According to this logic, every Bitcoin exchange or other BTC accepting business in the whole world, except Japan, is operating illegally. There are many 100's of exchanges and many 1000's of businesses accepting BTC worldwide. You don't understand how the law works.

Why not?

Theft is illegal already. No legal system is going to work efficiently if laws are written in a way that every new invention needs every old legal concept re-written completely from scratch.

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The point of all this is that politicians are floundering. In the late 20th century, electronic banking (and the demonetisation of gold) made it far simpler to track taxable money flows. Bitcoin suddenly makes that task almost as difficult as it was before, and it's only going to get more difficult for them as cryptocurrencies continue to evolve.

There was a golden age for music and movie industries in the 20th century too: the tech was only good enough that the only way to manufacture copies of the recordings was either too difficult or too expensive for regular people to do themselves.

In 100 short years that all changed, very few people respect so-called "copyright", and musicians and movie studios are gradually beginning to accept that their golden age is over (I'm surprised movie makers are still releasing movies on home media so quick after the theater runs).

Politicians are going to be way more less likely to let go, but the facts are undeniable: before, taxable incomes could always be found. Before, taxable incomes could always be taken by force. Not any more. I don't know what kind of regulations anyone realistically expects to change things back how they were.

I'm cool with paying for stuff I use, or subsidising things that are for the greater good. But the power Bitcoin gives the people over politicians is a change for democratic good, and should be presented as such. If I didn't want to pay for war, corruption, or propaganda, I previously had no choice. Now, we all do.


Bitcoin is the regulation. And that's what the politicians don't like.

That's from another Bitcoin node on the network.


Starting Bitcoin (bitcoind or Bitcoin-Qt) with -uacomment=<any_message_the_user_chooses_to_write> will (you guessed it) append any message the user chooses to write to the version string advertised to other connecting nodes on the Bitcoin network.

i.e. someone else wrote some graffiti in their version string, and you can do that too if you want to have a less anonymous node

Schnorr sigs will be a big deal. Work is set to start this year, but as OmegaStarscream states, that could mean we're looking at sometime around 2020 till Schnorr sigs are activated on the network (it can apparently be achieved by a soft fork).

It might be an exaggeration to say Schnorr solves the scaling problem, but it will certainly help alot (supposedly 25-30% extra space will be made available on-chain*). Privacy will improve for certain transactions too.


* proponents of on-chain scaling will, of course, be against Schnorr sigs for some invented non-reasons



I wouldn't worry too much, Lightning will make a very large difference to the transaction capacity long before that. It's important to remember that Bitcoin's market position is mostly driven by real demand, not so easily said for most other cryptocurrencies. Also important to remember that Bitcoin is the leader because of it's the most highly used cryptocurrency network, and it has the engineering quality needed to support that level of use.

Right, so nothing's changed. At all.

If the big plan of the IMF (and it's monetary system crooked cohorts) is to create rules for criminal acts using Bitcoin, then this "news" is no less than an admission of their failure to come up with anything at all. Criminals don't care about breaking laws and immoral behaviour ALREADY, announcements like this are about as terrifying as those announcements that banks will be fined for breaking laws.


There's nothing that the so-called authorities can really do, other than accept that Bitcoin is a higher authority than they are.

It is not unfair, open marketplaces are not unfair. The alternative is to have all prices heavily manipulated by non-meritocratic means, as they are in the established financial markets and government subsidy system. The difference is that anyone can use their knowledge of market dynamics to accumulate profits from an open market like Bitcoin, whereas only people who suck up to those well positioned in the established market places can become market makers (i.e.whales) themselves.

This system has shielded regular people from real markets for so long that most regular people have no clue how to react to market signals in this so-called capitalist world. If all Bitcoin investors rigidly stuck to the basic sensible trading advice just on this page, there wouldn't be such a wild swings in the BTC price. It's going to be a long hard road out of this centralised price-setting paradigm that is, to all intents and purposes, little different to the communist model. All regular people got a real-time education in market behaviour for 1000's of years prior to the 20th century, when the governments of the world turned price setting into a closed shop for them and their cronies to "protect" regular people from being able to profit from market movements.

SOME, yes.

The price could drop from here, not even the whales know accurately what will happen. The trick is to take obvious opportunities while they're there, but not to assume they're the only opportunities. Buy A LITTLE (i.e. don't spend your whole budget) when prices SEEM low, then wait. Sell A LITTLE when prices SEEM high, then wait. Repeat until winning.

If government services were so amazing, people would pay without being physically threatened. It's a protection racket.

These people are too used to being able to talk shit in order to get around a difficult situation.


Too bad. The evolution's already happened, and no amount of talking is going to change what Bitcoin fundamentally is. All the "legal" privileges banks had can now be enjoyed by regular people. I have a branch of the International Bank of Bitcoin at my place, as do all other Bitcoiners.

So keep talking, banksters. Everything they've known is set to be flushed away, I'm not surprised they're not coping well.

Older software will refuse to send to bc1 addresses, as a basic error-checking measure.



You can send from P2SH segwit or bech32/bc1 addresses now. It's sending to segwit addresses from non-upgraded exchanges that's the issue.

