Not just Bill Clinton.

Richard Branson, Ehud Barak (former Israeli prime minister), Kevin Spacey, Alan Dershowitz (Harvard law professor and also Epstein's lawyer), Chris Tucker, Hillary Clinton...

and Trump. Trump has been to that island, and was (maybe still is) very good friends with Epstein (Epstein is and always has been New York based).


Problem is that a few pictures of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton looking seedy is not evidence of what happened. Does anyone believe that Hillary Clinton is a pedophile rapist? It's not impossible, but being on the plane (for which there is hard evidence) is not the same thing as being guilty of child rape. The association is very bad, but not the same thing as evidence. All that exists is testimonies, which is not the most reliable way of proving wrongdoing.


(I was probably the first person on this forum to bring this up, btw)

Good businesses often do think about currency speculation, especially in regions with unstable currencies (or those who trade with others in regions with unstable currencies). Whether they think more in terms of risk is only semantic, avoiding risk is speculation by another name. Some would call this actual capitalism, as every business has to account for changes in the market in every material they use to operate, whereas today's businesses are more often very insulated from market conditions as a result of centralised price-setting on the commodities markets, or worse still by government subsidies.

eltoo would remove the penalty for broadcasting old channel states, so it's not impossible (but this depends on a new opcode being soft forked into bitcoin script)

There is however a less sensational alternative: Google Trends is a loss leader, to create goodwill and trust in the Google brand. Which would be interesting in it's own right; why would Google need to make such efforts to have people trust them? (nothing about helping to correct a deficit in how trustworthy google are, of course )

Still, I'd be very surprised if there'd never been corruption of Google Trends data for some kind of gain, just as could be expected from buying top positions in Google search results (I bet Google could make a real profit on that kind of shenanigans).

How do we know for sure?

I wouldn't trust Google Trends to not be distorted in various ways. The graphs and figures we get from Google Trends are not verified, we simply trust that Google are providing the correct numbers.

As ever, what's in it for Google to give the public free information services?

It's possible that BTCPay will be the first to implement Lightning payments too (don't think any other payments solution is doing it yet). Shouldn't take them long to do it, the developers have also done some work for lightning implementations. I hope so, meritocracy FTW (i.e. only those who are more hands-on with running their webshop will benefit).

If anyone really believes that institutional investors are waiting for regulatory approval, then you're all forgetting how corrupt Wall Street and the financial markets of the world are.

Business leaders often read Sun Tzu's Art of War, and an important maxim from that text is that "war is deception". If you really expect those involved in financial trading to publicly tell you important market information, you failed to understand how driven the big succeeders are. They will omit the truth and tell lies to the public constantly provided they can get away with it. Why on earth would they do anything else? They want to make money, not give others their most actionable information at their own expense.

In the history of market scandals (and the list is long), does anyone actually believe the media spin that "the bad guys tried, and failed, to cheat the system"? Think about the potential amount of fraud and deception that is simply never detected in a system that essentially relies on trust in the accounting firms (who have demonstrated that they are willing to collaborate with fraud and deceptive practices on the occasions when it's been publicly uncovered).

Given all this, it seems far more likely that the "institutional money is afraid of cryptocurrency trading" is simply a way of trying to keep the risk-averse public majority out of the crpytocurrency markets until they've used their most effective illegitimate channels to corner as much of the market as possible. Doesn't that sound more like Wall Street to you than "they're afraid of breaking the rules"? Come on now.

I'd say "they could and would".

Let's put it like this: the most corrupt business on the planet, synonymous with risk taking, won't do something corrupt to take a risk on a new, innovative and unprecedentedly profitable asset class? Don't believe it. Even without evidence, I think it's safe to say that large financial firms are finding a way to buy & trade cryptocurrency, all other previous evidence suggests they could and would.


As for Vitalik: major lol. He's basically saying "I'm a fraud". Because no ICO's == no Ethereum use-case, no Ethereum use-case == no Etheruem purpose, no Ethereum purpose == why are we listening to this guy?

Thanks guys, I'm probably not the only one who'd like this to happen

But remember that both points you make here are related to each other: governments and their politicians are used to the off-shore money system when they want to do some kind of scandalous dealings, but that puts them in the pockets of the bankers who arrange it for them. Bitcoin doesn't have that middleman problem in the same way, once you have some BTC, politicians can use techniques to do their questionable deals in far more privacy than they can with bankers intermediating. And then they owe the bankers nothing.

That's the beauty of peer-to-peer tech, everyone has genuine equal opportunity. Self interest can drive anyone towards cryptocurrency, as everyone has some reason to want it, even if the reasons aren't the same for everyone.

