Not sure what you are trying to say. Software development is a continuous process and ongoing updates are expected.



The loss of private keys has nothing to do with Bitcoin the network. Do you blame the internet whenever credit card info gets stolen from corporate databases?



One point that keeps popping up in your posts is how resource intensive it is to replicate the blockchain across thousands of nodes -- that's exactly why blockspace is a scarce resource and should be treated as such.



Pre LN. But doesn't make much of a difference as far as decentralization is concerned.



[citation needed]



It would be a bad thing, if it were the case.



Maybe we're talking about different things. If you can give me a concrete example of an alt that uses "coordinators" in the sense that you had in mind I'll gladly reconsider my position.



We're not talking about cars though.



Not sure you what you are trying to stay. You can compare PoW to other consensus mechanisms and still argue about centralization.



Create an alt then. Write either a white paper or protocol specs and find yourself some devs to work with.



Throwing credentials around won't help your argument. Some of the worst devs I've ever worked with claimed the same. Similar fields too. Different story though.



Maybe you should stick your head in academia. Just a little. Not that I ever did until late in the game, but it helps expand your toolset.

(Civil discussion has little to do with "praising the lord" by the way. This statement comes across as a baseless, hand-wavy dismissal of anything that challenges your way of thinking to be honest.)

---

So, where were we? Ah yes.

"PRAISE THE LORD!"

I mean... who else has played around with testnet LN so far?

I finally came around trying Eclair and the HTLC.me web wallet to see Lightning in action and I must admit it still feels incomplete. Which is expected, of course, but makes me slightly wary of how long it will take until we see the final product. Apart from what seems to be occasional connectivity issues it works like a breeze though. Tried microtransactions by unlocking articles on yalls.org. Instant and low-fee, just like in the olden days <3

Maybe I misunderstand you, but the obfuscation algorithm itself doesn't need to be secure. After all the attacker doesn't want to derive the original message from your obfuscated passphrase. That's were "security by obscurity" would fail.

Instead, my rationale is based on the potential attacker having two choices:

a) Derive your obfuscated passphrase from either your BTC address or your public key -- obviously unviable right now, otherwise we'd have other problems.

b) Brute force your original passphrase AND the correct steps with which you obfuscated it -- the latter of which there are effectively infinite possibilities, even when limiting yourself to pen-and-paper algorithms (eg. uppercase every nth letter, insert a special character according to the fibonacci sequence, apply multiple rounds of rot26... etc etc).

Combine a strong passphrase with some layered weird-ass obfuscation steps and you should get yourself enough entropy for decades to come.

On the other hand I just stumbled upon a fairly recent Def Con talk about cracking brainwallets, maybe it makes me rethink my assumptions.

Here's the link, without knowing yet whether it's going to be any good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foil0hzl4Pg

Edit: The talk above covers nothing that hasn't been discussed in this thread already. Keeping the link for reference though.

SegWit and LN implementation began long before blocks were even close to full.

Please expand on which problems you are referring too that occured before BTC started running at capacity.



Setting a maximum price on a scarce resource (ie. blockspace) never ends well.

Kindly provide me with an alt coin example that is significantly more decentralized than BTC.

In general I see the Bitcoin hardforks as alts of their own as well. But for the sake of argument it is important to keep in mind that those coins appeared basically out of thin air. Insta-alts, so to speak, complementary miners, community and issued coins included.



Entering Bitcoin mining has become incredibly hard, that is true. I'm not sure about mining profitably being completely out of reach for the average person though, as electricity costs vary a lot even in rather close geographical areas (at least in Europe) and I don't know how hard or easy it currently is to get your hands on mining hardware for a reasonable price.

Either way.

Bitcoin mining as a business is undoubtedly alive and kicking, otherwise we'd see a plateau in hashrate. However it keeps growing, courtesy of ongoing miner production, research and development.

Bitcoin mining as a community effort... yep, that's mostly gone, unfortunately. I don't think that the loss of this part of the community has much effect on Bitcoin's growth however, as each wave of newcomers will likely be less tech oriented than the one before. Or put differently, each wave of newcomers will care more about cryptocurrencies as speculative asset / payment method / store of value than about the technicalities of mining.



Admittedly this statement was a bit of a hyperbole, but as far as scaling is concerned, none of the alts that I've looked at closely so far have convinced me of offering a viable alternative approach.

Dash I have yet to take a closer look at, but its masternode based consensus algorithm smells to me like an even worse version of PoS, which by itself already is an instant turn-off to me. Arguments for / against PoS aside, I know too little about Dash to give full judgement. Unless Dash approaches blockchains vastly differently from Bitcoin -- such as a blockchain-abandoning, DAG-based currencies like Iota and ByteBall, both of which have issues of their own right -- it will likely fail to convince me (not that this should matter to anyone else).

