I think it would, not 100% sure, there may be some mathematical subtleties I'm not aware of. In principle, it should (I think this new Bech32 format is 32-bit in length and using base 36 numbers, whereas the current address format is 33 bit and uses base 58 numbers).



Not sure. The objectives for 0.15.1 aren't outlined AFAIK, it's possible there are other changes that could usefully be included. 8-12 weeks, if I were to guess.

You two are only highlighting how disingenuous the "big blocks" position really is.


You've got your big blocks Bitcoin, it's called Bitcoin Cash, but you don't want it for..... some reason?


So, why don't you tell the world, honestly, what it is you really want, because if it was big blocks, you shouldn't actually be on the forum of the conservative blocks coin. At all.

So why are you still here?

Segwit wallets plus a native address format (i.e. not script nested P2SH addresses) in 0.15.1. The new format is going to be cool, there will be no more case sensitivity in the address (i.e. bethisabitcoinaddressinnewbech32format is the same address as BETHISABITCOINADDRESSINNEWBECH32FORMAT)

A vaunted algo was something called EquiHash (I think), as it's design is amongst the more difficult to produce an ASIC circuit for, and presumably it isn't too new or based on exotic math. But it will always be possible to produce an ASIC eventually, Scrypt was always touted as "ASIC resistant", until someone produced an ASIC unit with the requisite RAM modules to vastly outcompete PC/GPU Scrypt miners.

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The key will clearly be to alternate hashing algorithms for PoW, either individually, or as a series of hash functions with the order of the series alternated randomly from a large set of hashing algos (Meni Rosenfeld's idea). And while that would decentralise mining a great deal, it would still mean those with access to the most resources would dominate mining (i.e. money, access to large premises with suitable MW rated electricity supply, cheap electricity, suitable environment for cooling, political favour etc).

But small miners would suddenly get back into the game even still; right now, mining ASIC manufacturers deliberately set the price of complete miner units at a level that guarantees their continued dominance in the actual block reward market (something like 5-8 times the market price of what electronics of a similar level of sophistication and material constituency typically would be). With that huge economic disadvantage removed, home miners can of course purchase regular CPU or GPU computing devices at the same prices as large organisations can. It would be good for Bitcoin, despite being somewhat disruptive at first.

Yes, that could be avoided, depending on how it's done. Don't worry, it's fairly simple to achieve.

Yeah, because super-majority miner activated hard-forks away from the proven development team, with zero technical justification == letting people choose


Done with you DooMAD, your shill account is burned

Hmmm, yet before your opinion was wildly different. You claimed that the chain with most PoW will be, by your own personal decree, called Bitcoin, and any remaining fork of the blockchain would be an altcoin.

Maybe you should stick to your alleged principles, and actually let people choose. And hey, maybe you could offer a qualitative assessment of the choices, instead of painting yourself as some kind of unbiased observer, while actually doing a very subtle job of steering peoples opinions on psychological/subjective matters regarding cryptocurrency hard forks (sorry to inform you, it hasn't worked, no-one much is interested in the rather thinly disguised attempt to take the development reins that you've been tacitly supporting)

It's an anti-government, pro-individual technology. It's never going to happen, cryptocurrency is now and always will be outside of government regulation and supervision. It's designed like that, deliberately



How can these Bloomberg idiots not see the glaring contradiction of the above statement? The whole purpose of cryptocurrencies is to operate outside of the grasp of "monetary authorities" and as such, has succeeded in that task so well that the authority no longer exists.

Cassette recording and peer-to-peer file sharing technology in essence gave everyone in the world copyright to every recording ever made. In the same way, Bitcoin makes everyone a monetary authority. It's gone boys. It vanished, wake the fuck up.



Someone help these Bloomberg people, I fear for their sanity when the gravity of this situation finally becomes obvious enough that they can't understand what's going on.

And I expect such a move would find very significant support in the Bitcoin community, it's simply not wise to trust the Seg2x developers when they are either unknown or, worse, known to be enthusiastically against the principles of permission-less sound money.

