A crypto-currency at its most basic is a software and its network. Bitcoin has the most mining power dedicated to its PoW algortihm and has the longest chain among all cryptocurrencies.
It derives its value from the fact that a transcation recorded in its ledger is irrefutable and irreversible. Being most widely used, its network effect is the strongest making it possible for the latest innovations to be tested and adopted much faster.

There are other currencies doing similar things but they lack the network effect. Their mining infrastructure and the code itself hasn't yet undergone the stress tests that Bitcoin has. Only comparable crytpo in terms of usage is Ethereum, though not in terms of security, decentralisation or code robustness.

That is its intrinsic value.

Right now, there are issues with scaling which have resulted in high fees. These are being solved with the adoption of SegWit and LN. As these get deployed, we can go back to the good'ól times of cheap and fast transactions, hopefully soon

Thanks for the better constructed sentences and thought out replies this time. I won't have to strain to understand you. This makes the discussion worth our while. The scenario of Bob buying his coffee is pretty simple. Its just a pessimistic, worst-possible imaginary situation because you have assumed that:
1. Bob needs to open a channel with everyone he deals with. Not necessary. He doesn't have to do that. The network does that for him.He just needs one payment channel with another node.
2. Bitcoin price decreases and he doesn't have enough finances. How is that not a negative scenario? Further, you are assuming that if fiat varies the merchant changes the amount in BTC. (which does happen, but then you miss the point that widespread adoption means BTC has its own value. As people keep repeating at the forum and elsewhere. 1 BTC is always 1 BTC.)
3. You assume that On-chain fees remain 30$. You again assume this ignoring the fact that the  avg. fees have already come down to ~20$ https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#3m and that with LN, a lot of transactions clogging the network will be gone.

Quite simply, you are imagining the worst cases because you are on the other side of the debate. Anyways, Moving on.


Multiple transactions for the cost of one transaction. This is a big positive for individual users. Or do you imagine a utopian situation where we will have visa-level transactions on a decentralized, secure, trustless network and there won't be any fees?


Major hubs are not the same as today's banks, no matter how much you want to continue beating that drum. You are not trusting them with your money. It stays in a multi-sig wallet and only the latest updated state of payments can be broadcast to the main chain.


You only need to use the Segwit address as a user. Use an Electrum wallet and there are enough instructions available to make a Segwit enabled wallet. Here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Electrum/comments/7llnll/here_is_how_to_create_segwit_bip49_wallets_and/
I do agree that bitcoin hasn't yet evolved to suit the most basic user who just want to install an app and start payments. To be honest, bitcoin's awareness has gone from the slightly tech oriented to everyone's grandma now. There is a lot of catching up to do in terms of user experience. How LN will incorporate all the underlying details is yet to be seen.

Once again, my being rude to you has only to do with your constant harking on "its a bank". And maybe also because you seem to have an agenda to fill the forum with such posts. "others have managed without having to burn CPU/GPU/ASICS?". Are you talking about IOTA etc. I have no intention of being an apologist for LN. I truly believe that such innovative methods are a better answer than relying on unlimited block sizes.


C'mon. You said "Pointers to blocks of data" and now you come up with this argument of capping maximum fees. You just changed the goalpost. All nodes should be able to verify the chain for themselves and take part in accepting or rejecting a new block. Your idea to only have a few super-nodes that carry the burden of verifying the blockchain is nowhere near what bitcoin is supposed to be.


This was in response to your statement:

Its easy to say things like that when YOU are not the one coming up with the solutions. I called you out only for showing such disregard to someone else's hard work.After doing that, you don't get to be the victim by saying things like "people are being rude" or that "they need to use insults" .
About the "green crypto mining ICO", You are welcome to check it out. Its a signature campaign. PoW isn't going anywhere for a long time. What you can try is to make it green by efficiency and using Renewable energy sources. I think its a good idea.

