It should be obvious that China will do away with paper money within the next decade.

They won't have to make many changes, the vast majority of transactions in developed countries across the world are digital/electronic transactions already. Credit cards, wires, ACH, etc.

Sweden is already basically there (cashless). The Chinese government supports it as it allows them more control over individual and corporate finances.

I almost never use cash, myself. It is all credit cards, auto-billing and wires. None of this requires a new currency.

My initial post referencing dogecoin was had an incorrect example and was confusing so I deleted it and replaced it with one that was clearer (within a minute). What you appear to be saying is that if I email someone a bitcoin transaction, for example "I'm paying you 1 bitcoin", that is the same as an actual bitcoin transaction. Even though there is nothing that happens on the blockchain.

If that is the case, then a transaction in dogecoin is also a bitcoin transaction if the two parties agree that the dogecoin transaction represents (is a proxy for) bitcoin.

With the LN, your transactions are not bitcoins, they are a proxy for bitcoins. Once off-chain, the transactions are supposedly pegged to the value of bitcoins but there is no 100% enforced and direct connection. The fact that both parties locked something in the bitcoin network is immaterial. The subsequent transactions are off-chain, no different from alt-coin transactions between parties.

Consider the following:

- two parties create a multisig address in the bitcoin blockchain (the "channel" address)
- the two parties transfer their bitcoins into that address
- the two parties transact back and forth, via email, any amounts they want to transfer between each other
- when done transacting, the two parties settle in the bitcoin blockchain using the multisig address

The "Bitcoin Lightspeed SMTP Network". Unlimited transactions, no fees, transactions occur immediately, the bitcoins are "locked" and both parties must agree to get any "locked" bitcoins so the transactions via email are actual bitcoin transactions.

Would you agree? The emails they send each other saying what bitcoins transactions they are making are, in fact, actual bitcoin transactions even though they don't appear in the bitcoin blockchain because they refer to bitcoins in the blockchain? If instead of using email, they used an altcoin like doge, would you say the doge transactions were also bitcoin transactions because the doge represented bitcoin in the bitcoin blockchain?

The full paper is here:

https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

Two parties get together and create a "channel", an address in the bitcoin block chain that requires 2 signatures to perform transactions. Both agree on the amount in the channel and when done doing transactions outside of the bitcoin blockchain, both agree to sign the transaction to withdraw from the channel.

This is no different from both parties putting the coins into an alt-coin where each have half the key to the alt coin, doing transactions there and then converting back into bitcoin with both keys when they are done. I am simplifying here (it isn't half-key, it is multi-sig, etc.), of course, to look at the big picture.

The individuals promoting "The Lightening Network" essentially are just promoting their own alt-coin. The full title of the paper includes the words "Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments", not "Scalable On-Chain Instant Payments"

The lightning network is no different from an altcoin.

With the "lightning network", bitcoins are transferred to another chain (lightning network altcoin chain), then transactions are performed on that chain and then at some point, transferred back into bitcoins for settlement. It shouldn't be called the "The Bitcoin Lightning Network", it should be called "Lightening Coin".

The exchange price of bitcoins is driven by speculation and demand along with supply.

The halvings will not decrease the existing supply in any way.  After each halving, the number of bitcoins will still be increasing. The halvings should have little to no effect on the price on way or the other.

I want my transfers recorded. If they aren't recorded, how do I prove that I sent someone the money?

If there is no record of me sending someone 10 million, why wouldn't they just walk away with the money? What if they say they didn't get it?

If you have a high enough balance, you can easily move millions anywhere in the world without any fees using traditional banking. I use Schwab, my wire fees are waived for any amount and I have wired millions with no fee. For a traditional bank account, the average wire fee is $20 to $25 for any amount, it is not dependent on the amount of money you are transferring.

You can read this for more information:

http://www.bankingmyway.com/credit-center/3-ways-cut-wire-transfer-costs

Example of Schwab's free wire transfers:

http://www.schwab.com/public/file/P-1036363/

"Wire transfer fee: With $100,000–$499,999 in Household Balances, you will receive three free online domestic wire transfers per quarter; with  $500,000 or more in Household Balances, or 36 or more stock or option trades per year in Accounts of Your Household, you will receive three free domestic wire transfers per quarter."

Almost 1 trillion dollars is transferred via wire transfer every day in the United States.

Source:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/ota-money-laundering/03ch2.pdf

An average of over 293,000 transactions are carried over Fedwire daily, transferring a daily average of over $841.4 billion. The average amount of funds moved by one Fedwire transfer is nearly $3 million, and the cost of one transfer is about 50 cents (see tables 2-2 and 2-3)

You can see the Crypto mailing list archive with the bitcoin 0.1 announcement here:

http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/date.html#15029

You can also see a post from Dave Kleiman some days later:

[heise online UK] Secure deletion: a single overwrite will do it   Dave Kleiman

So, as a member of the mailing list, he was certainly at least aware of bitcoin at its launch.

