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Doom Marine

2014 Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Discussion

What's in Your Wallet?  

99 members have voted

  1. 1. What's in Your Wallet?

    • Bitcoin
      9
    • Litecoin
      7
    • Dogecoin
      10
    • Peercoin
      3
    • Ripple
      3
    • Other Cryptocurrencies
      5
    • Pls Send Magic Intarweb Moola
      10
    • Cryptocurrency is a Scam / Ponzi
      17
    • Fiat Money / Bank Notes
      23
    • Empty
      15


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What's the scale for that green line? Is it also logarithmic? What orders?

Then again, this abstracted line fitting and blind hunt for correlations is actually pretty common to economy. Assertive pricks in suits playing at science with Excel sheets.

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dew said:

What's the scale for that green line? Is it also logarithmic? What orders?

Then again, this abstracted line fitting and blind hunt for correlations is actually pretty common to economy. Assertive pricks in suits playing at science with Excel sheets.

Dude, it's applied math. It withstood four continuous years of real-world data correlation.

I don't think you're contributing to the dialogue by dismissing data via straw-man.
I'm starting to think you're trolling here.

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How am I trolling you for pointing out how crudely represented the data in your pretty picture are? Why is it logarithmic again? That obfuscates how the trends really correlate in the higher orders. That massive divergence in early 2014 is conveniently downplayed thanks to old buddy log scale. What are "popular addresses" and why are they excluded? How significant is this filtered set in the overall numbers?

And the Metcalfe's Law itself, let's see.

wiki says:
...the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

Alright, fair enough. The law states that the more nodes there are in a network, the more transactions (squared) are made potentially. This translates to the network's value. Even this short article manages to mention that Metcalfe himself proposes to use n x log(n) proportionality when society is involved, because language barriers and other issues limit their dealings. Bitcoin seems to be outdoing reality and somehow follows the ideal mathematical trend. Are you fitting reality on the right curve?

Furthermore, since we're following bitcoin transactions, shouldn't the value be expressed in, you know, bitcoins? I don't see a note about adjusting for inflation, so the dollar on the left side of the graph is not the dollar on the right side of the graph. Maybe I'm wrong, because it'd be pretty damn ironical if Bitcoin cultists forgot that dollar is not the etalon of value, heh.

wiki says:
The law is also very much related to economics and business management, especially with competitive companies looking to merge with one another.

Lolz. Citation needed. That article is of rather poor quality, that's no way to word claims with no source links.

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dew said:

How am I trolling you for pointing out how crudely represented the data in your pretty picture are? Why is it logarithmic again? That obfuscates how the trends really correlate in the higher orders. That massive divergence in early 2014 is conveniently downplayed thanks to old buddy log scale. What are "popular addresses" and why are they excluded? How significant is this filtered set in the overall numbers?

"Assertive pricks in suits playing at science with Excel sheets" isn't trolling from your point of view I take it. Your view certainly differs from mine in more ways than one.

Popular addresses are implicated as the ones used by bots for high-frequency trading. Suppose I have one bitcoin and transferred them repeatedly one million times between two bots in an exchange, say Huobi, the transaction rate would then be over-represented via fake volume, and now the practical bitcoin volume is one million more than it should've been. Defining the threshold of a popular address would diminish this play and better represent legitimate transactions in light of useful data analysis.

Bitcoin's network effect has always experienced exponential growth during its 5-year lifespan. When dealing with exponential growth, logarithmic graphs are almost always used to filter out the noise of day-trading and delineate magnitudes of growth in a scalable manner, this is statistics 101 material. While your questions are not unintelligent, they are delivered in an accusatory manner that makes it hard to have a intelligent, civil discourse. I think you know this.

Notice that while Fraggle and I disagree on matters, because of our intellectual rigor and honesty, we are able to develop a progressive dialogue in which we can agree to disagree.

Rather than focusing on what the chart has wrong, it might be more useful to ask what it got right or what interesting questions it poses. I understand that it makes some pretty concrete fairly near term predictions about bitcoins which may be falsifiable, — and hey, making a falsifiable prediction would put it ahead of a lot of things.

dew said:

And the Metcalfe's Law itself, let's see.

Alright, fair enough. The law states that the more nodes there are in a network, the more transactions (squared) are made potentially. This translates to the network's value. Even this short article manages to mention that Metcalfe himself proposes to use n x log(n) proportionality when society is involved, because language barriers and other issues limit their dealings. Bitcoin seems to be outdoing reality and somehow follows the ideal mathematical trend. Are you fitting reality on the right curve?