Nested Segwit (starting 3) will work anywhere, all wallet software understands it. It's only the bc1 addresses that won't work backwards compatibly, and that's kind of irrelevant seeing as there aren't many wallets that use bc1 addresses. So it's all software related, so we just need to wait for wallets to be updated.

Best advice is to use nested 3-starting addresses for Segwit now, because they're completely backwards compatible for all services and wallets. So there's no need to wait for others to wait to update, you can use Segwit now backwards compatibly.



No, Bitcoin Core 0.16 will be available something like next week, I would guess. It's the Segwit wallet release, and has been expedited a little.

I'm pretty sure MAST only permits a limited amount of extra complexity using the existing op-codes.



MAST only increases privacy in specific circumstances; if a script has branches (e.g. when a threshold of signers is less than the total possible, 2 of 3 for instance), then only the branch that is satisfied ends up published on the blockchain when using MAST (e.g. if person 1 & 2 sign a transaction, person 3's pubkey isn't disclosed at all as a part of the transaction). With current scripting, all branches of a script are published when the script is spent from. This can make MAST transactions smaller than regular P2SH.

I don't think this will change LN privacy properties, it's already a private system in any case. I don't think it could make channel open/close transactions smaller, as they're always 2 of 2, but there's maybe some subtlety I've not picked up on.



There are no deployment implementations that I'm aware of, but any soft-fork is likely to get deployed using version bits (which Segwit was).

Ok, there's very little they can do about decentralised computer tech, that's right



But there's also very little that can be done, because ultimately, ICOs are also decentralised computer tech.


You are already doing the right thing without suggesting intervention of the (former) authorities, though: calling ICO scammers out. When the previous authorities can't do anything, we can only warn people.

This is symptomatic of powerful peer-to-peer (i.e. decentralised) tech. The tech is so powerful, that centralised methods cannot control it. This is great when someone with good intentions creates such tech, individuals are empowered. But those with bad intentions can similarly use the nature of p2p tech to manipulate people.

The only way to mitigate problems caused by peer-to-peer tech is therefore also peer-to peer. The financial press are supported by financial industry advertising, and so cannot afford to do anything except use ICOs as a stick with which to beat the well-intentioned cryptocurrencies availaible.

Currently, channels are limited to 0.16777216 BTC, and individual transactions can be no more than 0.04194304 BTC. These are safety limits, and may be changed (or possibly removed) in future



Atomic Multi Path (AMP) would be another option (a set of options really).

Instead of only sending via 1 channel, a Lightning node can send via multiple channels to a single recipient. This additional protocol is only at the discussions stage right now, though.

Bitcoin Cash die-hard: "Homo-sapiens is the original hominid species, they all forked from us!!! "




Bitcoin & cryptocurrencies are a self-regulating meritocracy: there's no reason to prefer Bitcoin for ideological or group-think/"home team"/latest fashion reasons.

Using Bitcoin enables and strengthens your economic & monetary rights directly, without the need to resort to the classical government model of protecting rights (which is essentially no more than a benevolent protection racket). There's no need to pay tithes to government goons to protect your interests, the Bitcoin network (and it's underlying software design) protects your money instead. Governments and banks are not big fans of this model of rights (and neither are the so-called liberal media).

It's easy to dismiss the "not a coup" assessments on this basis.



Both BCash and Segwit2x claimed to be "The Real Bitcoin". There was an attempt by both forks to get the ticker symbol (BTC) appropriated by their respective projects, including a point in late 2017 where Coinbase Inc. (which was heavily in favour of Segwit2x) were set to change the ticker symbol on their exchange. The marketing of Bitcoin Cash has continued to make the "real Bitcoin" claim since the demise of the Segwit2x fork.


There is no need to use such highly psychological tactics if the intention is to create an honest competitor, that kind of rhetoric is clearly and unambiguously dishonest. This is aggressive and manipulative behaviour, why would a technically superior product need to employ such machiavellian tactics? The answer is because these forks were self-interested attempts to de-rail Bitcoin's direction and stability, not that they were borne out of genuine technical disagreements.

Hmmm, invalid supposition is invalid. Amended my post.


Can a mod give buwaytress his merit back? Turns out I shouldn't have been given it.

Sipa is the only person still working on Bitcoin on that list, and is therefore the longest serving programmer in Bitcoin development. So Sipa has probably contributed to Bitcoin development more than anyone else.

Scratch that, apparently Sipa was not part of the deprecated sourceforge repo that Satoshi set up, or at least he was only part of the effort to move the sourceforge repo over to github in 2010.

Good things (about empty blocks)

• Increases the amount of work performed on the blockchain, making all previous blocks more secure (full blocks also do this)
• Inhibits the overall size of the blockchain (slightly)

Bad things

• Transaction rate not maximised

The incentive to mine empty blocks is pretty low overall, despite their frequency. Let's not forget that improvements in propagating blocks and in the efficiency of the Bitcoin client have helped to reduce that incentive alot over the years. As long as competition in mining remains relatively open, empty (or half empty) blocks will be great way for miners to decrease their profits.

That isn't going to be happening, the best strategy with your posts is to skim-read them until one finds the deliberate errors you try to promote as facts