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All right, I will be a bit specific for your benefit: - There is a lot of wash trading going on with several exchanges, some of which has had serious accountin

All right, I will be a bit specific for your benefit: - There is a lot of wash trading going on with several exchanges, some of which has had serious accounting issues since 2016. When they fail, the fallout will be far more spectacular than that of the late MtGOX because many traders are heavily leveraged. - Upcoming Segwit2x hard fork potentially splitting the network. - Uncertainty with China where the majority of hash power resides. The current crackdown on exchanges is pretty well reported. What I am concerned about is what will happen to the network when electricity price goes up in winter as hydro generation winds down, making mining more expensive. Historically miners were able to get favourable deals with remote thermal plants to cover the shortfall, which may be more difficult due to negative press and an ongoing effort to curb smog. The view I share with a few perssimistic pundits is that there will be one final rally to $5000 before November for people to cash out before the freefall. What we don't agree on is the timeframe and where the price will hit the bottom. Hence my reluctance to make predictions.

dwaltrip 9y ago
Fair enough, those are all good points. Do you have knowledge of wash trading and accounting issues at at any of the major USD exchanges? I know bitfinex was hacked last year (and paid everyone back?), and there have recently been some strange rumors around bitfinex and Tether, but that is all I have heard. And do you believe this crash/correction will be lethal? Or will Bitcoin "die" and rise again?
- Laforet 9y ago
  As long as there are two bitcoin nodes remaining to update the ledger we could call it "not dead", but the token would probably not be worth much by that point. And bitcoin probably have a hard time to recover due to the amount of cruft and technical debt it has. My best guess is that it could go through more boom/bust cycles before speculators move on; actual users have already started to move to other cryptos as we speak.
- joosters 9y ago
  Bitfinex & Tether seem to be the two major suspects here (or is that just one? their ownership links are murky, to say the least) https://twitter.com/bitfinexed https://twitter.com/bitfinexed single-mindedly covers the dodgy company. If there was some way of filtering their tweets to show just the linked articles and not all the comments/retweeting noise, you could find some good coverage of the issue.
topmonk 9y ago
> - There is a lot of wash trading going on with several exchanges, some of which has had serious accounting issues since 2016. When they fail, the fallout will be far more spectacular than that of the late MtGOX because many traders are heavily leveraged. Hand wavy nonsense. Exchanges have failed before and bitcoin is still going strong. > - Upcoming Segwit2x hard fork potentially splitting the network. There already was a hard fork, and the network did split, yet bitcoin is still going strong. > - Uncertainty with China where the majority of hash power resides. The current crackdown on exchanges is pretty well reported. What I am concerned about is what will happen to the network when electricity price goes up in winter as hydro generation winds down, making mining more expensive. Historically miners were able to get favourable deals with remote thermal plants to cover the shortfall, which may be more difficult due to negative press and an ongoing effort to curb smog. The bitcoin difficulty rises and falls with the ability to mine it. If the number of miners go down, the network remains unaffected. What's your point here?
- Laforet 9y ago
  >Hand wavy nonsense. Exchanges have failed before and bitcoin is still going strong. The stakes are different this time. >There already was a hard fork, and the network did split, yet bitcoin is still going strong. The previous party line is "Hard fork bad, soft fork good". Anyway, we can agree that now everyone is free to start their own fork and it's a good thing for bitcoin^TM. >The bitcoin difficulty rises and falls with the ability to mine it. If the number of miners go down, the network remains unaffected. What's your point here? The network recalculates difficulty every 2016 blocks. Assuming regular 10 minute intervals it is updated approximately every 14 days. If the BTC network was to split evenly in the 2X hard fork, then in the worst case it will take 28 days before an adjustment is due. If the split is not 50/50, then the minority chain will need proportionally more time. In the meantime both chains will be congested due to longer average block interval. That said, both chains will need several months to stabilise as miners move between forks to maximise their profit, as we have already seen with the BCC/BCH split, and that was initiated by a <5% pool. tl;dr A chain split will make the network unusable for weeks if not months.

dwaltrip 9y ago

Fair enough, those are all good points. Do you have knowledge of wash trading and accounting issues at at any of the major USD exchanges? I know bitfinex was hacked last year (and paid everyone back?), and there have recently been some strange rumors around bitfinex and Tether, but that is all I have heard. And do you believe this crash/correction will be lethal? Or will Bitcoin "die" and rise again?

Laforet 9y ago
As long as there are two bitcoin nodes remaining to update the ledger we could call it "not dead", but the token would probably not be worth much by that point. And bitcoin probably have a hard time to recover due to the amount of cruft and technical debt it has. My best guess is that it could go through more boom/bust cycles before speculators move on; actual users have already started to move to other cryptos as we speak.
joosters 9y ago
Bitfinex & Tether seem to be the two major suspects here (or is that just one? their ownership links are murky, to say the least) https://twitter.com/bitfinexed https://twitter.com/bitfinexed single-mindedly covers the dodgy company. If there was some way of filtering their tweets to show just the linked articles and not all the comments/retweeting noise, you could find some good coverage of the issue.

topmonk 9y ago

> - There is a lot of wash trading going on with several exchanges, some of which has had serious accounting issues since 2016. When they fail, the fallout will be far more spectacular than that of the late MtGOX because many traders are heavily leveraged. Hand wavy nonsense. Exchanges have failed before and bitcoin is still going strong. > - Upcoming Segwit2x hard fork potentially splitting the network. There already was a hard fork, and the network did split, yet bitcoin is still going strong. > - Uncertainty with China where the majority of hash power resides. The current crackdown on exchanges is pretty well reported. What I am concerned about is what will happen to the network when electricity price goes up in winter as hydro generation winds down, making mining more expensive. Historically miners were able to get favourable deals with remote thermal plants to cover the shortfall, which may be more difficult due to negative press and an ongoing effort to curb smog. The bitcoin difficulty rises and falls with the ability to mine it. If the number of miners go down, the network remains unaffected. What's your point here?

Laforet 9y ago
>Hand wavy nonsense. Exchanges have failed before and bitcoin is still going strong. The stakes are different this time. >There already was a hard fork, and the network did split, yet bitcoin is still going strong. The previous party line is "Hard fork bad, soft fork good". Anyway, we can agree that now everyone is free to start their own fork and it's a good thing for bitcoin^TM. >The bitcoin difficulty rises and falls with the ability to mine it. If the number of miners go down, the network remains unaffected. What's your point here? The network recalculates difficulty every 2016 blocks. Assuming regular 10 minute intervals it is updated approximately every 14 days. If the BTC network was to split evenly in the 2X hard fork, then in the worst case it will take 28 days before an adjustment is due. If the split is not 50/50, then the minority chain will need proportionally more time. In the meantime both chains will be congested due to longer average block interval. That said, both chains will need several months to stabilise as miners move between forks to maximise their profit, as we have already seen with the BCC/BCH split, and that was initiated by a <5% pool. tl;dr A chain split will make the network unusable for weeks if not months.