Check out the cyclic routing concept too, you're wasting your time writing about what will likely be remembered only as the original conception of Lightning, it will become quickly outdated

Very happy with how well 0.96.4 is working, can't fault it after testing it out for a few days.

Any news on 0.97? (features, not ETA )

1. Cyclic routing is automated, I don't know where you're getting the idea that it needs user intervention or any kind of extra skills
2. That's (probably) the end of the whole "scary hubs" situation, be happy
3. Rebalancing will be handled without services using the "channel factories" concept

You're not up to date on Lightning development, and woefully blinded to the pointlessness of using sidechains as a way to add transaction capacity, it scales the exact same way that adding block space does, i.e. it doesn't scale at all, it's not a scaling concept, it just adds capacity at the same scale.

You also fail to address the major problem with transaction sidechains: if you need to download & validate an entire chain you've not used up until now, that could take a long time if it's several hundred GB. "Just atomic swap across chains" doesn't help you if your coins are on a congested chain, if that was the reason you wanted to hop chains. And what if popular sidechains become mining monopolies? There are all sorts of strategic ways that miners could use multiple chains to screw with users, spamming chain A to drive users to chain B, then spamming B to drive them all to some other. This "uncomplicated" solution sounds like a great way to complicate things, for zero gain in transaction scaling.

This doesn't exist, there is no "exit-scam" attack. If a hub closed channels, everyone gets their money by definition, that's what channel closing means



Sidechains aren't a different layer, as they don't use mainchain scripts as building blocks



Adding extra transaction chains doesn't preserve the simplicity of the blockchain paradigm at all, it complicates it. Using Lightning, of course, does not complicate the way the blockchain functions, because it actually is a layer on top of the blockchain



Right, the Lightning paradigm is a new paradigm (there's only 1 though, you accidentally made it sound more complicated than it really is). And as for centralisation risks, I think the Lightning devs have got that taken care of with the cyclic routing concept.



Lightning just uses time locked transactions to expand capacity. There is no "interfering" with the mainchain, everything Lightning does can be done legitimately on-chain.



This is... a mistruth that Lightning critics often use? Are you one such critic, d5000? There's no reason to close Lightning channels once most people are using it, why pay 500 satoshi fee when you can pay a 0.0001 satoshi fee?



What if the sidechain pulls an "exit scam", lol


Sorry d5000, sidechains can work for non-BTC assets secured by Bitcoin miners. But no-one else in the cryptocurrency development field thinks they provide anything meaningful to help transaction scaling, oh, except the Drivechain devs, who go on and on about it every chance they get

yep.

Latest work from Lightning devs suggests there are channel formation algorithms that can keep the Lightning node network decentralised. The hubs objection doesn't matter any more, and neither do block limits (of course ).

Or we could just do all of that with Lightning, which scales up orders of magnitude better than sidechains can

Why are sidechains always the answer to transaction scaling for you d5000, are you involved in the drivechain project by any chance? Because the drivechain developers are the only other people that never miss a chance to say "hey guys! Ever considered using sidechains for scaling? You'd only need x sidechains for trillions of users..." etc etc, which is remarkably similar rhetorically to what you keep repeating, every chance you get.

Note: no-one else, except drivechain developers (strangely enough), thinks that using sidechains to scale transactions is a good idea, all other Bitcoin developers think the opposite

Explain how using a blockchain to serve media content can possibly solve piracy in a different way than if a regular streaming service were to simply making prices lower or allowing pay per view (pay per view already exists on, say, vimeo.com).



Explain how using a blockchain to serve media content can possibly solve accessibility in a different way than if a regular streaming service were to make distribution deals so that all content is available in all regions. How could using a blockchain help secure distribution rights in places where they cannot now?


After that all that, I'll explain about how much more expensive it would be to serve media content from a blockchain instead of just using web servers.

That's what one half of the media are telling you. Have you noticed how the other half (as well as the ostensibly independent Wikileaks themselves) are also parroting a different story in unison?

What's the evidence for any of these 2 polarised views? Have you seen any evidence, or are you just blindly repeating what you heard from one bias?


It is a weird story, that's a fact.

Wikileaks are just 1 of several significant organisations well known on the world stage that don't seem to get called out by the media for being so strangely inept. It's very difficult to believe that they're essentially an independent intelligence agency that are incapable of conducting very basic due diligence about financial institutions they deal with. They should by now understand the finance industry even if they didn't in 2010/11 (the last time Wikileaks had their fingers burned, which led to them Bitcoin adoption in the first place).

And this implies something else; I was led to believe that Wikileaks was based in Iceland. How did their Coinbase account help them in that region? I'm pretty sure there is no BTC exchange handling Icelandic Kroner. How can they possibly ever get any money from their Coinbase account to fund the actual organisation in Iceland?

Nice

Got 0.96.4 working well over here, massive thanks to droark and the mighty goatpig.

Notice how the text talks about copyright's long list of failures. And not how blockchain can do anything to help.


Blockchain can't cure this problem. One can apply the model of private keys in a crypto system to all digital assets (or any information for that matter). And what do we say in Bitcoin? Keep your private keys absolutely as private as you possibly can, handle with extreme care. The instant you expose them somehow, consider the money gone.

And it's no different with any type of information: as soon as you release the information, you can't expect to keep it secret any more. It's blindingly self-evident, but plenty of people of got some blockchain snake-oil to sell you that will magically wipe hard disks of unauthorised copyrighted material, and magically leave the paid-for copies intact.

Despite some thoughtful replies, I still feel everyone is missing the point.


Price is a very effective mechanism. Most people are saying "I won't pay", but they won't specify how much. We can do micro-transactions now, very effectively. We can pay the equivalent of a tiny fraction of 1 cent to make a post, like 0.0000001. Is that too much, if it cleans the forum up?