Mr. Wright was a partner with Mr. Kleiman on the paper they were discussing at the time.

Specifically, the Crypto group post Kleiman was responding to stated (among other things):

"Craig Wright, a forensics expert, claims to have put this legend finally to rest. He and his colleagues ran.."

So, Mr. Wright, undoubtedly, was also at least aware of bitcoin at its launch date.

The original version of bitcoin was developed under Windows. Mr. Kleiman was named a MVP for Windows - Security in 2007 and wrote a number of books on Windows development and security. The Satoshi key referenced by the article was generated under Windows, according to
the description. Mr. Wrights posts mostly deal with Linux.

To start with, I see no reason why someone wouldn't generate PGP keys with two different pieces of software. Especially if one was run under Windows and one under a variant of Linux. The "entropy" post made my Mr. Wright that contained a PGP key talks about "/dev/random" and such showing he was working on a Unix (Linux) variant.

However, there is an argument I find more compelling that things have been backdated.

And that is the blog post from 2008.

Specifically, this one:

https://archive.is/HWfzH

which was grabbed by the crawler in March 2014.

It contains a PGP key with this up front:

"Version: SKS 1.1.4
Comment: Hostname: pgp.mit.edu"

The article stating there may have been backdating states that the key was not in the blog post in 2013 because there was a Google Reader cache version found that showed it was likely modified in 2013. I can't find a Google Reader cache version like that as the Google Reader product was discontinued by Google and the archive they have doesn't appear to have much as far as the web goes.

But ignoring that, the key says "Version: SKS 1.1.4".

That shouldn't have been there until 2012. Specifically:

https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/sks-devel/2012-10/msg00010.html

The crawler grabbed it March 2014 so the key would have had to been edited in earlier than March 2014. And I agree that is a sign that posts were modified after the original publish date.

As Mr. Wright and his partner have/had a long background in computer forensics, this will be one tangled and extremely messy pile of spaghetti either way.

My personal belief is that it is him, along with his partner, and the rest of the developers. And I believe the launch post was an unedited post. And I believe the bitcoin community will rally around trying to discredit him as the founder at any cost. But I will also take the facts as they come out. And they will, one way or the other.

I had not looked at the GnuPG source when I wrote that comment. I knew he was building from source. When I looked at the source back in time and the spec, it was clear the hashes were not experimental, they were part of the standard hashes. If you want to see the hashes Mr. Wright generated himself, under his own name, they are littered around the web with date stamps that can't be modified.

I am taking the information in context. I have seen his blog post referencing bitcoin from Jan 2009. It has no evidence of being backdated as I am looking at the version stored in the web archives when the page was crawled in prior years. His blog post from Jan 2009 specifically references the beta of bitcoin "going live tomorrow" and "Some good coders on this. The paper rocks.".

The archive of the "bitcoin launch" post has been removed from the normal places on the web as attempts have been made to delete it.

But a little work digs them up with dates.

The "bitcoin launch" post dates from Jan 2009. It was subsequently modified/removed in 2015. Mr. Wright did not state he was even involved in that project in the post. It just shows that he knew of bitcoin before it launched.

The post was crawled in 2014 and there is evidence of it being there in 2013. If you want to see them yourself, go ahead. Here is the archived post from "2 Jun 2014 02:28:10 UTC"

http://archive.is/oe1fh

If you don't believe that is the date (as the dates presented in the top are a bit confusing), this should clear it up:

http://archive.is/http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.au/2009_01_04_archive.html

The post is near the bottom with the version archived from 2 June 2014 and the version that was updated in 3 Oct 2015 where he removed the "bitcoin launch" section.

Additionally, look at this page and search for "bitcoin"

https://archive.is/offset=2060/gse-compliance.blogspot.com.au

You will find:

original 17 Oct 2013 08:55:10 from
http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/bitcoin.html


which says a page was found by the crawler on his blog with a publish date of Jan 2009 and with the page name of "bitcoin.html". That link was archived by the crawler on 17 Oct 2013

Now, in 2013, did Mr. Wright go create a page called bitcoin.html and add it to his Jan 2009 blog entries? The number of entries did not change.

If the "bitcoin launch" page existed in Jan 2009, would you still say he faked it? Or would you say "it still doesn't say he was involved in the creation of it".

That blog has now been completely removed.

Craig White from March 2006, the Security Basics mailing list:

http://seclists.org/basics/2006/Mar/296

"From: Craig Wright [mailto:cwright () bdosyd com au]
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 12:56 PM

...

