So, both you and Satoshi highlight that the demand for Bitcoin is as a medium of exchange only, it has no other purpose. As Satoshi suggests, this makes Bitcoin very desirable as a medium of exchange, because in contrast to it's perfect uselessness otherwise, Bitcoin plays all the parts that a medium of exchange needs to so well.


The whole rationale for Satoshi's design for Bitcoin was to outclass (and hence outcompete) existing forms of money entirely. This present clamor to "regulate" Bitcoin signals Satoshi's victory in his design decisions. Policy chiefs saying "we must unite" when they are otherwise so divided is a highly effective admission of how powerless they are to stop Bitcoin.


When the entire modern way of life is sold to the modern day underclasses on the basis of fairness and stability, the underclasses are beginning to see the sales-spin more clearly. Assets pushed on them by the finance world and the media are looking increasingly questionable in value.

So, this is the other side of the faith argument: the authorities who would have us believe in the value of bonds, real estate, stock market or fiat currency are looking less authoritative now than ever. In today's world, yesterday's liars won't get so far convincing people of anything when grassroots movements like Bitcoin demonstrate so effectively how heinous their previous lies were. The faith in old institutions is eroding, and increasingly so. And the door is wide open now for new paradigms to step in. It's the perfect time for something like Bitcoin to establish itself.

You can buy Dogecoin. It's dead though.

A very superficial way.

Ripple is a 2nd layer network to all the systems it interfaces with. Lightning is a Bitcoin-only 2nd layer. That's where comparisons end.

Both dead.

Neither had much support, hence both dead.

Yeah, that would sound more convincing if you didn't have this (+ hyperlink to a website called *ahem* "bustadice.com") in your signature:


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There's only one united front: and it's Bitcoiners

As long as we continue to refuse to bow to pressure from governments, then governments will continue to be in disarray on the issue. Even if there was a uniform, worldwide totalitarian regime established to fight Bitcoin, Bitcoin could still survive it. The Bitcoin concept is too powerful, and it was deliberately conceived that way.


These are the croaks and groans of crooks and drones, publicly dying in slow-motion for all to see. They're terrified: of a ~15 MB piece of computer software.

With due respect to Ron Paul, he's wrong here.



Before Satoshi, these combinations were possible:

Gold/Silver	Tangible	Decentralised	Trustless
Paper bank notes	Intangible	Centralised	Trust required
Electronic banking	Intangible	Centralised	Trust required

The only reason to make money from something tangible is to make sure it has a limited supply (here, paper bank notes actually fail, as their value is in a printed number, not in the value of the paper the number is printed on). Satoshi's design for cryptocurrency achieves a limited supply for something intangible, decentralised and trustless. That's the significant achievement of Satoshi's design.


So credit where it's due to Ron Paul, at least he popularised the idea of sound money in politics. But he's so close to the issue that he's forgotten what the reasoning was behind choosing something tangible to begin with.

Satoshi was very smart. Not perfect, but perhaps even that is to his credit.


But Marx was an I D I O T

• Everyone owns their labour and their working infrastructure
• No-one owns anything
• Everyone owns everything equally

These were the tenets of Marxism, and GEE, WHAT A BIG SURPRISE that those perfect contradictions created a massive vacuum into which stepped state ownership of everything and everyone.


Yeah, he lived in a fancy house in London with Engels, who subsidised Marx to sit around writing all his life. Engels was an industrialist if I remember rightly, lol. Not much of a surprise that Marx's ideology was a macrocosm mirroring his own life, strange how he was drawn to the conception of an ideology that empowered arrogant idiots to sit around writing theories that didn't work using money taken from working class people.


Marx and Satoshi: only their disruptive nature is comparable. Marx failed more or less straight away. Satoshi succeeded, more or less straight away.

Could this be the reason there's been an increase in the rate of larger than average kB transactions recently? With ~195 MB of transactions confirmed in the past 24 hours across ~325,000 transactions, that puts the average transaction size at 600 kB (much larger than the 225 kB of a typical transaction).

Not aware of any, but I would look more to the developers implementing features like MAST or Schnorr for that type of information, the stuff that hits the press is usually self-promoting (why take it to the press otherwise). I think 1 MAST implementation exists (but is controversial), and no Schnorr implementations exist yet. Benchmarking to gauge the extent that MAST could permit larger blocks doesn't exist, AFAIK.



I'm not sure about Segwit being a one-shot, it's possible that future soft forks could be designed to increase the max blockweight even further. I would certainly hope it can be done, as it's the least disruptive way to do so.

This doesn't have to mean hard-forked blockweight changes will be difficult, though. I think once the case for that is genuinely compelling, then it will happen. Up till now, that case has been rejected by most Bitcoiners. But people will change their minds about it as improvements to block processing are tested and proven on the live network.

Segwit is alive, and S2X is dead.

First things first: I do a little study of Lightning, but wouldn't be considered any kind of expert on the subject. I certainly don't know anything about today's Ripple, which has no doubt changed since I first checked Ripple out (many years ago).

But your assertion that Lightning channels are backed by real BTC is correct. Lightning takes advantage of a protocol designed to make it safe to use un-broadcasted Bitcoin transactions as they guarantee ownership of the funds in those un-broadcasted transactions, if the transaction is broadcasted on-chain (which is what closing a channel entails).


Maybe an analogy for this would be the various payment processors that exist in the internet age: Square, PayPal, Moneygram etc. PayPal, for instance, has just one regular bank account to which all PayPal customers send money. PayPal then has a separate accounts system that tells them who owns what amount of the balance in that one bank account, so people with PayPal membership can send each other money without ACH or SWIFT or any other mainstream system.
 