"Ah ha! it cannot work, I've found the flaw!" Right on. It's certainly invigorating to attempt to poke holes in someone's argument without putting in due intellectual rigor and without checking if one is asking even valid questions in the first place.

But to answer your question: bitcoin is a protocol, a math... it has no practical language or societal barriers, so that formula you stumbled upon doesn't apply here.

dew said:

Furthermore, since we're following bitcoin transactions, shouldn't the value be expressed in, you know, bitcoins? I don't see a note about adjusting for inflation, so the dollar on the left side of the graph is not the dollar on the right side of the graph. Maybe I'm wrong, because it'd be pretty damn ironical if Bitcoin cultists forgot that dollar is not the etalon of value, heh.

Let's walk through your logic here, suppose that the graph's Y-axis is now quantity of bitcoins, what does the graph tell us? Bitcoin vs time? What is the use there? Have you rationalized and checksumed your argument before going ahead and asking me to address it for you?

The bitcoin cultist comment, I don't understand... what value does it add to the dialogue?

dew said:

Lolz. Citation needed. That article is of rather poor quality, that's no way to word claims with no source links.

So why are you complaining about wikipedia articles to me anyway? Be honest with yourself. You come off pretty immature.

Metcalfe's law is mathematical and certainly verifiable, if you are good at math. Sounds to me like an excuse to try to find a random, opportunistic argument to try to debunk my point without doing the heavy mental lifting.

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Problem with the logarithmic scale in the picture is that you can pretty much fit anything that grows exponentially, and it would still look like there was a correlation between the two variables :P It's not very convincing.

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Oh my, this passive aggressive lecturing on manners and debating skills is doing my brain in. Go fuck yourself AND your high horse AND your moving goal posts.

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dew said:

Oh my, this passive aggressive lecturing on manners and debating skills is doing my brain in. Go fuck yourself AND your high horse AND your moving goal posts.

Oh my, was that a passive-aggressive compliment on my debating skills?

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You can see a pretty clear non-logarithmic overview of the chart by clicking the time interval "1w" here:
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd

It is a gamble; you can potentially make a lot of money or potentially lose a lot. A population of a species of plant eaters with no predators might have exponential growth, but then eat all the plants and have exponential collapse. Even SSL was hacked with heartbleed, so bitcoin could have backdoors like some obscurely compromisable random number generator. It could be a tool for the powers that be to force everyone into a digital economy where everything can be tracked and anyone can be shut down with controls that might not even exist yet, sort of like how internet service providers can shut your internet down. Or you might buy bitcoin then some alternate coin might come along that is better resulting in bitcoin's collapse. At this exact moment I'm torn between buying or not as the chart is starting to curve up despite skipping the pattern of the next dip. There might be insiders to all of this who basically know what the chart will look like. Maybe gox was intended to collapse the price all along. Mega wealthy insiders could gamble billions on such insider knowledge and make maybe a thousand times that, increasing the gap between rich/poor. If predatory professional skilled traders can accumulate nearly all the bitcoins into few hands, it would be hard to boycott that coin and buy into a competing altcoin instead, because those same rich people can buy that new altcoin as well. One solution is an altcoin that algorithmically (crypto is 'programmable money') 'evens out' the wealth gap, transferring money from the richest wallets to the poorest. And altcoins could compete doing that to find the best algorithm. But then the rich would make tons of wallets to catch all the 'welfare' payments unless there was a way to algorithmically only allow a single wallet per person.

Complete social/economic/etc chaos is going on, might be a loosely organized group trying to use the tactic 'order out of chaos' or something. There seems to be a lot of manipulation in crypto. China mainly caused the 'bubble's rise and collapse, maybe all intentional. Maybe communist china authorities with insider knowledge made the most money from this. Maybe that was the USAs method of paying back the debt they owed. I know the real economy has been being turned off artificially, correlating with bitcoin's rise, almost like part of the same conspiracy. Like ebay has 'seller limits' now and items you list there are largely invisible. It is ludicrous to think that ebay making their customers (sellers) listings invisible and highly reduced 'selling limits' is a sane or profitable business model unless they are part of a conspiracy to collapse the economy. Practically half the items on amazon are 'restricted items' meaning you aren't allowed to sell them. And those 2 companies have first mover advantage/stickiness/network effect making it nearly impossible to compete outside this control grid. Emails regarding any sales are often sent to spam folders now too.

