i have been saying this for years. but.. here is the kicker...until things like localbitcoins can sort out their large profiteering spread.. the 10% (5%buy for sender 5% sell to recipient) bitcoin is not going to beat WU.

i and many people have done some actual calculations. using $100 or $1000 and using the localbitcoins valuations calculated the amount of bitcoins obtained.. then picked a remote country and calculated the amount of remote native fiat currency it converts to.. and then looked on WU website to copy the same fiat to fiat swaps..

and WU was actually cheaper.. (recipient ends up with more)

edit: ciyam just gave an example in another post of sending $10 to india, suggesting its 0 fee, so i done a quick calculation.. and its 6% "fee"(spread)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1309229.msg13419774#msg13419774

until bitcoin buyers/sellers sorts out the spread (hidden fee) then the recipient will still get less via bitcoin than WU..
sorry but even if bitcoin pretends to have no fee's... there are still hidden costs..

so bitcoin is not perfect for remittances either right now

.. but it could be

agreed, though edited to get the right terminology (crypto is such old school word for blockchain)

this was discussed last year, where bit debates about
0.00010000 : millibits,
0.00000100: microbits, (bits)
0.00000001 sats

which eventually people want microbits (bits). to allow for 2 decimals to allow for small change.

some said lets use millibits for now, as people can actually use a millibit, others argued that the tx fee made that unfeasable and in the near future when tx fee's drop thanks to the fiat valuation rise forcing miners to drop the tx fee, it will become possible...

but the consensus is that when that happens there would be confusion of different people using bitcoin and different people using millibits. and not long after that people will argue that millibits is too large as the fiat value keeps rising.. causing people to then want to move down to microbits(bits). meaning that millibits is just a temporary and confusing thing to change down to for such a short period.

so the majority of people are sticking to bitcoins and then there will be a big switch over to microbits, thus skipping the temporary confusion of measurements that millibits would cause common folk

average hard drives over the last 16 years has doubled every 2 years
3,6,12,24,48,96,192,384,765

yea some people in 2000 had 2gb hard drives some had 4gb hard drives
yea some people in 2016 have 500gb hard drives, some have 1tb hard drives.

but an increase of doubling every 2 years is a natural rise.. even satoshi envisioned that (every 105,000 blocks).. then people complaining about bloat wont complain about it as they will be getting larger hard drives to compensate

i agree that it wont suddenly make bitcoin handle visa transaction volumes in 6 months.. but thats because people are not realising how fake visa's suggested volume is.. especially when visa's system is not actually one system, but multiple separate systems with mutliple separate databases. and thus their actual handling of tx's per system is far far less.. and thus far less to worry about.

especially anytime right now.

and the reason most people are waiting more than 10 minutes per block is not to do with bloat.. its to do with miners limiting transactions out of greed..
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=30days

0.75mb is the average maximum... not 0.99mb

meaning on average there is plenty of room for more transactions per block... if only the miners would stop being greedy and just accept all transactions and stop blaming other reasons..

orphans only happen because miners do not stale their attempts when a competing block is solved.. this has nothing to do with transaction numbers. but more to do with miners greed hoping that if they push on and continue to solve their block, and then push on and hope to solve the next block before anyone else.. their previous block becomes valid and the competitors block becomes the orphan..

if miners just accepted transactions as they come and then stale their attempts if a competitor solves first.. then transactions wont get delayed and orphans wont happen.. its just that simple.. greed is the blame not bloat.

im talking about something that is more then just this troll forum.

something more professional that actually has proper content and organization where people dont need to google about bitcoin because everything is available to be found in the consortium. (coinsortium)
like business listings where people can easily find the so called 120,000 bitcoin accepting business
like tutorials, where each bitcoin client (multibit, bitcoin core, etc) have guides on how to use it (especially backing up privkeys and the importance for noobs to do it)
like courses that teach you how to code bitcoin.. whether its c++ bitcoin-core code or other projects like Nbitcoin which can be used with many programming languages
like job listings
like ATM locations
like bitcoin statistics
like crowdfunding
like project development

basically everything related to blockchain technology

for instance, many people on this forum ask "how to earn bitcoin".. this forum has several dozens topics asking this. and 90% of responses are to raid faucets and do sig campaigns..
thats stupid and the equivalent to going to an employment centre and they tell you to go begging on the street for pennies or stand on the street holding up someones advertisement.. you know.. not a real way to earn money

by having a more professional go-to place that has proper job listings, and listings of drop-shippers/manufacturers that accept bitcoin, it can easily be shown how people can set up businesses or get interviewed for proper jobs

and having all of it available in multiple native languages for international use, not just the yanks

lol you do make me laugh.