True, but the argument was not one as to which is the better method.
There are several secure hashing algorithms."

and an individual responds to Craig directly with

"However, there have been numerous news items in the last 18 months about the feasibility of engineering hash collisions with several popular algorithms; hashing must be assumed to provide weaker verification of its property than might have been previously assumed.
(For now, I've recommended that folks using tools that don't yet do SHA-256 or better should use *both* MD5 and SHA-1 -- I don't think anyone has yet described an engineered collision that works with both.)"

and Mr. Wright replies to that.  There are quite a few others, of course, as Mr. Wright is and was quite a prolific writer in 2006 with regards to the topic of public/private keys..

"Web of trust models such as PGP can result in a signature, but the issue of non-repudiation is not fulfilled in that the issuer can not be held to account separately (as it is a self signed certificate). In situations where the parties have had prior dealings, it may be possible to verify the owner of the public key, for example, at a personal meeting, parties may exchange public keys on floppy disks (eg key signing parties). However, if the parties are unknown to each other, and perhaps in different jurisdictions, the requisite level of....

Regards
Craig"

Want to read more? You don't have to take my word for it. Head over to Google Groups (Usenet Archive)

https://groups.google.com/

and search for:

"Wednesday, March 22, 2006" "craig wright"

Search for "Craig" in the output and start from there.

Maybe the Seclist and Google's archive of Usenet has been hacked and backdated?

There is nothing proving any key was backdated. Starting in 2005/2006, it became clear that SHA1 was weak and that alternatives should be used.

Any argument about it is pointless as the Australian authorities will certainly be determining whether Wright has access to over 1 million bitcoins and whether the contract that "transfers them back to him" in 2020 is legitimate.

Start by searching for "Craig Wright AES" in Google Groups (old Usenets posts)

As a followup, the argument that the preferred hashes "weren't added" to GNUGPG until after 2009 is meaningless. Read RFC 4880:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880#section-9

That is the RFC from November 2007. Now look at section 9.4, the preferred hashes. Hash algorithms 1 through 11 are in there. They are not experimental, they are standard hashes.

GNUPGP was just one of a number of OpenPGP implementations. PGP itself dates back to 1991. OpenPGP to 1997. Looking at the preferred hash list is meaningless.

If anything, that proves it is him. Specifically, the argument is this:

"PGP key.. its metadata contains cipher-suites which were not widely used until later software."

Craig was building PGP from source himself at the time. It would have included any new/experimental versions of the cipher suites. At the time, he was working with encryption. Go check his Usenet posts.

Look in Usenet. You can't modify dates in it or change posts retroactively after they are archived by things like Google Groups.

The top 3 mining groups control more than 51% of the hashing power of the network. If you add in the 4th, you are over 60%.

So, if you want to fork the blockchain or do anything else, you don't need to do math.

Sidechains are described in this way:

"The sidechains ideas is this.. Send your Bitcoins to a specially formed Bitcoin address. The address is specially designed so that the coins will now be out of your control… and out of the control of anybody else either."

further on, they are described like this:

"If the second blockchain has agreed to be a Bitcoin sidechain, it now does something really special… it creates the exact same number of tokens on its own network and gives you control of them."

After sending your bitcoin to a "specially formed Bitcoin address", what do you own? A bitcoin? A token?

When you buy something with a credit card, you are buying something with other people's money. It is not money taken out of your account.

That is why it is called a "credit" card. You buy things with a loan.

This is 100% different from bitcoin purchases and you can't compare the two.

With a credit card, you can choose to pay the amount off each month and if you do, you pay no interest charges. However, you can also choose to make a partial payment and roll the amount to the next month, allowing you to pay for something over time. The interest rates are high because a lot of people just walk away without ever paying anything.

Credit card purchases also have other perks like cash back. My main credit card gives me 1.5% cash back on all my purchases.

Yes, the vendor has to charge more because they pay credit card fees but look around at prices and you will see things quoted at one price, credit card or no credit card. So, I have a choice. I can pay with cash and not get 1.5% back or I can pay with credit card and get 1.5% back.

Because a merchant has to pay fees when they accept credit cards, you would think they would prefer buyers use another payment method. Merchants will always complain about fees. I've had the terminals myself and paid all the fees. But the truth is merchants love credit cards for a number of reasons.

First, the buyers all have them. Second, buyers can purchase things with money they don't even have so they can spend more. Third, the purchase happens immediately for a buyer, they don't have to think about the payment process.

Credit cards are subject to fraud. However, a user of a credit card can dispute payments and charge backs can be done.

So many differences. But the main one is one is credit and the other isn't. It is a whole different ballgame when you are spending someone else's money. And when it comes to travel, my credit card is easy to use outside the country and has no foreign transaction fee associated with it.