If I look at the current Segwit "adoption rate", not many users are using Segwit transactions. Therefore I´m highly skeptical that Segwit usage will reach a level where it really quadruples the blocksize. Really? That's not a very astute observation, it appears that you have no informed reasoning about either the system itself, or the design behind it, and you are even incapable of reasoning about basic trend extrapolation It's simply not possible for everyone to begin using Segwit immediately, that's inherent to it's design and rollout. If you're unfamiliar with the details of Segwit's design and rollout, do please educate yourself before you attempt to make a meaningful comment I know that the fork is run by a different group of programmers. Is that a bad thing? Maybe they are actually better than the current Core Devs. Besides, many of the current Core Devs joined just a few years ago. Many of the original Core Devs are not around anymore and have quit the Bitcoin community and Bitcoin development for a variety of reasons.
Not necessarily a bad thing, it's an important part of Bitcoin's design that users can follow any fork they like. But that's for the users to decide, and my individual judgement is that the new group are self-interested, that is not interested in benefiting Bitcoin's users at all. The new group of programmers are represented by the very largest interests in Bitcoin businesses, and a persistently pernicious character to Bitcoin development, Jeff Garzik, is leading the new programming team. Jeff makes anti-Bitcoin rhetoric all the time, he prefers authoritarianism to liberty. Bitcoin is about giving people choices free from moral interventionists, and Jeff is a proud moral interventionist. As i commented in the other Segwit news article topping the Press board atm, Bitcoin will always survive as a liberty based money, no matter how much dust people like Barry Silbert and Jeff Garzik kick up. Satoshi came with such a well though out design, there is always a way to sidestep authoritarians. They can cause setbacks, but freedom will always rise from the ashes. They can't win against an idea, without successfully banning thought. |
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Oh and the argument that bigger than 1MB blocks would not allow someone to run full nodes becomes annoying also.
With segwit the blocksize could be 4MB and the amount of transactions fitting in a block would only double if all would use segwit.
So, which contradictory "fact" of yours would you prefer to be true? - Bitcoin (with Segwit) has 1MB blocks
- Bitcoin (with Segwit) has 4MB blocks
- 2MB blocks is not enough
- 2MB blocks will be enough
- Stating that >1MB blocks is unsustainable is annoying
(bolded are true, red is subjectively true  ) More to the point, no blocksize will ever be enough. That's why trying to use "scalability" arguments to justify blocksize increases is never going to make sense, it's an inherently un-scalable technology. Scalability cannot happen on the blockchain, but it can happen at the level of transaction scripting. Which is, ironically, a point that the NYA proposal concedes anyway. Makes one wonder why the NYA puts so much emphasis on a blocksize increase... (and taking control of the Bitcoin source code in order to hard fork to that increased blocksize...) |
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HONG KONG (Project Syndicate) — Financial markets today are thriving. The Dow Jones Industrial Average , the S&P 500 SPX, +0.28% , and the Nasdaq Composite index COMP, +0.08% have all reached record highs lately, with emerging-economy financial markets also performing strongly, as investors search for stability amid widespread uncertainty.
But, because this performance is not based on market fundamentals, it is unsustainable — and very risky.
According to Mohamed El-Erian, the lost lesson of the 2007 financial crisis is that current economic-growth models are “overly reliant on liquidity and leverage — from private financial institutions, and then from central banks.” And, indeed, a key driver of financial markets’ performance today is the expectation of continued central-bank liquidity.
After the Federal Reserved revealed its decision last month to leave interest rates unchanged, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set intraday and closing records; the Nasdaq, too, reached all-time highs.
But there is another factor that could further destabilize an already-tenuous leverage- and liquidity-based system: digital currencies. And, on this front, policy makers and regulators have far less control. The notion that central banks can really control asset prices by interfering in the supply of money and credit is not a sensible one. Even the central banks will tacitly admit that any manipulation can only work in the short term, and is only for the smoothing of extremities in short term market trends. The larger, primary trends that markets exhibit are unstoppable, and they will always correct themselves of any artificial influences. However hubristic or arrogant, the central banks are not bigger than the markets, and cannot be by definition. They may well control the grand denominator that goods are priced with, but they cannot control the value of those goods, as the markets aggregate it. This is because the markets are us, it is our demand and supply of goods that really sets the price. We simply need the tools, and the lack of interference, in order to maximise our ability to leverage the power and control we should have over setting prices. Professional price-setting is a scourge on humanity, these people will resound through history as the biggest crooks humankind ever knew. Cryptocurrency is the start, when this revolution in information tools is over, our forebears will not recognise the world we left behind. The concept of private cryptocurrencies was born of mistrust of official money. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto — the mysterious creator of bitcoin, the first decentralized digital currency — described it as a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash,” which “would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
A 2016 working paper by the International Monetary Fund distinguished digital currency (legal tender that could be digitized) from virtual currency (non-legal tender). Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, or a kind of virtual currency that uses cryptography and distributed ledgers (the blockchain) to keep transactions both public and fully anonymous.
