The outputs of cryptographic hashes are pretty much by definition very well distributed.



The size of the coinbase transaction is determined by the miner. In other words a miner creating such as a zero block would just decide to receive whatever coinbase transaction is currently valid.

As mentioned by RGBKey, the chance of such a collision happening is extremely small and pretty much impossible. It's an interesting thought experiment though. If subsequent blocks were to reference the genesis block (or any other older blocks for that matter) I guess they'd get orphaned due to 1) having an invalid timestamp and 2) containing invalid transactions.

1) Lightning transaction routing is also automated. You don't actively decide which transactions to route and which not.

2) What do you mean by "financial interest in the offending transaction"? I don't think the fractions of a cent that get charged by Lightning nodes qualifies as "financial interest".

3) Lightning network will likely not be able to handle drug purchase transactions at the wholesale level.


Another example of why I doubt that running a Lightning node would you make accessory to a crime: What's with all the TOR nodes that route TOR traffic? It's been known that running an exit node can put you into legal trouble, sure. Whoever runs an illegal hidden service on TOR will also face charges, once discovered. But I've never heard of anyone running a simple non-exit TOR node getting in touch with the law over routing possibly illegal traffic. And there's much worse stuff going on over TOR than some college kid trying to buy weed.

Bitcoin mining will continue even after the last bit of block reward has been distributed. That's what the transaction fees are for.



Because without the likes of PoW and arguably PoS you don't achieve a secure, decentralized consensus. Those alts that did away with PoW without introducing a different PoX algorithm are depending on either central verification or a set of trusted third parties, at which points you might as well use Credit Cards or Microsoft Points.



Correct. Mining equilibrium will always be reached. How else would Bitcoin have been secured when it was priced at just a few cents?

Note that the difficulty adjustment period is calculated in blocks, so those 2 weeks can be shorter or longer, depending on whether the hashrate grows or declines. Same goes for the 4 year halving period.

Apart from some short spurts of activity SafeDice's support is one of the worst, but so far has always come through. I know it sucks but give it some time.



Then again admin might of course have left the building, always hard to tell with SafeDice unfortunately. Last post was about 10 days ago which is still within SafeDice's regular activity intervals though, so I wouldn't worry too much. Despite the lack of support SafeDice has a good track record so far.

As mentioned by OmegaStarScream, I would avoid buying a hardware wallet from a third party, especially on eBay. If you really do have no other choice than a third party reseller, reset the device once you receive it and generate a new seed. Don't use the one that comes with the device, unless you want to end up like this guy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2705576.msg28117326

Whether it's worth buying a hardware wallet depends on how much you plan to invest. If half your crypto holdings end up being used to pay for the device, it may not be worth it. If you plan on holding like USD 1,000,- and upwards, definitely get a hardware wallet. It comes down to personal preference however.

A fresh install as mentioned by Bitmous may be a viable alternative, assuming you have an old laptop or PC lying around that you could use as a dedicated device -- ie. Bitcoin transactions only. If you have a laptop or PC available that you could use as a dedicated Bitcoin device, consider setting it up as an airgapped (ie. offline) system to use in conjunction with either Electrum or Armory for cold storage:

https://btcarmory.com/
https://electrum.org/
http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html

Setting up an airgapped device for cold storage is just as secure, but not as convenient as a hardware wallet. Using a dedicated online device, is not as secure, but in my opinion reasonable for smaller sums.

I wouldn't recommend using your personal, every day computer for storing a Bitcoin wallet though, unless losing your coins will come cheaper to you than buying a hardware wallet or setting up a dedicated laptop or PC.

Reducing the hashing power pointed at BTC only makes sense if there's a viable alternative to point it towards to. Otherwise you just have expensive paperweights and lose out on millions of dollars each day. This makes withholding hashing power just for the sake of trying to pull off a 51% attack somewhere later down the road rather unprofitable. And those ASICs are the only machines of potentially doing such an attack. And those ASICs that you would be withholding, will already be obsolete in 10 months' time the latest, so time is playing against you.

Put differently: In practice less hashing power only means less security if there's other hashing power somewhere hidden away that could try to pull of an attack. Bitcoin's hashrate 2014 was much smaller than it is today, yet in practice the network was just as secure.

Miners getting shut down because they are not profitable anymore is a regular part of the process. It's been happening for years every time a new generation of miners hit the market.




I haven't followed BCH's scaling plans, but if they really want to handle 50,000 transactions per seconds using on-chain scaling that would require the equivalent of 7,142 MB blocks per 10 minutes -- or say, 714 MB blocks every minute. Now even assuming they'd manage to compress transactions down to, say 20% in size -- something that BTC could likely also do, if such a solution were to exist -- we'd still be looking at 1,428 MB blocks every 10 minutes. Unless they fundamentally change the way Bitcoin works this is not going to end well.

