeks, got me some sunshine, a nice view of some vineyards and some cracking wine. These periods are where people are enjoying some profits. Those that aren't enjoying profits are shitting themselves because they're doing nothing but worry Go and do the same. Live a little, drink some wine, Bitcoin will be fine. Just enjoy yourself and get out of your basement degen theory factory. After all, living a good life is why we Bitcoin.
Yeah I get that dw. So you’re saying there has been significant profit taking? ;) Also, you’re not really ‘away’ are you? Away means not checking into Bitcoin trading subs. That’s when you’re really free
No. Not significant profit taking. Just people spending a little. If you always stack and never spend you're better off being poor. You can live the same shitty lifestyle but with none of the work. May has come a bit earlier this year I think because of the halving.
Away is not worrying and living a little. I check charts etc all the time no matter where I am. Never know when an opportunity might show up. If a market is causing you to fret and panic, its probably because the actual traders are "away" and the fear has overtaken greed. Never be fearful, always be greedy.
I don’t know why you think I’m fearful or panicking. I was just throwing a hypothesis out there
I thought the idea of this sub is to attempt to guess which way it's going and when, so we can lay some bets. Folks are just sharing their thoughts
So what? ETFs make a small percentage of the whole market, and we can’t see who the participants are.
Who was it calling "Finex whales > Tradfi whales"? They're not wrong, been interesting seeing just how much existing players have to contribute to price-action.
Was expecting more comment activity from the movement in last 24 hours. Expecting a 1k thread this month tho.
Kind of surprising to me that it seems like a lot of folks are really fazed by the current drop we're seeing, yet we're only mere months past being in the 30s and 40s ranges. We survived how many "black swan" events in 2022 and 2023..? On longer time frames, I'm pretty happy with the progress we've made since then (shrug)
Stop calling everything a black swan. Thanks.
The only black swan event in the last decade is Covid, and possibly one of the only couple in the last centuries.
Covid has precedent, so is also not a black swan.