if it were just $50 then yea everyone would be doing it.

its not something you do just to protect your second hand car, LCD tv and apple ipad.. but if you have a new car or a house its more worth it.

see.. this UK Duke got away with £0 tax on £9billion inheritance
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/11/inheritance-tax-why-the-new-duke-of-westminster-will-not-pay-billions

put the deed in the name of a trust.
make sure you are not the beneficiary of the trust. but another trust is the beneficiary.
you then set yourself up as just an administrator of both trusts and take a fee for services rendered from the trust.

oh and make sure the bank accounts are set up under a foundation too. that way the fiat can flow without it evaporating. and because the funds dont legally belong to you no one will knock at your door

its how the fat cats get away with not paying tax.

looking at the actual numbers.
we have slushpool.. sheep think they are chinese but the pool manager is in thailand.
we have BTCC.. sheep think they are chinese but they have offices and stratums all over the world
we have antpool.. sheep think they are chinese but they have stratums all over the world and farms outside of china.

the actual percentage that are chinese is far far far less than say Ghash.io of 2013.

and out of those 'chinese' numbers you have to realise that they are not colluding.

there are over a billion chinese people. so saying that just because they are chinese is more fictional than saying Ghash was colluding with eligius
there are over a billion chinese people. so saying that just because they are chinese is more fictional than saying Gmaxwell was colluding with hashfast

why would i presume ghash and eligius were tied together... nothing more than both being white.
why would i presume gmaxwell and hashfast were colluding together.. nothing more then being corporate schemers.

but hey if anyone thinks all the chinese are all, yes all >1 billion of them are all in the same boys club.. then those of you that think this must have subscribed to youtube channels that promote that the earth is flat also.

all this "chinese miner" debate is doing is sidetracking the drama and trying to sway peoples gaze away from the real threat.. developer centralization, removing node diversity, and basically handing bitcoin rule creation to a handful of well paid devs that are contracted to make financial profit for the banks

lol you have no clue the link you provided. you seemed to have read the title but you didnt read it all to understand the context

unlimited is about scaling bitcoin.. LN is about commercializing offchains and pushing people away from bitcoin. open your mind beyond the sheep stories. its like you sheep only have one story to tell. and that story is in the fantasy section.

its core that developed locking funds for x days (like bankers business days) -CLTV
its core that developed revoking payments (like bankers chargebacks) - CSV
its core that have flipped fee's from reactive to exponential (like inflation) - fee average

you need to look passed the spoonfed info handed to you on a plate and actually read, research learn, understand and make an informed and independent opinion. the trouble is when i see you and the other sheep repeat the same crap over and over it begins to sound like a script. a pre-rehersed chorus to a song celebrating blockstreams takeover of bitcoin.

core 2013-2017 is not the same bitcoin ethos of bitcoin-qt 2009-2013, stop deluding yourself that those in core 2017 are the same people of 2009+.. since blockstream entered the arena and sidetracked development via showing bitcoin dev's millions of corporate dollars fanned infront of their faces.. bitcoin has changed. even the 90+ unpaid devs have turned into blockstream interns hoping to impress blockstream with blind allegiance hoping to oneday get part of that fiat cashpot blockstream has.

if your only real devotion to core is the past. then its time to wake up and realise that the past does not have influence over the future. so "trusting" devs based on the past and ignoring what they are doing in the present, and want to do for the future.. is foolish.


atleast take a day and really try to learn things beyond whats been prepared and handed to you on a plate.

1. even upto 8mb blocks are not an issue for the network or home computing.. the chinese firewall limitation is a myth, the datacentre requirement is a myth.. but even knowing 8mb is acceptable. the community think that 2-4mb is more than acceptable and even compromised down to 2mb base block to overturn the fake doomsdays.

anyone arguing about data costs/bloat are late to the party and just shouting out fantasy scripts of yesteryear. every time i see someone say 2mb is bad, i facepalm them that they are soo ill informed and so scripted with their rhetoric that i begin feeling sorry for them

core refused 2mb until they realised for their confidential bloat making fee increasing transactions to have a chance of forcing people offchain they need to bait the community with fake promises of more transactions just so they can push upto 4mb of bloated fat transactions.
but even knowing they had to push the bloat to 4mb with bloated future features of confidential transactions that are over 1kb a tx.. they had to keep legacy (old lean) transactions at a limitation. so they decided to keep base block at 1mb. instead of opening up scaling onchain properly.

