I think what OP is asking is whether mining pool operators use a full or a pruned node.

In general it seems to make sense for mining pools to run a full node, since if you already harness millions of dollars worth of computational power there's no sense on skimping when it comes to running a node, amirite?

But from a technical perspective it seems like they could run a pruned node just as well, since they only care about current transactions. Or would a mining pool be prevented from publishing blocks if they are not connected to the network as a full node?

I also think that for the most part the upsides of ASICs outweigh their downsides. ASICs themselves are not problematic, it's when there's too little competition in the mining market that things could get ugly.

Given the recent uptick of Bitcoin's valuation I think it's likely that we'll see new players entering the mining business over the next couple of years though -- keeping the market fresh and flowing.



Depends on what kind of flaw is found. Keep in mind that the use case of a PoW scheme is different from the use case of eg. hashing your users' passwords.

Best case it's the kind of flaw that makes SHA256 faster to calculate, in which case we'll simply see a new generation of miners.

Worst case Bitcoin needs to hardfork to a new PoW scheme. This would come with a lot of drama on which algo to choose, possibly leading to a multitude of competing PoW hardforks, but sooner or later one blockchain would emerge as the canonical Bitcoin blockchain. Even then we might see the original, SHA256 Bitcoin, continuing its existence although at likely a much lower market rate, corresponding to the severity of the found flaw.

Nice writeup. While I don't follow Stablecoins all that closely it definitely is interesting to see a comprehensive list of approaches at controlling volatility.

I'm not quite convinced that stability can be reliably achieved within tolerance levels that are acceptable for the general populace (say, < 5%) but they do give an opportunity to look at market forces in wholly new ways.

It really is just transactions all the way down though, that's how the protocol works. All that wallets do is process these transaction in a way that make sense to the user. That is, they scan the blockchain for transactions of which they can spend the outputs and show it to as the balance of the respective address and subsequently as the total balance of the wallet or account (the latter applying to HD wallets).

In the case of Bitcoin, accounts and balances are just metaphors that we use to make our life easier. From a technical perspective they are neither needed nor implemented.

Only your direct counterparty can claim the collateral in case of a explicitely provoked channel state mismatch. Routing nodes along the way have no say in this. They don't even know who's sending how much to whom.



No such thing as different kinds of access to the protocol. Both the protocol specification and the various LN implementations are open source and available to the public.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but mining has nothing to with how much transaction fees are calculated.

There's limited space on the blockchain. As such, if the demand (ie. transaction count) exceeds the supply (ie. available space per block) mining fees go up, as people try to get on top of the priority list. That's how a market works. That's all there is to it.



PayPal and VISA, you forgot about those two.

Solid writeup. Apart from some typos, just two minor nitpicks:


myetherwallet can also be used in conjunction with hardware wallets, which is yet another step up from metamask



Nowadays third party antivirus software is turning out to be more of a liability rather than an improvement. They tend to install questionable root certificates and effectively MitM otherwise secure connections. All in all third party antivirus software increases your attack surface, so in most cases your probably better off using the antivirus software that comes out-of-the-box with your operating system (eg. Windows Defender in the case of, well, Windows).

It is also worth noting that against properly written, targeted attacks, most antivirus software is pretty much useless.


But apart from that, like I said, solid writeup.

What's the alternative? Every user being publicly known? Records about each user being kept by a trusted third party?

All of this only puts holders in harm's way while not preventing cryptocurrency-thieves from doing their thing. Quite the opposite. It would merely make staking out potential targets easier, while cryptocurrency-thieves will likely just find other ways to stay anonymous.

You can't fight anonymity, so use it to your advantage.

PoC exploits should always be taken seriously, despite being PoC only. Apart from that I fully agree with you. The PoC in question doesn't even affect hardware wallets to begin with. It just shows that if you have full access to an unsecured hardware device and its software you can do amazing things with it.

As an attack it is thwarted by applying best practices in terms of security. Which is why these best practices exist to begin with.



Or, you know... buying a hardware wallet.

It's just semantics, but isn't any impact that Bitcoin has by extension attributable to the internet as well? After all the internet is what is enabling Bitcoin in the first place. Did anyone ever say that email will become bigger than the internet? Or that the world wide web will become bigger than the internet?

Maybe he meant to say that Bitcoin will become bigger than the world wide web. That would still be a contentious statement, but at least it would make sense. Saying that Bitcoin will become bigger than the internet, however, is a meaningless statement that only makes for a nice headline and nothing more.

Not quite, Bitcoin has neither accounts nor balances

It's just transactions all the way down...


