You misunderstood me. Lightning is a completely free solution. There are already multiple free open-source implementations right now, only 1 from Blockstream. Every site can very easily implement Lightning by just using their free open-source software.





All I am saying, is that bigger companies with plenty of money, don't mind paying some expert consultants to help their own developers for the implementation. Even if it is not completely necessary, simply to make optimal usage of Lightning and know the possibilities/limitations. Just like they hire bitcoin experts now.

For example: I am also planning to learn a bit more about Lightning and work a bit with some of the implementations to gain knowledge. If Lightning will really work well in 1 year, I can definitely imagine that some gambling site owners could be interested in paying me a fee just to help them a bit on their Lightning implementation (just an example.) But in the end, any developer can gain this knowledge and it is a free open-source solution.

Every LN node is effectively a hub. It is a peer to peer network. You are correct, the more nodes/hubs, the more resistant it will be against governments. Lightning is very strongly based on the six degrees of separation (everyone in the world is 6 steps away from each other - proven in FB research too.) Of course I could imagine that gambling sites, miners, exchanges, businesses, etc who have more money might become bigger nodes. But decentralization is definitely most important.





@franky1: nothing stops you from making a LN node/hub even if you are "anti-core".

I think that being an expert consultant is worth a lot of money. Even just a presentation at some conference can earn nice $.

Since everyone, including you and I, can have their own Lightning node (="hub") and earn some small fees (which drives fees to be even lower), I do not see that as part of their potential profits.




@franky1: do you base their on their routing algorithms and such or are you just "guessing"? No one working on Lightning wants to see 1 big node as that is obviously a fail in a decentralized protocol. I am skeptical too about such details, but I do not see it as reason to make a lot of conspiracies here and effectively block such innovation from even trying. If Segwit would be enabled on mainnet, Lightning would be still experimental (and therefor only for small transactions) and routing details can be still adjusted to ensure no 1 big node will exist - obviously no one wants that.

Because it is potentially very cool innovation on top of bitcoin!

I say "potentially" because of course it still has to prove itself. But instant micro/small bitcoin transactions with very low fee, sounds pretty nice to me!





Note that Blockstream just has 2 people working on Lightning (from their 30-something? employees.) It is definitely not like their whole business is based on Lightning. If Lightning proves itself to be really a proper decentralized second layer solution for microtransactions, every company that wants to use it, could use one of those implementation. But I could imagine that some bigger companies wouldn't mind to hire an expert consultant (and pay them decent $$$) to ensure that their Lightning implementation works good for their business. So I could imagine that this would be 1 potential future revenue source for any company/developer spending time on Lightning right now.

Lol, all you guys can do is come up with idiotic, false and just stupid conspiracy theories? If Blockstream will somehow charge money for their Lightning implementation, we will just use one of the other implementations. It's a decentralized open-source protocol, you must be rather stupid to think they will get rich from it.





There are 6 separate implementations of the LN protocol:

* Amiko-Pay
* Eclair (ACINQ)
* lightningd (Blockstream)
* lit (MIT Digital Currency Initiative)
* lnd (Lightning Co) - extra projects on top of 'lnd': Colu, lncli-web, lnd-gui
* Thunder (Blockchain.info)

The middle 4 projects are most active and working on implementing the same BOLT standard, so they will be fully compatible with each other. You can test them with Bitcoin's regtest and some do work on testnet (with Segwit-enabled) already.

Even if you don't like some Core developers, it should not be a reason to support a broken risky concept "emergent consensus" and to reject Segwit without any proper technical arguments.

Segwit will give us effectively 2.1 MB blocks (if used.) If "Roger Ver" and "Jihan Wu" really cared about "more transactions", they could have Segwit activated in just a few weeks. Any blocksize increase by HF will take much longer than that - especially if you want to have a non-contentious HF (eg no blockchain split.) This should be enough reason to activate Segwit ASAP even if someone hates "Core" so much. We can just focus on a good dynamic blocksize increase with safe thresholds etc after that.

In my opinion second layers like the Lightning Network are very cool too and will be much easier with Segwit too. Buying coffee was never really feasible with bitcoin, not because of the fees, but because of the slow blocks (10 min avg, but frequently 1h.) LN will not just make micro-transactions very cheap, but also allows them to be instant. Of course it would still take years before we can really use this, but if we could at least test it on mainnet already - progress will probably go even quicker. Note that there are already 6 different LN implementations: Amiko-Pay, Eclair (ACINQ), lightningd (Blockstream), lit (MIT Digital Currency Initiative), lnd(Lightning Co), Thunder (Blockchain.info) - some of them work already on testnet. While I still have many skeptical questions about LN, it does seem nice for small (low-value) payments.

Roger Ver, open your eyes please.

The reason why the price is going down is because we don't like the BU threat that will give the power over the blocksize to just 5 mining pool operators (or effectively 1 ASIC manufacturer.) I like bitcoin for it's decentralization properties, not because I trust Jihan Wu so much. I will never accept the idiotic idea called "emergent consensus."

