There are issues with this approach, and this is quite serious in the current state of the network. If people use Ordinals, then they stop regular users from making on-chain payments. As long as you don't have transaction joining, it is a choice between putting Ordinals, and putting other payment-related transactions. If you have only payment-related transactions, then you can for example apply cut-through. Then, it doesn't matter that Alice send something to Bob, and later Bob sent it to Charlie. If after 20 transactions, it could be simplified into a transfer from Alice to Zack, then all that matters, is the amount of coins received in the end. But this is not true in case of Ordinals, because if they are cut in the middle, then you practically lose that data.

Also, I wonder how Ordinals will respond to the cut-through. Because this method is something that can be used to specifically kill Ordinals, while leaving regular payments unaffected. However, as I told you previously, "nobody tested that", so I wonder what will happen, when some on-chain optimizations will kick in. So far, MimbleWimble was resistant to Ordinals, which means that weapon could be used to hit two birds with one stone: improve scalability, while killing Ordinals at the same time, because then on-chain users could at least have any weapon to compete with them.

Not to mention that such approach will effectively force Ordinals' users to move into some second layers, exactly as they should from the very beginning. Because the problem with them is not that they want to put some data. The problem is that they want to store everything on-chain, and cut-through could be used to push them in a better direction.

In case of Ordinals, it is just "Enormous Block Size Increases" path. Only in that case, you can actually store all of them on the first layer. They are not resistant to cut-through. Also, if you encourage people to put more things, then you will only flood mempools. Only a fraction of transactions will confirm, and obviously fees will rise, but then, implementing cut-through will be needed immediately, to transact on-chain at all.

1. Enormous Block Size Increases: this is what BCH community did, as well as a lot of other altcoins. You can see, where they are now, and make some conclusions, based on that.
2. Violate 21M Coin Limit: this topic was raised some time ago, you can read here, how it was commented: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5405755.0
3. >50% Miner Fee-Revenues Come From Merged Mining: you can see some federations (also known as "somewhat centralized" sidechains, like Liquid or RSK). We don't have fully decentralized sidechains yet, there were some proposals, like BIP-300 and BIP-301, but because first attempts were rejected, I guess people will try activating sidechains in other ways, or switch to some entirely different ideas, if all proposals will be killed.

But also, it could be the fourth way, called "Something Else". I don't know exactly, what it could be. We can only guess, for example it could be first-layer non-interactive cut-through, that could make it "cheap for users", while being "expensive in blocks" at the same time, when you combine N transactions paying single satoshis each, into a single transaction paying N satoshis that will finally land in a block. But it could be something completely different, it is just based on guessing and predicting the future.

Saudi Arabia is a sovereign state and they have the right to decide to whom they sell their oil and in what currency to take payment. One million barrels for Saudi Arabia is not that big of a deal to do a test trade in Indian rupees just to set a precedent and show the US that a half-century-old agreement to exclusively trade oil in dollars has lost its relevance due to changes in the geopolitical landscape.

"Trade-off" means you gain something in exchange for sacrificing something else.  Coinjoins do not require a user to forfeit custody of their data and their coins, we can confirm that "mixing sites" are scams since they force their users to give up their data and their custody for no benefit.

I know, the first time you heard about Wasabi you were insisting that it would be a terrible idea to coinjoin since it would include funds from criminals:

Bitcoin may seem fungible within its own protocol, but external entities are applying “taint” information to coins, making Bitcoin infungible in practice. Most large exchanges are automatically performing risk assessment on incoming customer coins. While it’s easy to claim Bitcoin also has obvious plausible deniability, that does’t matter to Coinbase, Circle, Cash App, etc. They are applying taint with enough confidence to close your account.

https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/bitcoin-is-not-fungible-should-it-be-620a28f3f8b1

Framing loss of custody as a "trade-off" is dishonest since there is no benefit to the user for having their data collected and coins taken.

You can stop feigning disbelief that mixing sites are scamming their users, you are well aware of this since you gained 0.31150000 BTC as your share from promoting Chipmixer:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1935179.msg19291440#msg19291440

@Kruw
I am really glad you are showing this immature and childish side of you.

You are right, there are advantages to using the dollar as the world's universal reserve currency, which is why the dollar is so widely accepted around the world as the world's universal reserve currency. Unfortunately, the United States began to abuse its privileges by imposing unilateral sanctions right and left - which is why even in the recent past, loyal US allies are thinking about alternative options to reduce the political risks of using the dollar and not be left completely without money for already delivered oil.

You don't protect your users by collecting their data and taking their coins. 

Bitcoiners deserve better than being scammed by mixing sites.  They deserve open source software that never requires you to trust anyone:  Wasabi Wallet.

Ignore me then, I don't care.  This thread is for Bitcoiners who want to preserve their privacy, not for people who want to trust third parties:

THE "[banned mixer]" SCAM SAYS IT "runs a thorough background check of incoming funds through a proprietary algorithm" AND "reserves the right to suspend or terminate access to services at any time at its own discretion, with or without reasons, with or without notification assuming no responsibility whatsoever" AND CAN "suspend or terminate services over an actual or suspected violation of these Terms and Conditions".

ETFs are a slightly different concept to conventional custodians, though.  They are effectively issuing shares based on the assets that they hold, rather than accepting deposits of the asset in question from their clients.  And because they don't take deposits, it's unlikely they could engage in anything resembling fractional reserve, so that's not really a concern like it is with Bitcoin exchanges and webwallets.

