In practice, it'll be simple.

You can open a channel with yourself to start with. No need to lock yourself to anyone.

Then, the wallet software will dynamically open channels with whoever you need to transact with. The option of choosing specifically who to open channels with can be done, but it won't be as quick or efficient as using the wallet software to route the transaction for you.



"Force" is the wrong word. You're right though, there's not much point in adding BTC to a channel just for 1 purchase, you should fill it with as much as you're happy with so you can make multiple purchases from 1 channel. That way you can take advantage of the Lightning's fees, refilling channels with on-chain transactions should be kept to a minimum if you don't want to pay too much in fees.

Are under 19's banned from using cash in South Korea? No?

What possible reason could the South Korean gangster-ment have for stopping kids from using cryptocurrency anyhow? Not that much different to the reasons to make draconian rules for adults: the "wrong" people are becoming wealthy. Can't have just anyone making money in a protection racket, after all.

Newsflash: kids are gonna be even more incentivised to break these "rules", and even more capable of doing so than the adults.

That's totally wrong.

There is no $30 fee (it's a bid-based supply/demand fee, not a fixed number). And there's no necessity to close channels often.

And there's every incentive to open plenty of channels. And free fees will undermine any attempt to turn Lightning routing into a business.



No, it's totally wrong. I'm talking to you, not some youtube video. If there's someone on that video who knows what they're talking about, they're definitely not saying anything resembling what you said.

Your ability to communicate facts about Bitcoin is completely inverted in relation to your confidence: you think you're perfect, but you sound like you're talking in your sleep after getting drunk the night before

Everyone's a bank in Bitcoin
Everyone's a bank on the Lightning network


That's totally wrong

There's no advantage to closing the channel having used it once. So

4. Channel stays open, 0 fees



Anyone can become a Bitcoin bank, just open a wallet or a Lightning channel



Lightning will be free. Or virtually free.

And my Lightning node won't charge fees, alot of people will do this to encourage the network to be better connected. Probably alot of traffic will get routed through free Lightning nodes (why pay?). Someone trying to charge high fees is gonna have a hard time competing with that.

You don't know how it works, basically. Please learn, you sound crazy.

It's pretty rare, that's true. But there are still maybe < 20 every week.

Anyone can open a Lightning channel with anyone else, and anyone can also open as many channels as they like. But I guess you're going to call anyone with more than 1 channel a bank


You've had it explained to you many times already, but it seems you're resistant to learning and just want to shout about everyone being a bank instead. You can use the same logic for Bitcoin mainnet, it's absolutely full of banks. One of the original taglines to promote Bitcoin was, in fact, "be your own bank".

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agreeing with everyone who says "blocks aren't full yet", or "Bitcoin needs validation performance increases first so the network can handle it"

Well, not quite.

There's a tiny percentage of blocks mined that are using the pre-segwit block type. Activation means that Segwit blocks cannot be rejected, not all blocks must be capable of including Segwit transactions.

There are alternatives to Coinbase, they'll lose customers to those eventually



Should be far earlier than May. Some features have been moved to 17.0 so that 16.0 can be centered around Segwit wallet and bech32.

I would guess March is more likely the release date for 16.0

Larger blocks are not a problem, but only if there is sufficient improvements to block validation time/costs before any increase, and that the increase is made in line with those improvements.

Sorry if it seems like I'm directing this at you richardsNY, not the situation. But it gets frustrating hearing people like coolcoinz bleating "can we has more big please" without thinking that there might be other consequences of doing that to consider too (or that other coins with that design are already available, and not so successful).

Check out what happens if unbalanced engineering solutions like Bcash starts becoming used (Bcash has 8MB blocks, and it still doesn't have enough transaction rate to fill up 1Mb of that maximum). Or even better, just check out Bcash's market price: there's not a whole lot of confidence that this approach will work

This is often said, but rarely true. Governments of most of the main currencies (e.g. Euro, Dollar, Yen) have little input in the decision making structure for monetary policy. Central banks are typically independent of government with private owners.

Both those "solutions" have been rejected, for good reasons. But if you want more centralised mining (by reducing time between blocks), or a centralised network overall (by increasing the blocksize), there are other cryptocurrencies that offer those "features".

It's a free market, put your money where your mouth is, instead of offering these reckless ideas as false solutions. And you are by no means the first.

Unfortunately, the answer is the same reason that we have to tolerate genuine racism: free speech


But remember, we have free-speech too, which is very difficult to govern in reality. Making coherent arguments that appeal to logic and reason is usually pretty effective, so the author of these bizarre ranting won't fare well in public debate on this matter.

