Nodes don't auto-update. Version numbers are ignored for the most part, as any node could fake the wrong version number. The only thing that matters is that all nodes follow the same protocol rules (eg. blocksize, block reward, etc).

If new nodes enter the network with looser protocol rules (eg. allowing larger blocks than before), old nodes will continue enforcing the tighter protocol rules, ignoring blocks that the new nodes accept into their version of the blockchain -- a hard fork occurs.

If new nodes enter the network with tighter protocol rules (eg. SegWit), old nodes will accept the new blocks even though they can't properly interpret them and the transaction history doesn't diverge -- a soft fork occurs.

Both cases only depend on the protocol rules as enforced by the respective nodes. Neither case depends on the version number or a forced upgrade.

Note that the transaction history is untouched either way -- balances are just the sum of incoming and outgoing transactions, as stored in the blockchain. New transactions may or may not get accepted into the network, but old transactions remain, thus balances are unchanged until a transaction under the new (or old) rules is made.

Ah, so you are suggesting a process on how new language boards can be added and grown if need be? Looking at the "Other languages/locations" board and seeing the Ukrainian sticky thread I think I know understand your problem. Question being of course at which point one considers a local community big enough to warrant a board of their own.

Could you rephrase what it is that you are suggesting? I fail to fully parse the meaning of your post, but regarding your polling options:

That's pretty much already the case. Some local boards have fewer sub boards than others, but I guess the availability of sub boards is mostly more or less proportional to the active users in a given language.

That's a shitload of local boards. Also many countries consist of multiple languages, so you'd be back to square one.

Which major languages are missing?

Larger geographic zones such as Southeast Asia usually contain multiple, highly differentiated language families and writing systems. Languages within the same language family still can differ widely.


From my perspective the current Local Board situation works quite fine, even though I'm more active on the regular, english boards instead of my "native" boards (in my case: German). The situation may be different for other native speakers though, but I obviously can't speak for boards that I can't read, let alone use.

In short:

Fast and cheap monetary transactions without relying on any third parties such as banks or credit card companies.


More lengthy explanation:

Bitcoin enables monetary transactions between two or more parties without relying on central entities such as banks or credit card companies. This works fine if you only have a limited number of users, but gets more difficult the more active users there are. This is because only a limited number of transactions can be handled per second. Lightning Network enables more transactions per seconds by bundling up multiple transactions into payment channels, that is you get multiple transactions for the price of two: Opening and closing a payment channel.


That's as deep as I would get into it without knowing how familiar you are with cryptocurrencies and the scaling debate of the last few months. I hope it gives you a starting point.

If you feel like binging Wikipedia, the Wikipedia page for Lightning Network should give you a rough overview, sprinkled with links to other concepts that you might potentially need to get familiar with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

ASIC stands for application specific integrated circuit -- they are used for all sorts of things, that require simple calculations, fast.

In the case of Bitcoin, they are basically the SHA-256 hashing algorithm implemented in hardware, rather than software. This makes ASICs faster than software being run on top of CPUs or GPUs. The downside is, that ASICs can do only one thing, and one thing only.

Note that cryptographic hashes are different from regular encryption -- they are neither symmetric or asymmetric, they are simply one-way cryptographic functions. That is, unlike symmetric or asymmetric encryption schemes there is no key that can be used to retrieve the original data.

The Large Bitcoin Collider is searching for private keys that contain a balance, not a SHA-256 collision. One of the good things about SHA-256 though is that it's used a lot outside of cryptocurrencies as well, so the vested interests in knowing whether SHA-256 is still safe to use stretch beyond the crypto community.

Also worth noting is that different hashing algorithms serve different purposes -- depending on your point of view and use case, SHA-256's fastness is arguably also its downside.

In general you can use any cryptographic hash function as part of your PoW scheme. "Cryptographic" being the important part, as there are also hash functions that are not cryptographically secure.