2. other implementations want bitcoin to hold lean transactions where increasing the 'weight' actually causes real and positive scaling. not one time boosts that become diminished after the bait has been successful to then switch them over to bloated tx's that dilute the transaction count again.

3. core have funnily proposed to actually intentionally split the network just to force in a soft fork, that alone shows how desperate core are


if you cannot see the truth behind what core is doing. then you are a lost sheep stuck in the wolfs pen thinking the wolves are the sheep dogs to protect and guide you. by the time you see and react to the wolfs teeth, it will be too late for you.

wake up

1. the fee is going up because of mechanisms implemented by core to push the prices up. done intentionally
2. they want you to move over to LN, again intentionally
3. they are holding onchain scaling back to push that agenda of intentionally taking away the freedom of bitcoin and reduce it to commercialised permissioned system.
4. the equipment cost to run a node is not anything more than a desktop. infact bitcoin would run on a raspberry pi
5. distribution vs decentralization are 2 separate things.bitcoin is wll distributed, but diverse and decentralized. hell know..
6. by calling everything not core a scam. you are proving bitcoin is not decentralized and proving you dont want decentralization. so how about be honest and just use the word distributed, so you can atleast say one honest thing about the way you see bitcoin

just to clarify some trolls points

bitcoin blocksize has 3 rules

core for instance has:
protocol size 32mb(bet most dont know that)
node preference 1mb base 4mb weight
pool preference 0.7mb base (but the pools have upped this themselves to 0.999mb after release)

while pools are at 0.7-0.999mb,  nodes can actually move their goal posts to anything they please. while still receiving any blocksize below their preference without issue.
we ALREADY have a few hundred nodes with block base sizes above 1mb with the main ones set at 2mb. and they are ALL happily accepting blocks

taking the control away from devs and letting the users control their own settings to show real community desire WONT break bitcoin.
pools wont up their preferential settings unless they see majority acceptance from the community, otherwise their blocks would get orphaned.
the community wont up their preferential settings unless they can handle it.

it does not require dev's to control when and how.. it should be a community consensus that does it.

anyone saying otherwise is just trolling for the banker backed dev's who want to limit bitcoin purely to commercialise it.

most people work out how much money they waste on fast food that literally gets flushed down a toilet 6 hours later.

this disposable income that is used for temporary gluttony but permanently lost is the amount people could/should invest in bitcoin, that way its not deemed a "risk" because when you think about it logically. its going to waste anyway.

so buying bitcoin regularly doesnt 'hurt your pocket'

if you have excess fiat (savings) some people pre-purchase a years worth of bitcoin based on their disposable income for a year, when bitcoin is at a low.. and then 'save' the fiat long term by not getting fast food for the rest of the year to accumulate their fiat back up to the savings level they were accustom to. thus basically not losing out of some good prices

LN has a niche market for gamblers, day traders, adsense and faucets.
but if you look at the stats. most NORMAL people only transact using fiat 42 times a month.
so if normal people swapped using fiat to use bitcoin. they would use bitcoin far less than 42 times a month due to bitcoin not being available for all retail, public services.

LN should be a side solution for the high use people. but NOT forcing everyone to use LN permissioned transactions

the funny thing is core KNOW that 4mb is no issue for the network.
the problem is they want to bloat that 4mb allowance with features like confidential transactions, rather than allowing 2mb-4mb of lean transactions.

plus this fake gesture core want to offer, is a one time boost that depreciates faster than it will boost.
causing effectively no long term benefit. and still requiring us to be spoonfed.

however a dynamic block allows the community to decide when to grow. obviously if nodes cant cope with certain growth, they wont change the setting to flag desire for growth. and consensus wont allow growth unless majority can cope.

we dont need devs to decide what is possible or not. especially when they are biased saying 2mb is too much one day, but suddenly 4mb is ok the next day they suddenly need it for their features.

let me guess though blockstream sheeple will jump in to reply "one billion terrabyte blocks tomorrow" without explaining the rational concept of CONSENSUS and slow NATURAL and PROGRESSIVE growth of time

but core are not devs, they are economists now.
their mindset is less about using code to expand bitcoin, but instead
limit supply of space, increase the price of space and force people into commercial services(charging fe's/penalties to repay blockstream investors)

if anyone thinks the network cant cope with 2mb thus 1mb should remain then why the F**k are core now ok with 4mb to allow extra space to fit their bloated features.

bitcoin should remain as the lean transaction network. let the bloated features go offchain.

and yet core devs think LN hubs (bank2.0/paypal2.0) is the future of bitcoin

imagine your real life. what is the main retailer you use the most often.. using LN will make that retailer becomes the new "BANK" where you will need their signoff on all fund movement requests.