Ethereum comes to a halt whenever a major ICO takes place or crypto-kittens clog the network. And that's not even what I would call real world applications. Any network that gets smothered by vaporware and memes has a lot of work ahead. Granted, one can expect Ethereum's scalability to improve over the next few years. Arguing about future Ethereum improvements is moot, however, as then you'd have to apply the same standard to other alts and Bitcoin itself.

Remember, I'm talking only about scalability in regards to transaction throughput here, as I believe that this will be the most important factor in the long term. Other pros and cons of the respective cryptocurrencies are ignored, as these would be discussions of their own. Also note that I'm mostly ignoring centralized solutions such as Ripple and Iota, as at that point I would consider crypto to have officially failed.

Regarding hardware breakage and obsolescence: Hardware wallets follow an industry standard (or whatever you may call it in our ecosystem) as far as seed words and private key derivation is concerned. This enables recovery of hardware wallets using software wallets such as Electrum.

Worst case you can still run a virtual machine / emulator once Electrum reaches end of life and is not supported by modern operating systems anymore. Best case you have other implementations to choose from, which will likely be the case since the private key derivation scheme used by current hardware wallets is an open standard.

Granted, it requires more code than just deriving a single private key from a complex passphrase, but at least to me this looks like a reasonable approach at securing Bitcoin wallets for the foreseeable future.

Mnemonic recovery seeds:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki

Deterministic private key derivation:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0044.mediawiki

That will be the case once Lightning Network is deployed. No official release date yet, however some time during 2018 appears to be within reach.

Project website:
http://lightning.network/

An article giving a simple overview of how LN will work:
https://cointelegraph.com/explained/lightning-network-explained

An article series explaining how LN will work in detail:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-building-a-bidirectional-payment-channel-1464710791/

This would imply that privacy focused coins have significantly gained in market cap, which is not the case. Closest being Monero on 11th place, which, if I remember correctly, used to have a larger pie of the market cap in early 2017.

At the time of writing about 8% of market cap are being accounted for by Bitcoin hardforks. Ignoring those, BTC is not worse off than in June 2017. What actually seems to be happening is that more alts that were previously widely ignored are gaining traction. This seems to be mostly at the cost of ETH, which is down to 13% from its peak of 31%. In other words, while people previously focused their alt coin portfolio on ETH, they seem to invest more diversified right now.



Fair enough.



What leads you to this conclusion? Bitcoin mining seems to be business as usual. Actually it seems to be more profitable than ever, given the recent growth in price and the option to mine BCH instead of BTC.



In the long run I expect the coin that scales best in terms of transaction throughput, without having to rely on centralized entities, to be the most dominant one. In their current states all coins seem to be equally shitty in this regard. All things being equally shitty, BTC remains on top.

There will always be demand for alts, regardless of which Bitcoin hardfork becomes the dominant one. And as long as there's a demand for alts, there will be a use case for cross-chain atomic swaps.

Worst case it's just people swapping speculative assets around, best case it enables decentralized purchasing of utility tokens, whichever they may be in the future.

How to acquire approval from the Bitcoin itself? Do you have to burn coins as an offering to the almighty blockchain gods?


Seriously though, the Bitcoin logo as posted above is public domain but derivations of it may be subject to copyright as stompix rightfully pointed out.

That's actually one of the physical attacks that I was referring to, and it is one of the vulnerabilities that got fixed early on. It even says so in the conclusion.



I'm not saying it's impossible to extract the private key from a hardware wallet, I'm just saying it's an academic exercise rather than a practical attack. If you have videos / articles on data extraction at the hardware level for current generations, or more precisely the chips that Trezor / Ledger are using, I'd love to see them (not being sarcastic, just being honestly curious). Smartcard hacks from 2010 are interesting for historical purposes, but likely not as relevant today.

And as mentioned above, this is ignoring the custom passphrase that acts as the 25th seed word. Which by itself already can have the complexity of a brainwallet passphrase. And that this passphrase can be hardly be extracted from your biological brain is something we both agree on. Apart from the $5 wrench attack of course



I never said that brain wallets aren't secure if you know what you're doing

All I'm saying is that hardware wallets are easier to secure for the average user, which makes them the better recommendation for the general populace.

(and that hardware wallets are more secure than brainwallets in that they extend the passphrase that is stored in your brain by 24 randomly selected seed words)

Nice.