However you slice it, the fact is that, nine years after Nakamoto introduced bitcoin, the concept of private electronic money is poised to transform the financial-market landscape. This month, the value of bitcoin reached $4,483, with a market cap of $74.5 billion, more than five times larger than at the beginning of 2017. So typical of financial journalism: vague, wooly language that essentially refuses the reader the respect of communicating, however indirectly, what money is and what it does, and why. The meaning of money is the most fundamental aspect of finance, and yet financial journalists so often speak as though they have zero clue how money works at all. Whether this is a bubble, destined to collapse, or a sign of a more radical shift in the concept of money, the implications for central banking and financial stability will be profound.
At first, central bankers and regulators were rather supportive of the innovation represented by bitcoin and the blockchain that underpins it. It is difficult to argue that people should not be allowed to use a privately created asset to settle transactions without the involvement of the state. The implications for central banking is strong competition to their (up till now) private market cartel. In fact, the central banking product is managed (and designed, to be fair) so corruptly that their only choice is to do what they do best: lie (how convenient that marketwatch.com is so willing to help the central banks prop up their bs with exactly the sort of nonsense central bank would like to hear) And marketwatch.com get it right the first time here: it is difficult to argue that people should not be allowed to use a privately created asset to settle transactions without the involvement of the state, they, for instance, go on to fail in this ostensible "market" study (which is actually better described as a study of the world's incumbent protection racket) But national authorities were wary of potential illegal uses of such assets, reflected in the bitcoin-enabled, dark-web marketplace called Silk Road, a clearinghouse for, among other things, illicit drugs. Silk Road was shut down in 2013, but more such marketplaces have sprung up.
When the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox failed in 2014, some central banks, such as the People’s Bank of China, started discouraging the use of bitcoin. By November 2015, the Bank for International Settlements’ Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, made up of 10 major central banks, launched an in-depth examination of digital currencies.
But the danger of cryptocurrencies extends beyond facilitation of illegal activities. Like conventional currencies, cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value. But, unlike official money, they also have no corresponding liability, meaning that there is no institution like a central bank with a vested interest in sustaining their value.
Instead, cryptocurrencies function based on the willingness of people engaged in transactions to treat them as valuable. With the value of the proposition depending on attracting more and more users, cryptocurrencies take on the quality of a Ponzi scheme. Commercial banks are only too happy to launder drug money. HSBC and Wachovia were caught by US regulators doing just that, and received a fine that represented a small proportion of the profits made from their drug money washing. Who moralises about perceived immoral acts, commits those same acts, then goes on to moralise about some other group of people doing the exact same thing? Gangsters As the scale of cryptocurrency usage expands, so do the potential consequences of a collapse. Already, the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies amounts to nearly one tenth the value of the physical stock of official gold, with the capability to handle significantly larger payment operations, owing to low transaction costs. That means that cryptocurrencies are already systemic in scale.
There is no telling how far this trend will go. Technically, the supply of cryptocurrencies is infinite: bitcoin is capped at 21 million units, but this can be increased if a majority of “miners” (who add transaction records to the public ledger) agree. Demand is related to mistrust of conventional stores of value. If people fear that excessive taxation, regulation, or social or financial instability places their assets at risk, they will increasingly turn to cryptocurrencies.
Last year’s IMF report indicated that cryptocurrencies have already been used to circumvent exchange and capital controls in China, Cyprus, Greece, and Venezuela. For countries subject to political uncertainty or social unrest, cryptocurrencies offer an attractive mechanism of capital flight, exacerbating the difficulties of maintaining domestic financial stability.
