Run a Lightning Node.. 

For either a Soft or Hard fork, the majority of miners need to agree.

But with a soft fork, anyone running software that DOESN'T MINE, doesn't need to update their software or change anything.

The easiest soft-fork to understand is a reduction in the block size. So .. let's say the miners decide to Halve the Block Size.

All the people running validating nodes (not miners) don't have to change their software, as the blocks are still completely valid as far as they are concerned, they are just small.

If every on-chain transaction, or most, was a CoinSwap, and they all used Confidential Transactions.. 

You could send any amount, via somebody else (within reason as you need to find someone who has that amount), without it being traceable, as the inputs/outputs are CT. You are no longer stuck having to send the same amounts.. same as CoinJoin+CT but with a far greater anonymity set, and yet you only have to find 1 other participant

This means that no-one would actually ever send money directly to anyone else, it would always go via somebody else. And you can't tell which transactions are linked.

Would you count that as Anonymous ? .. only the 2 people involved in the coinswap would know..

( I'm working on something and this popped up.. made me think )

Bi-directional Payment Channels allow 2 parties to send each other Bitcoins off-chain, backwards and forwards, up to the amount initially sent by both parties, forever.

This is what allows the Lightning Network to operate. And is very cool.

The problem is that each user has to lock up a certain amount of funds in the channel, and so cannot start up another channel with another user using those coins EVEN if he's not using them directly.

What if you could start up a Trinary Channel, with 3 users ?

This would look very similar to a Bi-Directional channel, but the initial MultiSig setup transaction, would be 3of3.

Then, instead of there only being 2 publishable transactions, there would be 3. One for each participant, and the HTLC would require BOTH secrets from the other 2 users to unlock. Again, all users would have to agree to update the channel, and no user could run off with a previous transaction, without allowing the other 2 to steal their coins. And as a last resort everyone can publish their latest transaction to collect what is owed them.

This way your coins can cover a much larger group of users, since each user would have access to the total amount, rather than chopped up little bits.

And you could obviously go higher. 4of4, 5of5..

I think the ICO frenzy has passed.. There was a couple of month period.. where DIM simply had to be on a functioning exchange. But it failed.

Unfortunately.. DIMcoin has missed the current boat. I'll keep mine, almost worthless anyway, but have almost no hope of them 'Pumping' to a 'Wow' level.

Maybe in 6 months. Not much lower it can go to be fair..

 

I'm sorry - but that is complete rubbish.

How would you like your landlord to know you have had a pay rise and then raise your rent ?

How would you like your business competitor to know how much you are making off your knew product and to know whether that strategy is worth copying ?

And - as for Drugs - This Ridiculous War on Drugs is the single biggest waste of time, money and energy in the history of forever. God - I wish people would grow up and realise that all the negative press / violence is a direct result of not legalising and taxing it. A moron could work it out.. So I'm not sure what that says about the current crop of utterly useless governments.

Financial privacy is a requirement of any forward thinking society (where money is still in use).

Anyway - it won't matter soon, as they'll crack it, and we'll all be CoinShuffling our CT'ed coins in a single aggregate signature block.. and no one will know what the hell is going on..

Take the first bit of Hash(blockhash) of the last 64 blocks.

Make a 64 bit number. Hash That.

It's random.

Everyone can calculate it independently.

lol.. Exactly!

What I find quite astounding is the pace at which these problems of old are being fixed. They're being knocked down at, dare I say it, Lightning speed.

I'm losing the, admittedly small, ability to think there will be an issue that Bitcoin can't fix on it's path to global dominance.

(searched but saw no mention of this paper.. I must have missed the original if it was mentioned)

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/new-scaling-layer-could-make-payment-channels-ten-times-more-effective/

Wow.. They've only gone and bloody fixed it.

A Lightning Network..  for the Lightning Network.

Basically it's a Layer inbetween the mainnet and Lightning that is used to create and rebalance funding channels (ALL OFF CHAIN!).