However I do believe there are some alts that could do well even without a stable Bitcoin price. Maybe not now, but a couple of years down the road I can imagine some of the alts having prevailed long and strong enough to be able to mostly decouple from the BTC price. Hard to tell which ones those will be though.

I think this is an overestimation of how quickly people are willing to switch from one technology or investment to another. If LN fails to deliver or takes another 2-3 years for deployment, then we're likely to see a major shift in userbase. But not after 1 year of scaling issues after a track record of running flawlessly for 9 years. Additionally few people seem to care about true anonymity, that is assuming the current anonymity approaches are viable and solid in the first place.



Actually that's pretty much what LN is doing. LN transactions are only visible to the involved parties, the nodes inbetween know nothing about the transactions they route. I'm not sure whether LN can provide full anonymity but it definitely will improve privacy.

The main objective when it comes to securing Bitcoin has been to be safe of online attacks. Hardware wallets are the most secure in this regard, even assuming physical backups. Which are not even necessary, should one memorize their seed.

Regarding physical attacks -- I'm not sure if you have followed Trezor, but they have a great track record of thwarting physical attack vectors. In other words, the physical extraction of private keys from a Trezor is currently a purely academic question. The many eyes principle has worked exceptionally well in this case. I reckon that Ledger is in a similar position, however I don't follow them quite as closely.

Even should an attacker get their hands on your wallet seed, there's still the user defined passphrase to break -- which in terms of complexity can be that of a brainwallet. So the security of a hardware wallet is that of a brainwallet -- plus 24 seed words.

The most common recommendation nowadays is to just get a hardware wallet. Which in my opinion offer an excellent combination of security and usability. They are fairly idiot-safe, so to speak



I guess Spendulus refers to using machine learning and / or neural networks trained on English syntax and semantics for creating lists of phrases that are more likely to be used for a brain wallet than others. Seems unviable without a sufficiently large set of existing passphrases to train the network on though.

Maybe the amount of pseudo-anonymity is already enough for most people? In general, people care more about convenience than privacy. Hell, there's little people don't give up for convenience.

Of the options that I'm aware of, all have downsides on other fronts (BTC being the baseline):

XMR -- High fees, low scalability
ZEC -- Single point of failure in the form of a central corporate entity
GBYTE Blackbytes -- Centralized token issuance and trust-dependent consensus

Of course the respective tradeoffs may be seen as worthwhile, but the point is that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

I'd be curious to know what other privacy focused alts there are currently available though.



I'd argue that the main value proposition of Bitcoin is being permissionless, with pseudo-anonymity being only a side-effect. Also I'd love to believe that people will become more privacy conscious in the next 2-3 years, but I've honestly given hopes up on that. Privacy has long been dead and people embraced its death with open arms.

Very true.

I'd still argue that this recommendation was aimed at the general populace that is notoriously bad at creating sufficiently secure passwords and passphrases. And I think there's enough evidence for that

I think what Spendulus is referring to is that brainwallets that are derived from human generated passphrases tend to get bruteforced sooner or later. At least those that are purely based on words that can be found in dictionaries and quotes that stem from books and song lyrics.

There are many examples of brainwallets that got swiped by attackers, however it is of course impossible tell what percentage of brainwallets is affected since the total number of brainwallets is unknown. Nonetheless the general recommendation on these forums and other social platforms has been to stay clear of brainwallets (whether justified or not).

Question being, whether a simple obfuscation algorithm that can be done in your head or with a piece of paper is sufficient, as opposed to a computer-supported one. Unless you can mentally sha256

Given the amount of possible simple obfuscation algorithms I guess one can achieve sufficient security without computer support, assuming you don't rely on any well known methods (rot13 anyone?). In other words, this could be a use case where rolling your own "crypto" and security by obscurity might be a good thing.

One of my key takeaways for 2017 was that Bitcoin finally found what seems to be a solution to its problem of self-governance: Hardforks.

...only to have the concept of hardforks as an expression of self-governance to be overtaken by pump-and-dumpers, as is custom in crypto.



If I had to define Bitcoin's 2017 by a single event though, it would be this:


The fact that McAfee upped the ante from half a million makes it even better.

Lightning Network requires you to pay regular on-chain fees when opening or closing a payment channel. Every transaction in between -- could be tens, could be thousands -- is handled instantly, without an additional on-chain fee overhead.

Given full blocks, the transaction fees will be more or less the same, but you can handle many more transactions at the price of just two. Think of it as a flat rate.

Assuming that LN will take most of transactions off-chain, blocks will likely be rarely full -- at least for the next few years -- and thus transaction fees as a whole are likely to be reduced as well.