They do implicitly. While nodes don't check the mempool for ongoing double-spend attempts they won't accept blocks that have double-spends in them (ie. blocks that try to spend inputs that have already been spent are invalid).

Private blockchains and immutability are exclusive, you can't have both. Ethereum's DAO debacle is a prime example of what happens to immutability when certain parties have too much power within an ecosystem.

AFAIK there's no fork planned in the foreseeable future, so also here the block and transaction format will remain unchanged.

Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying but... I don't think that this is how any of this works. You can't just graft one blockchain onto another to get the best of both worlds. Especially not in the way described.

If you're really interested in how to get separate blockchains to benefit from one another look into atomic cross chain swaps of what the future of cryptocurrency may entail.

Maybe you caught something on one of the torrent sites. While porn sites are supposedly surprisingly safe, torrent and streaming sites can't be quite as choosy as far as advertisers are concerned, so sometimes you'll get nasty little malware just from entering the site. Happened to me a couple years back, I wasn't sure whether to be pissed off or impressed. Either use ad blockers / disable JavaScript or use a VM when visiting any piracy related sites.

Also note that well written malware doesn't necessarily turn up on virus scans. Actually malware doesn't necessarily need to be well written to remain overlooked, it often suffices if it's just rare enough to slip under the radar. Accordingly I'd probably consider reinstalling my OS from scratch if I were you.

Do you have any spell checkers installed? Turns out they potentially leak your seed and other sensitive information:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/cryptocurrency-wallet-caught-sending-user-passwords-to-googles-spellchecker/

Your best bet is probably to run either a Bitcoin Core node or an Electrum instance and use their respective JSON-RPC APIs to create the logic you are looking for.

Here's the list of API calls for Electrum:
http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/protocol.html

Here's the list of API calls for Bitcoin Core:
https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference#bitcoin-core-apis

For the latter here's a list of a few wrappers for various programming languages:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/API_reference_(JSON-RPC)

Pretty much this.

It's become an old adage in security circles that biometric data should only be used for identification but never for authentication. There's simply too much downside on using biometric data for the latter (e.g. biometric data is easier to spoof than most people are aware of, it can't be revoked and exchanged for new credentials). Accordingly I have my doubts about the security awareness of any hardware wallet vendor following this approach.

USD 3100,-

I don't think we're out of the thicket yet, there's still too much hope around. The way I see it Bitcoin will try and fail to break USD 5000,- and as a result we'll see one (hopefully last) plunge towards the previous bottom. Come to think of it USD 4100,- is probably the more likely next bottom, however I'll stick with my more pessimistic prediction guess of USD 3100,-.

I mean that's pretty much what happened when Bitcoin entered the scene as well. Lots of misconceptions and nuances getting lost but the general understanding improved over time. Bitcoin went from "How is this different from Microsoft Points?" to "What prevents people from making their own Bitcoin?" to "Bitcoin is obsolete, it's all about blockchain the technology". All misunderstandings in their own right but at least somewhat getting closer to an actual understanding of cryptocurrencies (if ever so slowly). I presume the public's understanding of LN will undergo a similar evolution.

Are you trying to get around money transmission / AML / KYC regulations by selling services as a broker, rather than as a seller of cryptocurrency? I guess it might work under some legislations but in general I wouldn't bet on outsmarting local law based on a technicality. At least not without consulting a legal professional first.

Bitcoin's fungibility changes nothing about its deflationary nature. Fungibility allows for practical usage despite deflation.

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As far as fiat currencies are concerned I've come to appreciate their inflationary nature (within measures, obviously) as our current economic system would be unsustainable without an inflationary money. Inflation allows for credit and thus growth and progress, without it mankind would stagnate. Needless to say inflation has its downsides, but all in all it appears to be indispensable for the way our economies work.

That being said, I don't believe Bitcoin necessarily needs to be inflationary to be useful and stable in the long run. An economy where Bitcoin would be the one and only money around would suffocate but that is not and likely never will be the case. However as long as Bitcoin lives side-by-side with inflationary currencies (regardless of them being alts or government issued fiat currencies) I believe a mutually beneficial equilibrium can be achieved.

As far as miners are concerned I agree that things may become tricky. High variability caused by the majority of mining income being provided by transaction fees rather than a stable block reward could lead to some challenges. I don't think that this problem is unsolvable though. At any rate we should have plenty of time to consider our options, considering that the block reward will be reduced gradually over a very long timeframe, allowing for an ongoing observation of how miners behave and what security issues we might face.

I don't think that IOUs are that bad a comparison, it's just misleading in that IOUs imply counterparty risk which LN pretty much nullifies (assuming you keep an eye on your channel for adversarial behaviour). While this simplification may lead to fundamental misunderstandings (as simplifications always do) I'm also not sure what other metaphors would be suitable to explain LN to the layman or laywoman.