Moreover, while the state has no role in managing cryptocurrencies, it will be responsible for cleaning up any mess left by a burst bubble. And, depending on where and when a bubble bursts, the mess could be substantial. In advanced economies with reserve currencies, central banks may be able to mitigate the damage. The same may not be true for emerging economies. marketwatch.com, the website that doesn't even understand the fundamentals of the commodity used to transact on financial markets  , let alone cryptocurrency itself One can make this argument about any commodity price: that the value depends on a willingness to pay. And while the utility of cryptocurrencies persists, so will it's market value, QED. In a capitalist system, the state has zero role in making right the finances of the people who bet on a financial instrument and lose the value of their investment. So, marketwatch.com are essentially confessing here that this world does not run on capitalism, that wealthy people who fail should be subsidised with the money of those that contribute the most to tax revenues. Which is expressedly the problem in the world financial system since 2008 that this article begins with purporting to understand The fact is that even before 2008, we did not have capitalism in the world. The state intervened to prevent regular people from investing in stocks, shares, commodities, currencies and other financial instruments long ago. Qualified cronies invested money on regular people's behalf by proxy, and kept the fattest profits for themselves. The regulated financial markets are the biggest affront to capitalism the world has seen, essentially a facade to keep the investing profession a closed-shop culture, and to manipulate that nepotistic, incestuous culture to cultivate the financial world's superclass. The superclass whose interests are represented by websites like marketwatch.com, how strange that they write hitpieces like this worshipping their bed-fellow incestuous lovers: the state and central banks. But all farmers and animal specialists know: what does incest breed? An invasive new species does not pose an immediate threat to the largest trees in the forest. But it doesn’t take long for less-developed systems — the saplings on the forest floor — to feel the effects. Cryptocurrencies are not merely new species to watch with interest; central banks must act now to rein in the very real threats they pose.
As long as the will to use cryptocurrencies exists, there is nothing that can be done about it, except extreme violence and other rights violations. There is nothing, therefore, that the central banks can do, without the aid of state gangsterments. |
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Well, I was wrong, apparently! Antpool mined a block today breaking the 1MB limit, so it must have included Segwit transactions, and hence they must be using Segwit enabled Bitcoin client to process and broadcast their blocks. Turns out business > politics after all Still, Bitmain have demonstrated that someone there (i.e. probably not Jihan Wu, but some power-monger standing quietly behind him) really sees the value in commandeering the Bitcoin source code. This is likely not the last time it will be tried, I predict someone within Bitcoin Core will eventually try to split the team (as well as the blockchain). Can't predict who, but it's an obvious subterfuge technique since time immemorial ("someone on the inside"). It's not so worrying IMO, the user base will always have people that are smart enough to understand and explain the latest hard fork proposals, business > politics is equally important to the users, fortunately  |
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what gain does another hard fork present and is the risk worth the reward? More transaction capacity per block. Hmmm. Maybe we should wait for the recent quadrupling of the blocksize before we start deciding that another doubling of the blocksize is going to be a risk worth taking. Oh, and you forgot to mention that the fork is being run by a completely different group of programmers to those that developed the Bitcoin over the past 7-8 years? The real question is not, if a hard fork is worth the reward, but rather, which
chain gets the desired BTC ticker symbol at the exchanges.
Your fear of hard forks is unsubstantiated in my opinion, because smaller coins like Monero hard fork all the time
and it works fine, if the majority of the hashrate supports the forked chain.
Yeah, but these are scheduled hard forks for technical upgrades. Segwit2x is an unneeded technical upgrade, the real motive is political. There's no proven need to sack the present developers, this new team only wants control of the Bitcoin source code, and they're pretty desperate to make it happen. It's impossible to know their motive for taking control, but it's pretty clear (looking at the technical details) that upgrading the network is not the reason. Note that Segwit2x's lead programmer, Jeff Garzik, has been part of (taking junior cheerleader duties) the first 3 failed attempts to capture the Bitcoin source code. And he's a big fan of interventionist, authoritarian government (check out his twitter feed history and speaking work). Not Bitcoin compatible, IMO. |
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Yep. IRL business needs Lightning (or other 2nd layer networks) to do timely business, waiting for blockchain confirmations when doing business in person is just not viable if Bitcoin is to become a successful currency. Bitcoin is not a quick enough payment network for instant, in-person commerce. With Lightning, and other 2nd layer networks, Bitcoin can compete with VISA, UnionPay, and even cash  |
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Hey Carlton, that's sad coming from you. I value your words a lot and I'm a bit confused. I didn't wish any violence or theft about no one. I think you misunderstood me. Edit: think I got your point but I didn't mean it that way. Well, I owe you an apology, I was too quick to admonish you in that post, you didn't specifically advocate using the dominant legal system to solve the problem you're seeing. But maybe I should have said this: be careful what you wish for. Bitcoin is designed to be unstoppable in various ways, and of course people will use those features to realise their view of what's right and wrong in their eyes. So if you don't like drug dealers being a part of the investment capital for Bitcoin's exchange rate, you're using the wrong type of money. We, as Bitcoiners, must accept that all classes of moral behaviours will find their economic trading manifested in deals for BTC, it's a feature, not a bug. The danger to you (and all of us) is that people will classify you and your questionable moral use of Bitcoin as something to target. Here's an easy one: what if people who missed out on Bitcoin decide that people becoming wealthy is in itself an immoral act, and that you should give it away to those deserving people that don't have any! I mean, you were just lucky! Not to mention greedy... So, as I said, be careful for what you wish for. "An attack on freedom anywhere is an attack on freedom everywhere". First they came for the drug dealers, etc |
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Well, it depends on your timeframe and also how you define "good investment".
