I guess it was only a matter of time until such a thing would happen, sad to see the day when it actually did.



I still wouldn't want to take the risk of the other 1% though. Or at least generate a new seed as pointed out by gentlemand.

I guess it mostly breaks down to educating people about the risks of hardware wallet resellers and on how to alleviate it. It seems like crypto is one of the few areas where a healthy dose of paranoia absolutely pays off.




That's the problem though. When it comes to hardware wallets the only trusted suppliers are the hardware wallet producers themselves. I'm sure whoever supplied the reseller was also "trusted" at one point.

Apparently Coinbase is not even batching their transactions yet. Given Coinbase's transaction volume, this alone would already save a ton of blockspace. Apparently transaction fees don't hurt their bottom line, as they can simply roll that cost over to their customers. And as long as transaction fees don't hurt their bottom line, reducing them won't be much of a priority. Coinbase only cares about people buying bitcoin, not using them. A picture book example of misaligned incentives, unfortunately.

My biggest hope in regards to kickstarting LN adoption is currently merchants and the likes of BitPay. BitPay has nothing to gain from people buying Bitcoin unless they actually use them. So in this case the incentives should be aligned in LN's favor.

Both legacy transactions and SegWit transactions that do not involve the Lightning Network will still be possible. Lightning Network runs on top of Bitcoin, the Bitcoin protocol itself doesn't change.



Spammers can only affect the on-chain transactions that are required for opening and closing a channel. The routing on Lightning Network itself won't be affected by on-chain spam. Depending on its implementation there may be other ways for an adversary to affect LN performance, but that's too soon to tell. One can assume that spamming the network will become less effective as more transactions are moved off-chain and lightning channels are kept open for prolonged durations of time.

Bitcoins are not stored as balances, but rather as the sum of incoming and outcoming transactions.

A transaction is basically a signed message that says: "Alice sends Bob 1 BTC". What miners and nodes do is, they 1) verify whether the message has been signed by Alice and not and impostor and 2) they verify whether Alice actually has the funds (read: a sufficient amount of BTC in incoming transactions) to send Bob 1 BTC. If both is true, Bob himself now has a sufficient amount of BTC in incoming transactions to send 1 BTC.

Basically, you can verify whether a bitcoin is "real" by following this chain of transactions upstream until you reach the block where the coins have been mined. Mined coins are issued in a special kind of transaction that requires no inputs. The integrity of this special issuance transaction and the block that enabled it, is given due to the blocks that are mined on top of it, ie. the blockchain.

Here's a more detailed, technical information on transactions as transactions are actually little scripts and not just simple messages:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction

Wallet and blockchain explorers such as blockchain.info interpret this ledger of transactions (ie. the blockchain) for you so that you don't have to follow each transaction back to its source yourself.

Hi DarkStar_,

I too would like to update my BTC address to a SegWit enabled one.

old address:
14wcruSDsiwSyHSRoC4cAb4UqTAJdGSJ5V

new address:
33jr6swgJxHwyFTgXKcv7kbKSy4du8Yt8r

verification message:

signature:

Thank you and ChipMixer for running this awesome campaign!

I definitely agree with Bitcoin being the digital equivalent of gold. As an asset it shares a lot of its properties, both good (eg. can not be conjured out of thin air) and bad (eg. pays no dividends, close to no intrinsic value).

The true test will be once the next economic crisis hits. Will Bitcoin behave like gold and succeed as store of value during a recession, or will Bitcoin fall with the rest of the market, due to its speculative nature? I consider both a possibility, but it will largely depend on how well established and stable cryptocurrencies have become until then.

It looks like you should be fine when it comes to trading Bitcoin in a way that is distinctively non-commercial, say buying food or paying back a friend for picking up the tab. Gift cards, money orders or gold are probably a greyish area, depending if you plan on doing it just once or on a regular basis. I don't think you want to test the limits of what still requires a BitLicense and what doesn't though.

Have you looked into Coinbase or Gemini? As far as I know they have succesfully applied for the BitLicense. Even NY traders and miners should be free to use those.

Interesting, makes sense that they were able to seize additional bitcoins from other investigations. Just short of 4,000 BTC is kinda cute though. If they were to sale those coins on regular exchanges like the rest of us that would account for a whopping 0.5% of daily trading volume. That's quite a kill switch indeed.

I wonder if they sell the fork coins along with it? BCH alone would account for another USD 10,000,000,- on top.



According to Amazon you can get a fancy pool table for USD 3,000.

BTC 3,800 * USD 14,500 = USD 55,100,000 / USD 3,000 = 18,366 pool tables.

That would be enough for me to play on a different, brand new pool table every day for the rest of my life.

Not a bad deal to be honest.