And, as usual, Bitcoin doesn't care. The Bitcoin network is too resilient for one person's opinion about it to make a difference. One of the oldest and most powerful businesses in the world (banking) is very upset about Bitcoin's emergence, and 9 years hence, there appears to be precisely nothing that these powerful people (or their questionable friends) can do about it. This guy's whinging is a fart in the wind in comparison.

Anyone entering into ideological debates deserves everything they get. Transaction capacity scaling is a technical issue, not an ideological issue.

Lol, I think it would be better if Coinbase didn't do that.

The only time they've ever tried to involve themselves in Bitcoin development, they were pushing incredibly hard to make themselves (by proxy) in charge of everything (which was, of course, roundly rejected). Coinbase are pretty trashy characters, they always have been. The list of sketchy or unethical acts they've been involved with is pretty long.

Libertarianism as a political philosophy isn't inherently racist, it's simply 18th century liberalism extended to consider how a society could function without any central government at all.

That means racists can be attracted to the philoshophy, they (unwisely) believe that freedom from government diktats means freedom to do anything they like, and that doing so would suddenly work out for them (including behaving in all ways that most people consider immoral/idiotic, such as racist behaviour).

This isn't such a problem, social outcasts (like racists) have a tendency to stick together, and a free society just makes it easier to identify those you don't want to associate yourself with. The modern "ban" on racist behaviour doesn't work at all, racists simply talk racism when no-one else is listening, and make racist decisions disguised with some other intention.

Genuine free speech and freedom to act is for everyone, including reacting to the behaviour of others. It's far better to have racism out in the open (instead of self-censored), pretending unenforceable laws work just makes the problem worse. You can't magically make someone renounce racism by attempting to force their mouth shut. But you can try to reason with them, and that's only possible if people feel confident they can talk freely without being punished.

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And sorry but massive ROFL. Which ethnicity is Bitcoin racist towards? Or in favour of? Satoshi was famously just a fake name, no-one knows if Satoshi was 1 eskimo, 5 indonesians or a 20-strong multi-ethnic team of people. All we know is, Satoshi wrote good English, and not such great C++.

If Bitcoin was racist, how did it become used by anyone all over the world? There've been multiple translations of the Bitcoin Core software for many years. If people want to contribute code for Bitcoin Core (the software the majority of the Bitcoin network runs on), there are no ethnicity checks. It's a simple case of whether your coding or design ideas are good or not. Many contribute code using pseudonyms, just as Satoshi did, there's no way of knowing which ethnic group they belong to.


This is like saying "vegetables are racist to arabs, because they refuse to grow in the desert" or "TV screens are racist, because not white".

Well, we don't really know anything about who was aware of this bug, or for how long.

It's kinda irrelevant IMO: the Intel "Management Engine" (which can remotely operate your computer at a higher administrative level than the user can even access) has been a part of the Intel hardware spec since 2009. Only Intel (allegedly) have the cryptographic keys that permit executing software on the ME. So Intel (and buddies) could spy on your entire computer usage and have the computer lie to you at any time about what it's really doing, too.

Given all this, I don't think Intel needed to deliberately introduce the recent branch-prediction kernel memory bugs, they've had what they need to surveill user's computers for pretty much the same length of time that the bugs existed for.

Yeah I didn't read the article

Which is the sensible thing to do right now, until we know the full details of what the Intel CPU bugs can do to let someone steal your BTC.

Until then, I won't be going anywhere near websites that require Javascript, or that are run by possible incompetents (Coindesk.com is both, I believe)

It's much cheaper just to leave it open as long as possible (channels can be left open permanently)



You don't need a Lightning channel for every person or store you send to. Money can be routed across multiple channels, so as long as the overall network is well connected, there's not much advantage to who you open a channel with. It's probably better to open channels with more neutral intermediate channel operators, they'll almost certainly try to gain some advantage from opening channels directly with big businesses (that's not going to be an easy business to be in when the barrier to entry is so low)

For the fork to exist, you need at least 1 forked block to exist. For that, you also need the hashpower to mine at least 1 block on the new fork. Arbitrarily lowering the block difficulty would only work once the new consensus rules are established; those rules cannot be established for a chain fork that doesn't yet exist.


For blockchain networks with low block solution difficulty, mining one hardfork block is not a problem. To hardfork Bitcoin at it's current difficulty, that's a considerable infrastructure investment (hashpower, location, electricity outlay etc).