So you think the appropriate response is to bow to the pressure and allow the tyrants to have it all their own way?  Maybe my outlook is just generally more subversive than average, but I'd never think that way.  All the things you mentioned are concepts that need to be challenged and anything that helps put power back in the hands of normal people is another step towards those in authority realising they aren't as "in control" as they thought.

//EDIT:  And while it's a post responding to a completely different thread, I feel like this response applies aptly here as well:

We can't walk on eggshells here. 

---

I still believe exchanges in their present, fundamentally misused, format are on borrowed time.  I hope there will come a point where we simply won't do that sort of thing anymore, because it definitely wasn't part of the design concept to have these entities holding the keys to vast tranches of BTC.  The very concept of a centralised exchange is inherently weak and vulnerable to pressure from authorities.  It's no coincidence that  regulators so easily identified the choke point they could squeeze.  We're bound to come up with something better at some point.  I'm just hoping the rate of technological development will continue to outpace the legal framework designed to contain it.

I like the enthusiasm, but we also need to add a touch of realism.  To say it "could solve Bitcoin’s privacy problem" is a tad oversimplified.  It solves one aspect, but there are plenty of other privacy issues to consider as well.  This Bitcoin Wiki page has enough material on the matter to keep people busy for a while.

The point was, if a relative stranger suddenly appears on DT, regardless of who put them there, people are going to check to see if there's a good reason for them to be there or not.  If people arrive at the conclusion they shouldn't be there, it may be the right course of action to distrust an unknown quantity.  Why do you immediately have to turn it into something sinister about who does or doesn't like you?  

You claim the trust system should be about what's best for the community, but in order for you to see the trust system doing exactly that, you need to stop making it all about you.  It's clearly affecting your judgement.  You can't honestly sit there and claim that having random people turn up on DT without a strong history of references or feedback is a positive thing.

People refer to it as a "war on cash", but in practice it's a war on privacy.  There's no doubt that vast quantities of data about our spending habits is collated and sold.  I'll be using physical cash for as long as I possibly can.  It's still one of the best ways to protect your privacy.  And once the option to use cash is gone, it'll be time to start spending the non-government crypto. 

That's a funny phrase to use, considering you're the one who's constantly stirring the pot when it comes to the trust system.  You only come out of this looking a tiny bit obsessive.  



Trust is earned.  I can't speak for others, but if someone has very little engagement with the forum and suddenly appeared on DT2, that would certainly raise an alarm bell for me.  Are we just expected to take your word for it that these are trustworthy people?



With the levels of gamesmanship you appear to be engaged in, I wouldn't be surprised if you were adding totally random names to your inclusion list just so you can cry foul when someone inevitably excludes them.  

"Oh, the persecution!"    


 

Removing it now won't matter.  It's too late for that.  

If you use an old client that was made when satoshi was still around and tried to get it to synchronise, any blocks mined under EDA are invalid and will be rejected.  This means that neither the BSV nor BCH chain can ever sync from the genesis block using satoshi's own code.  Go ahead and try it for yourself.  The damage can't be undone and your chain is forever tainted with it.  It will always be a forkcoin with different consensus rules.  Never the original.

The only way to sync to the BSV chain is to alter satoshi's code to change the consensus rules.  Otherwise satoshi's code will sync to the BTC chain.  




//EDIT:  Looks like hv_ doesn't have a witty answer for this one and instead chose to reply to some other posts with points they feel they can dodge more easily.  Oh well.


//DOUBLE EDIT:  And could people please trim their nested quotes down a bit?  Topic is swiftly becoming an arduous scroll-fest.  You don't need to include a running history of the last 5 or more posts to reply to the latest one.

Okay.

BCH|	BSV|	BTC
☒ |	☒ |	☑

BCH and BSV = Emergency Difficulty Adjustment, or life-support to avoid having been stillborn with an insufficient hashrate to even survive, let alone propagate.

Didn't even make it past the 'Abstract' on the first page.  Perhaps your preferred chain is not as well represented by the whitepaper as you like to imagine.

I'd phrase that part differently.

With SPV, you're not using Bitcoin to its fullest potential, but you're still using it.  You're also not securing Bitcoin, but you are using it. 

If you can sign your own transactions with keys that you control, I think it's fair to say you meet the prerequisites to be classed as a user.

And you're the biggest one.  I love how you honestly think people won't notice when you pay lip-service to calling faketoshi a scammer, but you still continually spread the same lies and distortions he spreads.

