26 ms·
Is Bitcoin Down or Just Me?
- olalonde 5y agoWould be interesting to include stats on of chain reorgs (frequency, length, etc.) as they're technically part of their downtime definition ("current longest chain was not an active chain"). It would also give an idea of the level of risk when waiting for X confirmations.
- donmezgel 5y agoHow can one get such stats? Any source for reference?
- olalonde 5y agoYou could probably parse the Bitcoin Core logs (assuming reorgs are logged) or run a modified Bitcoin node software which explicitly tracks such reorgs.
- donmezgel 5y agoSince chain reorgs identical to the individual nodes, i assume we cant gather such data..
- olalonde 5y agoYou wouldn't catch all of them but I believe you could get a pretty good sample by running a single node. And you won't be able to get historical data unless someone else has been tracking this and shares their data with you. There's some discussion about reorg frequency/depth on BitcoinTalk[0][1]. Also there is this academic paper[2]. [0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1403436.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1403436.0 (2016) [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5351869.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5351869.0 (2021) [2] https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/127476/1193019932-MIT.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/127476/119301...
- boxmonster 5y agoActually Bitcoin is down 13.52% in the last 7 days https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/
- capableweb 5y agoActually, Bitcoin is lateral, not below me.
- iszomer 5y agoYou may be confusing the bitcoin network conditions with price action. iirc, there were some mainstream and social media stories of the recent "events" concerning the country of Kazakhstan regarding banning of bitcoin mining and the political unrest (and or violence that ensued). The blip you experienced may have been a direct result from this.
- kingcharles 5y agoYou may be confusing a joke with a WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
- boxmonster 5y agoIt was a little joke, but probably not funny to those hodling BTC
- iszomer 5y agoI think it would be funny for those HODLing their mined BTC but not those whom are HODLing their bought BTC. :)
- matheusmoreira 5y agoTo those people bitcoin going down is cause for celebration. It's a sale and they get to buy more for cheap. The real joke is the fact there are far better coins out there that nobody cares about just because they're not BTC.
- 5y ago
- mkdirp 5y ago> The Bitcoin network has been functional for %99.98 of the time since its inception on January 3, 2009 at 02:54:25 GMT Seems weird. What was that 0.02% when it was down? I've clearly missed it.
- donmezgel 5y agoJust added two events that led downtime for Bitcoin.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago> Yes, the Bitcoin Network has been down two times in the past. Once in 2010 for around 9 hours, known as the Value overflow incident where a block contained a transaction that created 184 billion Bitcoins for three different addresses. The network was soft forked to not allow any more than 21 million Bitcoins ever. > And once again in 2013 for 7 hours, known as the March 2013 Chain Fork, where a block that had a larger number of total transaction inputs than previously seen was mined and broadcasted. While Bitcoin 0.8 nodes were able to handle this, some pre-0.8 Bitcoin nodes rejected it, causing an unexpected fork of the blockchain. A new released a version 0.8.1, forked directly from 0.8.0 solved this issue without any harm to the network. https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/42961/has-the-bitcoin-network-ever-been-down https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/42961/has-the-bi...
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoHow to get to the 99.98% figure: 9+7=16 hours of downtime since the network started to operate (Jan 3rd, 2009). 4,753 days since then, or 114,072 hours. Uptime: (114,056 / 114,072 * 100) = 99.98% since inception.
- dane-pgp 5y agoFor 16 hours to be 0.01% of the total time, bitcoin will have to be 160000 hours old, which is about 6666 days, or 1913 days from today. So on April 5th, 2027 (assuming it has no more downtime before then), bitcoin will be able to claim four-9s of reliability.
- BoorishBears 5y agoI was hoping this would be a site that shows you how far up Bitcoin is in the last year So it'd be more like "Is Bitcoin down or just my poorly managed portfolio?"
- herpderperator 5y agoI believe the wording is a play on https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
- dgrin91 5y ago"downtime" is kind of a weird way to call it. Its not down in the same way we think of AWS being down. I guess the right way to say it is 'time when the current longest chain was not an active chain', but that doesn't exactly roll of the tongue I guess.
- donmezgel 5y agoI just changed it with your suggestion which i believe make more sense.
- kingcharles 5y agoWow, now that's some tech support :)
- patrickthebold 5y agoWhat does 'active' mean in this context?