EG
soon starbucks LN hub will be the bank of the future. requiring starbucks to authorise all transactions while starbucks hops the 'funds' to other entities. starbucks will put a 3-5day CLTV on settlements and CSV revoke chargebacks. and administrative penalties. EG not having enough fund available in the LN.(overdraft fee)

onchain should be the only solution. otherwise bitcoin is not solving anything, but just pushing fund managers into commercial hands

lol solution to sighash scaling is simple.

limit how many sigops a tx can do. no single person needs to ever produce a tx with 80,000 sigops or 20,000 or even 1000..

afterall a LN tx is just a 2in 2out transaction, so thinking that the quadratic/linear doomsday impacts LN is false

also LN requires 2 signatures so one party would refuse to sign if they see another party is doing something funky to a tx. so a tx wont even be accepted with only one signature. so that keeps both parties in a 'mutually assured destruction/mutual agreement to benefit' paradigm to not have issues with malleability.

but core devs have forgot how to make code rules. and have put their banker hats on and decided 'market' rules are better.
such as
not making DDoS protection code for LN, but instead give penalty fee's to hub 'customers' if they dont do things a certain way.
not have the onchain tx fee reactive to actual demand of blockspace, but averaged biasedly in an ever increasing amount over x blocks.

im still laughing at people who "love" core/blockstream

saying how they are
ok with bloating a 2-in2-out tx upto a few kilobytes purely to make the transaction TEMPORARILY confidential. but PERMANENTLY bloated.
ok with having tx's locked into 3-5 day maturities (CLTV frozen funds)
ok with chargebacks (CSV revoke codes)
ok with permissioned 2 party authorised transactions (LN)
ok with third party management (LN outsourced management)
ok with fee penalties

and ill say it again ok with bloating each transaction that was ~400byte to become over 1kb.

but if anyone ever hints that core Devs should lose their grip of spoonfeeding the code... everyone goes insane

the funny thing is that the core sheeple think that segwit is a boost from ~2500tx to 4500tx.. yet thats if everyone, yes everyone uses segwit.
but by the time everyone made the switch. confidential payments would be bloating things up again causing the transaction count per block to decrease while the size per transaction increases.

constellation..??

at first i thought why is the OP and the article using that word.
then i thought. what words have we used in the past..

hmm.. 'community' sounds more like a small neighbourhood, village or a cult. a small mens club.
hmm.. 'eco-system' sounds more about plant ecology buzzword rather than the economic system it suppose to be a buzzword for.
hmm.. 'arena' sounds like a entertainment/fightclub venue
hmm.. 'sanctum' but thats again a private boys club sounding buzzword

but i still think that constellation, just doesnt sound to be the right buzzword for describing bitcoins infrastructure and industry.

i personally prefer bitcoin industry when talking in the context of the article

you can always spot the blockstream sheep

they want to avoid onchain scaling.
they think offchain is the only way.
they love the idea of a fee war onchain
they love bloating onchain transactions by kilobytes via confidential payment commitments

a simple rule that would avoid mining centralization would be that no pool can submit a block hash solution if it has already solved 2 out of the last 6 blocks. that way a pool will never get more than 33% control, they would automatically get rejected at the 3rd attempt within the last 6 blocks.

seems like a simple rule that solves the 51% attack worry right??

though that can be worked around by a pool running 20 pools and quickly pool hops as soon as it solved 2 blocks.
so for every problem there would be a work around, found.

the problem is not that one pool hits 51% to do something. its the extra fact that a couple separate pools can agree to do something if their manage to control a majority of the blocks that are being solved.

and no matter what solution you find. someone else WILL find a work around. or a way to twist the rule in their favour EG if a rule is created to reject a block if the submitter is submitting too many. that same rule can be abused to deny independence , much like gmaxwell proposes to intentionally reject blocks if they do not collude with core

might be worth you doing some fact checking.

its core that wants to handcuff bitcoin to turn everyone over to LN (paypal2.0). yet those opposing bitcoin want more real permissionless transaction on the mainnet.

its core that while handcuffing bitcoin, they want to bloat transactions with kilobytes of data (confidential payments) where the reality is that these confidential payments will only be confidential for a few days before the 'hidden value' is revealed.

its core that want certain LN (paypal2.0) hub managers having a masterkey to move peoples funds without their consent to use to mix other peoples funds with only a moral judgement that these masterkey holders would put funds back.