So what's being used? Let's take a look at our top 10 PoW mineable coins according to Coinmarketcap:

1) Bitcoin -- SHA-256, obviously

2) Ethereum -- Ethash (note: Is planning to switch to PoS)

3) Bitcoin Cash -- SHA-256

4) Litecoin -- Scrypt (note: Is already overtaken by ASICs)

5) Monero -- CryptoNight

6) Ethereum Classic -- Ethash

7) Bitcoin Gold -- Equihash

8) Zcash -- Equihash

9) Verge -- Multiple hashing algorithms: Scrypt, X17, Lyra2rev2, myr-groestl and blake2s

10) ByteCoin -- CryptoNight


Most alt coins try to select PoW schemes that would be hard to implement as an ASIC. In especially ambitious cases they try to select algorithms that make it hard for GPUs to gain an edge over CPUs as well. In many cases this is achieved by requiring a lot of working memory / RAM, which especially for ASICs represent a challenge. Given enough financial incentive though, even those PoW schemes sometimes get broken (eg. Scrypt).

So it's not really a question of pros and cons, but rather a question of how ASIC resistant the PoW scheme really is, which is hard to gauge without in-depth research of each particular hashing algorithm. If you feel particularly fancy you could even look for hashing algorithms that are likely to be quantum-proof, albeit that might be still be a bit too premature to evaluate for sure.

Note there's also a case for ASIC mining making a cryptocurrency more secure due to the requirement of dedicated hardware. However that's a different debate.



Thanks for the lulz :D

1) So far no SHA-256 collision has been found and short of either a) an unknown security hole in SHA-256 or b) major improvements in computing (assuming for example quantum computers having an advantage in solving SHA-256 over traditional architectures) it's not going to happen any time soon.

For reference:
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/47809/why-havent-any-sha-256-collisions-been-found-yet


2) Even if you'd overwrite the illegal content with random data that still checks out, there's nothing stopping anyone from adding new illegal content to the blockchain.

If by programming perspective you mean the data type being used -- currently Bitcoin uses 64 bit integers for transaction amounts.

Since one bit is being used for the sign (+/-) the largest number this data type can handle is 2^63 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (= 9.22e+18)

So yeah, from a data type perspective it could be "something like 100000000000000000" (= 1.0e+17).

But no, from a protocol perspective such a transaction would be invalid.

Jr. Member isomoyes



Copy/pasted from here:
https://blog.monetha.io/proof-work-vs-proof-stake-explained/

Same post:


Paraphrased from here:
https://captainaltcoin.com/proof-work-vs-proof-stake/



Copy / pasted from here:
https://news.bitcoin.com/coincheck-drops-anonymous-monero-dash-zcash/



Copy / pasted and paraphrased from here:
https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/03/19/g20-announces-no-new-regulations-and-bitcoin-shoots-up-1000/

I think that's the beauty of Bitcoin's governance.

Sure, things get messy sometimes. But in a way the Bitcoin community has managed to organically organize itself similar to the Separation of Power that is the basis of today's democracies. Only instead of a legislature, an executive and a judiciary we have developers, miners and users. I might be biased, but in my opinion Bitcoin has managed to uphold this balance much better than most of the alts.

You made two assertions that are in direct conflict:

1) The break-even point is the same for each miner. ("The current break-even point for Bitcoin mining is $8,038.")

2) The break even point is different for each miner. ("That said, whether or not mining still makes sense, depends a lot on where you are.")


So which one is it?

Based on what?

As you already put it:


The break-even Bitcoin price is different for each mining operation as it largely depends on cost of 1) hardware, 2) infrastructure, 3) maintenance and 4) electricity. Those 4 parameters vary wildly from operation to operation so there's no singular break-even point for Bitcoin mining.

As long as the hashrate of the Bitcoin network increases beyond mere hardware improvements one can assume that Bitcoin mining is still largely profitable. Only once the network hashrate stagnates and adjusts itself to a decreasing Bitcoin price we'll see where the effective "break-even point" of Bitcoin lies.

It can happen if your wallet uses a faulty RNG (= random-number generator). That is, a biased / predictable RNG that results in a greatly reduced keyspace.

This happened back in 2013 and shows the importance of properly implementing security standards:

https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/hacking-bitcoin-android-vulnerability-digital-wallets.html


Short of such software implementation failures the chance of a private key collusion is, as already mentioned by the other posters, infinitesimal.


Regardless of that you might want to check out the Large Bitcoin Collider that tries to put your worries to the test in practice:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1877935.0

To add to what DannyHamilton said:

Miners have the incentive to publish a newly found block as quickly as possible, because if someone else beats them to the punch their block may be orphaned and they miss out on the block reward.

