The growth of available bandwidth due to technological improvements.

Even so you made a good observation, as that's pretty much one of the main arguments for keeping Bitcoin's blocks as small as possible. And incidentally, why Bitcoin has decided against linear on-chain scaling, favouring the likes of Lighting Network instead. The latter enabling small transactions to be accumulatively settled, without having to bloaten the blockchain with every single micro-transaction ever made.

Even as network infrastucture and technology improves, blockchain space is a limited resource and should be treated as such.

Educated guess: For added security, similar to how freshly mined blocks can't be spent until they are 100 blocks deep.

Keep in mind that Bitcoin's security model is largely probabilistic, meaning that while 6 confirmations are fairly safe, there's still a slight chance of a successful (and costly) double-spend attack. Or an accidental fork, even.

Now if a handful transactions get lost or double-spent, that would be already bad enough. Now imagine the same happening with either freshly mined blocks or a sidechain settlement -- an incredibly large amount of transactions would suddenly be invalid and a significant amount of economical activity would be lost. It follows that a generous safety margin is prudent.

There might be other reasons as well though. I haven't looked all that deeply into sidechains to be honest.

To add to that: Anyone who wants to continue sending transparent Bitcoin transactions can do so by staying on-chain. Anyone who wants to remain private would currently either use a tumbler or not use Bitcoin to begin with. In other words, neither transparency nor privacy can be forced by an outside party, regardless of LN's existence.

Either way, I'd also argue that cryptocurrencies should stay private, where possible. The way I see it the main reason for transaction transparency is to ensure that the money supply is not manipulated. If we can ensure the integrity of Bitcoin's money supply without depending on transparency I see little reason not to do so.

Given a large enough project, divisiveness will arise and not always be solvable within the same codebase.

Best case, this is how you get the plethora of alts exploring all kinds of aspects of cryptocurrencies or the variety of linux distros, feeding the need of different people and use cases.

Worst case, this is how you get drama and discord, such as happened during the blocksize debate and BCH vs BTC.

You obviously can't have both big and small blocks, so what BCH did when splitting off was the right thing. Obviously if enough people agree that bigger blocks are the superior scaling solution, BCH will eventually prevail. Just like ETH will overtake if its smart contracts and token economy turns out productive enough or XRP will overtake if people turn out to be idiots prefer centralized solutions after all.

In practice, the market is the decision maker. Be it in market cap or in adoption and usage levels. That's the only consensus that counts when it comes to self-governance in cryptocurrencies.

That being said, while Bitcoin Cash did the right thing by splitting off, what Bitcoin.com does is rather questionable.



Obviously you do, that's how trade works. I'm not sure how this makes LN any more permissioned -- in a meaningful way -- than on-chain transactions.

By that logic the original Bitcoin ceased to exist as soon as the first people other than Satoshi started contributing.



Bickering about which implementation is closer to the "original" vision is pointless.

Bitcoin is what the community decides it is. At one point in the future it may be a different fork by a different development team. Currently the majority of the community has decided that Bitcoin as implemented by the Bitcoin Core development team is the canonical protocol version.



I personally chose BTC over BCH as the canonical Bitcoin blockchain due to assessing its scaling approach as the more viable one. This has little to do with the development team behind it, although Bitcoin ABC's incompetence in some parts of the development process didn't bode well either -- at least in my book. Other members of the community may have different motivations, of course.

Please expand on what you mean by distributed vs decentralized in terms of software development.



Bitcoin is just a name. If an alt is viable, it will thrive long term, regardless of whether it's a Bitcoin hardfork, softfork or a different coin altogether.



Bitcoin's evolution worked out just as intended. The market decided. No need for trust, faith or control. Just permissionless currencies, competing on the free market. Nothing more, nothing less.


Regardless of where you stand in the blocksize debate and how Bitcoin should govern itself -- Many of the statements made in Bitcoin.com's Bitcoin Academy are simply factually incorrect. And that's what this thread is about.

lol... oh boy, bias is one thing, boldly spreading misinformation another.

