Could we club together to get the Overall a secretary? A precis of some of his posts would encourage people to read them. Leaving out the long quotes would help as well.

How about freezing the difficulty once the block rewards have finished. This could lead to the block generation time being linked to transaction volumes and fee rewards. This could also help with scaling.

I think Washington's handling of the Iran situation is more important. The oil supply agreements with Iran and Saudi Arabia led to the US dollar taking over from Sterling after the Second World War. Russia seems to have taken over OPEC, and Venezuela and Iran are likely to side with China to allow the Renminbi to replace the Dollar. A government backed "crypto" is likely to be more popular than FaceBux, especially as Facebook seems to be on the skids at the moment, as a result of their censorship.

This is my opinion, and don't forget that I believe that Satoshi is/was a department in a central bank.

Once you have an up-to-date blockchain, then synchronisation and validation are the important factors. Running a slow node can have an impact on the Bitcoin infrastructure, and I suspect that this will lead to some peers dropping you. Enabling both inbound and outbound connectivity will make a difference. The way your ISP connects to the Internet backbone will become more important in the future, especially if we enter into an era of attempted government control. Given a reasonably modern machine with adequate ram and disk space, I don't think hardware makes a great deal of difference, but the use of a large SSD seems to speed things up. Firewalls and ISP throttles and bandwidth caps seem to be significant, and these are things I am investigating at the moment.

I'd be interested to hear of any tinkering that can be done to the core setup to improve peer interaction.

I understand that I will get my JetCash.zil domain name tomorrow, and the blockchain will go live,

I'm still having problems in discovering how to use this, and I am not able to access many of the reference pages. I think it is a bit amateurish for them to use external services to list such information. I don't even know if it is a real domain name requiring the use of name servers, or just a wallet address translation service. It is starting to look like a fancy naming system for a wallet that they provide. So all the caveats about using banking services will apply.

The Wall Observer thread is a small community chat thread, and I think it is good the have threads like these. This is why I started the Jet Cash coffee lounge thread. To a certain extent these are self moderating, and the omission of signatures helps to maintain this. It is true that this is a forum focused on Bitcoin, but most of the members have many additional interests, and it is useful to have threads to support these, and to help build the community. Very often reading posts in such threads can help to build images of members, and thus they become a useful way to  evaluate the trustworthiness of members.

I hate Windows. I switched back because I've got some passwords stored, and I've forgotten them. I'm gradually changing them, and I hope I can run everything on Linux machines soon. I put Mint on a 2Tb SSD, and I just swopped it for the HDD in the notebook. It's a massive improvement. I keep meaning to see if I can put the drives in USB cases, and boot from them, that would let me switch without picking the machine to pieces.

I've got a few difficulties to resolve at the moment, but once I'm through those, I'll copy my wallet and the blockchain onro a USB drive, and try sync'ing it with the Netbook. That is running Ubuntu. All these experiments seem to have to go on the backburner far too often.  Once of my emerging problems is the change to the cPanel licensing fees, and I may have to switch my bulk domain hosting to Direct Admin.

I'm in a larger McDonalds atm, and it is pretty quiet - 10am on Monday here. I've fired up my node, and it's picked up a couple of peers almost instantly - one is using /Satoshi:0.18.0/ as a user agent, and the other uses /btcwire:0.5.0/btcd:0.12.0/, another has just dropped out and been replaced with an agent /Satoshi:0.16.0/. The ones that are dropping out have unspecified user agents. Will these user agents make any difference to connectivity maintenance?

Pings are between 61ms and 587ms - the second node at 215ms seems to be doing most of the work, that is the btcwire one.

I've been running the node for about 4 years, and it is a Core i5 notebook with a 2Tb hard drive, and rhat has about 1Tb of unused space. Location vary, but are usually either McDonalds or KFC. I'm at KFC now, and I started core to check. It's managed to find 2 peers, and it is estimating 8 minutes for 5 hours of synchronisation. Connection is about 200Kb/s. It is varying between 2 and 4 peers, with some of them dropping out, and this is what is leading me to believe that I have made myself undesirable in some way.