Of course BCH's scaling approach could turn out to be more viable. And of course that could reflect in price and thus hashrate. Right now, however, BCH is -- by your very own definition -- incredibly insecure. It oscillates at only around 10% of global SHA256 hashrate, making it an easy target for double spend attacks should BTC miners collude and decide to do so. And unless BCH's scaling approach blows BTC's scaling approach out of the water -- which I personally highly doubt -- that won't change anytime soon.

Eliminating risk? Stay in fiat and accept inflation eating away on your savings. Minimizing risk? Know yourself and don't do anything stupid.

This means:

1) Understand what you're buying.

2) Don't invest into something only because it has risen.

3) Don't exit a market only because it has declined.

4) Understand what you're buying.

5) Invest only as much as you can afford to lose.

6) Prepare enter and exit strategies way in advance.


Number 1) helps preventing you from doing stupid things. If you don't understand what you're buying, you're just gambling. If you understand what you're buying, but know it's shit... you shouldn't be buying it in the first place. If you understand what you're buying and are convinced of its merits... number 2) and 3) will be less likely to affect you. Number 5) helps alleviate your psychological burden which makes it easier to not do stupid things. Such as 2) or 3) for example. Same goes for 6).


Note that hedging only helps if your hedge actually acts as one when shit hits the fan. Historical analysis may help the process, but could still fall short.

Note that diversification only works if what you are buying is worth investing in. A diversified bucket of shit, is still a bucket of shit.

1) Miners will still receive transaction fees, just not as astronomical ones as in the last 6 months.

2) A Bitcoin blockchain that runs at half capacity will still provide more transaction fees than an alternative blockchain that is barely used at all.

3) To make Bitcoin less secure you'd need an alt that shares its PoW algorithm and is about as profitable as BTC. Where else were miners to go? BCH came close during the hashrate fluctuations caused by its EDA but could never sustain it so far. Keep in mind that unlike other cryptos BTC only competes for ASIC miners, not GPUs.

4) And as sad as it is, but if people cared even remotely about blockchain security 99% of alts would be left in the gutter.

In general applications that run on Ubuntu should not cause any problems on Xubuntu either. At least I personally never had any problems on Xubuntu that I couldn't resolve by following the Ubuntu or sometimes even the Debian support forums. Most problems that I had to resolve usually only required me to install missing packages. I suppose the situation is similar with Lubuntu. I'm not a heavy user though, so your mileage may vary.

As far as Bitcoin Core is concerned, I just installed it using the software manager that comes with Xubuntu. Starts up just fine, syncs fine, no errors so far. I didn't wait for the full blockchain to load though, so I can only give you a quick impression.

If you build from scratch you might have to install some additional packages, but as mentioned above, usually the same fixes apply to both Ubuntu and Xubuntu.

Exactly. If LN underperforms as a scaling solution, we can always rely on a different protocol layer instead -- whatever that alternative may be. If we simply increase blocksize however, there's effectively no turning back. And while increasing the blocksize may seem like the simpler solution, it's one of the approaches where the benefits are obvious, but the downsides are fairly subtle and thus more dangerous.

"Who needs it" isn't really a Con though, given that the underlying Bitcoin protocol itself remains unchanged and isn't exposed to technological risk by Lightning Network. You can use Bitcoin as is and ignore LN just like you would normally ignore Counterparty or OMNI unless you are transacting tokens on the respective protocol layer.




So far I tried HTLC.me, Eclair and the Lightning Desktop App by Lightning Labs.

I loved being once again able to send tiny amount of coins, with incredibly low fees and pretty much instantaneous confirmation. My enthusiasm was a bit dampened by connectivity issues, expired payment requests, not being able to receive Lightning payments on Eclair and skepticism whether the concept of payment channels is all that intuitive. To make matters worse I recently gave a complete newcomer an introduction to (regular) Bitcoin wallets which reminded me of how many possible pitfalls and new concepts onboarding a crypto nub entails. Take the complexity of Bitcoin wallets, add the complexity of payment channels on top and I see a hard sell for everyone who isn't interested already. Once people are used to it, it's no problem at all, but the steps to get there still take some commitment.

I'm aware that LN is still in early alpha though. And like I said -- it largely depends on the implementation. Given a solid foundation I'm fairly confident that pretty much every form of complexity can be wrapped up in a pleasant user experience. We still have ways to go though.

That being said, thanks for the link, I indeed haven't tried the current zap wallet yet!




Be grateful for the respite, but don't expect it to last. The sooner Bitcoin has a stable long term scaling solution up and running the better.

I still don't quite believe that negative lightning fees will be a thing in practice. However the boon of lowering on-chain transaction fees combined with the ability to amortize opening / closing fees across multiple transactions can indeed not be understated.



Mining will always reach a profitability equilibrium.


To add some of my own:

Pros:

1. The ability to scale non-linearly increases Bitcoin's long term viability without giving up its core properties such as censorship-resistance

2. An increase of Bitcoin's long term viability is positive for both consumers and miners. For consumers in terms of price stability, for miners in terms of long term business prospects

3. Adds new use cases to Bitcoin as it makes micro payments viable again


Cons:

1. Depending on the implementation the user experience may suffer and make handling Bitcoin transactions even more cumbersome for the average consumer than it already is

Taken care of. Very helpful posts indeed, I thought I had a somewhat firm grasp of LN already, but dinofelis' posts cleared up some of my misconceptions. Especially since I overlooked the crucial difference between closing a channel unilaterally and closing a channel uncooperatively.