The exchanges charge fees but are exempt from the fees since they run it. This means they can play the spread all day long, making pure profit for free. Meaning they can put a buy order 3 cents down and a sell order 3 cents up simultaneously, all day long, but nobody else can because the fees would just lose them money if they did. That basically means the exchanges have a neverending steam of green candles and can accumulate tons of crypto wealth. On that chart I linked above, the previous 258 mini bubble went down about half before going up again. And this bubble is down about half. But I think that bubble was the 'mania' phase. I mean will it seriously go up that much any time soon when gox just stole everyone's bitcoins? I think the bull might have died, not sure. I guess huge corporations could pump it up.

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Doom Marine said:

Oh my, was that a passive-aggressive compliment on my debating skills?

Did this make sense when you rehearsed it in your head? Anyways, I'm sorry for my understandable outburst. Yes, that was a non-apology.

The assertive pricks bit was aimed at economists in general, who often believe their own lie: that their simplified models based on very basic maths describe human society closely enough to be able to project trends way too far into the future, when they can't even come up with reliable patterns of the past. Then, with a straight face, they present us crap like the Laffer Curve. Psychohistory as portrayed in Foundation will take us a little more time than that.

Popular addresses are implicated as the ones used by bots for high-frequency trading. Suppose I have one bitcoin and transferred them repeatedly one million times between two bots in an exchange, say Huobi, the transaction rate would then be over-represented via fake volume, and now the practical bitcoin volume is one million more than it should've been. Defining the threshold of a popular address would diminish this play and better represent legitimate transactions in light of useful data analysis.

So there truly is a fuzzy filter that shaves the data down to something representable. The data set can be manipulated to fit the expected results with an arbitrary cutoff threshold like this. This isn't pure math anymore and "useful data analysis" is heavily dependent on interpretation.

Also I assume even these quick operations have to be verified by several miners. What happens if many people decide to go speculative with short term bitcoin rates, as is usual with fiat currencies and stock? Won't bots overload the entire operations with requests? We already know there's a fixed limit to how many operations can be done per second.

Wait, does this also mean that one can stage a terrorist attack on the entire infrastructure by having a botnet and moving btc around in bogus operations? There's already a non-negligible waiting period before your transaction is processed, this could go through the roof under a concentrated DDOS.

Bitcoin's network effect has always experienced exponential growth during its 5-year lifespan. When dealing with exponential growth, logarithmic graphs are almost always used to filter out the noise of day-trading and delineate magnitudes of growth in a scalable manner, this is statistics 101 material.

Don't trivialize. You can use log graphs to show exponential growth, but as Looper and me mentioned, you can't use it to prove correlations, because your precision is shot to hell at high orders. Your graph shows how on average the two progressions correlate, but the squared one's variance is smoothed out in a log scale while in reality it grows exponentially. You can use the representation, but not that way.

While your questions are not unintelligent, they are delivered in an accusatory manner that makes it hard to have a intelligent, civil discourse. I think you know this.

While your answers are not unintelligent, they're cherry-picking only what you feel comfortable to answer and cast an idealistic haze over valid issues, which makes an intelligent, civil discourse highly annoying. And you definitely know this.

Notice that while Fraggle and I disagree on matters, because of our intellectual rigor and honesty, we are able to develop a progressive dialogue in which we can agree to disagree.

Maybe you two should get married. At a university. With Richard Dawkins reading your vows. My previous outburst was mainly triggered by this bit. How arrogant and pompous do you have to be to attribute yourself with intellectual rigor and honesty? How is that any better than my snarky insults of the fanatic bitcoin followers?

Rather than focusing on what the chart has wrong, it might be more useful to ask what it got right or what interesting questions it poses. I understand that it makes some pretty concrete fairly near term predictions about bitcoins which may be falsifiable, — and hey, making a falsifiable prediction would put it ahead of a lot of things.

On the other hand, this made me laugh. I'm a huge Kelly's Heroes fan and I admit, I've been hitting you with them negative waves all this time.

"Ah ha! it cannot work, I've found the flaw!" Right on. It's certainly invigorating to attempt to poke holes in someone's argument without putting in due intellectual rigor and without checking if one is asking even valid questions in the first place.

Me being a dick doesn't make my arguments any less valid and nor does using pseudo-sophisticated science-like lingo make your arguments any more right. Gotta deal with facts.

But to answer your question: bitcoin is a protocol, a math... it has no practical language or societal barriers, so that formula you stumbled upon doesn't apply here.

Right back at you, buddy. If it's a protocol, a math, you cannot use Metcalfe's Law on it, because it deals with networks. And in those, nodes (people) interact. The barriers are there, whether they've manifested themselves yet or not. Checkmate, atheists.