Right after the factually incorrect infographic in the very beginning you already face the next objectively false statement:


In which timeline is this the case? Or did Roger Ver hardfork the universe as well? Jesus...

What's next? "Roger Ver is the original and most popular Bitcoiner. He is loved by all types of hodlers in every community."?


I always assumed that claims about Bitcoin.com's propaganda were hyperbole, but oh man was I wrong.

I would argue that PoS leads to more centralization in that you put too much power into the hands of people that already own significant amounts of cryptocurrency. Very reminiscent of the traditional financial system, if it comes down it.

With PoW you might have an overlap between whales and miners, but for the most part they are separate groups within the ecosystem, keeping each other in check. At least in the case of Bitcoin, where most coins have been mined before industrial-grade mining farms became common.



Assuming that mining hardware manufacturing becomes more mainstream and widely available (eg. Samsung), ASIC mining might become just as decentralized as GPU mining. I'm not yet holding my breath though.

Either way, I'm not sure if ASIC resistance is actually attainable. Taking Scrypt of Litecoin for example, ASICs may always emerge given a large enough market. However I know next to nothing about the technical limitations of developing ASICs, so some of the currently used PoW schemes may indeed be fully ASIC resistant.

Trying to get rich quick is a great way to get poor quick. This is even more true for the likes of Bitcoin. It's almost as if cryptocurrencies are schooling their own speculators. Alts being a prime example. I hope people learned their lessons from all those cancelled flippenings of 2017.

Google and Facebook banning ICO-spam from their platforms was the best move for every party involved -- Google and Facebook, would-be investors and the crypto-community as a whole. The only ones losing out are bullshitters trying to ride the blockchain hype train... and nothing of value was lost.

There's enough scams going on in this ecosystem as is.  Any respectable and viable project can very well live without those ads. The only ones truly relying on those ads were the snake-oil sellers and FOMO peddlers that don't have anything meaningful to offer besides vaporware and buzzwords. I hope they got hit where it hurts. Judging from the incoming lawsuits, it seems they did.

Still, I wonder on what basis they presume that any branche is entitled to advertising on Google. They're a private company after all.

Bitcoin is not dead until the community disperses and active development has stopped.

If you feel like Bitcoin is dead just because the price has fallen you're no better than any of those people that you "saluted".

This.

While crypto makes it easier to run an online casino due to taking banks out of the equation, the legality of the matter is still a bit tricky. The latter being one of the reasons why getting a bank account for a casino may prove difficult in the first place.

So if you're serious about this and intend to stay on the right side of the law -- get a professional. Best case someone who actually specializes in gambling law. You'll probably end up off-shore either way though.

Most likely by running the wallet software (or some derivation of it) of each respective cryptocurrency. Then you either use an existing library or write a wrapper yourself to use said wallet software for generating addresses and watching them. In the case of Bitcoin you'd likely have the wrapper access your wallet via its JSON-RPC interface. In the case of alts it would probably look similar.



Like Quickseller already said: Trades are just entries in a database.

In other words:

1) Your balances are stored in a database on the exchange's servers.
2) Whenever you place an order, this order will also be stored on a database somewhere.
3) The trading engine will do its magic and match buy and asks. If it finds a proper match it executes the order.
4) The state of your order is updated in the database. The state of your balances is updated in the database.

In the case of centralized exchanges, none of the above ever hits a blockchain. Only once you withdraw some of the balances of yours, an on-chain transaction will take place.

The electric car dilemma is a good example for a chicken / egg style adoption problem.

Still, for better or worse, crypto can harness a power that the electric car can't -- greed.

Regardless of the price right now I'd say that 2017 was quite an advertisement for Bitcoin and crypto in general. Sure, the euphoria of the last few months has subsided but now more people than ever before know about crypto. More companies and projects than ever before are dabbling with blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Most of which will turn out to be bullshit, yes, but there might be diamonds in the rough somewhere in there. It will take a while until these projects come to fruition, but progress is being made.

