The have been feasting on high transaction fees for half a year or so. Before that transaction fees were negligible. Heck, 2 years ago the price of BTC was negligible compared to nowadays. So even accounting for the upcoming halving I wouldn't be to worried about the balance sheet of miners.



While Lightning Network will vastly improve Bitcoin's transaction throughput, keep in mind that overall adoption and thus the amount of transactions is also likely to increase significantly. This means while each individual will send less transactions on-chain, the overall demand for on-chain transactions will persist.

Also keep in mind that Bitcoin mining will always remain profitable. Worst case you'll see hashrate growing at a slower rate and a decrease in Bitcoin's power consumption.



Running LN nodes is unlikely to be profitable. It might be a nice little side income, but unlikely to be worthy of a business model.



The fees per kb for channel opening and closing transactions won't differ much from the fees per kb for regular on-chain transactions. But as mentioned above, you can expect an overall increase of userbase and thus transactions to offset the "loss" of transactions moving off-chain.

Funny. A couple of months ago r/btc was still criticizing Bitcoin Core for scaling with what they perceived as federated sidechains. Now sidechains appear to be one of the main innovations coming to Bitcoin Cash.

Also the motivation behind implementing drivechain reads like a checklist of what they critizied about Core when SegWit was still debated (ie. protecting Bitcoin from hard forks, ignoring ideas...)

I digress though and I still need to read through it from a technical perspective.

But you definitely got a good point. The alts aren't sleeping. Ethereum also has some interesting developments going. And I'm sure some of the other alts as well.

Keep in mind though that a lot of these innovations are not exclusive to each respective blockchain. Sidechains have been in the works for Bitcoin even before Bitcoin Cash entered the stage. Vice versa Lightning Network can be implemented on any blockchain that doesn't suffer from transaction malleability.

A lot of human resources is consumed by banking and finance. Cryptocurrencies could free up much of what is basically a waste of workforce.



Ripple is centrally issued and requires a network of trust. Ripple and the likes of it fail at providing some of the core value propositions made by cryptocurrencies, namely being permissionless, trustless and decentralized.



You might want to rethink your conception of China:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/10/china-on-track-to-lead-in-renewables-as-us-retreats-report-says

All in all, good list. However:


I'd actually recommend simply using the out-of-the-box Windows Defender software instead of third party anti virus software.

Most actually open up more attack vectors than they close:
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/01/disable-your-antivirus-software-except.html

Many anti virus solutions basically MitM your https connection in a misguided effort to protect you:
https://www.securityweek.com/antivirus-software-has-negative-impact-https-security-researcher

Making sure to keep your operating system up-to-date is key. Luckily by default Windows pretty much forces its user to update on a regular basis. Good malware usually doesn't get caught by anti virus software anyway.

I would have put it slightly differently, but you're not wrong.

I'm still not holding my breath for Rootstock though.



Real estate is the best investment? Tell that to the USA of 2007. Or early 90's Japan. Real estate bubbles are a thing too.



Bitcoin has sold itself as an "economic experiment" since the very beginning, so such statements are nothing new. In fact it is indeed something that needs repeating during times of overinflated expectations. Good observation though. I hope there's nothing bad waiting in the bushes for our fellow ETHers.

I 100% concur.

Personally, I still strongly believe that technologically sound cryptos have a higher chance of increasing in value and utility rather than dropping to near zero and vanishing completely. But nonetheless there still is a chance that cryptos become utterly worthless in the future. And definitely no one should invest more than they can afford to lose (technically true for pretty much every riskier investment, to be honest). Claiming otherwise would be irresponsible, so hats off to Vitalik for speaking the truth.



I don't think anyone is worried about the early adopters. It's mostly the new money that needs to be made aware of the risk, as they lack the experience and stand to lose the most.

How do you secure a public blockchain without financial incentive though? Proof of Stake still implies that the system uses some form of valuable token, otherwise there'd be nothing to stake with. For Proof of Stake to work there needs to be something at stake apart from the data being stored. And even then its security is not without dispute.

Of course you could create a permissioned or private blockchain, but then you lose all the benefits of a blockchain and are just back at distributed databases.

What do you mean by difficult to repeat? The amount of processing power that goes into hashing the data? That entirely depends on the hashing algorithm being used. All (cryptographic) hashing algorithms are by definition easy to reproduce and hard to predict. However, by design, some require more processing power than others. Compared to some more modern hashing algorithms, SHA-256 uses only few resources.



Both the input and output of a hashing function is just binary data. It's just that in the case of text or messages the input is usually depicted as Unicode characters or similar, while the output is usually depicted in a hexadecimal format, which encompasses only a subset of characters (0-9a-f).

Also note that requiring ASICs to mine BTC makes it less susceptible to hashrate fluctuations caused by rising alt coins. We got a glimpse of the possible impact of such competition during the early days of BCH. Most alts that share BTC's PoW scheme are irrelevant today, but if BTC were CPU / GPU mineable again this could have serious implications regarding the stability and security of the network. Back then BTC was the only game in town, but nowadays sudden alt price surges could result in network slowdown and thus congestion.

ASICs leading to centralization has been mostly due to there being only a handfull of mining hardware manufacturers on the market, using a signficiant amount of hardware for mining themselves. With the likes of Samsung entering the mining market we might see wider availability of mining hardware again, or at least some serious competition for the existing manufacturers. Assuming Samsung actually pulls through this will increase decentralization either way.

