Exactly, it won't happen any time soon

After QE123, major banks are sitting on 5X more base money than 2008, in fact they have printed all the money that they should print in future 30 years, and now all these money are in their pocket collecting interest from FED

With that amount of cash reserve, any kind of monetary policy that we have seen before will be useless: Raise the interest rate will not crash the market, bond negative return will not slow the bond buying frenzy, simply because there are too much money in every banks' reserve. If no one is taking loan (loan condition raised by banks, ironically by the request from the government), banks will spend these money by themselves. As a result, large amount of assets will be bought by the banks in the next decades

Banks buy assets, and if the price crashed, they sell assets to FED in exchange for money, and use new money to buy more assets...

Because FED is going to raise the interest rate, no one except bitcoin can fight FED

I don't get it ... Say that leverage is 10x and I deposited €200 , and bought 10 bitcoins using 10x leverage, and I withdrew those bitcoins, what will happen?    

Or, you are just buying BTC/EUR pair like in a Forex bucket shop, no physical delivery of either euro or bitcoin  

The block solving does not need a lot of bandwidth. Chinese is powerful because their hashing power. Suppose that someone in China controlling a quantum miner, he can solve a block in 5 seconds, no matter where he is located, as long as he managed to get block-solving hash work from a pool that is located on internet backbone, and deliver the solved result back to the pool, that pool will broadcast the finished block to the whole network

Of course if they could control the pool inside main land China, that will give them some convenience, but it is not a must

And I think bitcoin's growth in China provide a good diversification. In western, the bank rules, if banks refuse to open business accounts for bitcoin companies (which is the case today), then bitcoin will not go anywhere(even the merchant accept them will have to convert them to fiat money). However in China it is more complicated, because Chinese banks are controlled by the government officers, and government officers may have different interest. When a government officer decided to go with bitcoin, the banks that he controls will ignore the warning from the central bank (Which had happened in China already, otherwise all those Chinese exchanges would be shutdown already)

Politics should never get into bitcoin, just like it never got into gold. But unfortunately, human has so far no better way than politics to deal with uncertain things

People can reach 100% consensus on 1+1=2, but they can't reach a consensus on block size, because that is an unknown scenario, there is no sure answer for that question, unless it has been proved hundreds of times

The decision making principle when facing uncertainty is conservative instead of aggressive, reduce the risk exposure instead of increase the risk exposure

Only in a game    Fallout 4 is coming out around September

Please think it over again: If Chinese decided to work further on the original blockchain, let's call it bitcoin legacy, then what will they do with their coins on the new blockchain bitcoin XT? They will dump them all, that will be millions of coins dumped on western exchanges, sending bitcoin's value to single digits, maybe cents, thus the whole XT coin ecosystem will collapse. Similarly XT people will dump all their coins on the bitcoin legacy chain, causing their coins to become worthless, both coins dead

Why should I spend a coin that will increase in value long term wise while I could spend fiat money which is decrease in value long term wise?

Unless every time I always first purchase bitcoin with fiat money from exchanges and then spend them, in order to promote bitcoin awareness. But it seems not a lot of people are interested (I have made some suggestions but people are too lazy to bother, maybe because the effect is too small comparing with long term holding
An easy way to make bitcoin worth millions of dollars)

Exactly, this is not a China specific thing. Currently, I count 90% of the bitcoin utility is coming from speculation and long term investment, only very tiny amount of bitcoin were used as payment medium (and mostly were used in mining, drug dealing and money laundering). International remittance have the potential to grow, but that also requires bitcoiners to be extremely good on IT and have good exchanges on both end, not an easy task

Because speculation and investment is the major demand for bitcoin, it is very important not to bring in uncertainties in bitcoin, that will hurt speculators and investors' confidence and affect the demand negatively, even increase the difficulty in regulation front

It has very little to do with nodes, you can setup thousands of nodes overnight, but the largest power in bitcoin ecosystem is miner, the second are exchanges. It is miners' hashing power decide where the blockchain goes. If you suddenly lose 50% of hashing power, there are much more danger on the way ahead: First, your transaction would not be able to process in time for at least 2016 blocks. Second, your chain's hash power would be the same as the other chain, so the hashing power on the other chain could easily 50% attack you and double spend/reverse transactions on your chain, causing your chain to be useless for serious business transactions

And exchanges are more important now than 2 years ago. Without exchanges, most of the people would never be able to get some bitcoin to do transactions, because mining are now concentrated on large mining operations

Even a 90% consensus will still compromise 10% of the user, the best way is to reach a 100% consensus that left out no one. I think the conflict of interest are largely caused by differences in different actors' knowledge of bitcoin network. So lots of education and discussion is needed to reach consensus

Just like 1+1=2, there is only one truth in this world. If you fully understand how bitcoin network works, you will not get second conclusion when you face a problem. But besides a handful of core devs, most of the actors have very limited knowledge about how bitcoin works under the hood

I have seen some education material that is not very objective and gone political, e.g. boast their solution in the name of decentralization. And due to the complexity of their solution, most of the actors can not make further decision simply because they don't have time to dig into those solutions

So I think to reach 100% consensus, the most important thing is that the change should be simple enough for every people to understand. And the change should be as small as possible

Just remember gold, no political decision can affect the character of gold, that's the reason it is used for several thousand years in many different nations with different culture and political interest. And gold is simple enough for every people to understand

