If you are against this solution then you would also against any soft fork, since what it does is exactly as in a soft fork

In this solution, by the time a block is made larger than 1MB, almost 99.9% of the miners are already running the new version, the remaining 0.1% hash power would make no sense, they might mine a block every week, means no transactions can be done in a week on the old chain

True


There is almost infinite money can be used in the payment channel, as long as the channel is open, and the money going from A to B is roughly the same as the money going from B to A every day

In bank settlement, although there are millions of transactions happened between Bank A's clients and Bank B's clients, at the end of the day, they typically cancel each other and make very small +/- for the amount to be finally settled between these two banks. Same thing happens between large LN hubs like online wallets, payment processors and exchanges

I always support increase the block size depends on the technology capacity, since on-chain transactions require real bitcoin. But second layer systems will always increase the money supply, that is a fact thus should be avoided if possible, because it destroys value

We all know that the biggest worry about a hard fork is that the minority hash power might extend and permanently split the chain

But what if a hard fork can prevent this from happening just like a soft fork? This is the latest post in chinese forum

"Terminate the hard/soft fork debate: A safe hard fork works the same as a soft fork" http://8btc.com/thread-40796-3-1.html

Put is shortly: A very smart Chinese engineer from the best science university in China analyzed the behavior of soft fork and concluded that the same behavior can be setup in a hard fork to achieve the same result, making sure that no chain split would ever happen

Let's look at an example: A new bitcoin version reduced the block size limit to 0.5M. This is a soft fork since it is a tightening of the rules. If majority of the miners are running the new version, then the old miners who produce 1M blocks will get nothing: All their mined blocks are rejected and orphaned by the miners running the new version. So their economy incentive will be quickly upgrade to the new version to avoid loss

If this new version increased the block size limit to 2M, that will be a hard fork, since it is a loosening of the rules. If majority of the miners are running the new version, then the minority miners who only accept 1M blocks would still working fine: All their mined blocks are accepted by the miners running newer version

The breakthrough is coming from here: In a safe hard fork, all the upgraded miners will reject those small blocks produced by the minority miners, and extend the chain with small blocks mined by them, thus orphaning those small blocks

As a result, non-upgraded nodes would incur huge loss and will immediately upgrade to the new version, quickly make the hash rate on the new version almost 100%

And for those full nodes running old version, they will not be affected as long as the new version still produce less than 1M blocks, so after a while when all the hash power are already on the new version, they could upgrade to enable the bigger blocks, since they don't command any hash power, their impact to the network would be minimum

LN's biggest problem is that it increases money supply. Notice that money supply means the available money in the market, not the base money supply, thus modern economy theories seldom use M0 to measure money supply, since a large part of the M0 is sitting there collecting dust without contributing to the economy activities

Comparing two cases:

1. you have 1 bitcoin to pay a merchant, when this 1 bitcoin is in transaction, it is unavailable for anyone else, so the money supply decreased by 1 bitcoin until the merchant received your coin and spent it. If he did not spend it in time, next time you must find a new bitcoin to pay him, this will create new demand for bitcoin

2. you have 1 bitcoin to pay a merchant, but your wallet operator and merchant's wallet operator opened a payment channel between them, and then you and the merchant can do any amount of trades without more bitcoin, because the amount of incoming and outgoing transactions are roughly the same between your wallet operator and merchant's wallet operator, thus their transactions basically cancel each other and no real settlement is required between them, the channel can be left open forever. As a result, you get some salary from your boss through another payment channel, and you pay the merchant through this payment channel, everything happens in payment channel, no real bitcoin is needed

So once payment channel and especially routing is established, all the bitcoin transactions can be done with a fraction of the total amount of required bitcoin, that will dramatically reduce the amount of bitcoin demand on market and cause the value to crash

Increased money supply always cause reduced money value, or inflation. Notice that not only new coins can cause inflation, any schemes that could increase the utility of the same bitcoin by multiple times is essentially another form of inflation, this includes payment channel, fractional reserve banking, and other forms of similar schemes

Please dump your coins and I will pick them up

Always sell some after an exponential rally, and buy back later

It is this mindset created current mess. There are various of ways to solve a technical problem, if you could not find the way that align with your long term social economy goal, it just means that you are not smart enough and not qualified. By changing the long term goal to suit a narrow technical limitation is like driving a car into the river because your steering wheel is locked: You have to sit in the car because it is high-tech

Just look at how Windows took over nearly most of the desktop market, they had far less stable and secure technology comparing with unix system at that time, especially the network part, but they get the right market direction before any other tech gurus realized it, they patch each bug, patch after patch, but their direction never changed: End user friendly