And then it would be true gold rush time, any new hashing algo chosen would be carefully vetted to be sure that the development time/cost for an ASIC would be maximised. A whole new generation of Bitcoin home miners would flourish

I expect DooMAD to ridicule this and make subtle points steering any readers in the direction of the Segwit2x fork, as usual, but let's remember that he's the only voice on the whole Bitcointalk board even faintly supporting Segwit2x. There's no proven case in favour of the move, and all other information suggests there are several reasons against the November hardfork.

Cue DooMAD, talking about how much he "favours choice", yet refuses to ever acknowledge the value proposition of the supposed choice that's actually being forced on the users (except when people are suggested to choose something that threatens the miner cartel, oh what a strange coincidence ), take it away son

And it's much less obvious to neighours, or your electricity provider, that something unusual is going on.

And hey, home mining in China may just become much more usual anyway if super draconian measures against cryptocurrencies ensue, the Chinese state (or any state for that matter) is only ever really effective at "cutting the heads of flowers that grow too tall". 100's of millions of people in China mining (or using other resources to obtain Bitcoin) are going to be impossible to stamp out effectively, yet again without turning China into a wholesale facsimile of the North Korean state. PRC could kiss their world economic standing goodbye if so.

And if mining were banned, I expect the Chinese market (and those of surrounding states) will be flooded with mining units from the large mines that are shut down, and they'll be sold pretty cheap in order to get the sale done quicker.

And in addition, mining ASICs will still likely be manufactured in China, the Chinese government is only too happy, upto now, to allow very loose control over electronics manufacturing, as they're all too aware that the state is profiting from the copying of copyrighted electronics for years now. It's going to be incredibly difficult for the Chinese state to put the Bitcoin genie back in the bottle, and of course, this was Satoshi's intention when he developed Bitcoin's design.

Is it just me, or is John McAfee not misrepresenting the facts also? I don't think he is a Bitcoin miner, he supposedly (or at least according to him) is on the run from Belizean government assassins? Maybe he changed his story, but this guy is full of questionable stories.

Also, isn't he a part of the whole Bitcoin Cash thing, being close to Bitmain et al? He seems like a spurious defender of Bitcoin, or questionably good example of it's human capital, looked at several different ways.

It could be implemented in way that wouldn't involve huge breaks in the hashrate, so I would forget about that angle

Bitpay is not the only B2C payments processor in the market, nor have I heard it said that Bitpay will refuse to service transactions from the Bitcoin blockchain in the event that Segwit2x forks away from the Bitcoin blockchain.

But it's kind of an interesting aspect of this situation; if Bitpay refuse to take payments from the cryptocurrency with the biggest economy and/or monetary base (as is their present mission statement), then why not? Even if Segwit2x displaced Bitcoin in these metrics, it would still be a little strange.

Please report on the experience. It'll be interesting to see how many regular people are using it, and some indication of how frequently. I predict it may be a little prone to overall awkwardness, on-chain transactions are a bad fit for this kind of retail experience.

WTF

How stupid are the Cointelegraph writers?


HELLO? Piratebay are already operating on a questionable legal basis, laws regulating mining are going to make precisely zero difference



And this is all without going into the more important point; cryptocurrency mining is intended to be permissionless, it's a very important part of imbuing Bitcoin with permissionless transacting, and HENCE A VERY IMPORTANT PART OF WHAT MAKES BITCOIN VALUABLE AS A CURRENCY TO BEGIN WITH.


Cointelegraph.com; you're off to see the wizard, desperately in search of just one brain that will allow you to provide cryptocurrency journalism with meaningful or intelligent reporting. You may as well employ regular news journalists with no knowledge of this subject if this is what you have to offer.

Well, the logic this commentator is using suggests the opposite: that currencies worth several orders of magnitude more are less legitimate than their competitors with less purchasing power per unit, i.e the Italian Lira and the Yen are actually more legitimate than the Euro or Dollar, because they're less valued.



