Old story

The 1st trade transaction using a blockchain happened on this forum, in 2010. HSBC appear to be taking credit, and I always assumed the 10 thousand BTC pizzas were ordered by bitcointalk member Laszlo, not HSBC! Maybe there's something Laszlo wasn't telling back then...

What's the source of the electricity in Iceland? Geothermal renewable


Typical idiot journalism and academic work here. Nowhere does this article mention the reason why cryptocurrency mining uses energy (although a reason is given, which is incorrect).

What would you expect from Cointelegraph.com, though? The article appears to be copy-pasted directly from some other publication anyway, which strongly implies Cointelegraph.com don't employ anyone to check the text in "their" stories, which you'd think would be particularly important when the text has been copied from a different website

The use of the word "terrorist" is particularly hypocritcal when voiced by any government. The only difference between governments and terrorists is that governments succeed in using violence (or threats thereof) to achieve political objectives, and terrorists usually fail.

Maybe that's why cryptocurrency is so demonised by the establishment in general: Bitcoin is a completely non-violent way to achieve true egalitarianism, which governments would like to think comes out of the barrel of a gun.



Including, ironically, acts to terrorise people into doing what they want

BREAKING NEWS:

BANKER DISLIKES ANTI-BANK TECH

How many Lightning transactions happened in the same 24 hours?

Scaling already happened, and all those coins above are completely irrelevant now. Bitcoin now needs privacy, scaling is over




Ethereum and Ripple aren't decentralised, your comparison is meaningless

It's happening slowly already, but eventually the full impact of the last 10 years of money printing is going to find it's way into the price of everything. Notice how massive political destabilisation is taking place in pretty much all oil extracting regions of the world right now. The price of "everything" is being primed for alot of inflation. The Bitcoin price will increase more than ever as a reaction to the outcome of the aforementioned trends than to anything else previously, these are very long term phenomena.  

I agree with some of what you're saying, but you're contradicting yourself here.

Saying "fundamental reasons" are needed to trigger bull markets, but dismissing reward halving or hashrate increases as possible such reasons isn't supported by any reasoning you provided. What I do agree with is where you state that "greed" (or more appropriately, "demand") is important, it's one of few factors we can measure in any way at all. Lightning network use cannot be measured very effectively, the only way that matters (counting the number of Lightning channels) is going to be rendered irrelevant once exchanges begin to use Lightning.

And so empirical measurements are the key, I believe. Even demand is a difficult metric to accurately ascertain. It's all very well claiming that this event or another was the cause of a given price move, but it's always just a theory. There will exist some extent to which Bitcoin exchanges and those responsible for big news stories (e.g. "Chinese gov bans Bitcoin for the 100th time") are colluding in pump and dumps. I think we're all too aware of specious numbers (I hesitate to call it "data") coming from exchanges already (remember the laughably high volume figures that certain exchanges would publish, or the innumerable solvency numbers and subsequent bankruptcies that have taken place?).

The advantage of the reward halving is that it's empirically factual, there is no maybe or perhaps about it, and the time and the magnitude are known to all. The BTC supply (and it's 4 yearly halving) is the only accurate component of the price equation that exists. Unfortunately for your arguments, the same is true of the hashrate; it's impossible to manipulate and the effects on Bitcoin's value proposition and price are well known (if somewhat complex and disputed). Talking up (easily manipulated) events is simply playing into the hands of those who may seek to manipulate that price. And you wouldn't want to fuel or be associated with manipulation, would you?

You're contradicting yourself perfectly. It doesn't matter how simple the firmware is, it's proprietary, and that means users cannot verify your claims without spending the BTC from these notes.

Tangem notes don't need "independent certification" or "manufacturer attestation" if there's no need to trust anyone. That literally means customers are being invited to trust your attestations and certifications.


A significant part of what makes Bitcoin valuable is that anyone can verify the validity of a payment, not just a company paid by a manufacturer to do so. The previous physical Bitcoin producers (or at least Casascius anyway) were very upfront that trust was essential to their product, that made it easier to trust them. The fact that you at Tangem either don't understand that, or are wilfully misrepresenting the fact, makes it much much more difficult to trust you or your notes.

Hmmm, well it could be worse.

But still, there is only one way to discover whether Tangem Notes are either counterfeits (or if Tangem are simply flashing memory chips with the same keys more than once), and that's to spend every Tangem note before you accept it from someone else.

I can imagine this working well:

Store: "So, let me just spend this Tangem note to an address I control, then I'll give you your goods"
Customer: "Uh, how about no?"

You can't really give a Tangem note to someone else, there's nothing to prove that there isn't another Tangem note that has access to the same private key. Except Tangem promising there isn't, of course.

In Tangem We Trust!

Would it be worth pursuing the obverse strategy also, i.e. try to target the weaknesses of ASICs when designing the hash algorithm?


An idea I've been fond of in the past is using a series of hash algos drawn randomly from a set, with the series also changing size randomly within a range, and a random interval between changes in the composition and size of the series (credit to Meni Rosenfeld for that idea).

But could there be other techniques to use the same strategy? Could a hash be written such that the potential for physical flaws in an attempted ASIC chip die would undermine the manufacturing yield, e.g. force chip designers to make individual chips that would need to be >30 cm²?

So the blockchain address is accessible, but the private key is not?

If so, there's a flaw in your model, and you've misunderstood how cryptographic keypairs work. There's no way for anyone holding a Tangem Bitcoin note to prove that they own the money at the respective Bitcoin address on each note.  

