Wow. Okay. That's... an opinion...

So by that logic, it sounds like you'd vote to make Ether, Monera, and thousands of other digital currencies, illegal?


But by asking for a special law written to prop up your favorite investment, you are asking the government to decide everything. Your opinion is that every investment that is not Bitcoin is, "shit" (I guess).

It's fine to have that opinion, but it's quite another thing to ask for the government to enforce your investment opinion into law such that your opinion gets special rewards from the government to the detriment of other people's opinions.

When you involve the government in investments, you are taking decision making away from individuals.

So every other cryptocurrency or digital currency in the world--and every other form of investment known to man--is a "shitcoin"? Is that what you think?

And you really think the government should be in the business of deciding which assets are "valuable" and which are "shitcoins"?

Great, so you want to use the power of the central government to force people to buy into the same investment you've bought into, thereby making the value of your investment going up. Nice guy .

So if Bitcoin should be forced upon citizens, why not Ether? Why not DOGE? Why not Haypenny currencies?

And while we're at it, I'm very bullish on a stock right now (MRVL). Should I advocate the US government make that stock "legal tender" so everybody will have to buy it, and make it go through the roof?

Why should Bitcoin, of all things, be given this special treatment by the government?

Hello folks. I was hoping to get advice on for the best exchanges for altcoins. I'm very interested in brokers who can take in USD or Bitcoin in exchange for the newest/hottest relatively undiscovered altcoins out there. I'm well aware of the "big" players like Binance and CoinBase, but I'd love to hear about some of the smaller ones that people think are worthwhile.

No, it won't. A government forcing Bitcoin down the throats of its citizens won't change the fact that Bitcoin costs up to 30 US dollars per transaction and can take up to 30 minutes to complete.

No government can repeal the laws of physics, which is what it would take to make Bitcoin fast and cheap enough to be viable for everyday transactions. In almost every country, people are free to use Bitcoin however they like. They don't do it because it's impractical, not because it's illegal.

PLEASE STOP ASKING FOR BITCOIN TO BE MADE "LEGAL TENDER"

It doesn't mean what you think it means, it won't work (see: El Salvador), it's completely unfair to all of the other technologies out there e.g. Ether etc., and it's inviting the power of the government to regulate it in ways you can never imagine.

And it goes against everything Bitcoin has ever stood for.

Any vendor is free to accept Bitcoin if they want. But guess what: many vendors don't want to because it can cost up to $30 and take 30 minutes for a single transaction.

So what then? You want to use the power of the government to force people to accept Bitcoin even if they don't want to?

So Bitcoin went from a libertarian ideal to... people asking their government to get the cops to shove Bitcoin down people's throats. Amazing.

This is everything the original founders of Bitcoin fought against.

And make no mistake: the minute you accept help from the government, then... the government is going to want its pound of flesh. That's how it works in the real world, folks.

What do you think the difference is? If everybody is free to buy, sell and hold Bitcoin, what more do you want?

Bitcoin is legal in almost every country in the world. What are you talking about?

The actual legal definition of "legal tender", as it's derived from the US Constitution, is that it forces those winning in a judgement in court to accept the given currency as payment whether they want to or not.

That's it. That's all "legal tender" means in actual legal terms.

What those asking for "legal tender" here seem to want is:

1. Bitcoin to be legal to hold and trade--which it already is in almost every country in the world. No new laws are necessary.

2. They want to use the power of the government to promote Bitcoin so it goes up in price (and they wish to do this while screwing over every other digital currency like Ether, Dogecoin, Haypenny currencies, and so on).

Bitcoin was invented for one reason: to create a numerically-delineated trading mechanism that would resist government subpoenas, and this is a something that indeed serves a purpose (so I overstated it somewhat by saying "no practical value").

The reason I overstated it was because Bitcoin was only partially successful at this since the publicly-viewable ledger allows authorities (and anybody else) to employ chain analysis in order to triangulate transactions.

Hence to fully realize Bitcoin's only unique purpose, you either need to add on the original model (e.g. use a mixer, or engage in other kinds of tradecraft), or use a follow-on architecture that solves this problem e.g. Monera.

For me, Monera is the only "correct" cryptocurrency because it actually accomplishes what blockchain was supposed to accomplish--so at this point, insofar as Monera is a viable system, Bitcoin doesn't really have a practical reason to exist when there's a better alternative.


There are literally millions of investment instruments besides Bitcoin, gold and USD. There's land, stocks, other digital currencies, private businesses, bonds, cars, watches, fine art, baseball cards, Hummel dolls, and so on. You can invest in gold or Bitcoin by physically holding it or through an ETF.  You can buy currencies of other countries. You can bet on horses at the track or on who will catch the next touchdown pass on Sunday.

All these instruments have risk, and they all have the ability to go up or down in value. It's certainly not the case that gold and Bitcoin are the only possible investments in the world which will go up in value over time.