Which illustrates an even clearer way to disprove this nonsense; the Japanese Yen and the Italian Lira were both heavily devalued in order to balance the public finances of their respective governments, stealing from the people holding those currencies to (help) pay for managing their fiscal budget so incredibly poorly. I say "help", as the real insult is that the Italian and Japanese never paid back the money they borrowed, they simply paid enough to make the debt load sustainable.

The real purpose of this commentary is to set Bitcoin an impossible task, but this and other commentators should be careful what they wish for. Worldwide economic circumstances could easily prompt Bitcoin to take such a seemingly fantasy valuation, upon which these sorts of commentards will simply change their magic formula for "legitimacy". But once Bitcoin reaches those heights, the writing may already be on the wall for the established financial system regardless of "influential" people hoping to talk reality out of existence. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

Good luck with your continued talking, gentlemen. Is it not the case that talking appears to be all you've got? Seems a bit like that for some time now

Not really workable on-chain in the long term, hopefully the POS company involved (Electrum?!) will have the sense to implement Lightning payments sooner rather than later. Small, independent shops is one thing, but large chains of stores cannot tolerate anything but the smoothest POS experience.

Sidenote, surely this is not the same organisation that develops the Electrum wallet software? Thumbs down for confusing the marketplace if not, and sideways thumb for selling the brandname if so. I hope this won't mean bad things for Electrum wallet users in that case (although Electrum Wallet has always had that federated servers aspect that caused my disinterest in using it, maybe it could be good in the end, assuming that's the situation of course).

None of those things are true, though.

• No government can know the jurisdiction in which a given transaction happens, or if the participants are subject to their tax legislation
• Governments have no effective tax collection method for cryptocurrency, banks are set up to make tax collection cheap and easy, whereas collecting cryptocurrency as tax would be expensive and ineffective
• Banks have amongst the largest political power existing, and would strongly resist moves to turn their tables over
• Governments are heavily composed of people with stakes in the banking industry, and so resistance of the removal of a banking oligopoly is probably unnecessary in any case
• USA didn't legalise Bitcoin any more than they legalised walking down the street, it's simply not legislated on the basis of it's use

Yep, money tends to inspire a conservative* instinct in all that hold it, commensurately more conservative as the value of the money increases.

That's difficult to align with something as inherently progressive as a radical and developing new tech such as cryptocurrency, and so making careful choices about how/where conservatism and progression can be applied to make a given cryptocurrency both as stable and as agile as possible is what cryptocurrency devs are tasked with. Bitcoin continues to lead on that basis.


* note that this does not mean political conservatism as a package, simply the desire to conserve the exchange value of an asset whose only inherent value is that of a medium of exchange, which is a delicate task. "Conserve" is a real word, that means something wider than its political connotations.

Ugh

The main (and enormous) difference is, that social media and search engines are mysterious businesses with no obvious profit motive. All the services being compared in the OP cost the user zero money to use, at any level. Yet they also all have large teams of well-paid software developers constantly improving their software platforms.

It's been said a million times before: when the so-called product is free, the user is the product.


And that's the real reason why the Chinese government prevents Twitter, Facebook, Google et cetera from accessing the Chinese people. The Chinese government knows that the information produced by these services is the real aim of their existence. They are loss-leading profitless corporations, subsidised by interests in the US government to provide other arms of the US government (as well as other private enterprises close to or run by the US or it's client-state governments) with pervasive and diverse information about the users of these services. The Chinese government doesn't want to protect it's subjects from this, it simply wants to do the same and keep the information to itself. "My god is a jealous god" etc.

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So Bitcoin is not really in that category, it's a truly revolutionary software concept that liberates people, instead of adding simply another layer of (well-disguised) subjugation. It's so powerful that most government pronouncements vary from very negative, to vaguely well-meaning (which I take to be a euphemism for "when we think of how, we'll be banning it". Good luck with that one, gangsterments).