Well, gmaxwell noted that Bitcoin Cash have now implemented Segwit and Segwit native addresses (i.e. the BIP173 Bech32 format), hilariously calling them alternative names, despite heavily promoting a supposedly superior tech to solve quadractic sighash DoS attacks and signature malleation.

So what's the actual difference between S2x and Bitcoin Cash in technical specification? While not identical, increasingly less (possibly Bitcoin Cash has the technical edge right now with their BIP173 deployment). And in market terms, Bitcoin Cash has a network, software running that network, a price, and a track record. S2x apparently has a promise of hashrate. I wonder how S2x futures prices are doing?

The wording of this article carries an important ambiguity; bullion or coins can be bought for BTC, but it's not at all obvious that gold can be sold for BTC. This possibly highlights the position of Sharps Pixley, as using Bitpay strongly implies that gold cannot be sold for BTC, and this in turn suggests that Sharps Pixley doesn't appreciate the value proposition of holding Bitcoin (and this is no surprise from a business that trades in a competing asset).

Furthermore, Sharps Pixley may regret becoming involved with an entity that engenders such systemic dysfunctionality and controversy within the Bitcoin sphere as Bitpay do. Strange business decision, a more neutral payment processor would be a better choice for a business in unfamiliar territory.

No it doesn't.

How will they achieve prohibition? How could cryptocurrency be restricted by the ECB or the European Commission?

You're making unqualified assertions, and easily to disproven ones; previous monetary systems or accounting systems operating outside of the control of the financial system (e-Gold, Liberty Reserve, Liberty Dollar) were all discovered physically and shut down (by US government agencies). No such move can be made against Bitcoin, it was designed to make that act exceedingly difficult to perform, even in a ruthlessly totalitarian environment (to wit, Venezuelans, Ukrainians and Zimbabweans using Bitcoin to survive under the watch of highly repressive state apparatus).

So what's the EU gonna do? The amount of money and resources to shut Bitcoin down don't really exist, just as the resources to prevent people recording radio broadcasts, copying friends' CDs or p2p filesharing was never enforceable. If the authoritarian states of China, USA, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and wartorn Ukraine cannot control Bitcoin, what chance does the EU have? Please reply

Well, I see what you mean there.


But it's likely to be a rare occurance. Randomised changes to the set and randomised series size are very severe deterrents to ASIC development anyway.

Smoothing out the problems with different hashing ASICs working in series would not be difficult, all that's needed is a way to make systematic implementations difficult. You're starting with sinking money into development of every single hash algo that's chosen for the hash set, and a modularised design to chain them together for when the series changes. This really causes problems for large mining operations, as the need for storing unused hashers multiplies by the size of the hash set chosen for the series. And any design decisions taken to make a modularised interconnect for hashing units more difficult will surely be taken. And for every (randomly intervalled) change to the hashing series, the hashers need to be physically reseated, lest valuable space in the infrastructure situated mining centers gets wasted. All only until the random interval changes the series again.

That's a far more difficult development problem than a hashing ASIC, and a commensurately significant investment. And clearly difficult to operate at all efficiently. And your point kills the idea off altogether, ironically; why limit changes to just the hashing algos when you could make other changes that cause further problems with the design of modular interconnects. There's nothing to stop periodic updates to the scheme to force the specialists to innovate an even more difficult design.

You're making alot of assumptions

It's unlikely that people will choose to transact on the S2x chain, Bitpay and Coinbase aren't enough to keep it going, alternative to both have existed for years.


And the "who's calling what an altcoin" stuff is a pretty funny joke. It doesn't matter what's called what, it's about the overall technology model behind the coin that counts. Being called "Bitcoin" isn't a magic trick that makes something valuable money, unfortunately

No


A series of hash algos, the size of which is not fixed, is used for PoW.

The interval between the changes is random, whereby the constituents of the series, and it's size, are changed (within some sensible set of bounds).


A hard fork is needed to do all this anyway, so simply make the amorphous PoW definition a part of Bitcoin consensus. If PoW changes are part of the protocol, it's not a hard fork to follow the prototcol. You seem a little confused by the whole concept, frankly.

You seem a little fixated on absolute hashrate numbers. Remember that if the PoW changed, the hash function is inherently different, and so comparing SHA256 hashrate with CuckooCycle hashrate is pretty meaningless.

You're also forgetting that PoW change will see Bitcoin mining explode in popularity, so the actual purpose of the hashing will be far better satisfied with such an unavoidably more decentralised hashrate.

You forget too that Coinbase and Bitpay are not the only providers of their respective services. And in fact, the recent news about Atomic swap transactions with BTC/LTC trading pairs is a paradigm shift in the making when it comes to cryptocurrency exchanges. Sure, Coinbase could provide it, but what would be the point in having a centralised point of trust when atomic swaps transcend the need? Who's going to trust Coinbase after all this strongarming anyway?


You should stop forgetting things

This is the sort of evidence that denies the statist calls of "well, Bitcoin will just get banned if it gets too popular, then it's going to zero"

There is no effective ban, and even when serious repression exists, what happens to the BTC price? It goes up, not down. And Bitcoin probably isn't even that popular in Zimbabwe....yet. It'd be nice to see a Bitcoin enable tax revolt in some repressive state or other, and Zimbabwe is a candidate for that. The state is pretty weak there, it wouldn't take much to cause such a fragile regime to collapse.

hey Mario, welcome to 2009

lol

This really hurts Charlie Lee's reputation. 3 possibilities exist:

1. Charlie Lee was not smart enough to realise that the Chinese government would have little choice but to change their mind. Charlie still chose to lend his reputation to the "China banning Bitcoin" message

2. Charlie Lee was not smart enough to realise that the Chinese government were simply manipulating the Bitcoin price. Charlie still chose to lend his reputation to the "China banning Bitcoin" message

3. Charlie actually knew either or both of the above points. Charlie still chose to lend his reputation to the "China banning Bitcoin" message


Looks bad for Charlie Lee, and Bobby Lee really, whichever way you look at it.