Why not tell us how much is too much, then we might start to get somewhere

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Maybe I've got too much of a bias to 2012 and 2011 when I started to read the forum: it was much better. This place was full of computer science types, sound money enthusiasts, math people, electronics people, old luminaries of the cypherpunk era, and totally anonymous people like today as well of course. I'm not saying everyone has to be some kind of polymath, but the conversations in the thread were usually motivated by earnest and genuine enquiry, people discussed all sorts of stuff. 2013 onwards, this forum just slowly filled up with sig spammers and trolls. Lots of the old crowd don't even come here anymore, the orgy cesspit of mindlessness that the Discussion board turned into pretty much killed the previous atmosphere. It seems like alot of people want to fight for keeping this place how it became after it went downhill, not for how high the quality here used to be.

Think of it as a bid. If someone else is willing to sell at that price (maybe the Wannacry coins, for instance), then now everyone knows these price scientists economists are buying at $200.

There are bids on website exchanges, right now, at 1$ and $25 thousand.

There is no "the price" in a capitalist system, anyone saying this has fundamentally misunderstood capitalism. That's only possible when prices are being fixed.

Doesn't anyone remember when BTC was trading in Zimbabwe nearly 100% higher than exchange prices last year? Or when the prices on BTC-e.com were consistently 5% lower than every other exchange, because it was considered a risky website to trade on?


I'm amazed: subsidised farming and monopoly commodities markets have managed to (essentially) brainwash 99% of the world into believing that there's a "correct" price or an "incorrect" price for goods

Is there a price scale that's too high for low-ranked spammers, but also low enough for high-ranked genuine posters?

Say,

• Newbies - 100 satoshi per post
• Juniors - 5 satoshi per post, + 1% returned
• Members - 2 satoshi per post, + 2% returned
• Full Members - 1 satoshi per post, + 4% returned
• Seniors - 0.1 satoshi per post, + 8% returned
• Heroes - 0.001 satoshi per post, + 16% returned
• Legendaries - 0.0001 satoshi per post, + 39% returned

(keep in mind I become a Member under this proposal)

I'm pretty sure that the 80 page shit-post spam fests, titled "can my Freindz still makes monies of Bitcoinz in thhis days?" would all just disappear completely. Instantly.

Could trolls afford it? Most couldn't. And those that could would end up paying for the Seniors (and above) to post.


I don't see the problem. I'm not afraid to rank up, or to pay, under that kind of system.

SHA256 won't necessarily be secure forever though (although how long for is anyone's guess). PoW algorithm will have to be changed eventually.



Having a stack of hashing algorithms would probably solve that problem. Take a pool of proven hashing algorithms, then randomly choose several in a series of hashing operations to constitute Bitcoin's PoW. Arbitrarily change the hashing algos within the series after a minimum of 3 months (not with another hard fork, build that behaviour directly into the consensus rules). CPU's or GPU's could be adapted to that, but an ASIC would be conventionally impossible.



There are only 3-4 manufacturers producing SHA256 ASICs for mining Bitcoin (and they appear to be price fixing)

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The other alternative is some kind of very sophisticated 3D printing technology that can usurp traditional processor fabricators. But no such tech yet exists AFAIA (and certainly won't be able to compete with bleeding edge nm node processes at first anyway)

AES is an encryption algorithm, not a hashing algorithm.

It's complicated.

To simplify, this has actually already happened: I think it was Bitcoin Gold (?) that hard-forked from Bitcoin a couple of months ago, on the basis of a more decentralised mining ecosystem by changing PoW to an algo that's difficult to produce an ASIC for. Needless to say, it didn't gain much popularity.


Until the mining cartel start to affect everyday Bitcoin users in a way that forces them to act, I expect nothing will happen. Segwit2x almost forced this situation, but in the end it was averted.

In principle, I think it would be better if PoW was changed, but it needs ALOT of planning to make the change seamless, there must be a minimally disruptive way to transition to the alternative source of hashrate to ensure highest possible confidence in the change. Otherwise the BTC exchange rate could crash badly.

Exactly what that would look like... well, maybe a testnet could be running beforehand, with all the new-PoW miners testing that chain. Then a "hand-over" period of blocks could be specified to permit both SHA256 and new-PoW blocks, after which only new-PoW blocks are accepted when handover is complete. Maybe if the end of the hand-over period is specified by the percentage of blocks produced using new-PoW (say 90% or 95%), it could be a very smooth transition. There would almost certainly be people continuing to mine the SHA256 chain afterwards though, although it's unlikely to gain much traction if they're only doing 5% of the work of the main chain.

Choosing the algorithm to ensure the viability of out-hashing the SHA256 miners would be very important, but that would also be the key to success.

Chile, check this out: Bisq

No-one can shut down decentralised exchanges

Oh, and @Pharmacist

You might be right that Merit hasn't been in place long enough to do what it's capable of. I'm just reacting to the fact that there's far too many 0-10 Merit accounts (seemingly more than ever) who seem oblivious to the idea that ranking up is in their interest (some come across like bots). Spambots cannot think rationally about ranking, but the owners of the spambots can watch the whole strategy disappear, spraying the walls of the boards with 100's of annoying bots would suddenly become very expensive under this proposal.

Well the results are interesting.

Most of the people who dislike the idea are -

1. sig campaigners
2. not picking up many merit points
3. high ranks as a result of the activity based ranking system



Whereas JetCash, who has much more earned merit than me (or anyone else in the thread) was kind of neutral.

And 3 straight Members with relatively high merit (Magic Smoke, nebuch & bitperson) were kind of positive. Interesting