It certainly adds extra work to the development. Seeing as network consensus is a multi-lateral model for lightning (only individual payment paths need a sequence of consensus, the failure of which isn't critical to the overall network), there is no reference implementation like with bitcoin itself, and so lightning development resembles any other protocol development far more than bitcoin does. This makes sense overall; clightning appears to be focusing on the embedded and webstore/server markets (it uses the C language, and so it can be compiled for just about any platform), whereas lnd is targetting mobile, server and desktop (lnd is using rust, which I would assume is unlikely to work well for super simple embedded Point of Sale devices for instance), or Eclair which is mobile only.

This makes sense as a development model in lightning's case, however messy the interoperability issues are. The nuance is that the list of new ideas you mention are originating from the different teams, and they do not necessitate universal implementation. If lnd doesn't want to implement eltoo, there is no problem at the protocol level, they can continue to use the punishment protocol instead. Vice versa if ACINQ (the Eclair team) decides against implementing channel factories, Eclair can still interface with the lightning network at the level of the 1.0 protocol. So once the wrinkles in 1.0 interoperability are ironed out, it will function as a stable base layer in it's own right. Swapping out components of the protocol for enhanced substitutes, or adding additional network layers (e.g. channel factories) shouldn't be too disruptive with a stable base protocol operating (it's very close already).



It was a little overhyped, the supposed attack withdrew much less than half the network liquidity. I think channel factories and/or cyclic node rebalancing techniques will cater for the liquidity of good actors on the network, and (yet another) proposed system for data authentication could be the building blocks to solve the bad actors problem (this would introduce rewards for serving reliable data of any type over lightning, which can be used to give nodes a routing score). There was a suggestion by the author that this could be used to simplify or remove the need for watchtowers altogether, which would be nice (I believe eltoo goes some way in that direction already)

Implies problems. RBF tx's are always colored that way in the Transaction window.

RBF should be default checkbox-ed on the Send Transaction form. In your case maybe not?

Are you using 96.4, or something earlier? (there were bugs in RBF before 96.4)

Indeed, I guess it's a case of whether it's worth it considering the timescales (0.96.5 maybe in a few weeks/months, 0.97 maybe winter/spring 2019??)

Yeah, biggest thing to happen in Lightning development since channel factories.


This demonstrates:

1. Lightning isn't perfect as per the 2015 original specification
2. It can be improved, and the developers know what the weaknesses are and are thinking carefully how to redesign optimally

It will take time, but the end product should be easier to use than regular Bitcoin clients. And this will be huge for Bitcoin's competitiveness as a currency, it could be like using gold with a debit card, where the actual bullion is under the complete control of the individual.

Right, but how much coverage can really be achieved with 26 satellites worldwide, even if you consider that EU/USA/Russia could pool their resources with such cameras. Even then, one word: clouds


I hope the threat of this sort of totalitarian control might get some of the more state-system apologists to finally wake up: what's the big plan, just pray like crazy that no electorate ever votes in a crazy dictator? Good luck with that, all government is always somewhere on the tyrannical scale. Blind faith that the next compromise "won't be too bad" is what slowly grinds a society into the situation where crazy dictators can take advantage of a desperate situation. If you think history can't possibly repeat this way, you deserve everything that happens to you

Thanks for entertaining the idea. But I can see from you're previous updates about 0.97 features that it will be an important Armory release because of your new business agreement, this question was more idle curiosity on a Sunday than anything else! Please don't waste your time if it's too awkward to implement.

Not even allowing sending? (I realise bech32 addresses in wallets is a significant change whether it's the mirror type or a new design) Just error checking without correction would be a useful win in summer/fall 2018 for sending to bech32 in different wallet software (clightning, electrum, core etc all support bech32).

Updated thinking on this?

It's getting to the stage now where I'm wanting to use bech32, but Armory 96.4 rejects sending to bech32 addresses. Are we going to wait till 0.97 for the ability to send to bech32 addresses, or could it make it into 96.5? (assuming 96.5 is still planned)

These are very important reasons why government announcements about cryptocurrencies are so vague, and why any policy is very weak or non-existent.

Governments can't introduce very harsh measures only to make complete 180 degree turns in the future. It makes them look weak and hypocritical, and that weakens their perceived authority. The cryptocurrency issue makes it very difficult for policymakers, many people have been saying this for a long long time. It's a phenomenon that's impossible to prevent, and it both appeals to the corrupt self-serving nature of politicians and yet simultaneously undermines the entire model of parliamentary democracy. The writing is on the wall.

That's what Satoshi said back in 2008, can't remember the exact context

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I expect someone will publicly burst the "this BTC is mine, and I don't care who you think are, you can't have any" bubble before another 10 years is over. That will trigger a whole new era in human history, and there's no  reason to think that it won't happen.

Waves of copycat behavior will occur, and the current model of handling that kind of non-compliance won't be able to cope. There are no doubt plenty of people already not cooperating with tax agencies in respect of BTC, but someone will eventually (and proabably someone in the financial industry) will one day just say no publicly.