I'm up to 300 Kb/s now. McDonalds can predict a sync time of 8 hours for a 30 hour catch up at times.

It used to be fairly stable and consistent, but since segwit, the connection can be sporadic. I've taken a couple of screen caps of the traffic, and I'll post those a bit later.

It doesn't matter for whom you vote, the deep state always stays in power.  This is true in the UK, the US, and Europe. It's time that the US fought for independence from the country that controls it - this is know as Washington. Money should be spent on repairing the national infrastructure, and the economy. and not on wars, attempted regime changes in 3/4 of the world, and the purchase of health destroying pharmaceuticals.

As many of you know, I maintain a full node over public WiFi. This means that I have several restrictions imposed on me. I can only allow outbound connections, and there is a maximum of eight permitted. However, very frequently I see that  I have only been able to make 2 or 3 connections, or none at all for some periods, and traffic is sporadic. Often there are quiet spots of many minutes between communication bursts. This is common to a variety of locations, so I suspect it is not due to limitations imposed by the service provider. Speed varies between 50Kb/s and 2,000Kb/s, and node ping rimes are usually lower than 100ms, although at the moment they seem to be in the range 100ms-500ms. I'm using Core version 0.18.0 under Windows 10.

I had to switch back to Windows for a couple of reasons, but I will probably return to Linux ( Ubuntu or Mint ) next month. I feel that the fact that I only run my node a couple of times a day, and that I am on a limited connection, may mean that some peers are blocking me, and that is limiting my ability to find eight good nodes for synchronisation. Is there anything I can do to improve my support for the Bitcoin system, and thus find some more peers who are prepared to  be my "friends".

I think I'm slipping - I need to try harder.

Time to revive Fit to Talk English methinks.

I think there is a possible conflict of interest, and therefore campaign managers should not be merit sources.

To understand the Hong Kong situation, you need to go back in History a bit. Britain forced opium onto the Chinese people, and as a result of this China rebelled, and this started the opium wars, which China lost. As a result of this, Britain claimed Honk Kong on a long lease. When HK was handed back to China, much of the old UK based legal and political structure was retained, but with emphasis on the protection of property, and a lack of democracy. The new extradition laws don't seem to be particularly draconian, and seem to refer to extraditions to countries that do not have a current agreement with HK, and are to be evaluated on a case by case basis.  It would appear that the protests are being funded by the CIA as part of the campaign to vilify China in the eyes of the world. Of course there are various versions of the "truth" being reported, and it will be interesting to see how much of the actions by Washington and the City of London are revealed over the next few months.

God told me I had to do this, but I have a McDonalds promotional coffee bean sticker covering my camera. I understand this is the Internet equivalent of a condom.

I try not to use any Microsoft products these days. I use the Brave browser, and I love it, I've even earnt a bit of crypto through using it.

They seem to be making a few changes at the moment, and that could start to increase interest. I don't know much about the service, does anybody here use it?

I don't install any apps
Btw this reply was typed on a Huawei mobile phone with a smallish screen

Apparently he burst into tears in court because he couldn't provide the addresses. What a wuss!! It's time he was locked up to stop him trying to mess up Bitcoin.

Wow - Bitcoin at £3,000, and I was thinking of selling. I'm struggling to pick up Bitcoin at under £8,000 at the moment.

I gave up on Dash, but I seem to be collecting Basic Attention Tokens for my content and browsing. I've also picked up over 500 free Bit Blocks. I thought that was an interesting project, but it doesn't seem to be doing much at the moment. I haven't looked at Steem for months, and I got a bit of money in that project.

cPanel is increasing it's licence fees in September, and that is going to have a massive impact on me. I'll probably put more sites on my VPS, and I would like the Crypto coin tree to be one of those. I still like the concept of creating a tokenised security, and paying dividends based on a small listing fee from members sales through a classified adds site. I'll probably update the site next month, and try to move forward with the project.

Was it Craig Wright?