I think eventually Bitcoin will need economic crisis or collapse to really take a hold.

But we already have the test cases for that anyway. This very Press sub has seen Argentina, North Korea, Ukraine, Iceland, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Greece etc regularly rolling through the 1st page over the years, with some news story about how dire economic conditions are forcing people to use and become familiar with Bitcoin. Sadly, the majority of people just don't have enough courage (or monetary comprehension) to take Bitcoin seriously. It's sad that it has to be this way, but desperation born out of desperate circumstances is a far more powerful motivator (and it's doubly sad, money is too basic a need and simultaneously too sophisticated a concept for people to take chances with, I find this particularly ironic).

I expect we could see Spain, Italy and Ireland begin to feature more prominently after some time (those states and their respective peoples have economic issues also), as well as perhaps Brazil. There will no doubt be some surprise entrants too, it wouldn't be Bitcoin without surprises.

Hmm, so it appears the technical specifications of Bitcoin Cash and Segwit2x are going to be very similar by the time the planned hard fork is set to happen. I've always liked Bitcoin Cash, lol (if only for making alt-dev hard forks look ridiculous )

Well, the S2x advocates are arguing that those developing for the "weaker" chain are those responsible for making the changes to ensure replay protection. But they're not trying to force everyone to "upgrade", this is like totally a free choice to choose their 51% attack alternate blockchain, lol

And maybe the interval between the changing of the hash series could be randomised. Keep thinking though.

LN isn't needed, but Segwit does remove a form of DoS attack, transaction malleation could be used to wreak havoc with the atomic transfer transaction (I believe the transaction hash, the target of malleation, for the time-locked funds is used as an input to the swap transaction. Segwit disallows that form of malleation).

Lightning just makes it faster and cheaper, as far as I'm aware, and that would open the doors to.... p2p exchanges that can trade at the sort of speed needed for a real time price. That could be a genuine game changer, and illustrates the pointlessness of the "you can't replace Coinbase" nonsense. Governments and regulators could ban Bitcoin altogether, worldwide, and still BTC exchanges would thrive without centralised pressure points. I kind of hope they do, Bitcoin was always about the free market anyway. Detractors might say "gonna be slightly slow getting your Tether USD onto your OKPay account..." but I seem to remember fiat withdrawals from the centralised crypto exchanges being pretty slow also. Plus ca change.

*sigh*


I think using a series of hashing algorithm that alternates randomly from a larger set is probably the way to go. There's no feasible ASIC for that, although I guess FPGA rigs could be introduced that could be re-programmable to the latest series size/combo might be feasible. Hard to see how that setup would be as flexible as just using a standard PC, but there are processing efficiency gains still. Maybe anyone doing that should pray that a random length of time for the hashing series switching interval isn't introduced too


So there is no manufacturers advantage, given that changes to the PoW hashing scheme are carefully thought through (in before some other smart mouth says "that sounds too complicated, confidence etc". If it's too complicated for you, go home, you came to the wrong place already)

The trouble is that these problems are essentially all solved.

• Lightning network can solve the speed of clearance problem
• Investment cycle inspires spending, as the article denotes
• Investment cycle inspires new investors, ready to spend once the cycle they join with peaks
• Regulation is easy: it's supra-governmental anyway, the software is designed so that it regulates itself

One supermarket chain can't contemplate these simple facts, but it's only going to hurt them and help their competitors who can see the opportunities clearly. Presumably their consultants are either not smart enough, or are taking the private opportunity to buy low.

And since when did multi-national corporations give one solitary fuck about dancing around regulations? C'mon now.

Not really.

This would be true, if your preposition that bitcoin companies give Bitcoin it's utility (or value) was true, but it's not (and is certainly hotly debatable, so presenting that as a fait accomplis is especially laughable)

Additionally, the signatories of the NYA are a small proportion of actual Bitcoin companies in any case. And the number of renegers to the NYA has been picking up, the situation is more that Coinbase and Bitpay are far more easily replaceable than the most eminent programmers working in cryptography & distribute systems, come on now


It seems an awful lot like the Bitcoin companies that are pushing the Segwit2x fork are starting a propaganda & misinformation campaign, what do you think Quickseller? Kind of highlights the weakness of their position if they feel they need to do such a thing.

Why waste words when NYA Bitcoin companies' "opinions ultimately determine if any HF will be successful or not"? Maybe because their opinions count for nothing, and the users' (who are the target of the words) opinions are the actual determiner of the success of the hard fork?

This guy also needs an economics lesson, straight from the first page of the most basic of basics.


When there are individual agreements as to the value of an asset/commodity, or when individual trading partners set their own terms of trade, economists call it "capitalism".

When there is a small group of individuals that decide all terms of trade or the value of assets/commodities traded for everyone else, economists call it "communism".

No, I disagree.

Young people are inherently open to new ideas; they are psychologically inclined to do so (because they themselves are new, young people often reject old things in favour of the new subconsciously), and their minds are typically more flexible to learn and accept new concepts also. Sure there are speculators amongst the young too, but they're far more likely to get involved with Bitcoin ideologically than the old.