So why are you complaining about wikipedia articles to me anyway? Be honest with yourself. You come off pretty immature.

The article uses speculative claims. It was your link that introduced us to it. I'm pointing out how shallow it is. Don't insult me at parts where my objections are thoroughly justified.

Metcalfe's law is mathematical and certainly verifiable, if you are good at math. Sounds to me like an excuse to try to find a random, opportunistic argument to try to debunk my point without doing the heavy mental lifting.

I've never attacked Metcalfe's law, but the dodgy way you interpret it and superimpose it over an arbitrary graph. That is anything but rigorous, but mostly it is just yelling "these graphs don't lie" to a Shakira melody.

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dew said:

(Teenage angst)

Ok buddy. While you keep dwelling on fringe arguments, I'm just going to get rich off my analysis.

We'll revisit this conversation in a few months and we'll do a post-mortem on why you're wrong.

... actually, I'll just continue the dialogue with someone who is worth my time, like some of the more intelligentsia members of this forum. Peasants like you are not worthy of my time.

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Doom Marine said:

Ok buddy. While you keep dwelling on fringe arguments, I'm just going to get rich off my analysis.

Oh, I believe you. The Ponzi scheme is still running strong, so if you get out at the right time, you can sit on your dollar pile and laugh at the morons left with worthless bitcoins. Then again, you tried to prove how btc is a game-changer that will become a true currency/stable investment tool/e-Jesus and that's where my fringe arguments rear their ugly head and your graphs are sadly still logarithmic.

We'll revisit this conversation in a few months and we'll do a post-mortem on why you're wrong.

Will we discuss how you gamed the system and gambled money out of idiots, or how I cringe in shame remembering my futile struggle against the mental powerhouse Doom Marine every time I use a btc paycard to pay for my groceries?

... actually, I'll just continue the dialogue with someone who is worth my time, like some of the more intelligentsia members of this forum. Peasants like you are not worthy of my time.

Couldn't have been more douchey right there.

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Doom Marine said:

Ok buddy. While you keep dwelling on fringe arguments, I'm just going to get rich off my analysis.


Yes, enjoy that mountain of pizza, veggie wraps and..hotel rooms. (?)

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lol why he losered? when all else fails, use moderator powers? or what happened? xd

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This is hilarious. Doom Marine's replies throughout the thread remind me of a devoted religious/cult follower who can't bear to hear anyone contradict his cherished beliefs. This is exactly what I meant when I said that I hate the Bitcoin "community": it's full of hundreds of true believers just like this, who have collectively convinced themselves of a shared delusion where Bitcoin is the beginning of some new revolutionary new financial paradigm that's going to change the world.

More importantly, isn't this the exact kind of response we see from people when they find out they're the victim of a ponzi scheme, pyramid scheme, scam, etc.?

I find the technical design of Bitcoin fascinating and deviously clever. But watching Bitcoin over the past year and observing its toxic circlejerk of a community has pretty much destroyed any interest in it that I initially had.

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Technician said:

Can some one change his title to a fool and his money...

Your request has been granted. :D

@Memfis - I suspect he was drop-kicked into Losers by a higher power.

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Doom Marine said:

What determines it's value? Math. Metacafe's law. In practice, BTC's value has almost perfect correlation with the square-root rate of transactions per time period:

An interesting report came out a couple of days ago detailing massive market manipulation by Mt.Gox in the period it was in operation. Looks like this "Metcalfe's law" thing is complete bunk.

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I'm still waiting to be convinced that Bitcoin is worth the sheer hassle. If every Bitcoin needs to be converted into fiat money, why not use the fiat money in the first place? At least my bank reimburses me when my debit card gets stolen, with Bitcoin I'd be SOL.

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The 3 day (meaning each candle is 3 days long, not the whole chart is 3 days which confused me when I first became familar with candle charts) chart at bitcoinwisdom has an obvious bull breakout from months of being bear (the rise of this wave is higher than the previous wave rather than lower, which was the case on all previous waves). So it will probably start waving upward now. The main up part of the wave already happened though, so might be slightly down for a month or so.

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fraggle said:

An interesting report came out a couple of days ago detailing massive market manipulation by Mt.Gox in the period it was in operation. Looks like this "Metcalfe's law" thing is complete bunk.

Read that when it came out, still inconclusive. This is venturing into conspiracy theory that rarely can ever be conclusively proven nor disproven.