So that 90% of txns that create payment channels no longer need to be created on the mainnet (96% if we have Schnorr Sigs). That can be done in this middle layer.

It's.. Awesome.

The one big gripe people have about Lightning is the fact you have to create a lot of payment channels on-chain (and ergo pay the BIG fees), but with this, you don't have to. You just have to be a part of one of the groups that is in this middle layer. Then you can create channels to anyone in any of the connected large groups, completely off-chain. And they can all be rebalanced.

Boom

Ok.. So Bitcoin (..and Ethereum) have hit the proverbial scaling wall. Both are running rather slooowwww.. and expensive.

No other coin has faced this level of traffic yet, but any large coin will eventually have EXACTLY the same issues.I have read almost EVERY white paper out there. No one has come up with THE solution. They all say - yeah we can handle 1000 txn/s.. but they just make the blocks bigger or the traffic demands greater. They are not in my mind million txn/s solutions.

BTC has tried to come up with a solution which doesn't involve giving over ALL control to a few miners. It is called OFF_CHAIN txns. This can scale to a million txn/s.

You will recognise it as 'The Lightning Network'.

That's what needs to happen now.

If FaceBook started up a lightning hub, so that any facebook user could send Bitcoins instantly to any other facebook user (trustlessly I might add)... then..

Boom. All your base are belong to us.

lets hope in 2018 - BTC - Rides the Lightning !

Then that's it. 1 Million $$ bitcoin.

At it's core Confidential Transactions use an ability known as 'Additively Homomorphic'.

this means that given a 'Additively Homomorphic' hash function H.

H(x) + H(y) = H(x+y)

Since you know that the inputs to a txn must equal the outputs (minus the fee - this is handled slightly differently) you know that the sum of the hash of the inputs equals the sum of the hash of the outputs.

It gets a little more complicated when you think about negative numbers but #gmax has come up with a range proof that ensures the answer is not negative (or not so large as to cause an overflow)

So a miner can easily check that the sum of the hashed inputs equals the sum of the hashed outputs without having any idea what the values actually are.

Once you throw in ValueShuffle, the ultimate version of CoinShuffle, the trust-less version of CoinJoin.. bingo.

IMHO .. superior to monero and zcash.. (there's no bloat, no infinitely growing set of data you can't prune, easy maths, no trusted setup.. etc)

Can't wait..  

... Lightning network.. will allow near-infinite off chain txns. Your light switch, along with the rest of your house, will have a payment channel open. ping ping ping. Of course they won't be on-chain txns.


I'm not saying use floating point.. I was just using that as an example of doubling precision from float to double.

I'm saying increase the number of ZEROs allowed after the decimal point, whatever the number format. so 0.0000000000000001 would be a valid amount. There are still only only 21 million btc.

Even if BTC only went to 100k.. haha.. it would still require sub-satoshi payments if you were counting every light switch on\off, or every single byte of data sent from a certain server.

Since I DO see that happening in the next 10 years, and it could take 5 years to pull off a fork (IF we can even pull another one off successfully, since I have a feeling it's only going to  get harder the larger Bitcoin gets ), then I think the next fork is probably the one to aim for.

Also - I would definitely think over compensation is the order of the day. IPv6 with it's 4 byte addition is way too small. They should have gone 8 and be done with it. They're just going to have to do it all again. Literally DECADES..

I know it takes more power to compute and store.. but I would still add 8 bytes. Orders of magnitude more than 4. Then that would be it. Honest miners could limit the minimum spend. But I'd also be up for a variable precision solution, if someone had a good one.


I'll get the popcorn.
 
..

Can it be done as a soft-fork ?

6 months go I would have agreed absolutely, but it's pretty crazy out there. It may take 5 good years to get another fork in place.


Lightning is round the corner. Next year it will start being used properly. I think we're very close now. And there is nothing blocking it's implementation. It's definitely coming.


I think there will be disagreement about whether to make it a one off 'doubling' of precision (float -> double) or a more permanent variable precision representation.