So if for some reason their mining software had only 8 transactions prepared for inclusion at the time the new block was found, it gets immediately published regardless of how much block space would have been left. These sort of blocks often happen when a new block has been found exceptionally fast (for example within a 1 minute interval instead of the expected 10 minute interval), meaning that the mining software had yet to catch up with validating the previous block and checking which transactions are still left in the mempool. Keep in mind that accidentally including an already confirmed transaction would invalidate the block you just found, meaning a loss of block reward, which means that the safest bet for a miner is to only include transactions of which they know that they wouldn't lead to an invalid block -- which in the most extreme form leads to the mining of an empty block, as in this case they only include a single transaction that is absolutely guaranteed to be valid -- the coinbase transaction, ie. their block reward.

In general though, miners are incentivized to include as many transactions as possible, as to gather transaction fees. So if a miner finds a new block while the transactions to be included have already been prepared -- which, as mentioned above, can take some time -- they would be stupid to simply leave them out.

Honestly, I think telling panic sellers to leave the space and not to invest in it is just the right message.

Well, actually it's the right message at the wrong time. We probably should have told panic sellers to go away when they were still panic buyers.

Most of those people panic selling now should probably never have invested to begin with. Buying out of FOMO is just as bad, if not worse, than selling out of fear because the sky is falling. I'm actually more worried about them than I'm about short- to mid-term market developments. But that's because I know where I stand and have entered the market out of conviction and not just out of greed. Well, maybe a little bit of greed.




The kind suggestions would have been 1) to never invest more than you can afford to lose and 2) to not invest into something you don't understand.

Once you're panic selling it shows you likely failed to follow at least one of these kind suggestions.





On a sidenote:


Good riddance. Those ads were mostly scams to begin with and rarely advertised projects of actual value.

Unless performance is of concern (eg. encryption / decryption taking too long or eating up too much CPU) I don't see any harm done. Whether it's really necessary or improves security all that much is a different question of course, but I guess rather safe than sorry? Keep in mind though that other attack vectors may still exist, eg. whenever your wallet.dat file is accessed and unencrypted.

Oh definitely. And it's going to be much more brutal than anyone can imagine so far, because...


...these are close to non-existent...


...while these make up the vast majority of the market. Coins and tokens in the top 10 market cap included.


To be honest, I think the only blockchain projects that are going to survive long term are the decentralized ones driven by community efforts such as Bitcoin and some of the mineable / stakeable alts. Companies serving these communities are likely to do well as well (eg. Coinbase, BitPay, etc.)

Every other startup-based cryptocurrency / token project is likely to either crash and burn or to pivot, given that their scopes are usually beyond feasibility, their use case of questionable utility and often both.

If you entered cryptocurrencies because you believe in the tech, you should know better than to worry -- unless you invested more than you can afford to lose, in which case, good luck.

If you only entered cryptocurrencies because the price was going up, sorry for your loss.

In the end it's up to you whether you have enough confidence in cryptocurrencies to sit it out, or whether you deem it wiser to cut your losses and move on. Either way there's no short cut and no easy way out.

Welcome to crypto.

You should look into universal basic income, if you haven't already. If you look into UBI you will find some ideas that pretty much align with what you are suggesting. There are also practical experiments, both past and ongoing, looking into the matter. Using a cryptocurrency as means of distribution would of course lend itself to the idea, but it's not an easy problem to solve, especially with both UBI and cryptocurrencies being rather unexplored fields.

Here's a list of pilot projects that may interest you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots



Of course there are a lot of passion jobs where money is secondary, but at the end of the day they still require money to continue their work. You can't just look at individuals in isolation without their socio-economic surroundings.

Also note that while researchers may not be in it for the money, a lot of them still get paid fairly well and rightfully so.

Point being, it doesn't matter if parts of the population don't care about money. As long as there are some people striving for wealth, they will try to exploit the current system. And if they are able to exploit the system, that's exactly what they will do -- at the cost of everyone else who "doesn't care about money".

Even if your main intention is to spread wealth evenly amongst the populace, as long as there are some angles to exploit or positions of power to obtain, the approach is prone to failure due to human nature. Case in point, every implementation of Communism so far either digressed into a dictatorship or some form of centrally controlled capitalism.

Communism is easy to romance with if you never lived in it, but it's not a pretty system due to being relatively easy exploited from the top down. Maybe even moreso than Capitalism.


That being said, I'm convinced that due to technological and economical progress, some form of UBI will become a necessity in the future. It's going to be a very hard problem to solve though, regardless of whether it will involve cryptocurrencies or not.