Big blocks are great. I definitely want to see safely planned blocksize increase after Segwit. And if it won't be merged in the beginning in Bitcoin Core, I will just support another client, but emergent consensus is still a joke and Segwit is still the obvious way forward.

If you still care about bitcoin, you should reconsider your perspective and look what is best for bitcoin.

They have been around for years already. Owner is also biggest and most trusted PH trader on LocalBitcoins: https://localbitcoins.com/accounts/profile/fort.satoshi/ (and some other LBC accounts)

That being said, with the new BSP regulations Paylance has started asking ID/KYC from (some of) their customers too.

Did a password reset and works now, guess my password manager saved wrong password hehe (:

I get the error "Invalid Login". If I remember correctly, I had that before when your servertime was off (causing the 2FA to fail.) Can you check this? TY.

Yes, you are missing that this was one of the first CoinJoin TX: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139581.0

Yes, I would love to get some free BTC from Ver too.

By stealing the DB, you cannot actually get the passwords, just the password hashes. In 2012 the method of password hashing was changed. So anyone who logged in after that (or registered after that), would have their password hashed in a very secure way. I am too lazy to do the math, but basically the password hashes before that are very easy to crack and after that would take an insane amount of computer calculation.


My point is that the real accounts who were active, still logged in after 2012 automatically causing the password hash to be changed to the much more secure method. That is why I believe most hacked account will be accounts with 0-low posts (former spam bots and other newbies), that never logged in after 2010 - (begin)2012 again. Therefor the damage is relatively limited, but could be used for selling / signature campaigns / maybe somewhat fake reputation / etc, so I do agree it is worth investigating for theymos. Note that the forum already keeps logs and theymos added extra logging methods too, like when the user changes a password: https://bitcointalk.org/seclog.php so IMO he can still do plenty of analyzing.


Hacked accounts have always been happening here for many years. Mostly because people re-use passwords on all sites. This means that if a hacker hacks any bitcoin sites (even faucet sites with ton of users), he could use those passwords on this forum. Bitcointalk also always have been the target of phishing attacks, so another way to get hacked.

As of now, I don't have very clear proof that 1) hacked newbies accounts from 2010-2012 and 2) hacked accounts after that - are related.

You are back to conspiracy theories again. Can you explain me how Blockstream exactly affects bitcoin in a bad way? Did you ever look at the projects they are working on (which are fully open-source)?

I am only glad that at least 1 company is interested in funding development of cool bitcoin improvements. Blockstream actually works (and has worked) on many interesting/innovative projects: Relative Lock Time, Segregated Witness, Lightning Network, Confidential Transactions, Sidechains, Schnorr Signatures, Mimblewimble, Extra Opcodes, etc. If any company is investigating new bitcoin innovations, it would be Blockstream.



Stop believing the /r/btc FUD blindly please.

I don't think we just need to wait, we should actively show support for Segwit too. If everyone (I don't mean reddit trolls, but real businesses and users) is clearly for Segwit, I do think it will activate. And IMO it is getting more clear every day that the community wants Segwit.

In the meanwhile, I personally do consider to sell some of my coins if miners keep going to the wrong direction. (Not for alts, I don't use any alts.) Potentially we will see lower prices - unfortunately. But maybe that is needed to wake the miners up to activate Segwit.



UASF without threshold is just like a contentious HF. I don't think many Core supporters/developers are really considering it.





PS, the latest development in my eyes is George Kikvadze of Bitfury visiting Jihan Wu yesterday. I hope he could give some proper arguments to Wu on how to improve the situation.

1.7 MB was estimated based on the transactions in 2015. Since more wallets/businesses switched to multi-sig addresses, the current estimate is 2.1 MB: https://twitter.com/sysmannet/status/800766999039184896

I agree this increase will not last us till forever, but this will give a bit lower fees while long-term solutions can be made without forking/splitting the blockchain like a contentious HF would do.

Segwit is such a no-brainer that I hope miners will ignore the lobbying from certain people soon and open their eyes. The community (real businesses and users) clearly want it and it is the safest way to do a small increase now. Just waiting for the miners.





The reason why I am replying to you here, is because I think the "anti-Core sentiment" from you is not very helping and as said prior, very misplaced. Bitcoin Core is not anything near as bad as you seem to believe. We should unite as a community again and activate Segwit and work on long-term scaling solutions.

Segwit as soft fork will give us an effective blocksize of 2MB. Everyone in Bitcoin Core wants that 2MB blocksize increase. What are you talking about?

Doing a 2MB HF instead seems completely pointless. I would not support a pointless hard fork. No way that will gain 90% support.

Note: if Segwit SF couldn't include an effective blocksize increase too, I would fully agree with you. But it does!

This.



A lot of the 2010-2012 accounts do seem to be compromised. In 2012 the site was changed to use a much stronger hashing method for passwords. In 2015 the site was hacked and the database (with password hashes) was leaked. It would make sense that the hashes from early accounts are easily brute-force-able.

At this point I would assume that the 2013+ accounts are unrelated though and probably hacked due to re-using passwords on other sites.