Gold is unlikely a good buy in the medium term, there are good reasons to believe that gold will experience a short term rally and a medium term decline.
But if you buy gold during that medium term decline, it may well prove to be a good investment in the long term.
Bitcoin looks, based on the information we have right now, to be a great short, medium & long term investment. But who knows what events and innovations could affect Bitcoin's value proposition detrimentally over those timeframes. With gold, one can at least say that events and innovations that could significantly affect it's value must be far more radical than those that could affect Bitcoin's.
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I want high prices not "high" people
Bitcoin need government support,not criminals support.
You've got no clue what Bitcoin is really about Bitcoin is designed to allow people to choose what they do with their money, free from morality (which is different depending on the person), and free from violent organisations that impose choices on you. You don't belong here, and don't deserve to have gained from the rises in Bitcoin's value. You are wishing violence and theft on people that have not harmed you at all, and are likley harming only themselves (and, in many cases, simply enjoying themselves). You should be ashamed of yourselves |
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Put simply: - Fiat currency will not be a good long term investment
- Bitcoin will probably be a good long term investment
- Cryptocurrencies will very likely be a good long term investment
- Gold will definitely be a good long term investment
What makes gold a good store of value hasn't changed, and it will outlast everything. It will drop in price as a result of the (likely) coming cryptocurrency revolution, and will drop significantly on a long term basis. None of this will change the fundamental value proposition of gold, whereas Satoshi's design for cryptocurrencies depends on how smart and/or wilful it's wealthiest users are. We will have to see how that works out in the long term, up to now, the wealthiest Bitcoiners have made pretty good decisions in rejecting the hard forks of obvious control freaks. But will they continue to do so? Or will Bitcoin get attacked by those seeking to dominate it from within the group of Bitcoin developers, instead of by an external dev team? Gold, of course, will never have this problem (in spite of all the problems gold does have) |
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And hopefully the pools which support larger blocks (particularly Antpool) will actually start mining blocks larger than 1MB sooner or later.
That might be later rather than sooner. Bitmain is the company behind Antpool, and they're vocal critics of Segwit (and, of course, the most significant supporter of "Bitcoin Cash"). |
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List of > 1MB blocks since Segwit activation: So, that's a grand ( ) total of 88 kB of extra transactions since block 481824. And yeah, many of those are just developers testing Segwit transactions live on the network, but that's hardly unwelcome (it's better that services and wallet software get it right before offering Segwit addresses for users to use). Let's not get caught up in these mindless Reddit comments, not only do these people not know what they're talking about, they're unlikely to be making useful contributions to the situation no matter what. Wallets and websites will offer Segwit soon, we just have to wait for the respective developers to test and upgrade their software before we judge the full impact of Segwit. |
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Taxi services (among many other IRL/brick&mortar business) aren't a good fit for any on-chain cryptocurrency, taxi drivers can't wait around for transactions to confirm before they take their next fare. Only 2nd layers built on-top of blockchain transaction systems (with instant funds clearance, i.e. no confirmations) can perform properly for the taxi driver's needs.
It's an easy fix. Instead of just paying instantly for a trip, add money (credits) to your account balance and there you go. Paying with BTC and yet instantly Well, that's essentially what 2nd layer networks are actually doing at the most simplistic level of explanation. Except the accounts are universal. And you can more or less forget about the 3rd party (who controls your account balance) running away with your money. |
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It would actually be great if Uber stars accepting bitcoin. Huge amount of people are using it and It would be great for BTC's publicity
I agree, this gonna be huge for bitcoin ecosystem as we all know that Uber has a lot of customers worldwide and the potential for them to get bitcoin to used as payment would bolster the ecosystem. But then again, the major drawback is the high fees and slow network confirmation. Taxi services (among many other IRL/brick&mortar business) aren't a good fit for any on-chain cryptocurrency, taxi drivers can't wait around for transactions to confirm before they take their next fare. Only 2nd layers built on-top of blockchain transaction systems (with instant funds clearance, i.e. no confirmations) can perform properly for the taxi driver's needs. |
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As events unfold, it seems likely we're going to see Lightning operating live on certain Altcoins before it's implemented in Bitcoin, so everyone will have a chance to see it in action and give us time to analyse and assess it.