Heisenberg_Hunter posted a handful of wallets supporting BIP39 over here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5112183.msg49832671#msg49832671

Alternatively there also tools such as this:
https://iancoleman.io/bip39/

However I only would use an online tool handling private keys after disconnecting from the internet and with the intent of moving coins onto a new allet.

However I'm not sure whether Electrum (especially older versions) use the same standard for extended seeds / passphrases as for example Trezor and Ledger hardware wallets. That is, while 12 / 24 word seed phrases are standard, I'm not quite sure whether the usage of a 13th / 25th seed word is the same across all BIP39 wallets. Maybe someone else has deeper insight on Electrum's implementation of BIP39 in this regard?

I fail to see the "private blockchain" aspect of what you are describing above. What's the difference to colored coin / token approaches such as OMNI and XCP?

While modular arithmetic sees a lot of use in cryptography I don't think it can be meaningfully applied to compression as information is lost and reversal is not possible. In this regard you could compare it to a cryptographic hash function (or any hash function) -- while the output gets reduced to, say 256 bits in the case of SHA256 regardless of the size of the input, you can only use it for validation (as is the case with Bitcoin) but not for compression (because multiple inputs will by necessity lead to the same output, even though the chance of finding a collision is currently infinitesimal).

In terms of compression in general the information always has to go somewhere, so given highly random data (as pointed out by mda) any amount of information that is taken away from the data to be compressed moves to the function required to compress it (as pointed out by odolvlobo). That is, the filesize of compressed high entropy data + the compression function can never be less than the uncompressed high entropy data that serves as its input [1]. While Bitcoin transactions have elements that can be fairly well compressed AFAIK those are already mostly accounted for (ie. compressed in one way or another). What isn't and can't be compressed is the signature data (ie. the witness data that has been segregated as part of... well, segregated witness, aka SegWit). However that's where e.g. Schnorr signatures come into play, which stand to significantly reduce the size of aggregated signatures [2] (e.g. when multiple small inputs are aggregated into a single large output; it is however even imaginable to aggregate the signatures of multiple, unrelated users).

That being said, have a look at MimbleWimble [3]. I think MimbleWimble's cut-through method is pretty much what you are looking for. Essentially it reduces block sizes by getting rid of intermediary transactions once they have become obsolete (eg. Alice -> Bob -> Charlie gets reduced to Alice -> Charlie) while gaining privacy without sacrificing security. It is a fundamentally different transaction / block approach from Bitcoin however, so you won't see this beyond alt coin implementations (Grin and Beam, respectively).


[1] https://marknelson.us/posts/2006/06/20/million-digit-challenge.html
[2] https://medium.com/@SDWouters/why-schnorr-signatures-will-help-solve-2-of-bitcoins-biggest-problems-today-9b7718e7861c
[3] https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.md

IIRC in early 2013 reddit still occasionally referred to Bitcointalk threads. I guess it's been mostly overshadowed by the deluge of shovelware crypto blogs and crypto news sites that followed the 2013 bubble(s) though.

There's nothing wrong with accepting payments as a private key, assuming you immediately swipe the amount into your wallet as described by nc50lc and Pamoldar. It's true that similar angles get used for scams though.

I'm afraid you've been scammed and someone is trying to get even more from you.

Apart from most cloud mining services being scams and those that aren't being unprofitable, searching for Zkong leads to a "company" website that has been registered just one month ago. So that company is most likely fake and an attempt to scam additional money from you.

Searching for iswift card leads to what appears to be a legit company, however the first website I find is less than half a year old, which is an additional red flag that you are not looking at a real company website. Moreso if they "recommended" Zkong for delivery.

That is assuming you posted the wrong link for iswift card:


Because that site is gone.

Still I wonder what the "next big thing" is going to be.

In 2013 it was simple Bitcoin clones and centralized securities / mining contracts.

In 2017 it was spezialized / innovative alt coins, Bitcoin hard forks and ICOs.

Short of a complete and utter death of crypto 20xx should be interesting, if even more or less a variation of what we've already seen before.

I don't think alts will die that easily though. Even DOGE got pumped during the last hype cycle, regardless of it lacking active development and being little more than a meme. That's the beauty of crypto though. Easy to conceive, hard to kill. I doubt that this will hold true for abandoned ICO tokens though.

Very true, but seeing how abysmal r/bitcoin submissions have become it's no wonder that discussions have died down. And is it just me or is r/bitcoin in a worse shape than it was pre-2017? Maybe it's the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, but I remember much more focus on upcoming Bitcoin tech being discussed. Right now even the memes are r/comedycemetery material at best.