Coinfire emerges as most trustworthy bitcoin reporting site
A user in /r/bitcoin set out a few E-Mails last week with a simple aim: to figure out which sites are willing to accept payment in return for articles, and which, on the other hand adhere to a high journalistic integrity. I don't know why nobody had thought of performing this experiment before now, as it seems to obvious when looked at in retrospect.
The results are stunning. A supermajority of sites had no issues with accepting payment for articles. Only three sites did not offer to accept payment, and of those, two of them didn't reply. While the author equates a lack of a reply with a refusal to publish a paid story, I do not interpret a lack of a reply as having the same strength as an outright denial (since the site simply may not have received the message at press time, it was considering the offer, or it wasn't outraged by the request). The exposé essentially shows that there is one news source that can be 100% trusted: Coinfire.
Cryptocoinsnews is one of the sites that was ranked as having low standards in the article. They constantly make predictions about the fall of bitcoins, and then when bitcoins haven't died yet, they ignore the previous predictions and make higher, but similarly dire, predictions. They criticize other sites and put down people who use reddit and /r/bitcoinmarkets. In /r/bitcoin, one of the writers on Cryptocoinsnews defended the site's behavior by explaining the difference between a "sponsored article" and a "normal article."
As /u/jonhuang will tell you, the New York Times doesn't have "sponsored articles." It has articles, and it has advertisements. No matter how well a paper tries to mark "sponsored articles," people will rightfully be confused as to what a sponsored article is and how it is different from a normal article. The kicker is that when you have sponsored articles that present a positive point of view on a subject, the "normal articles" can't present a negative point of view without angering the sponsors.
This study is not only devastating to the sites, but it is also a problem for the community. I single out Crytocoinsnews periodically because they have managed to get themselves listed in news.google.com searches at the same level as Washington Post and Times articles. Other sites that were identified to be dishonest also show up high in these rankings. This is a serious issue because people new to the space may search to find out the latest news in bitcoins, and be misled into visiting these sites every day for accurate content.
This should serve as a wakeup call to people here and in /r/bitcoin. Whenever an article from the listed sites shows up, it needs to be immediately downvoted. People also need to post a comment with a link to the report so that their articles are discredited. While not everyone has bad motives, it is important to prevent scammers from being able to pay $250 to have their products advertised as the next big thing.
/u/Emocmo's moment of truth
A week ago, /u/Emocmo said that a decline from the price of $650 to around $620 with several "bounces" off that price would be the "most bullish possible" formation. Given that what he said is occurring so far, We may have reached the point where I said that a decision will be made: whether a large bubble will occur immediately or whether the development issues and negative metrics will cause people to hold back on their enthusiasm for a few months.
/u/Emocmo has a stellar track record with his analysis. It is hard to go against his predictions, as I can't recall a time when they have been wrong. That said, a lot of predictions have been wrong recently, as this slow bleeding was not characteristic of previous cycles. Given that there are conflicting indicators today, I'm not willing to take a stand as to which direction the market will take, and I also won't make any moves with my money either.
The "Eternal September"
The phrase "Eternal September" seems to be becoming popular around here as people compare bitcoin to the period in the Internet's development where new users started to arrive constantly, instead of arriving in bubbles. I think there are a few things to be said about this concept that make the comparison invalid.
First, the Internet is a system where joining does not impact anyone else. In 1997, I discovered the Internet. During the two years before my grandfather started using it in 1999, his life was not changed. He still did the other things he did like playing pinochle, watching TV, traveling, and so on. My use of the Internet didn't force him to take any action, except put him at the minor disadvantage that if he wanted to receive my E-Mail, then he could not.
My grandfather died a few days after bitcoins were invented. Had he survived long enough to avoid bitcoins while I chose to buy them, then his money would be worth less. Unlike his initial ignorance of the Internet, he actually loses out by sticking with dollars when everyone else starts to use bitcoins. As bitcoins become more widely adopted, people who choose to do nothing will see inflation increasing and their quality of life being significantly affected. Therefore, when the tipping point to bitcoins occurs, I would imagine it happens over the course of 24 hours, not over years. Like a bank run, people will rush to get their money out of all the weak currencies into bitcoins at any price. This could happen even while we are asleep, such that we wake up to a changed world where people are scratching their heads and asking how such a thing could have happened. Governments would be left scrambling to figure out what to do now that the economy has changed.
The second reason the comparison is invalid is because there are serious technical limitations preventing that scenario from happening. It could conceivably occur at any time, except that if it were to happen now the 1MB transaction limit would be hit and sellers simply wouldn't be able to get money to exchanges to sustain the transformation.
Therefore, we are not in an "Eternal September," nor is the "Eternal September" coming soon. Months ago, I stated that that I would not make any prediction of the continuation of the cycle past the next large bubble, because the protocol itself has flaws that prevent any further growth in its current state. The immediate question that people should be asking is whether the development standstill has caught up and is the cause for the unexplained behavior in this cycle, or whether a large bubble is still going to kick off any day and the development problems won't be an issue until the next cycle. There are arguments to be made both ways, as a large bubble can probably be sustained to a few thousand dollars before hitting the limit. Are the rich guys seeing these problems and holding off until there is more activity in development, or will they put money into another bubble and let it crash when the technical limits are actually reached?
Other
- Something that hit me recently was the idea of creating an object-oriented programming language for music. Instead of looking at music as an ordered sequence of harmonies, melodies, and rythyms, what if a song were viewed as an object with mathematical characteristics like consonance, dissonance, length, period, mood, and so on? The normal process for writing a song is to create a rythym and melody, and then expand upon it with harmonies and repetition. The process for programming a song would be to select the relative strength of a large number of musical elements, without any control over the actual notes or instruments, and then modifying the strength of the characteristics for the language to generate the desired music. This is one of those ideas of completely reimagining the process of creating something that is either great, or more likely is unworkable. Maybe, in 2 or 3 years, I might decide to explore this further.
- Days until July 24: 10