thus LN/mimble wont be permissionless, trustless, or even frictionless. those making LN are already putting in stumbling blocks and penalties to charge people extra just for the 'privelidge' of using LN. after all their desire is to repay blockstreams investors so they need to handcuff bitcoin to force people into LN(paypal2.0) to get those penalty fee's to hand back to blockstreams banker investors.

it really makes me laugh pretending blockstream are not involved with the banks..

its not genius..
its a path to centralization and middlemen taking your funds(hoping they put it back). same with CLTV locking you out of your own funds until they mature and CSV revoking the funds way from you like chargebacks. turning features into things banks do.... things we should be avoiding, not welcoming.

do you honestly think that wasting over a kilobyte per tx to hide a transactions true value which within weeks can become obsolete once analysts get the commitment.. thus bloating the blockchain up for nothing.

yes features sound good at concept. but when running them through real world scenarios and see what actually happens when used, and used repeatedly.. these features fall flat of any permanent solution/utility. but the risks of malicious use to steal funds or bloat the chain become apparent

i dont see these features as "genius". yes they are original and new.. but not a proper solution to the problem

funny thing is its the blockstream paid devs that are wanting centralization. mainly to push bitcoin down a rabbit hole to commercialise it and repay their investors.

Gmaxwell proposed anyone not core should ForK off


gmaxwell proposed auto rejecting blocks simply because those blocks dont vote for core

kind of funny how gmaxwell wants to cause an intentional split just to activate a soft fork.. very counter intuitive

as also shown above, gmaxwell is so desperate and depraved he calls anything not core an altcoin... makes me laugh that he stoops that low to confuse his sheep

it is actually the blockstream paid devs and their interns that have been on a campaign to centralize the blockchain, telling lies, twisting the truth and spreading rumours to try reigning their sheep into the wolfs den

as for the impending replies of the sheep.. distribution vs decentralization are two very different things.
yes bitcoin is distributed. but if they are all blindly following the wishes of just a few devs.. then distribution becomes meaningless because independence is lost

currently multisigs will delay time because the front end currently take a long time. due to having to manually build a transaction.
bt if the devs (im not relying on core dvs because they dont care about such things) othre devs will make userfriendly front ends that make it simplistic and easy as typing in an amount and pressing send.
thus a milisecond thing. not a minute thing.

imagine it.
you have a multisig with an exchange. the LN node is api calling the exchange as a hub, to send the signed tx's
along with signed TX the LN node can obviously API call other data to the exchange.
so imagine your LN node is the exchange 'bot' thus not needing to log into an exchange webpage separately but all done within an LN node

its got nothing to do with the price of bitcoin.

the 10 minute theory is not a hard rule

the hard rule is 2016 blocks in 2 weeks..
this could be 2015 blocks in 2 hours and then 1 block taking 1 week, 22hours
this could be 1008 blocks in 1 day hours and then 1008 block taking 1 week, 5day 23hours, 50 minutes

where in both cases no difficulty adjustment is needed.
or it could be only 1995 blocks are found in the next 2 weeks. causing the difficulty to drop to compensate
or it could be only 2036 blocks are found in the next 2 weeks. causing the difficulty to rise to compensate

the reason most blocks are found in ~10 minutes is when hashrate is exceeding difficulty that more often than not blocks are found quit rapidly.

on the 28th of december the difficulty jumped by 2% (310-317) but the hashrate has not grown by 2%.
the hashrate was at 2,575 and is now 2,337 (-1%) meaning the solution is 2% harder but the hashrate is 1% less.. causing a 3% drop in efficiency.

this wont correlate exactly to a 3% change in timing. but more so a 3% more of a chance that some blocks will take longer than usual.
EG imagine there were 2016 blocks measured at ~10minutes

it could mean
60 blocks taking a little longer than usual(11min instead of 10mins)
6 blocks taking alot longer than usual(an hour instead of 10mins)
1 block taking even lonnger than usual (6 hours instead of 10mins)

the first one is most likely. the last one is least likely. but no one can know with exactly honestly when the next block will be solved to the exact second.

its only average 10minutes based on the maths of 2 weeks

firstly you have to understand the concepts of multisig. where not only is it a 2 of 2 but there is an ability of a masterkey that can override both.

next you have to understand confidential payments where the units of measure are replaced with randomlooking number that a commitment of a few kilobytes of data added to the tx can translate, but only by keyholders.

next you have to understand that mimble is where a masterkey holder of many unspent multisigs can move the funds with the cough promise cough that everyone is made whole eventually, but by moving funds from different multisigs at different times and by the funds being non-transparant. blockchain analysts wont be able to know who paid what to you and how much and when. because the masterkey holder is grabbing random unspents to hide the true payments so analysts cant tell whats a true payment and what is just a ruse.