It's important to remember that Satoshi's work didn't happen in a vacuum. Most of the concepts had been around for quite a while. However Satoshi was the one to finally piece everything together in a way that would give birth to a whole new asset class.

For anyone interested, I can't recommend this article enough:
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/12/223058-bitcoins-academic-pedigree/fulltext

The profitability of Bitcoin mining won't change, the network's hashrate will. The hashrate (or rather: the resources spent on Bitcoin mining) will depend on the total amount of transaction fees spent. The transaction fees will depend on the amount of people using Bitcoin.



Oh yeah, and that too.

Well, you could make a Bitcoin hardfork that uses the same metrics as Litecoin (ie. same PoW algo, block reward, block interval, etc...)

However such a coin would be neither Bitcoin nor Litecoin -- it would just be a Bitcoin hardfork using the same metrics as Litecoin.

Either way, not sure how much Litecoin's codebase has diverged from Bitcoin's ever since the code got forked -- after a lot has happened since then -- but it's likely still one of the technologically closer alts (apart from more recent hardforks, of course).

That those third party resellers can not be trusted is exactly the point that bitmover is making though.

If you refer to SatoshiLabs and Ledger themselves -- SatoshiLabs never increased the Trezor price, except for priority shipping. Ledger did increase their price, but not even close to doubling it.

Keep in mind that both those companies are rather small operations, so production bottlenecks are indeed a thing and not just a way to artificially manipulate supply and demand.



Doesn't matter. Hardware wallets are built to work securely even on compromised computer systems, regardless of whether it's been compromised by malware or out-of-the-box. That applies to both the computer's software and hardware.



Light-based quantum encrypted transmission channels have existed for a long time and have been cracked as far back as 2010:
https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100829/full/news.2010.436.html

I'm not sure how this relates to the current discussion though.

wut



You pretty much answered your own question, but anyways. It is worth noting that limited supply does not apply to PoW coins only, and that there are PoW coins that do not limit their supply.


That being said: One effect of the halvings that often gets ignored, yet in my opinion is worth a mention, is that it ultimately keeps Bitcoin's power usage in check. Assuming Bitcoin's price finds a stable level, each halving will see miners drop off the network and power usage reduced as a new profitability equilibrium is found.

Another thing I find interesting about Bitcoin's halving is the 4 year cycle of sudden decreases instead of a more gradual schedule. My pet theory is that this 4 year cycle coincides with the public's attention span, causing upward price pressure and therefore media interest whenever the general public was just to forget about Bitcoin.

That's the thing though. Most of the questions that get asked over and over again are already covered in stickies -- or countless other threads on the same topic. So if something like a newbie jail actually encourages people to use the search function or google first, that's a plus in my book.

That's the important bit

Not getting your system compromised is one of the reason you air gap them in the first place. The other thing is that this also means that hardware wallets are not affected by this attack, so hooray for hardware wallets!



Trezor bugs are usually fixed swiftly, but some guys even found ways to extract private keys from Bitcoiners a while ago, albeit with special tools:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/man-robbed-at-gunpoint-for-1100-worth-of-bitcoins-in-brooklyn
https://cointelegraph.com/news/russia-blogger-who-boasted-about-crypto-wealth-beaten-and-robbed-for-425k
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/910958/Bitcoin-ripple-ethereum-UK-robbery-cryptocurrency-armed-thugs-oxfordshire-news-latest

Physical access is not just a technological problem, unfortunately.



I like your style

I concur. There's already posting restrictions for new accounts in place. While we may argue about whether these restrictions are tight enough, completely preventing new accounts from being able to open a new thread sounds like a bad idea to me; as it would very likely also shut out new members that are genuinely interested in the matter. For an interested newbie crypto can be already intimidating enough, pre-emptively shutting them out completely would make matters only worse. After all we also want the community to grow.

I remember when I started out in 2013 newbies where only restricted to certain sections -- is this still the case? It seemed to work rather well back then.

Pretty much the whole industry does.

Just look at IBM, Microsoft, JP Morgan... sometimes I wonder if these companies themselves are aware of the bullshit they're selling or whethere they're too blinded by the cargo cult called "blockchain, the technology". I mean supposedly there must be enough smart people working at these companies for them to realize that it's not the right tool for the job... right? Right? When the European Central Bank did their research on using a blockchain for international remittance they at least had the integrity to admit: Nope, that's not gonna work for us. Alas, using existing public infrastructure -- ie. decentralized blockchains -- is apparently not as profitable as trying to force your own proprietary standards.

Aw well. Enough of a rant. This too, shall pass.