The updated app is pretty good but we have lost the coinbase functionality I guess. It was the only place you could simply buy bitcoins online while all the other apps only let you trade.
I don't understand the OP's fear that how does this mean the "death" of bitcoin. People will simply trade amongst each other and if demand grows, we may even see some of the disparity on prices like in Korea.
The price differences between the international prices in USD and Indian prices is still maintained. That means we haven't settled to a lower value or anything. Thats a good sign as it means that there are enough of us trading on Zebpay who believe in the value of bitcoin to keep this going..

Although, If these changes removes the people who are just buying/ selling to make quick bucks, then I'd say, Good Riddance!

Your posts are pretty much incoherent to analyse the argument except that it sounds like you are hell bent on kicking dust. I am sure most of the notable members on BCT don't want to indulge people like you who just want to come up with the worst-possible imaginary situations. So I'll try in whatever humble manner I can.

you make this argument about the settlement transaction. LN aims to enable micropayments and it does that quite well. The settlement transaction when closing the channel is a one-time cost which will not be the 30$ owing to de-congestion as smaller payments move to LN. That will become clearer from the state of mempool once LN starts to be used by exchanges/ merchants.

You won't need to open channels with every individual/ store you want to transact with. It'll be a multi-hop transaction as explained in the videos quite well. You will anyways have a channel with some major hub whenever you make your first purchase. Depending on how that services you, you can always change it to someone else when you settle your transaction and open a new channel.

Segwith adoption is still low due to which its positive effects are not being felt. This is a community project and of course the "üser" community needs to do its part. Bitcoin developers don't owe anything to anybody. They give you an elegant solution and you don't use it. Its not on them to market it like Mr. Ver and form a circlejerk of Bcash tipping idiots.


Same repeated argument. You want to use keep using the fear psychosis of "Banks". With funds committed to an LN channel, EVERYONE is a BANK. Everyone is in it together. Of course some will be bigger, some medium and some smaller.


Are you a developer? Do you have a working code for this "Idea" you are proposing? If yes, you are welcome to go join the github and propose it there. If you can't do this and have only thought of this in some algorithmic way then how are you talking about Pointers to collection of nodes??!! All nodes are supposed to be equal. What are you even doing here if you think that its okay for only a few masternodes to process the block data. There's SPV wallets for that.


Yeah, sure. Coming from someone who cannot form more than a couple of coherent sentences, this is good advice /s

Hello Atriz. Sharing my Segwit address..

32B3XPrxaLxMSsBATTKvj7u9cgF1imctUU

Followed this link to configure Electrum for the BIP 49 implementation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Electrum/comments/7llnll/here_is_how_to_create_segwit_bip49_wallets_and/

I used a combination of different seeds from the website as my seed. Should be enough entropy hopefully.

Nobody really knows.

As a newbie, you have to decide what are you in this for. Are you in it for the technology? Are you in it for the socio-political impact? Are you in it for the economic impact? Or are you in it for free money! you have to decide for yourself whether you want to believe in Bitcoin as a long term thing or just something you want to 10X your money from. The 10X isn't happening anytime soon (or it may!)

The market value of bitcoin has increased many folds but that doesn't mean it will continue minting money for everybody. At its core, its a technology that needs work to establish the new scaled mechanisms for payments, like the Lightning Network.
Here, as usual,  Bitcoin is leading from the front while others continue to try to manage the market in order to pump their coin in the name of "widespread adoption"

In my opinion, for the time being, other marketed coins like Bcash will continue to try and scavenge off of Bitcoin's development, Banks and Governments will keep trying to meddle and control while we will have another small bunch of people trying to understand the tech, its limitations and possibilities, work for it and become a part of this ecosystem.

In the short to medium term, the speed and transaction-fee issues will be solved and the good fight shall continue.

Don't be ridiculous and don't fall for some propaganda shit.
Maxwell was being targeted as the one person who controls what goes into bitcoin or not. Most allegations then follow linking the core team with Blockstream and banks.
Maxwell has stated that he wants independent time to work on further protocols "for bitcoin". He was also one of the co-founders of Blockstream with the aim of developing an ecosystem that can sustain itself by contributing to bitcoin and they have accomplished that.