- dgrin91 5y agoAt any given moment there are a handful of active chains on the bitcoin network. really a better word I should use is fork, because these chains are 99.999+% identical, its just the last few blocks that may differ. The consensus work that Blockchain does is all about figuring out which one of these forks is the one we all agree on. This is why if you deal with actually posting transactions to the bitcoin network they say you should wait for ~6 confirmation blocks to ensure that you don't end up on on a fork that doesn't end up in the consensus (its unusual, but it happens). During those downtimes the current active chain that is run today was not one of the active chains in consideration for consensus. This is why the fixes was to go back and do a softfork from an earlier state.
- soheil 5y agoKazakhstan is returning 503
- iafdognionio 5y ago
- ogogmad 5y agoWhat happened to Lightning? Did it solve Bitcoin's problems yet?
- rawtxapp 5y agoIt has healthy growing adoption: 1ml.com.
- nas 5y agoIt's functional but not ready for prime time yet, IMHO. Buying things on Bitrefill using Lightning works well. It is better than a credit card, I think. Really fast and low fees. Imagine a gift card that works for any merchant that opts into the open protocol. Also, if you want to refund the money on the card, you can do that without the cooperation of any merchant. There are a number of improvements in the pipeline. Taproot just got enabled. It seems we need something like SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT (BIP-118) in order to implement eltoo. eltoo would be like the next generation of Lightning, making it easier for users.
- dane-pgp 5y agoSo you're saying it's just 18 months away? https://www.icc3.com/18-months-away-latest-lightning-network-study-calls-system-a-small-central-clique/ https://www.icc3.com/18-months-away-latest-lightning-network...
- grey-area 5y agoWhat do you mean exactly about refunds, do you mean a merchant can refund without involving a card network?
- 88913527 5y agoI am curious how the 99.98% SLA compares to other payment networks (eg: Visa, etc). A bit apples to oranges, since the transaction volume is different.
- flatiron 5y agoYou can buy goods and materials with visa though. Not sure people want to wait 30 minutes to buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin.
- vmception 5y ago2016 called and wants its arguments back
- recursive 5y agoIs the argument less valid because someone made it in 2016?
- vmception 5y agoIts less valid because the state of the network has changed to make the argument irrelevant sometime over the last half decade
- flatiron 5y agoits not an argument against bitcoin at all. go walk into a starbucks with a gold bar. it certainly has value. they certainly want to give you coffee for value. it's just not the write medium. bitcoin is gold bars. not ready for retail but certainly ready for a hold of value. nothing wrong with that.
- vmception 5y agothe point is that the user experience is not accurate so no rationale for it is relevant either many merchants take 0 confirmations with payment processors or use lightning network or use a faster blockchain
- revskill 5y agoFinancial freedom is not a ponzi system like btc. Let it drop to where it started: 0 usd.
- dylkil 5y agoshort it then
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoWho would pay my profits if it all blows up?
- rawtxapp 5y agoYou'll buy it dirt cheap to cover your short position and keep the initial capital you got from the short sale. Pretty dangerous though, even if you're right in the long term, short term anything can happen and you'll get liquidated.
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- throwhauser 5y agoBitcoin could go over a million dollars, or below one dollar, multiple times, in any order. It would be a risky short, even if it did ultimately end up valued at 0.
- notch656a 5y agoAll fiat currencies go to zero eventually as well. Good luck timing it.
- rvz 5y agoNot Bitcoin itself but the price did - and this aged perfectly well: [0][1]. Did people really think that last year, Bitcoin was going to $100K? Actually, we are going back down to earth again. After all, this is even before regulations are coming for cryptocurrencies. So who knows which ones will survive this. As for those who jumped into Bitcoin at >$60K, you are going to be waiting for a long time. I hope they didn't FOMO all in with their life savings, loans and everything they had at $68k last year then. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27206314 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26937131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26937131
- camjohnson26 5y agoFor all the hate Bitcoin gets because it’s obviously in a bubble market, can we at least agree that it is an astounding engineering achievement that an anonymous individual and a small group of researchers were able to build a network capable of transacting billions of dollars of value with only 2 service incidents in 14 years? All without any meaningful service costs and no hacking of the network, despite huge incentives.
- vanusa 5y agoAll without any meaningful service costs No we can't, because there's no way you can dismiss the climate costs (and the impact on energy prices and chip supply) as not meaningful. It is this blue-sky pollyanna-ism among crypto advocates which generates much of the "hate" against it, btw.