Bitcoin is its own best advertisement. For both investors and entrepreneurs. The seed for the next wave has been sown.

Also the VAT number id on the page (DE528006423) is -- unsurprisingly -- invalid.

Feel free to check yourselves: http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/vieshome.do?locale=en


Also the house numbers on the Lindenstraße in Prenzlau are ordered -- Starting at no. 1 in the south, ending at no. 19 in the north. So no, there's definitely no Lindenstraße 495 in Prenzlau either.



lol

Yep. It's a scam.

Depends on your investment horizon.

If you're thinking short- to mid-term, you might have a problem. If you're thinking long-term or based your investments on the fundamental properties of Bitcoin rather than its price, this shouldn't concern you. Either way, buckle up.

We are undeniably in a bear market right now. The Death Cross confirming it would merely state the obvious.

Which is precisely why the usefullness of private, permissioned blockchains is questionable. In the end they lose all the worthwhile properties of a blockchain -- including, effectively, immutability -- leading the concept of blockchains ad absurdum.

The upcoming data directive of the EU is merely yet another reminder why it makes no sense to try cramming blockchains all over the place. The blockchain use cases that "got lost" due to the upcoming EU directive were likely never viable in the first place.



Would make for an interesting legal case though. Say you're a company that offers the service to store your personal data on a public, permissionless blockchain by offering a simplified user interface for the likes of OP_RETURN. Who has the legal responsibility over the data? The consumer that made use of the service or the service provider?



Exactly.

Storing personal data is not a prerequisite for smart contracts. The large majority of currently active smart contracts are working without the usage of personal data.

Land registries can decouple personal data from the property transactions to be stored on a blockchain.

Heck, even a digital identity can be established without storing personal data. Obviously not what IBM is striving for though.

Which companies in this space actually do store personal data on a blockchain? Transactional data is not affected by this directive, which is what blockchains usually consist of. Transactional data can usually be decoupled from personally identifiable data.

Besides, it seems to only affect private, permissioned blockchains, which to me still looks more like snakeoil rather than a viable use case.

It does affect the handling of KYC/AML though. ICOs operating in the EU will need to be able to comply with this directive.

Pretty close, but not quite.

Wealth is not created when the price of a security (stock, ICO token, whatever) increases. Wealth is created when these companies use the money provided to them by investors to create actual products, may they be physical or a service. Until that happens it's just debt that gets shifted between speculators.



Advancements in technology have been the new way of wealth creation since the industrial revolution.

Is it fair that the older generations are holding most of the real estate, forcing the younger generation into a modern form of serfdom?

Is it fair that wealth begets wealth and that income through labor is much more heavily taxed than capital income?

Is it fair that the younger generation has a much smaller chance of aggregating wealth due to the fact that income levels have not even remotely kept up with the purchasing power of fiat currencies over the last few decades?

People investing into new and unproven companies, industries and technologies take high risks. Naturally they expect high rewards. It not always pays off, but when it does, even those that failed to invest usually simply accept it. I've never heard anyone complain about how investing in Microsoft, Apple or Google in their early days was unfair. Something that has always been well in reach for older generations. And for the most part of modern history, investing in stocks was much more difficult for the layment than investing in crypto is today.



No one is forcing anyone to invest. Those that invested early, took the highest risk. Those that will use cryptocurrencies once adoption is high and risk is low (should that ever be the case), will profit from improved economic freedom caused by less friction in international remittance and trade.



If you find a viable ICO, sure, by all means, go for it. I'm sure as an economist you are well aware of the failure rate of startups and how to asses and mitigate these risks accordingly.



Do they? There's been a lot of talk about how cryptocurrencies could help economies in developing countries. Banking the unbanked is a prevalent topic. Supporting citizens of nations suffering from hyperinflation and questionable monetary policies is another.