I don't play pool tho

There's more than 1000 cryptocurrencies and counting, so that would be quite a feat

As far as alts are concerned, while Ledger supports only a fraction of available cryptocurrencies it still has the widest range:

Ledger:
https://www.ledgerwallet.com/cryptocurrencies

Trezor:
https://coinsutra.com/trezor-supported-coins/

KeepKey:
https://www.keepkey.com/keepkey/faq/compatibility/

Like I said... the dominant coin could very well be an alt at one point, but the current ones are not quite there yet in terms of scalability.

I think BTC will see the most work being done, which will put it ahead of the crowd for years to come. I do expect to see the existing alts to improve as well though, so who knows



Excellent point of view. It's important to keep in mind that the endgame is the prosperity of crypto as a whole is, with BTC just being part of a bigger picture.

KFC accepting BTC is still little more than a marketing stunt, although a good one at that. Also note that they were clever enough to make the Bitcoin Bucket a home delivery product only, thus circumventing possible confirmation delays.

Paying for food delivery with Bitcoin has been possible for years now. I don't expect restaurants to accept Bitcoin at the point of sale though, at least not until the likes of Lightning Network has reached a production ready state.



21 forever accepting Bitcoin would be pretty funny.

None of the decentralized alts are scaling better than BTC though. For the most part their fees are still low because they process only a fraction of the transactions that BTC does.

I agree that whatever coin manages to solve scalability will likely become the dominant one. This could very well be an alt at one point, but none of the current ones is quite there yet.

No idea, to be honest. It seems to have plateaued at ~11% with little signs of adoption growth for weeks. Some major service providers such as Coinbase have yet to deploy SegWit, once they do we should see some further increase in SegWit transactions. Hard to say when they will be ready though, some time during 2018 I suppose. Whether this will suffice to push SegWit adoption to 90+% is yet another question though.

I guess OP is referring to the seized silk road coins, most of which already have been sold in 2013 - 2015.

Apparently more than BTC 288,000 in total:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Arrest_and_trial_of_Ross_Ulbricht

Well played, well played.


Whatever BTC the FBI has left, if any, would be hardly noticable in today's market.

Bitcoin mining is most profitable in places where electricity is the cheapest. Electricity is cheapest were its supply outweights its demand. As electricity is hard to store, any supply that exceeds demand is simply lost. It follows that Bitcoin mining mostly uses leftover electricity that otherwise would have gone by unused.

So far PoW appears to be the cost of maintaining a decentralized digital currency, since PoS is a questionable alternative and most other approaches rely on centralized entities. Assuming decentralized currencies are something worth striving for and are able to meaningfully replace large parts of the financial system and reduce spending on literal mining of precious metals, the environmental impact might be a net positive in the long run, given that both sectors require a lot of human and natural resources, which arguably could be better spent elsewhere.

YoBit support just got back to me and my ECASH deposit has been credited. Looking at the other thread it seems like they solved whatever issue they had on their side. Still not exactly confidence inspiring, not sure if I'm going to touch them again.



Given their secretive nature I don't think YoBit exactly cares much about regulation, regardless of whether it was a genuine hiccups on their end or a lucky accident. I don't mind exchanges being shady, but this isn't going to end well. BTC-e was at least reliable until they got raided.

It's safe to assume that OP is referring to hardforks though, as all Bitcoin hardforks were code forks but not all code forks lead to hard forks (LTC for example). Snapshotting / airdropping is a valid distribution scheme, but nonetheless something different from a hard fork.

Soft forks weren't mentioned and are something completely different still. Soft forks lead to neither a blockchain split nor to a new a currency.

Bittrex should cover most of these coins. Poloniex and Bitfinex cover some of the major ones.

I don't think any of the exchanges that accept bank deposits trade in anonymous currencies though, one may speculate why that is. For cash trades you'll probably have to look at the respective communities.

...is what I would say if SegWit were widely used, Lightning Network could be activated by the flick of a switch and transaction growth would be linear

However SegWit is nowhere as widespread as it should be, Lightning Network will take time to be widely accepted and the amount of transactions will likely grow much faster than what my initial guess was.

Point being, 1) our current situation would be much better if SegWit transactions were more common and 2) SegWit alone is no long term solution.



On BTC? I don't think so, as SegWit itself is deemed to be the malleability fix.

On BCH? I think they are working on one, but am not sure about their progress. Either way I doubt that BCH will adapt LN anytime soon, as LN was one of the main criticisms of the BCH community regarding BTC's scaling approach.



I guess LN will serve as an additional incentive to adopt SegWit, as it will have a larger impact on transaction fees, meaning that once LN becomes production ready you'll likely see an uptick in SegWit transactions as well. Also LN will likely take some time until it sees widespread adoption, so the sooner deployment starts the better!

Welp, I should have known better but I guess you can add me to the list of people that just had ECASH disappear into YoBit. My deposit got forwarded to the same wallet as OP, but not credited. For what it's worth I contacted their support, let's see if they have something to say.