I don't know where did you guys paid $30 or $50 for transactions but last time I paid $1.8 for a transaction with 196 bytes I think.

I already talked about that, but in as much as the theoretical asic boost implementation is really winning in efficiency (it does, on paper, but the electronics my be more complicated), this is much ado about nothing.

Note that I'm adding the above caveat, because I too, accepted the theoretical efficiency gain of ASIC boost as established, but then some experienced electronics designer jumped in to point out that it is not because on paper, you can save yourself from repeating 25% of the calculations, that you can make hardware that is 25% more efficient, if the householding of those calculations is much more involved (which it is).

So, *under the assumption* that a hardware implementation of ASICboost is genuinly more efficient (with the above caveat), then this is just "technology improvement".  The hard part of this is that there's a patent deposited on it, but it is not bitmain that detains it, it is a core dev as far as I understood.

There's no "cheat" in asic boost, the principle is published, it is just a smarter way of organizing the calculations ; note that the standard way of calculating the hashes is already doing something similar.  The standard calculation doesn't calculate full hashes either for each trial and re-uses previously calculated results.  But ASIC boost is a smarter scheme, that uses the particular split-up of the two blocks to be hashed in the header, to re-use results in a smarter way, gaining 25% in the amount of individual operations to be done (but has more complex data paths).

As I pointed out earlier, PoW being a silly cryptographic protection scheme where the attacker needs to spend *the same* amount of work as the good guy (in most cryptographic schemes, the attacker needs to spend MUCH MUCH more work than the good guy), at least, the good guy should use all of the available technology and knowledge to not have to spend MORE work than the attacker.  This would be the case if miners wouldn't but attackers would use ASIC boost.

Also, if the "fairness dogma" would be that "hashes have to be calculated each time completely and no results can be re-used", then the standard algorithm is already cheating on that hypothetical dogma (which would be vastly stupid given the previous paragraph).

So the only problem with ASIC boost, if it is true that hardware based upon it is more efficient, is that there's a patent taken on it.

Bitcoin can never be dethrone as long as there is a lot of people using it and also miners that sustaining the network. Even there is a lot of altcoins you can see the domination of bitcoin in the market by looking at the price move of the altcoins now and they are mostly dumping because of the price rally of bitcoin, so i don't think bitcoin is very easy to dethrone.

The second one is proof of work as consensus mechanism, which industrializes and centralizes the system in an industry/customer relationship, instead of a user community.  

I used to make fun of ETH and ETC. But it looks like even after the DAO and the ETC split disasters, ETH is much more reasonable than BTC now.

It has a similar market cap that BTC had 1 year ago, so ETH is only 1 year behind in progress, and if BTC doesn't pull together itself,  ETH might surpass BTC.

Same with DASH. People criticize DASH because of the masternode centralization. Well then what you call the Lightnight Network HUB transactions?

agreed overall but a bank transfer is no more than a few entries on a ledger they swap around. a bitcoin transaction spreads through thousands of computers across the globe. decentralization costs, but right now it costs too much.

fiat money
noun
inconvertible paper money made legal tender by a government decree.

You can't create a new fiat currency system unless you gave banks and governments a real incentive to adopt this system.  Bitcoin is already an alternative currency system and I'm not sure there's anything you can do in terms of fiat.
 

$3000 is not an if but a when.

Out of curiosity, how about the confirmation which needs to arrive? Is it just accepting zero-confirmation just like some bitcoin payment gateway do?. The average confirmation needs about 15 minutes to arrive and probably some people still have some time to wait for it until the plane's landing, but, how if the fee is just not enough and the transaction get stuck?.

Pareto principle will only work for marketplace but bitcoin is the good investment for whales or poor. They need to plan the spending according to their economic status and plan the savings accordingly.

It will soon agree as a global currency in future for sure. There is first step by Japan adopted bitcoin as a legal money and implementing btc ATM in their airports and large amount bitcoin exchanges.

You fail to catch the full irony of that

While they might in fact have been screaming for a blocksize increase during all these years (I don't really know), but their screams should have been very hypocritical, insincere and hollow since they are the ones who could have actually increased the blocksize if they ever chose so. As I said in my previous post, we should hear what is said between the words and read what is written between the lines

2017-01-29 06:59:12 Requesting block 000000000000000000cf208f521de0424677f7a87f2f278a1042f38d159565f5
2017-01-29 06:59:15 ERROR: AcceptBlock: bad-blk-length, size limits failed (code 16)

<gmaxwell> murchandamus: they'd all end up banning each other.
<gmaxwell> murchandamus: because segwit nodes would hand witnesses to 0.14 nodes, and then get punted because things aren't supposted to have wittnesses yet.
<gmaxwell> Segwit is more than the consensus rule, it's also a set of P2P changes.[the tier network]
<gmaxwell> And the p2p parts are already in effect.
<gmaxwell> Because we didn't want to have the p2p behavior suddenly change and light up a lot of new codepaths when segwit enforcement started.
<gmaxwell> (as that sounded like a receipy for disaster! )
<gmaxwell> Segwit has the bip9 activiation, and a network service type which is used to make sure the graph of segwit capable nodes is not partitioned, and new p2p messages for transfering messages (tx, blocks, compact blocks) with witnesses if they have them.

It definitely looks more promising than what the last agreement was, I definitely think there is some potential for it to blossom into a full-fledged activation of segwit within the blockchain but it is going to take a while to get everyone on board, especially with the omissions that you mentioned. Looking at the names it's not bad, but there are a lot of people that will need to find their place, otherwise it won't work.