Lightning and Sidechains are two different things.

Sidechains are separate blockchains, pegged to BTC. Lightning uses a network of smart contracts to add an additional protocol layer on top of Bitcoin.

As far as scalability is concerned, Lightning Network is the approach you should keep an eye on right now.


Trade offs, as far as I know:

1) When opening a Lightning channel you need to reserve part of your balance in advance for subsequent payments

2) Wallets of both parties need to be online when sending / receiving the transactions


There are fears of centralization in that the network will largely consolidate around bank- and cooperation-run lightning hubs. To me those fears seem largely unfounded given the low entry level to running a lightning node.

I assume OP extrapolates from the fact that most of the coins that were recently pumped are centrally issued currencies. There's definitely a trend towards releasing tokens via centralized entities, but we have yet to see whether community acceptance and thus price will increase in the long term

Holy shit and they used to call crypto markets a farce

Thanks for the laugh, that was quite unexpected. Gotta love the speculator's mindset, I just hope they lost their own money and not someone elses.

Are you talking venture capital or are there any cryptocurrency-focused companies in the US that are publicly traded right now? Last thing I checked the likes of Coinbase and BitPay were still private companies.

Signing an offline transaction with an airgapped device won't compromise your private keys, since the online device that transmits the transaction has no access to the private keys on the airgapped device.

However, the following possible exploits still prevail, regardless of Meltdown and Spectre:

-) A compromised USB stick could still grab your private keys from the airgapped device while copying the signed transaction for later transmission using the online device.

-) Simply moving a private key from an online device to an airgapped device will do little for your security. The private keys should be generated by the airgapped device itself.

-) Make sure your device is indeed airgapped and doesn't try to connect to any open Wifis that may be around.


Basically, every offline approach to wallet security still holds. Hot wallets are more susceptible to attacks than ever, at least until the security updates are out.

I agree that 2018 will be the year of premined vs decentralized tokens, but I doubt that it is necessarily going to be a long battle. The premine pumps just started a few days ago, so it's still too early to tell how sustainable their growth is. My guess is... not so much. But I have a feeling that the peak is yet to come.



lol I know, right?! it's pretty much The Wolf of Wall Street meets Game of Thrones right now.

Centralized currencies seem to be en vogue right now. Might be whales, might be a shift of thinking.

Either way I'm highly skeptic, as crypto has a long history of alt coin pumps. Don't mistake the weather for the climate.

LN can't come soon enough. Judging from the testnet clients there's still quite some work to be done, but once the kinks have been worked out things should get interesting.



The clock is definitely ticking for BCH right now.

Short to mid-term I can imagine BCH getting scarily close to BTC in terms of market cap.

Long term I don't see much of a future in it: Either BCH becomes the victim of its own scaling approach, or people lose interest due to all the other shiny alts promising riches and scalability.



Note that SegWit blocks can effectively reach up to 4 MB in size. That's kind of a middle ground.



SegWit adoption has indeed been underwhelming, to say the least. If SegWit were more widespread we probably wouldn't even discuss Bitcoin's scalability issues right now. Here's hoping that LN will see a better launch.

I'm afraid you're giving people too much credit, otherwise this would have been the only bubble in history.



Cryptos aren't even down like cryptos were during the busts of 2013. We still don't know whether the slump right now is just a slight bump in an ongoing bull market or just the beginning of what will turn out to be a brutal crypto crash.



Yes and no. While cryptocurrencies are fundamentally different from tech startups, there's still some lessons that can be taken from history.

If crypto were still one order of magnitude away from becoming a bubble that would be the most bullish thing I've read all day

---

I just found this article from the late 2000's:

http://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/

By November 9 internet stocks were down by USD 1.755 trillion from their all time highs. That's more than double the current market cap of all crypto combined. And that wasn't even the low point.

So buckle up folks, we've still got ways to go!

Sure. Assuming scaling gets resolved we'd finally have a truly global currency. A means of online payment that works on a supranational level between private individuals, not just businesses and consumers.



It depends.

If you're talking about the BTC exchange range staying the same for the next 10 years, no.

If you're talking about BTC retaining its purchasing power, without losing or gaining much, definitely.



Wouldn't buy. Wouldn't sell. Would just... use. I don't buy USD or JPY either, unless I plan to use them.

Depends on the exchange. Most exchanges seem to pay adequate transaction fees. I do remember a troubled post a few days ago, where an exchange paid way too small fees, but in general they do OK.

Keep in mind that depending on the exchange it may take an additional 5 - 30 minutes before they put your transaction on the network.

Why shouldn't it be? Laws usually don't care about online account ownership. It's probably the one thing the SEC doesn't look after

It might be against Bitcointalk's terms of service, but you regularly see people asking / bidding for Bitcointalk accounts in the Market section without visible repercussions so it seems to be fair game. How many of these trades succeed without either party getting scammed is a different question though.

If you are a German tax resident and held your Bitcoin for more than a year, then no tax applies.

If you are a German tax resident and sold Bitcoin before the grace period of one year, income tax applies and you'll have to state your profits in your tax report.

