17 ms·

A reminder that this metric—number of new addresses—means nothing. Addresses should never be reused, so modern wallet software should be making new addresses wi

A reminder that this metric—number of new addresses—means nothing. Addresses should never be reused, so modern wallet software should be making new addresses with every transaction, no matter the nature of the transaction. And with blocks consistently full, the number of transactions doesn’t change much.

teh_infallible 6y ago
Addresses do frequently get reused, though- people send to the same addresses, and last time I checked, the bitcoin.com wallet defaulted to reusing receive addresses
- scottisbrave84 6y ago
  Well submit a pr to change it then.
  - grapehut 6y ago
    The wallet is not open source (they made a private fork of bitpays wallet as part of their strategy to shill "bitcoin cash" a relatively worthless coin that cashes in on bitcoin.com's official sounding name)
- grapehut 6y ago
  FWIW the bitcoin.com wallet (and really bitcoin.com) is borderline malware. It exists solely to leverage its official sounding name to constantly nudge people towards deceiving people into buying "Bitcoin cash" which is largely unrelated to bitcoin. When ever they're called out for doing it too blatantly deceptively (e.g. spent months calling "bitcoin cash" the real bitcoin, and bitcoin "bitcoin core"), they just walk it back slight enough to not get outright banned on platforms.
  - teh_infallible 6y ago
    To be fair, bitcoin cash is not “largely unrelated to bitcoin.” They have the same transaction history up until the split. They are basically brothers who hate each other.
    - grapehut 6y ago
      It might be poor choice of words, but I think it gets the point across. It's barely worth more than "bitcoin SV" (another coin that shares the same transaction history with bitcoin to the same point) that's controlled by a painfully obvious and blatant scammer and his backer.
  - bufferoverflow 6y ago
    Bitcoin cash is more bitcoin than the current BTC is. It continues the idea of peer-to-peer cash, payments on the chain. Read the whitepaper. Where's BTC is being pushed into a strange, lot less useful, "store of value" niche.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      My god is better than yours! It says so in the white paper. No not that white paper, this one!
modeless 6y ago
The metric I'm watching is Google Trends[1]. So far it's hardly budged and is far below its peaks in 2017 and 2019. That indicates to me that this run up in price could be just beginning. I expect that if an all time high is reached then a wave of publicity will propel the price much higher, as it has several times in the past. I don't see a 10x price increase like 2017 though. I expect less extreme price movements now that bitcoin's market cap is so much higher and more large investors are involved. I think it would take something huge to move the price that much, like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F05p0rrx https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
- jen729w 6y ago
  > like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC For the sake of the children† and the diversity of the planet‡ let’s hope not, eh? I mean it’s just tremendously wasteful to generate Bitcoin. I don’t mind it as a concept, I think it’s cool, but fuck me what a waste of energy. † Have none, don’t care. ‡ This tho.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Each transaction requires enough power to run an average household for 22 days (or to drive a Tesla from San Francisco to New York) and produces as much ewaste as hucking half your iPhone out the window along the way. [1] Not to mention it likely makes international arms and drug dealing Bond villain Paul “Solotshi” Calder Le Roux the wealthiest man on earth. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-international-drug-dealer-maybe/ https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      I knew it was wasteful, but that was orders of magnitude more than I thought.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
jtsiskin 6y ago
This is a contradiction - if the number of transactions isn’t increasing, and mew addresses are created from every transaction, then the number of mew addresses shouldn’t be increasing. So something most be changing - either wallet software is preferring to use new addresses more often, or something else, like more distinct users.
- garmaine 6y ago
  The metric is: "The number of unique addresses that appeared for the first time in a transaction of the native coin [sic] in the network." They're not excluding old, never-reused addresses, so the number of addresses is always increasing as every transaction adds more. What they tweeted was that this rate of increase has itself increased by about 20%. Since blocks have been full during this period, this means the difference lies in the type of the transaction. If the current transactions are more of a fan-out (pay multiple parties) and less consolidation (sweeping payments made to the same institution), then that makes sense. And indeed, right now there is a larger than usual outflow from exchanges. Maybe people are getting nervous about holding increasingly more valuable bitcoin on exchanges and are pulling their funds off? That alone could explain a 20% increase in this meaningless "address count" metric.