---

firstly confidential payments
imagine a multisig address is created between bob, alice and fred.. bob and alice are the 2-of-2 and fred is the manager with a masterkey
the multisig is 3bobalicefred

imagine the blockchain sees:
[in: 1bob value=20546590.90909091]
[out: 3bobalicefred value=20546590.90909091]
signed bob
commitment: bcd2b8e028b1d215bb3cb3a9a693d023c4cb906820ba423be1282590eb41bdc9

[in: 1alice value=33409090.90909091]
[out: 3bobalicefred value=33409090.90909091]
signed alice
commitment: bcd2b8e028b1d215bb3cb3a9a693d023c4cb906820ba423be1282590eb41bdc9

above is just bob and alice funding the multisig
now fred moves the funds to another multisig
[in: 3bobalicefred value=20546590.90909091]
[in: 3bobalicefred value=33409090.90909091]
[out: 3fredmultisig value=53955681.81818182]
signed fred
commitment: bcd2b8e028b1d215bb3cb3a9a693d023c4cb906820ba423be1282590eb41bdc9

in my example commitment each satoshi is multiplied by 294 then divided by 176 but the blockchain is not told that its 'multiply 294 divide 176'
only bob, alice and fred know about ''multiply 294 divide 176''
this is what fred alice and bob see
[in: 1bob value=0.123btc]
[out: 3bobalicefred value=0.123btc]
signed bob

[in: 1bob value=0.2btc]
[out: 3bobalicefred value=0.2btc]
signed alice

[in: 3bobalicefred value=0.123btc]
[in: 3bobalicefred value=0.2btc]
[out: 3fredmultisig value=0.323btc]
signed fred


on the face of it blockchain analysts dont know what the hell
20546590.90909091
33409090.90909091
53955681.81818182
 is. but the public nodes verifies that simple maths of add and subtraction, that mathematically the numbers cancel eachother out to atleast know the values.. whatever they are, pay in and out correctly

this is the simple bases of confidential payments.

---

next mimble,

mimble adds to the confidential payment, with the premiss that one manager(fred) has the masterkey of MANY unspent multisigs. so it can grab unspents from many blocks and form a new transaction anytime he pleases, using any/all unspent multisigs he manages

so that analysts can no longer confirm or deny if alice and bob wanted to buy something, how much, when, why... because the funds are moved into a large reserve by one person(fred). and fred is then incharge(cross your fingers he is ethical/honourable) of repaying whomever, whatever amount is owed to them

imagine fred picks another multisig to mix with dave and alices multisig
 a multisig address is created between dave, kim and fred.. dave and kim are the 2-of-2 and fred is the manager with a masterkey
the multisig is 3bobalicefred
(for time/laziness sake lets just say dave and kim pay in same amounts as alice and bob did)
and now fred is moving the funds belonging to dave and kim

[in: 3davekimfred value=20546590.90909091]
[in: 3davekimfred value=33409090.90909091]
[out: 3fredmultisig value=53955681.81818182]
signed fred
commitment: bcd2b8e028b1d215bb3cb3a9a693d023c4cb906820ba423be1282590eb41bdc9

[in: 3fredmultisig value=53955681.81818182]
[in: 3fredmultisig value=53955681.81818182]
[out: 1robert value=39088636.3636364]
[out: 1alison value=16704545.4545455]
[out: 1david value=17205681.8181818]
[out: 1kimberly value=33409090.9090909]
[out: 1frederic value=1503409.09090909]
signed fred
commitment: bcd2b8e028b1d215bb3cb3a9a693d023c4cb906820ba423be1282590eb41bdc9

issues.
1) because fred is using the same commitment (math) for everyone to ensure public validation without revealing true value
then analysts will eventually decode the numbers, simply by analysts doing a few transactions with fred and then the commitment math is revealed
2) to do this. each transaction has to include kilobytes of excess data for the commitment
3) it involves allowing a masterkey holder to move funds to mix together multiple peoples funds to try confusing analysts.

which is too much bloat for such a temporary idea of hiding value from the public, and also violates the bitcoin ethos of permissionless peer to peer trustless ideology of bitcoin.