In various times in history, had you invested in gold you would have either lost your shirt or made a fortune. Gold goes up and down in value just like every other hyped-up asset. And the USD is no different. There is no "magic asset" that only goes up in value.

And quite the contrary, like any other investment instrument, gold absolutely is subject to arbitrary manipulation, as many major market makers in commodities have shown.


Bitcoin lost 75% of its value only two years ago. There's absolutely nothing stopping that from happening again. Or it could double in price. Who knows. Unlike gold, Bitcoin has no practical value in the world (it's not even Monera), so it's a pure meme investment--the value depends on how people "feel". That could change at any moment.

And yes, Haypenny currencies are also meme investments (once we're out of beta they will be  anyhow ). Haypenny allows people to place bets on very small amounts e.g. just a dollar or less since the transaction fee is so low (a half cent, aka a "haypenny", and it will be this price forever).

Unlike blockchain-based currencies, however, a Haypenny currency could (and should  ) be used for every single transaction on the planet because the platform will scale to that level while undercutting every other form of high-scale value transfer by at least an order of magnitude.

I wouldn't suggest anybody put their whole life savings in either asset, however. They might be fun places to make a little money sometimes, but these instruments are very volatile.

Yes, but the word "decentralization" alone doesn't mean anything. Bitcoin in particular is pretty safe (although nothing is 100%). But lots of projects that were decentralized pretty well have failed.

Bitcoin's code base, for instance, is by definition centralized. It has very good governance which is what makes it safer, but the point here is that Bitcoin's system security stems from the same things that other system's security does, not by some kind of magic.


LOL, absolutely nobody can "ensure the longevity of my wealth over decades" and if anybody tells you any different they are trying to steal something from you. Bitcoin could crash in value tomorrow (it's done this before), just like any other asset.



Haypenny has published the Haypenny Promise which is our contract with our community. This is a set of six simple agreements we have with our users. Hence the short answer to your question would be, "we would get sued and/or arrested" which is the same reason Citibank can't just keep the money in your checking account for themselves.


All of these things could happen to Bitcoin as well, and could happen to you the deed on your house, your car, your brokerage account, and absolutely anything you own including your Bitcoin since your private keys are vulnerable to rubber hose cryptanalysis (and good luck trying to prove "you really owned that" when you complain to the police since, well, how would they ever be sure?).

Bitcoin is not magic. It's a store of wealth based on software and data stores and governance. It is doing very well, and it is a very safe system, but so are lots of other systems in our civilization.

But if LN doesn't handle a mainstream transaction load such that it could be used for everyday transactions, then... what purpose does it serve? Why not just use normal Bitcoin transactions?

By the way, I continue to be a little bit dumfounded that in a community of thousands of deep thinking technical people the central tradeoff of centralization, safety, latency and cost hasn't been quantified. For me, as a 30 year veteran of high-scale architectures, it took me about five minutes to understand that Bitcoin, or anything based on blockchain, would never scale to mainstream loads. And hence my viewpoint is that insofar as a project gets closer to doing so, it gets further from being actual blockchain in the way that it was meant to be used.

As a technical architect I usually try to make my point with theory, but in this case the empirical evidence is inescapable: they've been working on the problem for over 13 years and it's only become worse, not better (which, if you understand the theory, is exactly what you'd expect).

The Bitcoin project and all of the sundry blockchain-based projects would be better served to stop wasting time trying to make blockchain something it is not, something it was never meant to be, and something that it cannot ever be no matter how hard they try.

Or to put it yet another way: Bitcoin already has a "lightning network": it's called the ETF and/or central brokerages that store a representation of people's holdings in an ordinary centralized database.

Most consumers today see a purchase of Bitcoin as something that only takes a few seconds and only costs a few dollars. That's because they aren't actually transacting in Bitcoin. And guess what: most consumers don't care about "decentralization" and they don't even know what that means.

Lightning Network, to me, seems like a project that was generated by denying these core truths.

The same thing that would occur to any project, including Bitcoin. You could certainly argue that Bitcoin itself has a more established system of governance, but that's the only difference. Bitcoin is a piece of code just like our system is. In both cases there would be ways of winding down the project while allowing people to safely retrieve their data.

To be clear, adding the word, "blockchain" doesn't do anything by itself, since it ultimately relies on a data store like any other system. In the case of Bitcoin, the physical integrity of the data store is well protected by its redundancy, and the software in the project is well-governed by the organization and the fact that there are a lot of eyes in the project.

Virtually all the world's wealth is stored on data systems that have a data store, software, and governance, Some of those systems are more secure than others. Blockchain does not inherently make a system more secure, and it doesn't inherently make a project a safer place to store your wealth, as is evident from thousands of failed blockchain projects out there.

Indeed, unless the project is an extremely visible one like Bitcoin, you are much better off trusting a real company whose owners can be identified and sued should they be negligent with your holdings, rather than project started by anonymous people.