Everyone should be allowed to release coins. That's the whole point of being able to fork open source code -- cryptocurrencies are no different in that matter. It's only that people should be smarter than throwing their money at every new coin and token that enters the market.



People that sign up for bounty programs don't care much about a project's feasability. Why should they, it's free money for the most part (ignoring time spent).

It's only when people start literally buying into it that things get problematic. But they can mostly blame it on themselves, if you're honest. No one is forcing anyone to invest in something that they don't understand.



It seems like every now and then people need to take a lesson. Many people will waste their time and money, but in the end the worthile projects will prevail and some people will hopefully end up smarter regarding what makes a good project.



An open source environment doesn't prevent one from writing incorrect code. Case in point:


I guess you are mostly referring to applying a proper engineering methodology. Whether you do proper engineering has nothing to do with being open source or being proprietary -- it's a matter of properly assessing how critical your code is. And in crypto pretty much every bit of code is critical while most devs still seem to be in happy-go-lucky start-up land, instead of in finance.

In general I find TA rather silly, however it is definitely worth knowing some of the basics as to be able to understand how the other market participants tick. At least support and resistance levels seem to play an important role in crypto, if only because other people believe them to be true, making the confirmation of support and resistance levels a self fulfilling prophecy.

SHA-256 being a cryptographic hash function the output should by definition be uniformly distributed, ie. not be affected by the problem described by nullius.

The tricky part is selecting an input with sufficient entropy, as to make it hard for an attacker to guess the input itself. Dice throws meet this condition.

*slow clap*



Your bank and the feds are the only ones you need to worry about, so as long as you get in touch with your bank and tax attorneys you should be fine. There's not much else you can do anyways.

Coinbase themselves probably won't care much about the size of your transactions, as long as you have taken care of the required verification steps and your bank account data checks out.

/thread


Blackhat hackers are finally able to turn security vulnerabilities straight into cash, without having to go through secondary markets by either selling stolen data or the exploits themselves. Questionable security has always been a problem with online businesses, it's only now that in the case of crypto people are actually aware of being hacked because money is missing. No one notices stolen data because the "original" is still there. How many corporate databases do you think got silently stolen and sold on the black market without companies noticing? IT Security is neglected most of the time. The majority of people barely give a fuck about it until they painfully learn that properly securing a server is more than just an academic excercise.

Luckily with Bitcoin itself the security aspect is an inherent property. It's a solid technology, it's just that people need to learn how to handle it properly.

Funny, I was just thinking the same thing

I've evaluated all the information that is available to me and came to my own conclusion. I'm sure you did the same. Only time will tell which perspective is closest to reality. Enjoy the ride, see you on the other side mate.

Define "most"? Source?



What do you mean by "best suited for making multiple repeat payments"? The same channel can be used to send transactions to any number of market participants, not just the ones that you deal with on a regular basis. In other words, LN is suited for any form of day-to-day payments. If day-to-day payments aren't your thing, ie. you don't plan on transacting BTC on a regular basis, then you are not using BTC as a payment network anyway and are only marginally affected by transaction fees in the first place.

Your BTC wallet has to be pre-funded with money before you are able to use it. Same with your ETH and LTC wallet. So what's the argument?



Please expand on how LN is turning out to be disaster?



Indeed. Not as easy as simply increasing the block size, for example.



Blockstream is only one of multiple development teams working on LN. LN is decentralized both in regards of how transactions are handled and how it is developed. Using LN is and will remain optional. It does not lock out other scaling solutions that may turn up in the future.



Payment channels being one of them. Nonetheless as mentioned above, LN does not prevent other scaling solutions to be deployed in the future, instead of LN.



FOMO, greed and misinformation.



How is multiple development teams working on an optional scaling solution a hostile takeover of Bitcoin?

Lightning Network being used by only a small group of people is not the same as Lightning Network being only deployed on testnet.

There's currently 700 nodes connected via 1700 channels on mainnet. A lot has happened since the Bitrefill transaction.

https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/


The anonymous VPN provider Torguard has been accepting mainnet Lightning Network transaction for a couple of weeks now:

https://dowbit.com/torguard-lightning-payments/


I'm not sure if there will ever be such a thing as an "official announcement". A real-life rollout is progressively taking place already though.

The solution to the first problem is something that the market -- ie. ICO investors -- need to enforce. If people would actually demand proper documentation instead of simply throwing money at every shiny new project they see this problem wouldn't exist. No documentation, no funding. It could be easy as that, but fact of the matter is that most people don't really care all that much as long as there's a quick buck to be made.

The second problem is definitely the most interesting one. Given how much KYC data is being shuffled around in this space, I wouldn't be surprised if at one point gathering exploitable passport selfies becomes a core part of scammy ICO-based "businesses". I'm pretty sure most ICOs already break a bunch EU regulations concerning the gathering, handling and storing of personal data. But of course preventing possible attempts at small scale money laundering is much more important than protecting the personal data of private citizens. In practice I guess the solution is pretty much the same as with the first problem -- stop throwing money at questionable ICOs.

The third problem is simply scammy behaviour and indeed just needs honest up-front communication.

Oh yes. Solutions such as Simplicity are exactly why I give Bitcoin a better chance of survival than most of the alts. The academic work being done around Bitcoin is amazing. It might not be as flashy as the snakeoil that some of the alts are selling, but at least it has substance.



That reads less like bug descriptions and more like a checklist of what not to do. The second point -- not entrusting critical verification to client-side code -- is literally one of the first things that gets drummed into your head when learning web development.