im sure the OP can collect fnds after the audit from the crumbs left behind that brock forgot to raid

but on a separate note
i thought you would be more concerned that any downvoting (due to offtopic) would mean your gleb pseudonym would eventually get banned from coinsortium, where as your Phineas Gage pseudonym will get all the glory for all the community projects it proposes

so your admitting that it needs everyone to upgrade to work. your admitting something wont work if people dont upgrade.. thank you thats a hard fork!



emphasis on the word FULL.
if its not doing the full work its not a full node. so if a old version cant see, verify, understand a transaction, then its no longer a full node..
the description is in its name .. FULL

i think you need to really stop looking at your bank balance and start thinking real hard about segwit..
its only the SW clients that will store atmost 1mb as they are ignoring the signature merkle..

EG
(by the way dont knit pick numbers, their just examples.. concentrate on the reasoning)
lets say a miner was SW upgraded
lets say a normal tx was 250bytes 1pay,1receive(220 tx data 156 signature)
-----
Input:
Previous tx: f5d8ee39a430901c91a5917b9f2dc19d6d1a0e9cea205b009ca73dd04470b9a6
Index: 0
scriptSig: 304502206e21798a42fae0e854281abd38bacd1aeed3ee3738d9e1446618c4571d10
90db022100e2ac980643b0b82c0e88ffdfec6b64e3e6ba35e7ba5fdd7d5d6cc8d25c6b241501

Output:
Value: 5000000000
scriptPubKey: OP_DUP OP_HASH160 404371705fa9bd789a2fcd52d2c580b65d35549d
OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG
-----
if all tx were normal it could fit <2700 tx in 1mb.. right
but remember sw promises more transactions per block

so a sw miner sets the tx merkle to 1mb and the sig merkle to Xmb
now the tx merkle can store 4,500tx (tx 1mb/220byte=4500)
but the sig merkle is 0.7mb (totalling 1.7mb for tx+sig)

yea many fanboys will say things are great if as they can have 4500tx's for only 1mb
but regular unupgraded full nodes will have either
blocks being 1.7mb (containing 100% normal tx)
blocks being 1mb but (containing txdata they cant verify as it looks like a pay to script)
or something in between

what like 1mb per 25btc block solved..
but thats hard to measure as couple years ago a block gave 50btc and had less than 0.4btc average..
next  year the block limit will increase and the reward will halve..

and if your not going to just calculate the block reward vs the block.. and just wait till 2014 and then divide 21m by the total chain size.. that wont work either as transactions spend the exact same satoshi's many times a year.

the best logical answer is that a satoshi  1 is one byte and bitcoin is 100000000 9 bytes as recognised behind the scenes in the code.. or 10 bytes 1.00000000 as recognised front end in the gui

im not set on anything.. i thought we were just pushing idea's to the OP, who will hopefully have some funds after an audit, to implement.

but personally. coinsortium sounds better. but i just wanted to make a quick logo to say its a consortium not a foundation

my 5 minute idea in visual form

description of above
the main post of topic has its voting linked in the subcategory. and also the links for things like github, irc, litehouse (which only show if the author adds links)
below the authors post is the sub-discussion area where people can vote up and down the sub comments.



description of above
the links in the list make the built in player play the video selected.
(yea i havnt thought through how to display the links in a more user friendly way.. but you can always get idea's from how vimeo, youtube or other place displays links


description of above
kind of self explanatory

yes it's ugly.. but all it takes is some alternative hybrid of a forum to let people come together and link idea's and help people get all the information they need

well my idea is just in its infantsy..and just an idea at that.. but it would be a hybrid bringing a forum-esq, youtube-esq, github repository, litehouse, irc, even googledocs all into one platform.

maybe not github/docs within the platform, but atleast the ability to link it in a manner that is standardized so that people are not searching for hours. as its part of each proposal.

i cant exactly imagine the final design right now.. but if all the tools are in one place and membership is free, where people only pay for projects they want to see or be part of.. then it would be more about having the platform there to let it grow naturally by how the users interact, rather than some governing system limiting real world actions by having meetings just once a month or limiting to only a few proposals to vote on..

leaving it open to anyone who wants to do anything. where people can request help or funding or even just idea's, and yes even having the reddit/stack exchange/quora upvote-downvote thing where people can show free appreciation for certain topics, thus keeping the most valid stuff ontop.

