Miners Revolt

As Theresa May makes nice speeches for the hard Brexit and still manages to feel as cold as Margeret Thatcher. And as people buy safe assets in the shadow of Trumps Inauguration, Bitcoins price is bouncing back to $900 after a serious pull back from all-time highs, Litle however, the nubies know, but we have a Miners Revolt in the mix.

Adoption of the new core code including Segregated witness has reached a plateau. This update to the software that runs bitcoin was expected to be picked up quickly by people running bitcoin nodes, but it appears many miners are hesitant to adopt it. The new technology increases the transactions that can be processed in a single block on the blockchain.

Miners, who get paid in part by transaction fees, see this as a pay cut. Yes, it's true, the block size debate is not yet dead. Increasing the block size would theoretically allow miners to make more from transaction fees which are oft6en paid by kilobyte rather than by transaction. Segwit however, allowing more transactions per kilobyte is simply seen as a permanent pay reduction,

Miners are in an extremely competitive game and don't want or need this kind of efficiency. Every little bit counts to get ahead of competitors. It has become so prolific that Bitcoins total mining computer power is more 100 times that of googles servers. Is this justified? Of note is the that miners still only make a small percentage less than 10% of their money through transactions. This transaction fee payment is set to increase until, somewhere around 2120, it makes up their total income.

As yet there is little pressure from the community on miners to implement Segwit. Despite this, during the last all time high transactions on the blockchain were seriously delayed. 30 minutes is a long time for a crypto algorithm. Segwit could have prevented this. Bitcoin core is still very much a leading contender but many people have not updated their software to the latest version. Are we overly complacent?

Now is the stage in the debate when people must take advantage of the open source vote with their home computers. Thankfully a node can still be run this way. If you care you can easily make a digital vote. At the moment it takes 125GB. Miners are not the only people able to running the network. With the way votes seem to go these days, it is hard to know whether people will actually participate.

It all depends on your interpretation of decentralisation. Are there enough nodes in this cloud? The ballet is streaming live. Segwit needs 51%

(note currently Segwit node coverage including Bitcoin Core version v0.13.1 and Bitcoin Core version v0.13.2 is = to 47%)

Social Trading and the Hyper Neural Market

In our current financial system approximately 60% of trade volume is algorithmic and performed by computer trading bots.This can do some strange things to the market and over the last twenty odd years governments have set up things like market shut downs and "circuit breakers" etc, to try and stop things like flash crashes which have happened for unknown robotic reasons in the past.

As a human, it's not such a good thing. Traders struggle to keep up with the machines, even the simple indexes. Active traders and hedge funds are having a hard time proving their worth. Only the select few do really well and they are hard to get access to, with restricted access and minimum contributions.

Computer automation and the internet as we know has also been harnessed in a big way for social structures. Following and copy pasting are made easy and news is distributed quickly through various different channels. Now there is a new way to trade stocks, bond and commodities that take advantage of this. you can trade bitcoin on there as well. It turns out people are better at choosing people to copy than at choosing stocks. This is called Social Trading.

So now we have a combination of an algorithmic market and a new human social market. Like we did before except the human market is somewhat automated, people can copy other people's trades automatically in real time and combine combinations in different ways. You can get a tree of traders copying other trader copying other and copying themselves again in various different human links. I call this the hyper Neural Market.

It's like a cyborg market. A totally new beast altogether and I think that understanding this will be key to the future in crypto-currencies.I've been looking at it for a few years now and it is going well. You can set it up here. You do have to be careful who you copy, but social trading is one of my latest vices. It makes for an easy way to take advantage of volatility and the big uptrend in bitcoin price we are seeing now. You don't need to watch the charts all day. You Just need to find someone who is. I'm on it all the time.

PS Etoro actually runs a kindof a bitcoin ETF for trading which is somehow linked to bitstamp.