- camjohnson26 5y agoThose are externalities, not service costs. Hal Finney didn’t have to pay a dollar to keep the network running, the users pay all the costs, and the users are miners or accounts. Nuclear bombs can be cheap and bad at the same time, the 2 things aren’t mutually exclusive. If you can’t admit the nuclear bomb was an engineering achievement because it had externalities, then that’s short sighted.
- vanusa 5y agoThose are externalities, not service costs. In strict accounting terms, yes. But in practical terms -- the cost offloading that is inherent to BTC is so blatant and direct that it barely qualifies as an "externality" (and only in an abstract, technical sense). The gist of the GP comment was, in essence: "Isn't BTC nifty because it can do all these things, and it costs basically nothing to run." When in fact the exact opposite it true. And in fact there are still countless people running around trying to downplay its true cost. If you can’t admit the nuclear bomb was an engineering achievement I will accept that the bomb was "an engineering achievement". But I'm not going to get out my pom-poms try to lead the room in a cheer to the effect of: "The Bomb was an astounding engineering achievement that keeps the world safe for democracy, and at minimal service cost".
- arthurz 5y agoBitcoin, or any Crypto, Block Chain, are too complex, unfortunately, to understand, and therefore is a huge barrier to their adoption. Whoever comes to an easy way of doing the digital currency first will win big. One other turn off remains: is to solve the material part, how to turn crypto back into Fiat Money so it really seamlessly works and not entangled into revenue control traps, losses on exchange between networks, daily limits, and so many more.
- amelius 5y ago> Bitcoin, or any Crypto, Block Chain, are too complex, unfortunately, to understand That's a feature to make them look less like a Ponzi scheme.
- dylkil 5y agoVery true, I even think satoshi wrote that somewhere on bitcointalk back in the day, something along the lines of "I have designed bitcoin, it solves byzantine general problem. This solution is extremely complex so it should hide the fact what ive really made is a ponzi scheme"
- AlbertCory 5y agoNo one gets their shoes shined anymore, but [1], [2]. In 15 years, everyone touting crypto now is going to be either: 1) bragging about how they got out before the wipeout 2) changing the subject [1] https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/04/15/211503/index.htm https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv... [2] https://work4btc.com/the-shoeshine-boy-in-1929-and-my-co-workers-today-im-worried/ https://work4btc.com/the-shoeshine-boy-in-1929-and-my-co-wor...
- iso1210 5y ago1) is dated 1996, the S&P started on 614 and ended on 766. It would never be as low as it was then. Had you put $1k in at the peak in 2000 then you'd be below water for 12 years, but by now 22 years later you'd have $3300. Had you instead dripped $50 in each year since 2000 you'd have $3500. If you'd have put that $1k in a bank returning around the fed funds rate, you'd have about $1400. Dripping it in would be about $1300. To be down over the course of 15 years, you'd have to go back to the 1926-1930. Even putting your entire life savings into the stock market on Jan 1st 1929 you'd be above water after 23 years, would have doubled your money in 30 years, and quadroupled it in 40 years.
- AlbertCory 5y agoI'm not sure what your point is. Buying the whole market or a substantial part of it has always been a good strategy. "Beating the market" is what "hot tips" are all about. "A fool and his money" etc. etc.
- notch656a 5y agoThe market still seems to be in price discovery for crypto. Also, I wouldn't use crypto as an investment for some of the same reasons I wouldn't use dollars.
- aasasd 5y agoSo bitcoin failed its guarantees two times at least, but it's fine and dandy by the ‘crypto’ people. Such cryptography, wow.
- dylkil 5y agoWhats your suggestion, how should crypto people react? They currently dont hide the fact the network split twice (8 years ago), so what else should they do?
- aasasd 5y agoLike, maybe have a thing that doesn't break its own core rules when a bunch of jerks decide that it should? That would be a start. “It's so decentralized, very nice! Oh, wait, let us centralize it real quick. Here, now it's decentralized just like the other day! No, wait, we need to centralize it again for a minute. Done, now it's surely decentralized and immutable, tell all your friends!”
- dylkil 5y ago>Like, maybe have a thing that doesn't break its own core rules when a bunch of jerks decide that it should? That would be a start. LOL