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.

Wild Predictions

Predictions are spinning out of control. People once coined crack pots are now getting a voice in reputable publications such as time magazine. This journalist guy thinks the price will hit $3000 USD. Ironically this is where I first found out about bitcoin. My mum sent me the article.

Some people think it will go higher to $40000 and the media, with little better to report are picking up on this amongst the steep increase in the price of bitcoin over the last 6 months. I have even made my own predictions in this blog.

Though I'm confident that bitcoin won't go away and will go up over time, I'm not too interested in this spin. It would be great if the general public actually started using bitcoin for spending and not just seeing dollar signs. It is actually a much easier and more convenient way to buy online and even makes a slick and cost-effective point of sale for your local shop or service person.

The Simul-Buy

This is it, The power of coordination seems to be taking effect. Bitcoin purchase volumes in China are at record highs. Are people realising the advantage of non-political money to a united world? 

Giving Bitcoin for Christmas

So many of us are last minute shoppers, why not put some bitcoin under the tree?

It's much more intriguing than fiat money. I found my family really appreciated it. Wth the recent increase in value they all thank me two fold. When I try and encourage them to spend it they all say "no I want holding on to mine, It's a good savings account." I am afraid I have seeded a new generation of Christmas bitcoin hodlers. This year they might have to get litecoin instead.

I Cry for ChangeTip

It's not hard to see why ChangeTip had to shut down. They didn't charge anything so it's pretty clear that they must have been getting quite poor and hungry after coding for all these years. The charity gift/ social bribery/ online begging and busking economy just isn't that lucrative as yet. Someone really needs to do something with that code though, it's just so easy to use. Maybee in good crypto tradition it will become open source.

Never fear though we have Brave, a new, super-speedy add blocking auto bitcoin tipping browser, and ProTip, a Chrome extension which can work automatically and has social functions basically like ChangeTip. With these new apps all you have to do to get paid (or potentially accept small donations once in a blue moon) is to spurge one of these on your page.

Bit me,

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Price Hits $800 USD

I have been busy moving house lately so haven't had much time to write or draw. Bitcoin has been keeping busy too with the price building on a solid uptrend and now hitting over $800 USD on OK Coin and BTCC. It's a sunny dey in Tauranga and a pretty good outlook for our bits.