How can you prove that the money at these addresses is money sent to the address by Tangem, and not just any random bitcoin blockchain address with 0.01 BTC contained? How can people be sure Tangem didn't use the same address twice, three, four or a hundred times on different notes? Are you going to release videos of Tangem workers sending each transaction to every Tangem note ever made? Will that be enough for people to trust the funds are really unspendable by Tangem, or that you aren't re-using addresses over multiple notes?

There is something "regulating the names", it's the brains and respective mouths of the people involved in cryptocurrency. If some people want to shout very loudly "Bitcoin Best is the real Bitcoin!", it doesn't much matter, because no-one else will care.

Besides, being called "Bitcoin" doesn't make something inherently or universally good, there are (probably) a majority of people out there that dislike Bitcoin, and so to them the name carries nothing but negative connotations.

The trouble with legislating this sort of thing is that the legal system is pretty corrupt already, and Bitcoin is treading on the toes of an even more corrupt system (the banking system). Do you honestly feel confident that a legal judgement about the "real Bitcoin" will produce the "right" answer?

Try that. I had a similar sounding problem to yours, solved when I nuked the database files and rebuilt from zero.

The text above in particular is pure imagination. No evidence exists that Bitcoin Core (or DGC) deliberately created Bitcoin Cash to force miners (the 65% opposed) onto the Bitcoin Cash chain.

Evidence does exist that even if that was the secret plan, it most certainly didn't work: Bitcoin Cash would have 65% of the global hashrate now if that were true. Bitcoin Cash has never had anything close to that hashrate, now or in the past (it's not even reached double digits IIRC)


What actually happened was that the miners compromised with BIP91, probably because they wanted to make sure they could continue mining without causing a controversy that would affect the BTC price too much. BIP91 was an aggressive way of getting BIP 141 (the Segwit softfork) activated, which was achieved by orphaning non-segwit signalling blocks and activating Segwit at an 80% signalling level instead of the 95% signalling level required by BIP141. BIP91 was similar to the UASF BIP148/9 in that way, it took what was a simple signalling exercise and changed into something more forceful.

Only miners ran the BIP91 code, as far as the rest of the Bitcoin network was concerned, BIP141 got it's 95% signalling and BIP91 never existed (segwit signalling went straight to 95% anyway very quickly after miners started running BIP91, which is kind of predictable seeing as miners risked losing any blocks they mined once 80% of miners were signalling BIP141). I don't know how many miners were actually ever running BIP91, as simply signalling BIP141 was enough to make sure they could continue mining without having their blocks automatically orphaned. BIP91 was a risky move, but it all happened so quickly that there was little time for anyone much to feel nervous about it (except the miners not signalling BIP141 yet, who were probably pretty stressed out for a day or so)


TBH WindFURY, you should be able to tell that most of this is nonsense without having to ask anyone; the writer suggests that the old style of Bitcoin addresses (starting with a 1) can no longer be used. This is so obviously false that it's not really worth giving any of it much time.

They did, the limit is now 4x higher at 4MB.

Biggest ever Bitcoin block was 2.3 MB. That's bigger than the 2MB you're asking for.




Lightning testing has been conducted on the Bitcoin testnet for over 1 year, and increasingly large amounts of people are using it with the live Bitcoin blockchain (6000+ channels moving around 18 BTC right now).

Lightning payment channels are proven technology, by definition. It's been tested extensively now.



Name them.



No-one can prevent forks in the code or any blockchain forks caused by forked code. The Bitcoin developers can only do their best to make sure that Bitcoin users stay on the Bitcoin chain, they cannot control the actions of people deliberately splitting the blockchain.

If you don't intend to use segwit addresses any time soon, then it's probably not worth changing. It sounds as if the transaction signing functionality in Armory will be getting additional capabilities in the next version too (as there will be a new wallet format).

Maybe the "it'll never happen" people are all forgetting something:

$1 dollar is about 10,000 satoshis now

(and $1 dollar was worth only 5000 satoshis when BTC was $20,000)


1 BTC = $1 dollar? People said "it'll never happen"
1 BTC = $100 dollars? People said "it'll never happen"
1 BTC = $1,000 dollars? People said "it'll never happen"
1 BTC = $10,000 dollars? People said "it'll never happen"


With the continuing improvements in Bitcoin tech (and the continuing deterioration in democracy), BTC will break $100,000 dollars in the next few years, maybe even in 2019. What will you guys all be saying then (when $1 dollar will be just 1000 satoshis...)

I think 0.96.4 is needed to fix a tx signing bug when spending segwit outputs:


So having >= 0.96.4 as your offline signing software is necessary if you're using Segwit addresses.

Lightning devs are also working on a routing algorithm that causes the network graph to be arranged like a grid. It's gonna be pretty difficult for hub-like nodes to monopolise routing when that techniques makes it into the protocol, trying to predict which nodes to open channels with could become frustrating experience if the hub operator was trying to make money. It'll make more sense to just open up lots of independent grid nodes, in the hope that you can somehow predict where money will flow on the network, and put nodes in strategic parts of the overall network graph. And the network graph is going to be changing shape (and it's payment flow dynamics) constantly, so the algorithm that places your (supposedly profit making) nodes needs to be able to predict the randomness of payment demands, in essence. There cannot be 100% success rate, let's just put it that way, and it wouldn't surprise me if profit making Lighning nodes is a non-viable business in that scenario.

Forbes.com, still learning about the dynamics of cryptocurrency mining tech nearly 10 years too late