I was thinking that, if anything, CBCDs would only further legitimise Bitcoin.  All the people who say Bitcoin "isn't real" or that it's "just a bunch of ones and zeroes" won't have a leg to stand on when they unquestioningly accept CBDCs like a bunch of hypocrites.  Calling it now. 

Maybe switch the [ code ] tag for a [ quote ] tag for the sake of readability.  Although I suppose the code tag is still needed for the ascii sections.  I ended up just visiting the github and reading it there.

I'm hoping this is eventually implemented and becomes so ingrained that people just accept privacy as the new norm.  There's no escaping it if it becomes something that any wallet can implement.  Eagerly awaiting the demise of "Big Data", although it's a pretty distant goal at the moment.

I get that you're mostly only capable of making posts that effectively boil down to "My belief is that BTC is going to die soon and all the BTC supporters are going to be sorry.  Then maybe people will pay attention to my wonderful altcoin which has a daily volume that's seemingly too small for anyone to bother tracking", but could you at least try to add something coherent to the discussion?  Your inane babbling doesn't appear to serve a purpose here.

And to top it off, there's this little gem, too:


So faketoshi created a bitmessage account under Kleiman's name and proceeded to have a conversation with himself.  Then dated the conversation to a time before Bitmessage was available for anyone to use.  Then gave the court the key as evidence to prove that he did those things.

What an absolute cretin.  

 

Loving the desperation on your part to avoid admitting that the public figurehead and guiding hand for your chosen coin is a proven once again to be a lying shitweasel.

No.  I don't remember that.  Because that's not what happened.  I remember BIP91 activating with consensus.  Here is the BIP in question.  Notice a total lack of reference to 2x.  SegWit was agreed by the network.  2x was only "agreed" by some businessmen who suddenly realised they didn't have the influence they thought they had.  Stop attempting to re-write history with made-up nonsense, unless you want to wipe out what little credibility you have left.

---

In an attempt to get the topic somewhat back to the bitcoin.org domain itself, there has been a fair amount of discussion about concerns over Lightning and how it isn't ready for the average user yet.  On that note, I quite like the "helper" on the Choose your wallet page.  If you tick the box that says you're a new user, rather than an experienced one, it doesn't recommend Lightning enabled wallets:



I think this is a responsible approach and would hope that, whoever does gain ownership of the domain, that feature remains in place until such a time as Lightning had matured to a suitable level.

Let's try not to allow the trolls to further derail the topic with their revisionist fairytales.

That's a distinct possibility, sure.  But similarly, private companies can also waste their time and investments by attempting to cash in on the latest tech trends and have it all amount to very little profit when people realise they don't need to rely on that company to use that tech.  And there's a much bigger risk of that happening to a company in a field like this one where the tech is primarily open-source.  If particular companies are taking aggressive or predatory stances, I'd guess it's because they know their proposed business model has a limited shelf-life.



There's a long way to go, no arguments there.  I don't think anyone can promise beyond doubt that Lightning doesn't remain a niche thing for the more tech-savvy users as it is at the moment.  But I don't see the harm in other dev teams attempting to make Lightning software more user friendly over time.  There's still a fair amount of impetus behind development of the underlying Bitcoin protocol and further scaling and privacy improvements are in the pipeline.  That said, even the transactions that are being made off-chain right now are still contributing to scaling, because it's fewer transactions that need to be included in the blocks we're currently producing.  If that number does grow in future as the software evolves and more people start using it, then it stands to reason that more people can make transactions that are still cryptographically secured (albeit to a lesser extent than on-chain) without creating too heavy a burden for people running full nodes.  It's an elegant compromise.



I tend to view it the same way as the early dotcom days, where companies attempted to monetise walled-gardens and create something like a subscription service for their customers to have access to an enclosed intranet.  The bigger idea resisted the corporate attempts to co-opt it.  I'm confident the same will happen with Bitcoin.  I just don't see a way for big business to "control" it, unless we centralise the network to the extent that only companies would have sufficient resources to run a full node.  That would definitely weaken Bitcoin's innate resistance to regulatory shutdown or corporate takeover.

Out of curiosity, do you feel the existence of the Lightning Network is the direct result of Blockstream's influence?  Or is there a possibility that the idea would have been pursued without Blockstream having their fingers in the pies?  If this email excerpt is genuine, then it appears satoshi theorised something vaguely akin to Lightning several years prior to the Lightning whitepaper being published.  Maybe it was something that was always on the cards?