Overall, I do assume most of those old accounts are newbie accounts (most even by spambots) where the owner didn't login after 2012 (as that would update the password hash.) Basically the potential damage is very limited. He might be able to sell those accounts though. I don't think admins can do too much against it. But if there is a very clear pattern (like all accounts logins from same IP), obvious accounts could just be frozen IMO.

Source?

TBH I think you are believing /r/btc a bit too much /r/btc does not represent the community. While a majority of /r/btc users are just people who want TXs to be a little bit cheaper and therefor bigger blocks (which is fair!) The vocal actors on that subreddit are very obviously malicious. They constantly spread propaganda full of lies just to push the threat that is "emergent consensus". Any critical rebate, even with proper arguments and technical proof, is downvoted to oblivion. /r/bitcoin is not really good, but /r/btc is just terrible. (Overall I never liked reddit.)

But IMO go outside reddit and look a bit to businesses, known bitcoin users, full nodes, etc. The majority (still) easily support Bitcoin Core as it is obviously the most competent team.

I can agree. But the problem is that people expect Bitcoin Core to act as 1 clear entity with a clear message. But Bitcoin Core is an open-source project with a lot of different indivuduals. For example, LukeJr tends to have a bit of an extreme opinion (and obviously vocal /r/btc love to quote him.) But he does not represent Bitcoin Core, he is just 1 of the developers.

Many would love to see Core officially pledging to a blocksize HF in the future. But the thing is, only individual developers/contributors can really do that. And IMO most of them have said to support a blocksize HF increase somewhere in the future. The idea is basically to activate Segwit, collect data (like are full nodes affected by the increasing blocksize that Segwit brings?) and have a definite dynamic blocksize HF based on that. Core isn't best in PR, but their path still seems most scientific/best to me.

I personally believe that after activating Segwit, we will continue the blocksize increase HF discussion and the best solution will come forward. There is no real point in trying to do it before Segwit... if we cannot even get consensus behind an obvious improvement on bitcoin (fixing malleability, opening the options for second layers and having an initial bump) as a SF, how will we ever get consensus behind a HF? I don't think the "emergent consensus" where effectively miners have full power over blocksize and users risk being on the wrong fork constantly, is even a real option. But there has been some BIPs (from Jeff and even from Luke if we change the start parameters), that could be adjusted and potentially still get consensus.

Why would you prefer Segwit as HF while you don't want 2 different bitcoins? Softfork is obviously less risky. Additionally Segwit as SF can be activated within just some weeks, HF will take many extra months of planning. Segwit just need some miners to activate it now. Businesses and users seem ready.


I understand and glad to hear it again

I just want to say that I fully disagree with this:



1) Theymos has nothing to do with Bitcoin Core. Equally Bitcoin Core has nothing to do with /r/bitcoin subreddit. Only very few of the Bitcoin Core developers are active on reddit. IMO you should separate those two things.

2) Bitcoin Core has more than 100+ contributors. Only very few Blockstream employees (like 4 or 5?) are working on Bitcoin Core too. Blockstream != Bitcoin Core.

3) If you want bigger blocks (me too!), you could start by showing your support for Segwit - which will give effectively 2x the blocksize (2MB indeed) in a very safe and properly tested way.

4) I fully agree with your statement about $100 fees. But it is important to realize that almost all Bitcoin Core developers do not want $100 fees either! Just because some extremists say this, doesn't mean that everyone in Bitcoin Core wants this.

5) Segwit is just a start. It give an initial minimal bump to make the fees a bit lower. Additionally and more importantly, it will help decentralized trustless second layers for real scaling like the Lightning Network (LN.) While I am skeptical about those second layers, it is interesting and could potentially be awesome. It is important to realize that it is decentralized protocol with different teams working on it: lightningd, lnd, Thunder, eclair, Amiko-pay. I am personally planning to test LN a bit with regtest and testnet to see IF and HOW gambling sites could potentially use LN in the future

6) After Segwit, I have no doubt more scaling improvements will follow. I am personally a big supporter of Bitcoin Core, but I definitely want to see a safely planned dynamic blocksize HF in the future too(!) 1MB Is definitely not enough in the future and a properly planned non-contentious HF should be possible IMO.

7) BU will cause a blockchain split and will be very bad IMO. I don't think miners should have the full power to change the blocksize limit to any limit they want. Effectively "emergent consensus" would give that power to 5 mining pool operators, while the costs of a blocksize increase is mostly upon the full node owners. IMO with the risks of "emergent consensus", gambling sites will have to change their required confirmations too. Most sites require now 1 confirmation (yourself included), but even a very small miner can fork off and trick you to get 1 confirmation if your BU node's EB setting is "wrong". Orphans are possible now, but 1 till 12 confirmation will be much less safe with the "emergent consensus" model. Not even talking about their incompetence, lack of testing / peer reviewing, etc. I understand you don't explicitly support BU, but just sharing my opinion.



Overall I think you are experiencing the bad things of the rising fee (which I understand), but your anger towards "Blockstream/Core/Theymos" (which are 3 different persons/groups) seems to be misplaced TBH. I personally fully agree with RHavar's statement today.