teh_infallible 6y ago

Addresses do frequently get reused, though- people send to the same addresses, and last time I checked, the bitcoin.com wallet defaulted to reusing receive addresses

scottisbrave84 6y ago
Well submit a pr to change it then.
- grapehut 6y ago
  The wallet is not open source (they made a private fork of bitpays wallet as part of their strategy to shill "bitcoin cash" a relatively worthless coin that cashes in on bitcoin.com's official sounding name)
grapehut 6y ago
FWIW the bitcoin.com wallet (and really bitcoin.com) is borderline malware. It exists solely to leverage its official sounding name to constantly nudge people towards deceiving people into buying "Bitcoin cash" which is largely unrelated to bitcoin. When ever they're called out for doing it too blatantly deceptively (e.g. spent months calling "bitcoin cash" the real bitcoin, and bitcoin "bitcoin core"), they just walk it back slight enough to not get outright banned on platforms.
- teh_infallible 6y ago
  To be fair, bitcoin cash is not “largely unrelated to bitcoin.” They have the same transaction history up until the split. They are basically brothers who hate each other.
  - grapehut 6y ago
    It might be poor choice of words, but I think it gets the point across. It's barely worth more than "bitcoin SV" (another coin that shares the same transaction history with bitcoin to the same point) that's controlled by a painfully obvious and blatant scammer and his backer.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  Bitcoin cash is more bitcoin than the current BTC is. It continues the idea of peer-to-peer cash, payments on the chain. Read the whitepaper. Where's BTC is being pushed into a strange, lot less useful, "store of value" niche.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    My god is better than yours! It says so in the white paper. No not that white paper, this one!

modeless 6y ago

The metric I'm watching is Google Trends[1]. So far it's hardly budged and is far below its peaks in 2017 and 2019. That indicates to me that this run up in price could be just beginning. I expect that if an all time high is reached then a wave of publicity will propel the price much higher, as it has several times in the past. I don't see a 10x price increase like 2017 though. I expect less extreme price movements now that bitcoin's market cap is so much higher and more large investors are involved. I think it would take something huge to move the price that much, like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F05p0rrx https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

jen729w 6y ago
> like a bitcoin ETF approved by the SEC For the sake of the children† and the diversity of the planet‡ let’s hope not, eh? I mean it’s just tremendously wasteful to generate Bitcoin. I don’t mind it as a concept, I think it’s cool, but fuck me what a waste of energy. † Have none, don’t care. ‡ This tho.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Each transaction requires enough power to run an average household for 22 days (or to drive a Tesla from San Francisco to New York) and produces as much ewaste as hucking half your iPhone out the window along the way. [1] Not to mention it likely makes international arms and drug dealing Bond villain Paul “Solotshi” Calder Le Roux the wealthiest man on earth. [1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption [2] https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-international-drug-dealer-maybe/ https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-inte...
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    I knew it was wasteful, but that was orders of magnitude more than I thought.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

jtsiskin 6y ago

This is a contradiction - if the number of transactions isn’t increasing, and mew addresses are created from every transaction, then the number of mew addresses shouldn’t be increasing. So something most be changing - either wallet software is preferring to use new addresses more often, or something else, like more distinct users.

garmaine 6y ago
The metric is: "The number of unique addresses that appeared for the first time in a transaction of the native coin [sic] in the network." They're not excluding old, never-reused addresses, so the number of addresses is always increasing as every transaction adds more. What they tweeted was that this rate of increase has itself increased by about 20%. Since blocks have been full during this period, this means the difference lies in the type of the transaction. If the current transactions are more of a fan-out (pay multiple parties) and less consolidation (sweeping payments made to the same institution), then that makes sense. And indeed, right now there is a larger than usual outflow from exchanges. Maybe people are getting nervous about holding increasingly more valuable bitcoin on exchanges and are pulling their funds off? That alone could explain a 20% increase in this meaningless "address count" metric.