To answer your question directly, our users would be taken care of, lest all of my own personal wealth be taken away in lawsuits. Since we're a normal registered American corporation, so I have to fear something like that.

And while there are thousands of failed blockchain projects to point at in the last 10 years that have lost consumers billions of dollars, can you point to the last time a major American bank has lost the savings accounts of its holders? I'm not saying any data store is infallible, but non-blockchain data stores for wealth have a far better track record than blockchain data stores, despite the mythology spread around by Bitcoin fans. And with most Bitcoin holdings these days being stored in some centralized database governed by some corporation, it would seem as though most consumers understand this, too.

Sure, but those "channels" are not decentralized...


And a credit card transaction for, say, a dollar would cost you perhaps 10 cents. I still think this is exorbitant (my platform charges $0.005 for all transactions, forever, always, and can scale to millions of transactions per second), but this is the sort of level LN would need to get to just to equal the status quo, and then it's unclear what the benefit would be over plain old credit card transactions...


But even a small country like Nigeria would need something that would perform at levels far higher than anything using blockchain could do.

But of course from my viewpoint, if you are going to go with a centralized architecture, do it the right way, which means not using a thing that was never meant to do that...

Blockchain doesn't solve anything with respect to security since you still have a data store that needs to be protected just like any other data store. A hard drive is a hard drive, and hacking into it means you have control of the data on it. Application controls are application controls, and if you manipulate the controls that means you compromise the application. Adding "blockchain" to this just increases system complexity, which makes it less secure than a standard system like they've been doing for decades.

Unless the data stores are compromised, then "one employee cannot change records at a bank branch" etc. in normal banking software for instance. If they are compromised, then they can. Adding the complexity of blockchain doesn't change that one way or another.

To put it another way, if a hacker were to somehow take control over a majority of Bitcoin's servers and manipulate the ledger for their own purposes, the concept of "blockchain" would not magically protect current Bitcoin holders from such an attack: Bitcoin would be compromised and potentially anybody could lose their blocks. Of course this is extremely unlikely for a lot of reasons e.g. Bitcoin's operation on thousands of servers, and the extensive vetting that the specific software system of Bitcoin has undergone.

But there are literally thousands of examples of compromised blockchain projects out there that underscore that there's no magic buzzword you can add to something to make it secure.


I'm right there with you on this, but we keep hearing this stuff here and elsewhere like a broken record...

1. Bitcoin, and the blockchain architecture generally, was intentionally designed to be slow and expensive in order to make up for the lack of a central authority on the network.

2. Blockchain solves one unique problem: thwarting government subpoenas into transactions. That's it. It you don't want to solve that problem, it's silly to use blockchain.

3. "Centralized blockchain" is an idiotic contradiction because it's using an architecture that multiplies your complexity and cost and doesn't add any other useful features.

4. A correctly decentralized blockchain-based currency will never, by definition, scale to mainstream transaction loads.

5. Seeing this, many projects (like say Lightning) tried to do some variant of #3 in order to create the appearance of solving the scaling problem, but all that did was: a) counteract the only benefit of using the blockchain architecture; b) not really solve the problem since even "centralized blockchain" won't get you there in terms of truly mainstream transaction loads.

6. Bitcoin and cryptos generally have been very popular and useful by performing the role of meme investment instruments. People love to invest in things like this, and Bitcoin and the others fill this role. Just because blockchain isn't the magical solution to every single one of the world's technical problems doesn't mean it's a "failure".

Satoshi made transactions for Bitcoin intentionally slow and expensive so there would be a cost of being a node in the network. It was never designed to handle "normal" everyday transactions, only the very special ones that people trying to avoid the government need.

And most people I talk to actually don't know that Bitcoin transactions are so expensive and slow because they use a broker app which "buys" Bitcoin (or whatever crypto) for them and puts their purchase in some centralized database.

Bitcoin Cash is more centralized, and therefore more scalable to higher transaction loads at a cheaper price, but it's still nowhere near fast/cheap enough to seriously take on mainstream everyday transactions--no blockchain-based architecture could do this.

Satoshi never envisioned taking over the world's transactions with Bitcoin or anything using it's architecture. It's simply not a problem he was trying to solve--and it shows.

Decentralization, and thwarting government subpoenas into transactions, comes at a cost--and most people don't want to do that anyhow.

The only viable mainstream digital currencies for everyday transactions will be centralized architectures e.g. like Haypenny currencies.

If they aren't on-chain transactions, then they aren't decentralized, and they aren't actually Bitcoin. You might as well just use a bank.

Credit card transactions are rarely more than a dollar or two, and take no more than a few seconds.

Bitcoin is absolutely unsuitable for mainstream transactions.




No country in the world uses Bitcoin as a mainstream means of transacting--because to do so would be a practical impossibility.