Block capacity/size increase

Since old nodes will only download the witness-stripped block, they only enforce the 1 MB block size limit rule on that data. New nodes, which understand the full block with witness data, are therefore free to replace this limit with a new one, allowing for larger block sizes. Segregated witness therefore takes advantage of this opportunity to raise the block size limit to nearly 4 MB, and adds a new cost limit to ensure blocks remain balanced in their resource use (this effectively results in an effective limit closer to 1.6 to 2 MB).

Miners could be liars. They’ve proven that in the past when they have signaled falsely. So you get all types of Machiavellian games. But it does appear that we’ve gotten consensus.

People are starting to signal they are going for SegWit and people are relying on that. It’s really not in the miners’ best interest to disrupt this process any more than they already have. They stand to lose the most amount of money because they’re the only ones who have to actively choose which fork to follow, and that has the economic consequences.

Everybody else can just sit and hold and see how it plays out but doesn’t have to make an economic choice.

So, on December 19th, 2013, a journalist interviewed me. Near the end of the interview, she asked, “Are you ever going to accept Bitcoin?” And, at the time I thought in maybe a year and a half I’d get around to doing it, so I said, “Yeah, I hope someday that we'll do that.” She put that in her article, and I started getting Google alerts from newspapers in Thailand, in South Korea, in Africa. I mean, that little mention got picked up all over the world. And I realized, Geez, there’s a subculture around the world who is waiting for this.

 

So on January 1st, 2014, we started working on it. We put 40 guys in a room, sliding pizzas under the door so they could work day and night. And, by January 9th, we got Bitcoin up. As soon as we announced it, it became global news. At that point I realized that the world was ready for this earlier than I had expected it to be.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a form of money that's a stable field that the government can’t destroy and can’t distort.
Because its creation is governed by the laws of mathematics.

It can’t happen any faster or slower than a certain rate, and it all sort of self-adjusts. What that means is -- unlike Janet Yellen, who can sign something and whisk 85 billion new U.S. dollars into existence -- there’s nothing she can sign that will whisk new Bitcoin into existence.

So, cryptocurrencies in general give us a stable medium through which we can communicate our information about values and prices in a way that no government mandarin can distort or usurp.

CEO of Never Stop Marketing, Jeremy Epstein thinks that the current market behavior is as a result of the growing confidence of Bitcoiners about the technology as a long term phenomenon. Epstein tells Cointelegraph:

   “I think that the reason for a relatively stable market at this time is the fact that more and more people are getting comfortable with the idea of Bitcoin over the long-term.

    

    They realize that this is a short-term disruption and it is a feature, not a bug, of the way that the system operates. As a result, people are playing patience and they recognize that the age of decentralization is truly upon us so they can tolerate some of these challenges in the near term.”

As some coins were deposited back to MtGox, we could identify which accounts were used to receive them; two in particular were of interest, and were possible to link to the online identity "WME". (Clusters who directly used these MtGox accounts are highlighted in red.) WME has been active since a long time back, often advertising "cheap coins" on the BitcoinTalk forums and wanting to trade exchange money codes. BTC-e publicly vouched for him, saying that "[we] know WME very well".

WME was involved with an incident involving stolen Bitcoinica funds (visible in the graph above), which provided yet another strong indicator that we had identified the right man, seemingly the main money launderer behind the MtGox heist. This incident also ended up revealing the name "Alexander Vinnik", though we didn't at the time think it was his real name, having seen many aliases. Today's arrest suggests it was real after all

To be clear, this investigation turned up evidence to identify Vinnik not as a hacker/thief but as a money launderer; his arrest news also suggests this is what he is being suspected for. He may have merely bought cheap coins from thieves and offered a laundering service. He is, however, a crucial piece of the puzzle, as he will have likely known who he was dealing with and laundering for, and so represents a major breakthrough in the case. We assume that law enforcement will now be taking the appropriate next steps to pursue all the remaining angles and hopefully identify the other individuals involved as well.

good for him, the man is living the dream but others have to live in the real world.

bitcoin is the law

Ok, I found it

-snip the countdown-

This BIP will be active between midnight August 1st 2017 (epoch time 1501545600)

Every time that I see the price pushed back up into the $2700-2800 range, alts are down.
That would seem to indicate that alts are getting squeezed each time to prop up bitcoin.

there's a mountain of obsolete mining machines out there.
i dunno what they're up to these days but they're looking for work.

What miner in their right mind will mine BCC peanuts for 3 months?

The mempool is currently almost empty