To be honest, I see a lot of conflicting answers in this thread, and apparently some people don't understand the idea of rewarding members based on merit. This concept is based on encouraging users to publish quality posts. So that users have an incentive to reach the point where they will receive the maximum rate (this is why it is important to have several levels of rewards).

The peculiarity is that when a user crosses the mark of 3000 merits (mostly), he stops thinking about merits, so his posts are organic and such users are very interesting to managers. In addition, as soon as the user begins to position participation in the campaign as a hobby and not as an income, he immediately becomes desirable for any manager (believe me, this is very noticeable).

I want to add that no project will invest resources in marketing initiatives if there are no tangible results, and there will be none if the published posts are lost in mega threads (after all, the highest quality discussion fits on the first two pages of the thread).

Wallet refilled.
Current balance: 0.35137179 BTC

We will have a new payroll structure from next week. I will announce it in the next few days.
In summary, Green Zone will be removed and Merit Rank will be introduced.

---

Two parallel questions to get community feedback.
- Maximum 50 posts per week is good enough or 40 per week is better?
- Would you like to have $250 or $200 per week?

I am not considering opinion from average quality posters but posters who do not chase weekly maximum limits, who posts because they shares valuable insights and guidance. I would like to have opinion from current Green Zone, Legendary and many other prominent bitcointalk members.

Please share your thoughts.

Cheers,

Why not both? Why do we have to stick in one no matter what? Sure, encouraging people holding their own bitcoin is good, but apparently, the regulatory oversight and the convenience an ETF provide outweighs the benefit of doing self-custody for institutional investors.

Let's accept it already. Regulations aren't in favor of the Bitcoin spirit. If we truly like the concept of a decentralized, denationalized, free enterprise money, then accepting the governmental compromises is inevitable. Achieving the desired outcome, which is more or less to make Bitcoin official, involves sacrifices. Otherwise we will continuously remain the unofficial, non-systemic currency.

I don't see anything problematic, let alone laughable, in this situation. What could be wrong with the development of balanced bilateral trade relations between the two countries? India exports offshore programming services every year for what seems to be about $400 billion, why not trade some of that for a million barrels of oil from Saudi Arabia, or does Saudi Arabia need programming services at all?

I think that Saudi Arabia is still buying them, just paying for it with US dollars, which it receives for the sale of its oil. Why is the US dollar in this scheme, is it not an extra link that only imposes a few percent of additional overhead on conversion and does not carry any useful semantic load?

It's too hard to implement. Theoretically, it would be possible to use bitcoin for these purposes, and there is a certain economic sense in this, but the governments of the BRICS countries are unlikely to take this step for political reasons.

silly conversations i see even people that have been in the community for 6+ years:

"the coins are yours even if they are not confirmed/settled to your key"
"bitcoin payments happen in seconds and can handle million transactions a second"
"bitcoin relies on middlemen to pass payments along a route"
"bitcoin has more then 8 decimals"
"to use bitcoin you need to choose a partner"

to me these people are talking about other networks pretending to be bitcoin. which then makes other newbies have a bad experience when they see bitcoin is not like how these first idiots explain it to them

If BRICS wanted to hurt the USA economy that badly, China could do it by dumping much of their USD bonds in the market, and yet Pekin seems to be more interested in getting yield out their bonds in the long term, as they build their own system to face the hegemony of the dollar. I still believe that it will be very difficult to achieve, but not impossible.

It would take all the BRICS members to adopt a second mutual currency in their territories o move onto the Chinese Yuan.

Also, there are altcoins which in my opinion are more suitable as first-layer solution to be a threat to the traditional financial sistema than Bitcoin, because problems of scalability, mostly. Sadly, Bitcoin sounds to be more an asset than a currency nowadays.

And then I wonder (as well as some others) why the market reacted in such a positive way, considering that regardless of the court decision, 5+ months may still pass until the SEC makes a final decision whether to approve a spot ETF from any company. However, theoretically, the approval can also happen during 2023, considering the deadlines, especially if the SEC is a team player of the company (BR) that is closest to the top of the US government and that has the greatest chance of being the first to get the green light.

In any case, in less than half a year we will know whether the SEC will finally give in to the pressure, or whether the story will have a new continuation during the next year as well.

I would say it would be 51% on which it is really that considering that Bitcoin had failed but well numbers couldnt really be just that a solid thing that would indicate that Bitcoin did really fail.

It id really just turns out that lots of people didnt understand the true utility or the whole reason on Bitcoins existence on the time that they would be entrusting their coins into those banks which we know that they are really that heavily centralized.

There is a difference between "permissionless" and "testless". Ordinals were "testless", because they didn't write many tests they should, before going into mainnet. And that's why ownership is not enforced (nobody tested that), that's why zero satoshis can break things (nobody tested that), and that's why sighashes are not used (nobody tested that). Not to mention things like CoinJoin (also nobody tested that). Also, there are probably even more bugs in mimetypes or recursion, but they will explode later, because it is the same situation (nobody tested that).

In case of Lightning Network, it was tested, at least partially, before touching mainnet.

I like DooMAD's answer, so that puts the threshold at 2.

New participants already have to "ask" someone to use Bitcoin. Usually that "asking" involves paying them to buy Bitcoin, but the end result is the same: they need something from existing Bitcoin owners (and obviously I'm ignoring the possibility for mining here, because that's not what most new Bitcoin users do). Luckily, money talks, so there's always someone willing to make a deal.

One of the great things about Bitcoin is that it doesn't matter what other people or even governments do. "They" can use Bitcoin custodial, on side-chains and second layer, or a bank could even make up "fractional reserve Bitcoin". As long as I have my private keys, none of that matters to me.