If for some reason you plan to sell in Germany, but are not a German tax resident, you'll have to check which tax laws apply to you.


Check the German local boards for more information:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976285.0

Dude, chill out. I told you that I misunderstood your argument and that I concur with your statement that pioneers get dethroned sometimes.


Just one minor thing though:


Except for search, Google was involved in neither of these things when they overtook Yahoo.

Email, Videos... even advertising only became part of Google's portfolio when they already dominated the search market. The only thing Google and Yahoo had in common back then was the search engine. Yahoo had spread itself too thin and unlike Google didn't quite get how quintessential internet search really was. Yahoo failing to acquire Google when they had the chance didn't help much either.

Acknowledging that pioneers get dethroned from time to time is only half the battle. The other is understanding why they do.

Correct. You will have gained USD 100,- but have lost value relative in terms of BTC. The latter meaning that you'd have gained more USD if you would have invested in BTC instead of the alt coin.

Makes sense?

Yep, cryptocurrencies as a whole are definitely in a bubble and there will be consolidation further down the road.

What often gets ignored though is that not all companies where hit equally hard by the bubble burst. A lot of companies prospered afterwards. Those that dropped the hardest didn't have much to offer to begin with.

You can expect the same thing to happen with cryptocurrencies. Also remember that the dotcom bubble was just the beginning of a new era. While speculators failed to correctly gauge which parts of the ecosystem would succeed, the industry as a whole shaped the world beyond their wildest expectations. They were not wrong, they misjudged the details... and the timing.

Bitcoin has been all over the news a lot of times, both positive and negative. The immediate impact doesn't seem to be that large. Long term it seems to be a major factor in gaining traction as media presence increases. Bitcoin is it's own marketing, so to speak, the volatility and drama helping a lot in keeping the news interesting.

It's easy to be cheap when transaction traffic is negligible. BCH has super cheap transactions for example. But that's not because their blocks are bigger, it's simply because barely anyone is using it when compared to BTC.

Take roads for example. Say you have multiple 4 lane highways, that for some reason go along the same route. But one is being used by pretty much everyone, because it was the first around. So naturally, traffic jams occur. Does this make the other 4 lane highways less susceptible to traffic congestions once everyone decides to use them instead?

A simplified argument of course, but I think you get my point.

All current alts that I'm aware of make either use of a centralized entity or rely on linear scaling. Linear scaling will not get us close to credit card levels of transaction throughput. The first successful approach at non-linear scaling that doesn't rely on a centralized entity, will take the cake in my book. Right now that appears to be Lightning Network.



Sorry, I was under the impression you meant to say that every market pioneer has been dethroned. That's what I meant to debunk. I didn't intend to argue that no market pioneer has been dethroned, which is not true of course.



Exactly

Market pioneers that still are at the top of their game.



Exactly! Market cap means nothing. Or market dominance means nothing, depending on how you see it.



MySpace focused on music, before and after becoming a social network, so you could still argue about different markets.

Yahoo focused on... fuck if I knew, everything except search I suppose, which is why they lost to the focus and simplicity of Google. Yahoo veered off into different markets and drove the truck off the road long before Google became relevant.

Just nitpicking

Either way, as mentioned above, I misunderstood the argument you were trying to make. Can't disagree with you, now that I get it.



Technologically the internet is decentralized, but that's all for nothing given that the governing bodies are not. Important to keep in mind when faced with cryptocurrencies. I still hope that the latter are part of the equation that will help us take back the internet though.

I used to dabble a bit with mining and the surrounding ecosystem. Would probably mine if I had a house instead of being a city dweller though.



Agreed.

On the other hand it gives me comfort that BTC has only few alts to compete with regarding hashrate. Especially the BCH / BTC hashrate oscillations showed the negative effects of hashrate competition on network stability.



Which is why I expect the most important factor to be transaction throughput, since people want cheap and fast transactions.

You can always put a fancy user interface on top afterwards. Bad technology with a fancy user interface is still bad technology. Anyone who used Kraken lately should know. (I kid, I kid! Kraken is still a solid exchange regardless of performance issues!)

Store of value comes in a close second. However I assume that Bitcoin's viability as a payment network is of great importance for Bitcoin's role as store of value, which brings us back to transaction throughput as mentioned above.

Bitcoin competes with gold on the store of value side and with credit cards -- or at least PayPal -- on the payment side. Combine both and we got ourselves a winner.



The argument goes both ways:

AMD came before Intel.

Ebay came before Amazon.

Microsoft came before Apple. Wait. Nevermind. You get the point.


Given enough foothold, even deprecated technology -- whenever Bitcoin reaches that state -- can stick around amazingly long. Just look at IPv4 vs IPv6. A struggle that has been going on for decades, yet IPv4 still prevails. The network effect at play, quite literally.



I fully agree with you.



That's what worries me. Most people don't care about decentralization and trustlessness. Dismiss both principles and you can scale to your heart's content.

Not sure if a tokenized version of PayPal makes for a compelling value proposition to the average consumer though.

To some extend decentralization is just an ideal. But it's why I'm invested in crypto in the first place, otherwise I would have just continued lamenting PayPal.