Just because it has been four years and you STILL aren't even close to having the slightest clue about anything, that doesn't mean what I'm saying is wrong.  It just means you're too obstinate and belligerent to understand the reality.  

Also, I think you'll find you're the one who doesn't have any code or BIPs because none of your astonishing ideas ever get past the brain-fart stage.  The ideas I support have been fully peer-reviewed and coded into existence because they actually work and people want to run the code that has been produced.



Show me in the code where it says you aren't allowed to buy or sell coffee on-chain.  Anyone can do that if they choose to.  But from a networking perspective, it also makes sense to incentivise making smaller transactions off-chain by offering lower fees to those who don't believe they require the same level of security for a $5.00 transaction as they do a $5000.00 transaction.  Why is that such an abomination to your dogmatic beliefs?



As it happens, I don't particularly care who stays or goes.  I believe everyone is free to use whatever networks they want to.  You're quite happy to sit there and tell all the LN users that they basically have no right to exist, but sure, I'm the bad guy here.  It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if most of the active users of the forkcoins disagree with what we're doing on this chain, but at least they had the sense to use the coin that works like they want.  Because that makes for more sense than berating devs and making up fairy tales in a wasted attempt to get what you want.  I only tell you to fork off because you are the most obnoxious, tedious, loathsome specimen in the entire crypto community and none of your beliefs fit with the direction consensus has set in motion.  Your efforts are utterly futile and it makes no rational sense for you to continue because it's never going to pay off, yet you keep spouting meaningless drivel anyway.  So keep calling me a centralist if that's what it takes to ease your misplaced rage about how pitiful and inconsequential you are.  Makes no difference to me.  

It's okay, though.  These troubled individuals might have convinced themselves they're right, but anyone with an ounce of sense will look at them the same way they look at other conspiracy theorist screwballs like Flat-Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers and people who believe 5G somehow causes plagues.  If they had just one idea about the Bitcoin protocol which held even a modicum of technical merit, someone would be coding it, but no one is.  So they continue to scream for attention for the rest of their sad little lives because they'll never get what they want.



I can see why corporate interests are a concern in a decentralised and open-source platform, but I honestly think people take it too far sometimes.  If developers are only coding something because a company is paying them to, that would indeed present a conflict of interests.  However, if developers are producing code that they personally believe will be beneficial to Bitcoin and also happen to be receiving an income from a company to continue their work, that's an entirely different matter.  I'm not convinced that any one company has a "grasp" on Bitcoin.

The difference should be obvious in practice.  When Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published their ideas in the Lightning whitepaper, people took notice regardless of where their income was sourced.  Those who understood it recognised the potential and it sparked enough interest to result in multiple implementations, each with numerous team members, all producing code.  There wouldn't be several teams of people working on it if no one thought it was a good idea, no matter how much money someone might be willing to throw at it. 

In stark comparison, when some of the more vocal anti-blockstream evangelists (some of whom are here in this topic) present their ideas for how to "improve" Bitcoin, those who understand development take absolutely no notice because the ideas are often terrible, would likely centralise the Bitcoin network and generally have no technical merit whatsoever.  No implementations, no teams, no code.  Just incessant, whiny noise and half-baked concepts that go nowhere.  So these people, with their wounded pride, bitter and resentful over the fact that no one is paying attention to their "vision", rather than accepting the reality that their ideas are terrible, seemingly have no alternative but to engage in the fantasy that it's all a big conspiracy and that a shady company is pulling all the strings and manipulating the protocol to suit their evil corporate greed.

It would almost be amusing if it weren't so sad.  It also doesn't help that these self-righteous, ego-maniacal zealots are openly hostile.  They can't present a coherent argument without there being some boogeyman to attack and blame for all the things they can't understand or rationalise.  And then they wonder why they receive hostility in return.

At the end of the day, developers in a project like this are ideally not beholden to anyone.  Not the corporate entities and certainly not the conspiracy-theorist crazies who seem to believe they're owed a client that reflects their own unique interpretation on how this should all work.   

I suspect "original research" (in whatever language it is people seem to be speaking in 2020) probably translates to "read one website and arrived at the wrong conclusion".  We can probably guess whose website they were reading by their "findings".  Probably best not to waste too much time questioning the level of journalistic integrity in YouTube videos. They want views and subscribers, not accuracy.

Your insistence to discuss LN in topics that aren't even about LN make you the biggest fangirl on the planet.  Please stop derailing topics to fulfill your obvious need to emote your obsession and infatuation with Lightning.