He doesn't say anywhere that he was against LN. That is a lie coming from your Bcash shilling brain.

He is clearly stated his intention to continue working fro Bitcoin, just unhinged from the formal obligations of being a CTO. This is a streak of a lot of tech people that they don't like the management jobs. He is just going to his roots and his contributions will make Bitcoin stronger for the future.

EDIT: Here's the link to his official post regarding the resignation:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-January/015586.html

You are talking about Bitcoin vs Investment methods. Judging from your simplistic HYIP post, I'd say you are just another troll for the time being.

If you don't consider yourself a troll but a reasonable person open to new ideas, you can try reading the first few chapters of the book "Mastering Bitcoin"by Andreas Antanopoulous.
Read about the history and earlier developments behind it and how bitcoin is the first time in history that you can hold and exchange value without relying on a third party or securing a physical medium.

If these possibilities don't excite you and you can only see this through your myopic "ïnvestment" lenses then you are welcome to try increasing your posts with such troll activities. The forum is supposed to be welcoming to newbies. So..Welcome!

Bitcoin's ability to transact peer-to-peer and its immutability makes it a currency. The nature of blockchain and decentralization is such that it cannot scale in its present form. Though there has been work going on to scale using even 1 GB blocks (which even the said researcher admit doesn't have a chance of yielding anything). Thats why Bitcoin is going to scale using SegWit, LN and a combination of upcoming improvements.
Thats the main target at present. Once that happens, it won't take long for the existing order to correct itself.


Such pessimistic views are easy to put forward but blockchain is being used by a lot of startups. Those raising money through ICOs etc. Providing  banking services (Bankex), Removing middlemen between buyers and companies (INS), even cloud computing (Golem, SONM etc)
So its an upcoming field. It'll have its winners and losers.

A bank holds your funds in such a way that it can mismanage them and you can lose them. As far as the 'hubs' in LN are concerned, they cannot hold your funds or lose them. The fee that we are talking about is also not implicit in the network. LN is supposed to be a decentralized way to allow smaller transactions. When you open a channel with someone, depending on the fund that you commit to it, you become a hub yourself.

Sure, the bigger hubs would be made up of merchants and providers who implement LN. But they wouldn't be holding any funds captive. If the implementation was as simple as just giving over custody of funds, it wouldn't take so much code and testing to implement.


A true peer-to-peer system has to scale first. And in a decentralized manner. People on the lower block size believe that independent full nodes run by people without access to terabytes of storages (for long term) are the basis of decentralization. Do you agree with that?
XRP is closed source and has its own masternodes (That is centralization).
With high block size and a blockchain growing by terabytes every year is for miners and data-center level investors, thats centralization.

LN on the other hand relies on the network effect of a lot of people joining in and then acting as hubs in their own right. A micropayment of 100 Satoshi can easily use my meager 0.1 BTC as a 'hub', if i decide to commit those small funds to my LN wallet.
Even i get to be a hub with just < 0.1 BTC.
You support BCC, all good, but know that its going to be have its own scaling monsters, if and when it starts to be adopted. And then the same people will copy the code and give it some other RPG-sounding name. They are the people who thought that simply hard-forking and increasing block size to support the explosive growth and then tweaking for future improvements would be a better idea. Like Microsoft updates.
Different work ethics i guess, but we all have our sides chosen. 

Good question to ask.

Reliance announced and he decided to make a facebook group out of the blue so that newbies who don't know about the multitude of scammers in this field will join in.

If you are claiming to provide referal income on behalf of the possible JioCoin, all without any formal affiliation to the group, you maybe on slippery slope there in terms of the legality of this.
You may think this to be a clever step but they can sue you for using a brand name illegally.

If you really want to mine then there is a lot of information available in Google. Though the entry barrier is quite high as you need an investment of almost INR 1.5L to 2L for a decent 6 GPU build.
The fun part is getting all the stuff together and then making it work.
Its a real earning system but with a chance that you may not recover your money. If you are willing to risk that amount and think that it could be fun learning the new stuff too, only then invest.

