Just because the nascent BCH network at the time barely had enough hash power to find a block (eventually finding one many hours after the planned launch time), it has no correlation to SegWit being activated as a softfork by 90+% of the hashrate on the BTC network.

If you're going to lie, at least learn how do do it convincingly.  

I can only see the positives in terms of the effect it'll have on users if they lock him up.  One less liar filling their heads with nonsense. 

The problem with removing sections of the board is that all the posts currently made there would just end up being made in other parts of the forum where they would be considered off-topic.  Even if you don't personally see the benefit of a particular subforum, you would probably notice the deterioration of all the other boards, effectively turning into dumping grounds, if Trading Discussion wasn't there anymore.

There's a part of me that wants to believe it's simply some ideological differences combined with an unhealthy dose of bitterness on their part, but increasingly I'm starting to think it's malicious.  Like they are just attempting to undermine Lightning purely because any user they can turn against it could potentially start using whatever it is these trolls are supporting.  

It makes sense when you think about it:  

Got no unique selling points for your preferred client/blockchain/whatever?  No one cares about your shit ideas?  Hardly any users?  Why not try to sabotage the project that currently has all the support instead?  

I'm pretty sure that's how their mindset works.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, though.  LN topics can get locked in all the places they currently get posted, but they can still provide some useful information before they get derailed by trolls.  If we allow disruptive behaviour to hamper our ambitions, the trolls have been successful in their goal.  Don't let them win.

I genuinely hope so.  Totally called it if he has.   

Might be the best news the crypto community has had all year.

You should probably get rid of all the fiat money in your bank account too, then.  If Bitcoin's encryption can be broken, so can the encryption used in the legacy financial system.

I thought after all this time that mainstream articles might be a touch less reductive, but it seems there are no signs of it changing yet.  It's not as simple as "regulations = price stability", but it's the same thing people have been spouting for years.  Why do people expect predictability from something that has no real precedent?

Bit late to the party as I've been away on holiday, but fully supportive of a layer 2 section.  It seems like half the time people can't decide if it belongs in Bitcoin Discussion or Development & Technical, so a dedicated sub would be ideal.

It's a shame, but hopefully some new entrepreneurs spot the potential for this new gap in the market.  We ideally need some sort of peer-to-peer matchmaker software.  Would be more resistant to regulatory shutdown that way.  It wouldn't surprise me if such a thing already existed.

By design.  It would somewhat defeat the purpose of it being off-chain if they were broadcast to the blockchain.  They're still not IOUs.  A commitment transaction is more binding than an IOU.

The clue is in the name.  That's why they call it a "commitment transaction" and not an "owed transaction", or a "promised transaction".

Yeah, Localbitcoins is the confusing one, having recently blocked users from Iran.  Would it be something to do with them technically qualifying as an escrow for all the trades there?  It wouldn't surprise me if part of the US sanctions against Iran included preventing companies from offering escrow services to Iranian residents.

If my words are lost on you, the fault clearly lies with you.  I'm not shocked by this news.  This sort of thing is going to happen to other services too.  It will continue to happen until people realise that centralised systems are very easy for governments to manipulate.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.  This is the natural order of things.  The weaker systems with a single point of failure will gradually become co-opted by the authorities and will subsequently be superseded by more resilient systems.  It's simple evolution.

I think it's possibly a bit naive to say banks are "unsure".  The banks are fully aware of the reasons why they aren't pursuing this technology.  The main reason being, they don't actually stand to benefit much at all.  There are effectively two options for banks:

• Option 1 is the fake "blockchain technology" the mainstream media keep talking about, which is still a private walled-garden where the company maintaining the "blockchain" (read: database) is in total control.  The customers won't actually see any difference in practice, so it would basically amount to a monetary investment in developing a great big pile of 'nothing new' if they went down this route.  It's still traditional banking but with a slightly different way of storing the data.  Who cares?

• Option 2 is a true, decentralised blockchain, where users have control over their funds.  But if you have a profitable business model where your customers are effectively reliant on your services, why would you risk drawing attention to a technology that puts regular people in control of their money?  Real blockchains remove the need for middlemen.  That's a threat to their profitability.  So it's a no-brainer as to why they won't pursue that.

You can certainly try to fudge a mix of the two (and I'm sure loads of companies are looking at that exact thing as I type this now), but unless they've got an absolute goddamn genius in their midst, I don't see them pulling it off without making some serious compromises that would significantly limit the appeal to customers.

To sum up the whole topic, the term "Blockchain" has somehow been distorted into a catch-all phrase that means finding a cost-cutting method of storing digital information.  It bears little to no resemblance to what any crypto users are talking about when they refer to blockchains.  In the vast majority of cases, these are not open, public, distributed blockchains.  It's just a bunch of private companies looking to reduce their operating costs.  As such, these particlar "blockchains" are neither noteworthy nor interesting.

On the plus side, if the US government did officially recognise Wright as satoshi [//EDIT:  I know they're not, but *if*], maybe one of the three-letter-agencies will take him out.  

In all seriousness, though:


This.  I normally avoid coingeek as it doesn't seem like a very reputable source.  IMO, it's closer to a dedicated shilling site than any sort of legitimate media outlet.

That's just it, though.  I doubt this has anything to do with the common people.  I'm pretty sure they aren't going to be the ones with a copy of this blockchain.  And it's not accurate to call it "web 3.0" until they do.  When ordinary people are involved, that will be progress.  Until then, it looks like it's just a private company updating a database.

The balance on the blockchain can't be faked, but the balance displayed to users in their centralised exchange/web wallet/casino/faucet/etc accounts can absolutely be faked.  So unless you know the combined total of all the balances being displayed to all those users, you won't know if that figure matches the figures shown on the blockchain.

I assume this is the source OP is referring to?

Sorry for the reality check, but I'm going to rain on the parade a bit here.  I know in the early days of crypto, due to all the hype and novelty, people generally believed that everything was going to run on a blockchain in the future.  But after witnessing most of the attempts that have been made to do it so far, I think it's only responsible to temper those expectations just a little bit.  I was posting about this in Meta the other week.  It seems like, most of the time, when companies say they're using "blockchain", what they actually mean is "a centralised database", but they're calling it blockchain to generate attention in the media.

What we need to verify is:

• Who is securing this particular "blockchain"?
• How decentralised is it?
• Is it sustainable by having sufficient incentive for users to keep securing it?

It's not possible for me to get excited by this until we know if it's something truly revolutionary, or just another bunch of marketing executives trying to cash in on the hype.