Note to any newcomers reading this: The site posted above has been around for less than half a year (ie. has yet to build a reputation), so be careful. Then again SafeDICE has been around for a couple of years before it went AWOL so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nice looking site though, will definitely keep an eye on you!

As pointed out by hugeblack most of these services are not yet established, so caveat emptor! Same even goes for already established sites like Bitfinex, unfortunately.

Either way, I got another addition for your list -- Bitstamp:
https://www.bitstamp.net/lightning-network-node/

Stats as of writing:

From the looks of it this halving countdown doesn't take hashrate growth into account, so you might be lucky

98 days (as of today) is what you get when you assume the average 144 blocks per day to be true. While difficulty should adjust every 14 days (ie. every 2016 blocks) continous hashrate growth can lead to more blocks being mined towards the end of a difficulty period until difficulty re-adjusts (the opposite is true when hashrate declines).

So for the last few cycles the average blocktime was closer to 09:30 rather than 10:00:
https://btc.com/stats/diff

Leading to an average of 151.5 blocks per day.

As of right now there's still 14,212 blocks left to the next halving, which means adjusting for 151.5 blocks per day would put the next halving in 94 days, ie. on the 8th of May rather than the 12th. The 8th of May would be a Friday, so keep your fingers crossed that the Bitcoin network keeps growing the way it has for the last few weeks Or maybe that growth slows down just a little bit, as to put the halving on a Saturday.

After seeing the occasional thoughtless newbie post about combining blockchain with machine learning (who cares about details as long as we put buzzwords together amirite?) it's nice to finally see something with a bit more substance.

What bothers me a bit is that the concept of PoUW seems to be more like a red herring, with the actual security coming from a PoS system trying to keep participants honest. That is on top of what odolvlobo posted regarding PoW requiring "useless" work for security.

Their treatment of Sybil Attacks also looks a bit hand-wavy to me. Disallowing nodes to pick their own tasks might work if you only have a limited number of bad actors; I have my doubts that this would be effective enough in a more serious scenario.

Either way I still need to dig a bit deeper into that paper. Thanks for sharing!

Not directly related to decentralized exchanges, but if you're looking to expand your background knowledge of core concepts of cryptocurrencies and blockchains I'd recommend the following article as a starting point:

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559

Y'all need proper data protection laws.

GDPR got a lot of flak for forcing people to cLicK aWaY uNneCesSaRy cOoKie wARnInGs but it's the sort of legislation created for redeeming exactly that.

For EU citizens there's the Right of access, which includings, amongst other things, information regarding:


(yes, I'm aware of the irony of quoting a UK site just a couple days short of Brexit)

Apart from that, if you're tired of using opaque and untrustworthy exchanges... stop using them. It's a free market, there's plenty of alternatives out there these days.

Bitcoin's hashing power is so overwhelming that even after killing off half its network you'd still have plenty of protection left. Obsolete mining farms would take their place as mining becomes profitable for older hardware again.



There's not enough hashing power available for rent to mount a reasonable attack. Simply seizing private property of highly profitable companies to then run these companies into the ground on the off-chance that one could get enough hashing power for a successful attack is a losing proposition.




Which means less hardware being produced meaning less hardware being available for a potential attack.




Making PoW mining illegal would simply push mining operations to countries where mining is still legal -- assuming you could even successfully persecute miners.

A price drop caused by unfavorable regulation would lessen Bitcoin's hashrate but still not make an attack much easier (ie. see my answere to (3) above)

Kommt nach Österreich, solange sogar die Post am Bitcoin-Handel mitverdient sind wir einigermaßen sicher!

Hast du genauere Infos dazu was sich in Italien rechtlich geändert hat? Das einzige was ich auf die schnelle finden konnte war die Senkung des Bargeld-Limits von EUR 3.000,- auf EUR 2.000,-.

That's the downside of running on an "ASIC-proof" PoW algorithm -- more easily available hashing power that can just as easily be reused for another coin so you don't even have to shoot your own foot when running an attack.

BTG having relatively small hashing power to begin with didn't make things much better.

I'm curious to see with which blockchain analysis company they'll end up working with. Chainalysis already has the IRS on their list of clients, adding the HMRC to that list would further cement their position in the market. On the other hand, who knows what the other companies have up their sleeves.

Still, with a budget of GBP 100,000,- I don't seem them going very far as far as mixers and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies are concerned. Either way yet another reason to focus on privacy and stay a step ahead of governmental institutions.

Since Peter Schiff's tweet is what lead to this thread, an update might be in order:



Learn how to use wallets, folks! You can't have financial sovereignity without personal responsibility!

To be more concrete, the Bitcoin bootstrap torrent used to save time, but since 0.10.0 the direct download via Bitcoin Core is actually faster [1].

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bin/block-chain/README.txt


@OP: If you're not planning on running a full node consider using a SPV wallet such as Electrum ( https://electrum.org/ ) instead. That way you can use Bitcoin without having to download the whole blockchain.

There's very little to no competition for Bitcoin's hashpower which probably won't change for two reasons:

1) Transaction-fees-only from a highly valued cryptocurrency is still more profitable (ie. able to pay for more hashpower) than transaction-fees-with-block-subsidy from a cryptocurrency that has very little value. LN is unlikely to "steal" fees from miners as there's still transactions to be made and mining fees to be paid -- just shared across a much larger user base, decreasing the cost for the individual. That's if LN succeeds. If it fails its impact on mining fees will be -- obviously -- nil.

2) The largest cryptocurrencies sharing their hashing algorithms with Bitcoin are (currently) Bitcoin hard forks that follow the same emission rate, so they have no advantage in terms of transaction-fees-with-block-subsidy vs transaction-fees-only. All other SHA256 coins are way out in the water, the introduction of new SHA256 coins (apart from the stray Bitcoin hard fork) is unlikely to happen.


That being said, what's your opinion on Ethereum's Casper?

Thanks for the link, Bitmain just gets more likeable by the minute. In that case I'd also keep my head down, jesus christ.

It's not that I have much sympathy for Bitmain, but getting into legal troubles for merely selling mining equipment to the wrong company does seem a bit excessive. Maybe it's just a way of "playing it safe" and covering all their legal bases?

Most coins were lost in the early days, so any coins that are being lost now are little more than a drop in the bucket. Also I think it's fairly safe to assume that the majority of people and companies holding significant amount of coins nowadays know better than to lose their password, so the amount of coins being lost over the next few years will probably be rather limited.

Be aware that the letters are just numbers as well in this case.

Hashes are commonly displayed as hexadecimal numbers -- ie. base 16 instead of base 10 as is commonly used in day-to-day live -- hence the letters are simply numbers as well (a = 10, b = 11 and so on).

SegWit-enabled nodes (ie. non-legacy nodes) will deem the transaction invalid and ignore it.

Legacy nodes (ie. ones that can't validate SegWit transactions as emphasized by nc50lc) will deem the transaction valid and fork off the main chain (assuming there's enough legacy nodes left to propagate this transaction amongst each other). Unless the majority of miners decide to follow this fork it will be orphaned rather quickly though.

Yes, see opentimestamps.org as posted by Abdussamad for an example of how this can work.



Assuming you have been using a secure hashing algorithm to create a hash of the data, you have reasonable proof that the data you stored off-chain has not been modified.

However the data itself is only as save as your off-chain storage (ie. if the server or cloud service goes down that hosts the data, the data disappears as well).



See above.

To unlock your wallet file the password you used when initially setting up the wallet should be all you need. When opening your wallet in Electrum, it will ask you for the password. There's no username, if that's what you're asking.