Similarly here, by putting all the transactions on-chain, you have to strive to find the best possible on-chain scaling technology, like thin blocks doing right now. But if you start to become lazy and try to use the old centralized financial models like payment channels because they can provide millions of transactions per second, then you just drag bitcoin into the old banking model, which will dramatically reduce its usage and increase its risk, especially when there are many other alt-coins provide on-chain scaling

Because Roger Ver is among those a few people that really understand bitcoin's potential. Programmers seldom look away from their technical worries, they care about how the car works, but are not able to see where the car is going

The blocksize debate is not a technical issue, it exposed several long existing problem of bitcoin: Mining centralization, development centralization and lack of consensus based decision making mechanism regarding protocol change. And what core programmer is doing is to make these problems worse, their solutions create more and more centralization incentive, especially in R&D. If bitcoin is centralized in the hands of a few guys, government and law enforcement will take down them in a couple of hours, then the whole system will just collapse like e-gold or liberty reserve

The market rallied because of ant pools independent thinking demonstrated that bitcoin works!

Everyone should make their own judgement, thus a complex solution like segwit will never get enough consensus in any meaningful time, simply because most of the actors are not capable of understanding it and they only trust their own judgement

Mathematical wise, the inflation rate will all drop to close to zero regardless of constant supply or limited total supply, so if you have a little bit mathematical knowledge then you know they are essentially the same inflation wise

Of course limited total supply will create much higher potential for value gain, but you can always change a coin to limited total supply later when it gained enough market traction, which ethereum is striving for

Any change is OK with a formalized change management process, e.g. first collecting feed back from all stakeholders, then implementation based on consensus. Without this process, it will definitely create disruption in the community and many wasted efforts in coding since the code will never be used. The order is wrong by first coding then pushing it out

Of course by this approach you will never be able to make large and complex changes, but that is good to make sure the system works at its maximum stability, especially important for financial systems. Some banks are still using protocol from 1960s, why bother change bitcoin protocol every a few months

The interesting thing is that ETH is mostly dumped for BTC, so if they are really dumping ETH you would see a rise in bitcoin price. ETH is like added money supply to bitcoin, so the effect is that the overall value increase against fiat money has been drag down by added ETH since they have 80 million supply now, it is 5x more money supply, similar to QE

The rise of ETH has many reasons, but the major reason of its rise is the split of bitcoin devs and community

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts might not want to cash out hard earned bitcoin when they lose faith in the current central planers of bitcoin,  they just relocate to other cryptocurrencies. As a result, all the new fiat money purchasing bitcoin just went into ETH, and previous ETH holder take the time to cash out their ETH first to BTC then to fiat, it is like increased market capital in cryptocurrency world, thus require much more fiat money to pump its price. ETH works like stock/commodity in the crypto economy, used to hedge bitcoin risk, it is like petroleum anyway

From the beginning, this has always been a possibility: A banker who can effectively create unlimited fiat money can easily acquire all the mining infrastructure and control the network hash power (Of course he don't need to do so through one single entity, it will look like that many people control the mining infrastructure, but when a vote happens people will discover that over 90% of hash power is controlled by a few entity and can go against majority of people's will)

PoW method is vulnerable to large capital taking over. This is the nature of PoW, so some people have suggested to use a PoW+PoS hybrid model for the future mining, but without major hash power, how do you implement this change into the network? Why miners should give up their dominance power today? It seems only a fork or re-design of a new coin can start afresh

If say Gavin and his classic friends made a hoax, the detail that does not match is why would they ask Andreas who is pro-core to validate it?

They might not want to release all the evidences altogether, to reduce the shock to the market, but the fact that Andreas get asked makes this claim much more likely to be true. We will see how it develops

Satoshi has 1 million coins, which can kill any fork he does not like at ease, even that fork has 99% hash rate support, so this news should never be taken lightly

21 inc's LN has been out for months, it seems no one cares, so there is no market demand, if there is slightest market demand, 21inc's LN would be used at least to a degree, but no, I don't think average users would use prepaid model, and institutions would not trust a third party to handle their settlement

Price is irrelevant, but the reason causing that drop should be carefully analyzed, if it is a chinese government taking over of chinese mining farms

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/04/05/how-software-gets-bloated/

In my experience, software bloat almost always comes from smart, often the smartest, devs who are technically the most competent. Couple their abilities with a few narrowly interpreted constraints, a well-intentioned effort to save the day (specifically, to save today at the expense of tomorrow)
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As systems get bloated, the effort required to understand and change them grows exponentially. It's hard to get new developers interested in a software project if we force them to not just learn how it works, but also how it got there, because its process of evolution is so critical to the final shape it ended up in. They became engineers precisely because they were no good at history

You sounds like a central planner/protector for all the people. This is experimental software and open source isn't it, no one is responsible for people's financial loss, thus everyone here knows how to protect themselves by only investing risk money. But they hate being centrally controlled, it seems you value money over freedom