Well, the global Bitcoin testnet is a better model for how Lightning will behave on the Bitcoin network itself, and Lightning channels (and transactions) have been confirmed/transmitted (respectively) on Bitcoin testnet for several months now. The testnet is just a Bitcoin blockchain without any hashing difficulty re-targeting, every other aspect of the Bitcoin testnet is identical to Bitcoin (with the exception that softforks are easily activated, none of the political nonsense that gets you of out of bed in the morning ) |
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Is the climate even changing? I mean seriously... every year the seasons come and go at the same times. Nothing changes!
ROFL That is the climate changing, more colloquially referred to as "the weather" (but you knew that, good satire, Barrel ) The only thing the climate change theorists get wrong is the attribution ("anthropogenic climate change", lol), and the magnitude of the outcome ("pay the Breathing Tax, or it's the end of the world!!!") Strange how people whose business it is to predict the end of the world never seem to go out of business |
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Let's see an actual LN in operation and how it operates it before deciding anything. Much has been theorised. Nothing has been proven.
that's my take. and it goes both ways; we can't hold the lightning network up to be the answer to all scalability questions, because we haven't seen it work in practice. some tests, sure, but nothing on mainnet, and nothing at the scale that we need to make it useful for bitcoin. i'm not concerned about centralization and hub-and-spoke as long as the trust model is secure, and there is no custodial trust involved. as far as i can tell, there isn't, so i fully support LN. how much value it will provide remains to be seen. Concurred. There will be bigger and smaller nodes in the network, which is no different to any network where the participants can choose the amount of resources they use in order to participate, this happens with both the Bitcoin network, the cell phone network or the internet itself. Lightning node operators will necessarily need more resources than Bitcoin network participants do, but those resources are..... some BTC. And everyone on the Bitcoin network probably has some BTC anyway, it's just a common sense reason to use the Bitcoin network, not a requirement. So the on-chain "scaling" proponents can exhort us all to join them crying themselves to sleep like this if they want to, but it just is what it is, sorry gentlemen. Lightning is not the complete answer to the scalability problem, but it sure as hell has huge potential to be either one technology in line-up of scaling solutions, or a stepping stone to whatever scaling tech predominates in the end (and it will very likely be a 2nd layer network, leveraging the combination of high security and user led consensus that the blockchain gives us the way the current balance of incentives is structured on the Bitcoin network). The only route that's not going anywhere much is the so-called "on-chain scaling" ideas. Sure, we can aggregate signatures and other such tricks to encode blockchain transactions more efficiently, but it's never going to create the magnitude of transaction increases needed to allow Bitcoin to fully compete against the euro, dollar or yuan. |
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The "battle" here is represented hideously wrong.
The current chain is not "Core". A lot of people are running non-Core clients which are compatible with the chain we're on. In the same way, Core could develop software which was compatible with the new chain as well if they wanted to do that.
And that's kind of the point, Bitcoin Segwit2x (the BTC1 client) is not compatible with the consensus rules. And Core does control the consensus rules (because they control the source code). Control over the source code (and hence the rules) can be taken away from Core, (or from whoever controls the source code at any given time) but Jeff Garzik and the DCG group haven't given anywhere close to adequate reasoning for their bid to assume control, IMO |
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The thing is people might let a bad group stay in control even though it isn't the best due to fear of losing their investment value. I really hope Jihan never gets control of the main chain.
Yeah, the non-agreed hard forking control battles are a valid feature of Bitcoin, even Core could start making questionable decisions (although this actually depends on which trolls you ask ) Really, it's a good thing overall. It forces Bitcoin investors to either understand their investment (and hence the computer science behind it), or sell up and let those that believe they understand it make the investment decisions. Which doesn't stop people believing something that doesn't work out, but hey, nobody's perfect |
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Actually, I'm quite surprised by this stuff:
Altcash is at block 481850 , while BTC is at 481656 so it seems like they really do have the longer pen blockchain.
So their previous adjustment going down while they were bringing in lots and lots of new hashrate and the period end helped them quite a bit.
I can hear the altcash shills preparing to brag about it.
I've already seen some of the Bitcoin Cash shills saying it's the longest chain. It's pretty deceptive to say that; it's pretty well understood by now that what matters is the chain with the most cumulative work. Exactly. The chains with the most difficult hash solutions is what Bitcoin software follows.... Except even this is misleading. Because this rule doesn't matter when applied to 2 separate blockchains, which is what the BTC and BCH chains are, separate chains. So, it's all just stupid rhetoric really (and it's really extra dumb IMO) |
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