If 2 Lacs is a lot of money for you and you want to make mining your first source of income by putting everything in it, then better steer clear of it. Its mostly a high-risk venture which can give awesome returns.

Dude, this is old now. Not enough people get scammed this way. Not on the BCT forum atleast (or so i hope).

Why don't you go back to peddling this shit to greedy, middle-aged uncles with cash to spare. Organize a "meetup" for them at a cheap venue, serve them "Royal Stag" and get some poor, wasted call-girl to dance there.

There are those of us on the forum who are simply trying to understand this technology and maybe contribute something useful to it someday.

People like you on the other hand see this and think "Ooh, Lets make up a scam because most people in my poor-ass country are not educated enough anyways to know the difference between bitcoin and my ass. All they want to see is an English flyer with 10x returns written on it"

And how exactly does "Payment through bank" ensures no scam??
Anyways, Please quit scamming people and maybe use your knowledge and energy for something good.
AND...

The marathi paper does have "AMCAP" written in hindi somewhere in the middle. This guy who is getting caught is most probably just some fool who decided to take other people's money to invest into Amit Bhardwaj's scam.

But even then, how did he not already double his money and payback the original amount?

Pune police is well-respected for its cyber capabilities. If they really go into it, I am sure they'll figure out the MCAP/BGF/Bhardwaj nexus soon. The question is whether they can act on it responsibly and without corruption.

Anybody on a bitcoin forum that calls you a dear friend and then offers a non-https link to an ICO, you know you can trust them completely. Especially if they are a newbie in the India section of the forum and have a tantalizing bollywood heroine's first name for their username.

Completely checks out and you can totally give this person your private keys!! /s

Why are you comparing bitcoin functionality with that of your investment adviser/ personal banker??!
First and foremost, bitcoin is a method to exchange value without the need of a middleman with the assurance that the transaction is irrefutable.
This has only been possible until now with an intermediary in between to back the value. Bitcoin needs no backing as its backed by the continuously growing ledger on its blockchain.

If you are talking about additional functionalities then all of it is possible with bitcoin sidechains.

Looks like you can't believe any of these fucking crytpo-reporting news these days..

While this "Laxmi Coin" I mentioned above was being touted as RBI's foray into cryptocurrency in the above article, Here's another one listing it to the Ponzi schemes going on in India:

http://www.news18.com/news/india/bitcoin-craze-how-fraudsters-are-fooling-investors-with-fake-cryptocurrency-1635143.html

It lists a few known Ponzis, the head being the one by Amit Bhardwaj of Gainbitcoin.com, later bitcoingrowthfund.com, the fake MCAP tokens and now he is onto starting ICO's.
Reportedly, he has fled Indian and is laughing his head off at one of the high towers in Dubai. Well played you Con-man. We'll wait your heroes' return to India that the stupid, greedy people of this country will inevitably give you some day.
But remember that some of us won't ever be fooled by betrayers like you.

This "War on bitcoin" has been an ongoing phenomena for quite sometime. China did the "ban bitcoin" step in September last year and resulted in a lot of cheap BTC buy-ins.
This time around maybe the same or maybe different. What doesn't change is that you only buy more if you understand and believe in cryptos. Governments act against them because they see it as forming a potential channel of capital transfers that it cannot control. So they put out warnings and regulations. The whole scenario is still evolving but considering the potential of blockchain technologies and cryptos, a blanket ban would neither be possible, not beneficial to even the governement.
Take it in your stride.

If you are worried about your investment in bitcoin then you don't have to, given that you only invested what you can afford to lose.

Is there some kind of guide for the eclair testnet wallet? I downloaded it on my phone but have no idea what exactly am i supposed to do with this. Do I get testnet currency from some faucet?

The people who were involved from the start are now the patrons probably. The baton has been already passed down as different teams were working on the Lightning Network. This is also a good thing probably because now new developers can start afresh and take control of the project. We probably need another few Satoshi Nakamotos, if he was only an individual.

Also, The Lightning Network software is more or less made already. Its on testnet and main-net. There's even the "Eclair Wallet Testnet" on play store.