Large part of today's bitcoin value is due to Chinese speculation and capital outflow through bitcoin at the end of 2013 (Thus their central bank banned financial institutions from doing bitcoin transactions, and bitcoin's value has been dropping since then)

First and second ASIC miner was invented and produced by Chinese, and now they are holding significant percent of hashing power. They are also important part of bitcoin ecosystem and contributed a lot for bitcoin's success

But again, this is become political, and politics is all that we want to avoid. Bitcoin is so attractive because it gives everyone the possibility to get away from central banks' monetary policy, they get the maximum freedom. If some day they have to give up that freedom because others decided to use a vote to deny their right, then bitcoin is no more different than the FED. In fact, a fork will double the amount of coins and cause 100% inflation, after a couple of forks, devs are doing as good as FED. Then people will just return home and pick up their USD notes

In China, exchanges typically also own mining farms and wallet services, or at least have very close relationship with miners

Voting is not a solution, bitcoin is invented just to avoid voting of monetary policy. To reach universal consensus is the only way, why could not Gavin take the 4MB approach and make the change gradually?  I think everyone could make some compromise and reach a universal consensus. This is more like diplomatic negotiations between countries, no vote is possible

I don't think this kind of thoughts (politics) is good for bitcoin

If bitcoin's future can be decided by a group of powerful people of their own interest, who can guarantee that some day in the future, another group of more powerful people will make another majority vote and change other aspects of bitcoin? Then the different developers will focus on how to lobby the powerful actors to agree on their view of bitcoin's future

FED can vote to change the money supply, but no one in the world can vote to change the character of gold, that should be a guidence when we design the decision making mechanism of bitcoin

No need for so many steps, now step 1 will not happen for those chinese exchanges, together with their corresponding mining hashing power and wallet services

Take an extreme example, if all Chinese miners connected towards several mining pools in Taiwan and HongKong, and those pools do not upgrade to XT, it means more than 50% of the hashing power will stay on the original chain. If Chinese exchanges won't change to XT, then it is very likely Chinese miners won't change too. They do hold lots of negotiation power in this case

Of course 90% is a major consensus, but it could also be a 40/60 or 30/70 situation which we are stuck in right now

In fact you can fork the chain anytime, just run a different version of clients that is not compatible with the core (currently XT is still compatible, but it has the potential to be incompatible if the block size limit is raised). You can even support your version of bitcoin with your own hash power and your exchange, but that will most likely become some alt-coin

http://cointelegraph.com/news/114481/chinese-exchanges-reject-gavin-andresens-20-mb-block-size-increase

Now some chinese exchanges have rejected the 20mb approach, it is getting complicated. I think a important part of the consensus is that all the exchanges should reach agreement on which coin they are trading

And the problem is not only this, if you take democracy approach, it is similar to an election where no party can win the majority, eventually some small party that stay in the middle would become the weight to decide the result of the election

We definitely need a decision making mechanism in bitcoin, chain fork is not the way to go, democracy does not work either. It is easy to say "just fork your own chain and be satisfied", but in reality if you can not get the hash power to secure the network, and can not get exchange and merchant support, the new chain will almost be useless

Bitcoin protocol itself is very centralized, it is established on science and coding, the decision making mechanism should also be based on science and coding

The storage will never be a problem but broadcasting 20M data throughout the network in 1-2 minutes will be a challenge. With the arriving of 4K TV, bandwidth should be upgraded to 1GB in not so far future, so at least in 5 years it will scale

IMO, banks are having a hard time dealing with AML regulations and fines recently, and bitcoin account will attract illegal transactions like a honey pot. They don't want to constantly be contacted by the police and regulators and even receive a fine for it, so they deny all the bitcoin related business accounts(classified as high risk business)

You can have a look at China, where banks and payment processors are banned from doing bitcoin business. Their exchanges are using employee's personal account to do bitcoin funding. Suppose that one employee can have 10 different personal account in 10 different banks, 10 such employee will get 100 such accounts, that will be enough for a while

Over time, some of them will be shutdown due to some illegal transactions (99% of the transactions are legal thus will not trigger bank's warning mechanism). Banks do not trace each account daily, accounts could be never checked for years if there is no police report of illegal transactions. But sooner or later, some money laudering/man in the middle attack/id theft will trigger such an event and resulting in the closure of one account

This means that the fiat banking practice can also be decentralized. If bitcoin is legal but banks refuse to open business account, then that will create a market demand for bank accounts. There will be people selling their personal accounts to bitcoiners for bitcoin trading, just like what happens in China right now

When you go to a Forex exchange desk, you can see there is a big list of many different currencies, and you do not have a standard unit of value in a sea of different currencies, all is relative. This is very natural for people working with Forex exchange everyday, they don't have any idea about which currency is the standard

But for average Joe, he is only familiar with his own domestic currency, because all his income and spending is measured by domestic currency. So, in order to use bitcoin as a standard unit of value, it must become people's income: If you receive 10 bitcoins every month as salary, then you will naturally measure the price of other things using your income, since that income seldom changes, you also want other thing's price to be stable

But since bitcoin is deflative and employer would like to hoard it and give employee inflative fiat currency instead, bitcoin will never become people's income at large scale, thus always work as an asset