I'm inclined to think that yes, the market is manipulated by Markus and Willy, but to what quantifiable degree? Most of the bitcoin community already knew in 2013 that MtGox could not be trusted, hence a large portion of trading activity is distributed elsewhere that year.

http://media.coindesk.com/2014/02/140208_CoinDesk_Removes_Mt__Gox_from_BPI_docx.png

As a trader, if I tried to manipulate the prices on one market while ignoring the others, arbitrage will eat it all up.

To the author's credit, he has shown correlation, but he hasn't proven the causal link between prices and bot activity (or inactivity), which asks the question: was the bot driving the price? Or was it merely following the market?

The author pointed out that the bots only come alive during rallies, and inactive during stagnation and decline. Can it be proven that the bot led the rallies? And to what quantifiable degree?

In light of these questions, I don't think the price manipulation necessarily debunk the Metcalfe correlation in the manner nor magnitude you think it does, as I've shown in the previous posts that the Metcalfe value still correlates well with the market many months post-MtGox collapse.

Last but not least, here is an Occam's Razor counterpoint to the Willy bot theory:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/26is61/the_simplest_explanation_is_usually_the_right_one/

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I have roughly $3,500 USD in BTC.
That's where I cut it off. As of right now I am ahead by nearly $500.

If it brings returns, awesome.
If it doesn't, then that's my fault for buying into this.

I can forgive myself if I lose that money though, I didn't strain myself financially to take this gamble. To be clear, that's exactly how I view this: A gamble. I find this much more interesting than blowing thousands of dollars on other hobbies I finally started to phase out of.

I'm really not able to give a useful opinion on the semantics of crypto currency and where it is going to be in the end. The community behind this stuff melts my brain so I only follow news and trends.

Also I cracked up at Doom Marine's custom title, ha!

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Mr. Freeze said:

I'm still waiting to be convinced that Bitcoin is worth the sheer hassle. If every Bitcoin needs to be converted into fiat money, why not use the fiat money in the first place? At least my bank reimburses me when my debit card gets stolen, with Bitcoin I'd be SOL.

To be honest, I would not recommend bitcoins to someone who isn't tech-literate and/or know what they're doing... that's just tragedy waiting to happen.

From a technical point of view, bitcoin as a medium of exchange is more frictionless than the current fiat structure we have now. If hypothetically, all businesses were to accept bitcoin, then you wouldn't need to convert to fiat money at all.

The hassle aspect you brought up is the chicken-or-the-egg dilemma that a lot of venture capital is trying to solve for mass-adoption. We'll have to wait and see.

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Doom Marine said:

Last but not least, here is an Occam's Razor counterpoint to the Willy bot theory:[/url]

Wow, that's pretty damn desperate. Occam's Razor doesn't prove anything, this is another bullshit bitcoin apologist construction. Actually, almost any fraudulent behaviour in the history of mankind would slip through the cracks of the Occam's Razor principle, because it's a goddamn scheme to game the system. If fraud was the simplest explanation, everyone would see it from a mile away (just most of us do in this case).

Occam's Razor is a logical tool that picks out the simplest hypothesis amongst competing ones as the most probable explanation. Your poster presents a competing theory, but he doesn't even start explaining why it should be considered simpler than the fraud hypothesis. He just magically assumes so, because now there are two hypotheses, so Occam's Razor, ha! Actually, he even claims the bot was purely a reactive simplistic algorithm. If that was true, it would be rather disappointing in an environment where every goddamn fool makes short AND long-term predictions.

In short, this is exactly like the Metcalfe's Law issue - a manipulative usage of an abstract rule on data that can never fit it without serious tampering. To be a hypocrite and use Occam's Razor inappropriately myself, the Mt.Gox guys are obvious crooks. The simplest explanation should be that they were crooks all the way and tried to gamble the system as hard as they could... hm?

EDIT: tl;dr If Occam's Razor was a real proof, Pluto would still be a planet.

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dew said:

Occam's Razor is a logical tool that picks out the simplest hypothesis amongst competing ones as the most probable explanation.



Occam's Razor picks theory with the fewest assumptions.

It states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.

assumption =/= simplicity

Thank you for playing my game of logic 101, buddy.

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dew, his custom title inexplicably no longer says fool, so he undoubtedly must be right. Or a mod jumped the bit-coin bandwagon.

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So you corrected my definition of Occam's Razor, but that hasn't removed any of those assumptions from your guy's "it's all just a coincidence" theory. You still lose in my game of applying logic to fucking reality. 101.

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Of course I corrected you, my logic is correct.

How can anyone trust you to be correct when you can't even get your fundamentals of logic correct?

Hmmm?

;)

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