With Lightning, you can open your own decentralised Bitcoin payment processor (a channel) that lets you forge the Bitcoin transactions you would have use on-chain, but just without sending them, in the full knowledge that you can send them should you wish to send that money on-chain instead. So it's like letting everyone open up a private payments processor for Bitcoin, but with the difference being that there's a protocol for all the individual payment processors to send BTC between each other, i.e. Square can send to Moneygram using the same system. And you are your own independent peer-to-peer Square or PayPal, you are still your own bank in the same way you are when using the blockchain, no one has different rights or abilities than anyone else on Lightning.

From what I remember about Ripple, you don't own anything. Banking corporations control the Ripple payment gateways, and can accept or deny your transactions for any reason they choose. So it's not peer-to-peer at all (despite being endorsed by the so-called p2p foundation), because there are privileged nodes on the network that can dictate what you can and can't do, no different to the regular banking system.

STOP

DO NOT enter your Bitcoin private keys to any type of website, ever.

There is no need to enter any private key. At best, this site is incompetently designed, at worst, a scam to steal your BTC

STOP

This is a good point. There will still be relatively safe ways for kids and young adults to obtain Bitcoins, but not necessarily all will take those options (many of the safer online ways probably won't be practical for accessing anything except low quantities of BTC)

I hope governments will learn to give up eventually. Because they're demonstrating already that they're willing to put people in danger in order to maintain control of the monetary system.

Define "too high". Clearly, everyone has different definitions of how much is too much, people are paying historically high average fees at the moment which are clearly not too high for those people.

As for on-chain size increases, those need to be preceded by study into off-setting the additional processing burden higher blockweight limits represent. Segwit is somewhat of an example; allowing signature hashing to scale linearly mitigated (but did not offset) the increase to a 4MB block limit.

Aggregated Schnorr signatures will positively off-set the effect of larger blocks; not only will they permit more space within the present limit, but the much reduced processing required for aggregated signatures means larger block sizes should be safer (but only for block-space containing aggregated signatures, much like how >1MB of block space is only available to Segwit transactions).


Segwit. Increased block limit to 4MB. No clusterfuck (or continuation of a non-Segwit hardfork) occurred.

A soft-forked change cannot be mandatory, it will always be opt-in, by definition.


Enhancing Bitcoin privacy is a must, and not for "die-hard" reasons. The privacy of transacting in a form of money affects it's effectiveness in performing the role of being money. The goal is to implement and popularise a form of independent electronic money, and so compromising Bitcoin's money characteristics is obviously anathema to that goal.

Yes, we know that. But they succeed in nurturing an anti-establishment image to their readers by positioning themselves against privatised authoritarianism (and labelling anyone against socialist authoritarianism as a fascist).



This is what the (true) establishment cronies like The Guardian (and equally Fox News or the Daily Mail) want to achieve: heavily promoting just 2 ideologies, and making sure that it appears as if only 2 options exist.

We, as Bitcoiners, terrify the real establishment. We dare to take a 3rd option, not spoonfed by the media.



I mostly agree, but must take a hard line in describing The Guardian's socialist politics as "liberal".


This is the most highly Orwellian language distortion of the modern age (in addition to the blurred meaning of the word "fascism", or the laughable nonsense of the neologism "neo-liberal").

Liberal does not, and can not, mean any form of authoritarianism or aggression. We may as well tear up the dictionary and start again with an altogether different language if we allow this double-speak to pass unchallenged. It should be perfectly obvious what liberalism means (little different to what libertarian means), no matter how often the US media mis-labels authoritarian socialism as liberalism, or how often the European media mis-labels corporate fascism as neo-liberalism.

Liberalism (and it's ultimate conclusion, voluntary society with no state at all*) is what governments fear, as there is nothing for them corrupt if they have no power. And that's why the corrupt media is so desperate to corrupt the meaning of liberalism into either privatised (neo-liberal) or nationalised (socialist) authoritarianism, there would be no need to work so hard at changing the meaning of the word otherwise.


And they love it when people that want to be independent of government fight each other. So please, think more carefully about what I'm saying if anyone feels the need to shout "leftist!", or "nazi!". They want that.


* I hesitate to use the word "anarchist" these days, the media are working super-hard to corrupt what that word means too

PayPal can't do micropayments either.

Micropayments are probably best defined as payments in amounts less than the smallest unit that a given payment network can process using regular payments. Which isn't possible on PayPal.

Who's going to make money out of a p2p network if there are nodes on it charging zero routing fees? You can charge as high a price as you like, nodes will simply route around your node.

There's no incentive to charge high fees (or any fees) if it makes your node less well connected. And there's no cost to running a node if you have a home and a computer. So your talk of centralised hubs is complete nonsense, they'll be sat around routing nothing (and costing the same amount to run as the nodes who do route traffic)



It's true, you're incoherent and rambling alot of the time

The Guardian sells itself as a progressive, anti-establishment news outlet.

But their coverage of Bitcoin over the years demonstrates a consistent and concerning pro-establishment bias. Even a basic education in monetary history and theory will leave the average person wondering how Guardian writers (who are alleged professionals) can get something so incredibly simple so incredibly wrong.

It's impossible that their writers (or the editors) are this dumb. One can only conclude that this piece has been written to order, to satisfy the financial industry in some way or another.


These attacks are getting to sound really shrill and desperate, as if independent currencies scare the living crap out of the establishment (something that is borne out in the history of money, incidentally). Why say anything at all, if there's nothing to fear except a rollercoaster ponzi scheme? (a good description of government-backed currency at it's worst) Conclusion: The Guardian are about as anti-establishment as Trump or Obama.