1) Put your private keys on a laptop hard drive

2) Securely store the laptop hard drive in a landfill

Problem solved!


The above also happened in the UK. Coincidence? I think not!

That's pretty much how I understand it as well. You're encouraged to close a channel cooperatively, but you don't have to. However closing your channel unilaterally will likely cause you to lose all the coins that are locked in the respective channel, making it a stupid thing to do. It's a pretty cool application of game theory, come to think of it.

One possible exploit seems to be that it may be attractive to try closing a channel uncooperatively when your side of the channel is close to spent anyway. Seems unlikely to work in practice though, especially as it's easy to thwart such an attempt once people know it's being used in the wild.



Lightning is not a highway where one broken down car causes a traffic jam. Think of it as a city with a lot of small streets where people simply bypass obstructions by taking another route. That's one of the merits of decentralization.

Note that having "a lot of small streets" also means that you might not be able to navigate the city with a large truck -- ie. the main use case of LN is small transactions, as large transactions may have a hard time finding a route.

The latter is necessary for the first. Unless more people start to use SegWit, Bitcoin won't be able to satisfy the next growth spurt. Without our crazy pioneers testing LN on mainnet, it would take even longer for LN to become production ready and enable the scalability that is needed for an increase of adoption.



To improve Bitcoin adoption and reduce fees, the most tangible thing you can do is to 1) start using SegWit, 2) avoid exchanges that haven't yet switched to SegWit (looking at you, Coinbase) and 3) become one of the crazy pioneers that test LN on mainnet, if you are so technically inclined.

Apart from that, the only thing you can do is educate yourself and those around you. Know the up and downsides of Bitcoin and its surrounding ecosystem. This way you'll be able to call out bullshit, when you see it, and support potential newcomers, when they need it. Especially the latter is of utmost importance.

Should friends of you decide to enter crypto, make sure that they stay safe. That they know how to secure their coins and that they learn how to avoid getting scammed. I'm not sure why, but people seem to lose common sense after entering crypto, start to get greedy and fall for the silliest of rip-offs. Don't let this happen to your friends.

In addition to that, it's of utmost importance that we, as a community, make the lifes of newcomers as easy as possible, lest they turn their backs and never come back. It used to be that cryptocurrencies was mostly for techies and a special breed of libertarians. Now the average consumer is entering the game and we need to make sure that those civilians don't get hurt in this wild west clusterfuck that is crypto.

Oh, and don't try to push crypto on people. It gives crypto a bad rep and makes it seem like a weird cult. I mean it is, in a way, but just be supportive when people ask for help.

I guess I need to listen to the full podcast, but based on the article the concerns still don't make quite sense to me:


I don't understand that argument. LN nodes don't know the origin and destination of transactions that cross them, so far so good. But exchanges still know that they are the destination of a LN transaction -- and who send it. Otherwise how would anyone know that they received a Lightning transaction from the correct counterparty? Unless the argument is that running a LN node makes you a money transmitter according to US law, but that would open a whole different can of worms with exchanges being the least of our problems.

Exchanges don't need to keep track of the whole blockchain and each Lightning transaction though. All they do and should care about is coins and fiat entering and leaving their system. I don't think KYC / AML regulations require anything beyond that. Otherwise you wouldn't see the likes of XMR and ZEC on Kraken, for example. But maybe I misunderstood your concern.



Why shouldn't people switch to LN and what do exchanges have to gain from preventing LN adoption from happening? Everyone profits from low transaction fees. Looking at the big picture even miners stand to profit from LN in that it will help Bitcoin's adoption and long term sustainability.

Great news. Mempool has declined for about a week now, even before the current spike of SegWit adoption, so I think it's the other way round. It seems more like people have taken advantage of the last few days of lower fees to move their coins to new SegWit addresses, so now a larger amount of people are able to send SegWit transactions. Keep in mind that for most of December Bitcoin was barely usable, so everyone who still had coins in legacy addresses was well advised to wait the congestion out before moving on to SegWit.

I used to talk a lot about Bitcoin when I first got into it. Tried to share my enthusiasm for this new technology I fell in love with. Told people to keep an eye out for this new asset class. Most people either took me for misguided, crazy or a shill.

Nowadays I mostly shut up about it, unless cryptocurrencies enter the conversation. Whenever someone asks how many coins I have -- which rarely happens -- I usually answer with "too few", which still holds true unfortunately. I occasionally help and guide people that approach me because they remember me talking about Bitcoin years prior.

I do see where this whole "not shutting up, just like vegans" trend is coming from though. There's a lot of people that apparently can't stop posting about cryptocurrencies on social media. Talking about crypto seems to have become a trend of sorts.