I can see arguments for both. Although - lol - a 'double' should do it. They may find other things to do with the numbers.

I honestly never thought this day would or even could come so soon, but now I'm not so sure.

With 8 decimal places, if BTC hits 1 million, 1 satoshi is 1cent.. So we can't do sub-cent micro txns. An area Lightning Networks will utterly transform and finally make possible. You could be paying fractions every time you turn a light on. Maaaany use cases.

Since a 'fork' takes, well, at least a couple of years to pull off, and since 5 years from now 'may' be too late, I guess this may have to be thought about for the very next fork (dare I mention it) ?

Wow.. Is that a possibility ?

Is there a plan yet - I'm sure there are many options.. Is there a preferred current best guess ? (Just go float->double ? )

Can it be done with a soft fork ? Sounds pretty hard-forkish to me, but they can do amazing things now SegWit's activated.

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2017/11/30/2017-was-the-year-when-everyone-finally-learned-bitcoin-isnt-controlled-by-miners/

It's not the miners.

 

Absolutely.

From the BIP. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_Network

Thinking about it a little more.. of course it's safe 

No one on the network would know if you were sending the coins to yourself anyway.

So using this technique you can refill/rebalance your channels, by sending funds from other channels you are part of back to yourself via a specific route, without having to open/close anything on the main chain (send a BTC txn..).

I am working on a fee-less decentralised P2P LN network. not HUB based (there is a difference). This technique may prove quite useful.

Bi-directional payment channels allow the lightning network to work.

At some point one side of a channel may be empty and all the funds belong to just one of the channel owners. This means the other party cannot send extra funds on this channel, and must either multi-hop the funds, or close the current channel and open a new one with new funds. It also means that this channel cannot be used in other multi-hop payments in both directions, restricting available options.

Say for instance I had some funds in a channel with StarBucks. Paid for my coffee every morning.

Although this is a bi-directional channel most of the traffic, if not all, would be one way. When I had sent all the funds available to me, that channel would be pretty useless for me, but could still be used to send multi hop funds one way for other parties.

It would be in StarBucks interest to refill that channel, off-chain of course, so that my payment experience with them would be uninterrupted and seamless. It would also be good for me, as I would not have to publish an expensive on-chain BTC txn to settle up. And good for the LN network as the channel could be used in other multi-hop payments in both directions again.

....

What if there were 3 channels, which circled back to me. There could be more, but they must create a circle where the same 'side' of every channel has more funds.

In this extreme case all the participants of the path are completely bottom-heavy in funds, the number in the brackets.

Spartacus[0]   -> StarBucks[10]
StarBucks[0]   -> Epicurus[10]
Epicurus[0]     -> Spartacus[10]

In total :
Spartacus has 10
StarBucks had 10
Epicurus has 10

And now you perform a txn that sends 5 each on their respective channels. this is zero sum since every sender is also a receiver.

Spartacus sends 5 to Epicurus
Epicurus sends 5 to StarBucks
StarBucks send 5 to Spartacus

(This is why all the channels must be bottom heavy, as only one top heavy link in the chain can prevent it from working)

So the new channel positions are

Spartacus[5]   -> StarBucks[5]
StarBucks[5]   -> Epicurus[5]
Epicurus[5]     -> Spartacus[5]

In total :
Spartacus has 10
StarBucks had 10
Epicurus has 10 .. all good.

Now the channel is back to being fully useful again.

I am not 100% sure if this sequence of off-chain txns can be performed atomically (securely) ? Your basically sending a payment to yourself on a special route. So you would know the hash of the hash lock contract at the start. I don't think it screws with anything ?

( Or is this something that is being considered already ? Did look but could not find this specifically.. )

Hello.

trying to send some DIM from DepotWallet.

Says I need Stamps ?

I have scoured the site, and the the web, and this thread.. not much mention Anywhere of these.. hmm..

Can someone explain how you get Stamps ? What they are.. ?

Thanks.