EG say 3 people propose to make a conference. each laying out the cost of hiring the hall, cost to cover speakers travel/hotel and suggestions as to how the profits from tickets will be split.

people can pay a litehouse (crowdfund) to help fund it if they chose to, but also they can upvote for free the most desireable conference. that way the most popular locations sit at the top of the list.

ofcourse anyone wanting to get funding will need to be transparent about who they are and the funds may even need to be released in phases as proof of progress is shown..

again still imagining it.. but it would need to be user-centric rather then chairman governed.

welcome to capitalism of the real world... thank god bitcoin is here to change things

i agree the current conception of the foundation is not needed..

but imagine something completely different.

a forum-esq platform. where it links businesses, programmers, idea's together, where people can make crowdfunding proposals, or labour sourcing proposals, and also includes the tutorial, development courses and howto guides all in one place.... without the trolling and sig-campaigns this forum is bloating with.

where each 'topic' has a IRC chatlink so people can informally discuss it and only use the forum posts for more official information.

imagine it like combining this forum, with lighthouse(kickstarter) with each topic having an IRC chatroom.. where the forum topics and categories are organised and more professional..

with a 4Thash costing $1800

$20mill = 44petahash

for instance slushpool has similar amount of peta (41) and has only 3% of hash power of the network..

which equates to 25btc only 4-5 times per day
=$45,000 a day (before figuring in electric and staffing/maintenance)
EG $25k electric if placing miners in china, $100k if miners are in australia

so lets presume its china

thats only $20,000 a day... call it $19k to include leasing the building and labour
thats only $1.7mill for 3 months.. which is where the equipment becomes obsolete and new rigs need to be purchased..
remember the rigs cost $20mill...

what the australians dont know is that while they are buying rigs at retail ($1800each) the other pools are the ones MANUFACTURING the rigs at 5-7 times cheaper.. infact its these manufacturers that are literally getting 4-6 miners for free just from the proceeds of their sales to others.

which no one can compete against... (unless they are rig manufacturers themselves)

so goodluck australia.. i truly hope you are manufacturing your own rigs instead of buying them.. or you have no chance of ROI

2 options

1. phishing site where the link for the 'privacy policy' goes to a phishing site that then asks to login
2. Gleb signed up a couple years ago to claim the 0.05btc they were offering to new signups, and never used it since.. forgetting all about it

you do realise there is a thing called "programming code" right?.. there is no need for a government or law.. when code can do it.. like my last post suggested


trying to change the method of mining can be manipulated by the miners themselves. after all look what happened with the GPU/asic race.. it meant to be independant mining but pools linked up multiple devices.. which will happen no matter what mining code you use to confirm transactions..
what needs to be done is to let the miners do what they do, but then on the receiver side WE decide to accept or reject that block if it appears they are getting too powerful. which mining pools wont have control of.

but thats all just idea's and theory. because as you say


changing anything purely so that the little guys can get rich is a non-ending cycle of greed.. and people should just find other ways to make money. the only reason for changing mining/block relaying is to avoid 51% attacks

mining is decentralised, what you are talking about is widening the distribution.

the simple tactic i can see is that when a miner relays a solved block, nodes can have a rule to ignore blocks from that same pool for atleast 3,6,10 blocks.. that way one miner cant gain more then 33%, 16.5% 10% of blocks.

but pools wont like that

i said years ago not to have a "foundation" but more of a "consortium".

but no.. some of them guys just wanted to look smart by having glorified titles, doing no work that benefits others..

then brock came on the scene and sucked them private keys dry, before moving to the UK to rinse and repeat it with BTC foundation 2.0

last i checked bitcoin foundation moved to the UK in 2014.. and thus there wont be a 2014 american IRS record for them, just a 2013

if mining pools dont upgrade. they wont accept SW transactions..  as told here:
and users of SW will drop it and go back to bitcoin-core v0.12 instantly because their SW tx's are not being accepted and validated

if mining pools do upgrade to v0.13sw. the merkle tree is now 2 not one. and the data bloat for mining pools is 1.3mb not 1.0. (which negates the point of the 1mb)
v0.12 full node clients will then feel limp and receiving data they cannot check and so they are forced to upgrade..

now in my last 2 sentences.. if mining pools and full node clients are upgrading and mining pools are happy to have more than 1mb of data per block(which they have to be to even allow SW).. we might aswell up the block limit to 2mb and not have to make 2 merkle tree's

the SW fanboys are underselling the impact and overselling the features.. just for a 30% possible reduction for liteclients (but 30% increase for full nodes)

there are easier ways to increase the blocksize and implement malleability fixes. which if people need to upgrade.. should be done properly.. not this half assed manipulation that is only a temporary fix..

separately, lite clients can still save data by simply not saving signatures when they put it on their hard drives.. which should be a local decision for that lite client.. not a network decision