Yeah, and I was aware of (and even following) Bitcoin for something like a year before I bought in too. And today, some other person is just becoming aware of Bitcoin - and they'll buy some months down the road at a large increment in price. And _they'll_ score a hundred-bagger. If this thing goes where I'm 80% convinced it is headed, we have several orders of magnitude to go. Still opportunity for riches for everyone.

If _we_ don't F it up.

And if we are capable of F-ing it up, it wasn't the right solution anyhow.

And some of us watched -- fascinated -- as it unfolded in real time.

Not long ago.

I'd advise you act quickly.  

The personalities in "bitcon space" are fascinating, quite unlike those of other communities I have known in the past 30+ years of forum surfing.  Most in a negative way, unfortunately.  People like Mark Karpelès, Danny Brewster, the BFL gang, the Bitcoin Foundation, and many other far too numerous to list. 

I cannot avoid taking sides in the block size limit war.  I am not exactly a fan of Mike and Gavin, but on the other hand I cannot find anything good to say about the Blocstream guys.  Not about character, not about ethics, not about respect for the project and its users, not even about competence.  Bankruptcy is the least they deserve.

A couple days ago, Luke-Jr trolled BitcoinClassic by posting a pull request that would change the PoW algorithm to make it impossible to mine with ASICs.  I then proposed that the Core devs do that on Core.  It was meant to be a just counter-trolling.  But it seems that Greg and Luke-Jr are seriously dreaming the option of doing just that in case the miners switch to Classic.  It is Idiocracy II -- but with bitcoin!

Which chart are you looking at? I don't see one which relates directly but I may be looking in the wrong place

(apology from earlier accepted BTW)

Edit: NVM, found it. That looks like daily average. Might be instructive to plot it as a distribution.

I'd advise trader here to secure their long position.

We have consensus.

I don't know about silk roads, but there are there are real roads if you live near Canada or Mexico.

So for anyone still harboring any doubts, here is the actual data ChartBuddy used to generate this widget. Please feel free to point out any errors. I picked one with both empty and full blocks to give an illustration.


Note that this round included 10 blocks, way more than the targeted 6 and 50% were still full. I probably should have included the times as well as though the last block is only 6% full, it came a scant 44 seconds after the previous block.

Empty blocks marked with a *

I know a place. If you savvy. 

No the only hard forks have been uncontroversial development issues or bugs.

The LN would want to disable bitcoin settlements for the same general reasons that the US government decided to end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold or silver.

Namely, tying LN payments to bitcoin imposes many limitations on hubs and clients.  For example, a big deterrent to LN adoption is the requirement that a new user locks in advance into each new channel an amount of bitcoins sufficient to cover his payments for the next 100 (or next 10'000, according to Adam) payments that she expects to make through that channel.  VISA, on the other hand, gives a bunch of credit to the new client, so she does not have to deposit anything upfront.  The hubs cannot do the same because they would have to lock real bitcoins, not simply let her pay on credit.  if the LN could decouple from bitcoin, it could let hubs create money by credit, like banks do...

Also, one big problem that the LN is still trying to solve is what happens if the bitcoin network suffers a spam attack that delays a fraction of the legit traffic for days.  That could cause many channel settlement transactions to be delayed past the channel timeouts, effectively doing a permanent chargeback on every payment that was made through those channels. And/or it would force the receiving parties of those payments to issue extra transactions in an attempt to push their settlement transactions through with CPFP: and those attempts would eat into their profits, would make the backlog worse, and would be guaranteed to fail in a large fraction of the cases, whatever the fees they used. Again, decoupling the LN from the bictoin system would eliminate that and may other problems...


My reading of history is that Greg Maxwell got pathologically obsessed with the fee market idea years ago, and won't give up on it, no matter what others say.  Some Blockstream employees, especially the guy who is working on LN, even said publicly that the LN would require increasing the limit; but Greg does not seem to be impressed.  That may be the reason why Blockstream has committed to the disgusting SegWit hack, that will provide some relief (especially to the LN, that may require humongous signatures) without touching the sacred 1 MB limit.

(There is an exchange in this forum, some years ago, where Greg says that the 1 MB limit is as sacred as the 21 M BTC limit, and he would not have put any time into bitcoin if Satoshi's design did not include it.  Gavin then points out that the 1 MB was not in the original design, and quotes Satoshi's Oct/2010 post where he explains that the limit could be lifted when needed by a simple 2-line patch and a routine hard-fork release.  I did not see Greg's answer.  Considering that he has never answered Mike's "crash landing" post either, I assume that he just shut that fact too out of his mind, since it did not fit his convictions...)

They look like more than 75% full right now. That could create problems if you need a transaction confirming quickly. You could probably average the blocks out over a few hours to make it look like the average is below 75% full, but that doesn't help people who need transactions confirming quickly right now. There are times when the average is below 45%, and other times when it's above 90% (which is creating problems).

From Wikipedia:
"While there’s no agreed-upon definition of a bear market, one generally accepted measure is a price decline of 20% or more over at least a two-month period." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_trend

From http://content.moneyinstructor.com/693/what-bull-bear-market.html
"If the markets fall by more than 20% then we have entered a bear market. "

From investopedia:
"Although figures can vary, for many, a downturn of 20\% or more in multiple broad market indexes, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or Standard & Poor's 500 Index (S&P 500), over at least a two-month period, is considered an entry into a bear market.

Read more: Bear Market Definition | Investopedia http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bearmarket.asp#ixzz3xfIUiEIk

It's not just paranoia, you squirrel-brained boob. The Chi-coms have a history of nationalizing businesses, industries and whole sectors of the economy. They've done it more than any other government in history with the possible exception of the Soviets.

JJG if you think he's wrong you have to explain why!

Hellrow? Do you know what the commonly accepted definition of a bear market is? It's a market that has dropped greater than 20%. We have been in a bear market for over two years. we've dropped more than 20% from the November high of $504. We've dropped more than 20% from the more recent December high of $475. just this month, the drop from $465 to $352.50 was 24.2%.
WE ARE IN A BEAR MARKET, DIPSHIT

I don't know why this didn't occur to me until just now, but with well over 50% hashing power in China, what happens if the Communist Party confiscates all the mines? Then instead of shutting them down, they merge the pools and double spend until the price crashes to pennies.

It wouldn't even do any good to fork away from them.  They have the ASICs, so they could just jump on the new fork and double spend again.

I think this is the biggest security threat to Bitcoin right now. This is a bigger threat than pools, massive miner farms, fewer nodes, anything.   

These mines are too big to hide. If the ChiComs don't know where they all are, they could easily find out.

The Red Chinese government is the only power on earth that could shut down Bitcoin right now, but they could do it with a few phone calls.   They have reasons for doing it too, from preserving the value of the Renmimbi to enforcing capital controls, to consumer protection to regulating commerce to protecting incumbent players or even propping up their preferred altcoin (Litecoin?)

I did explain it at one point but it probably does need to go in the explanation link, probably with an explanation diagram.

I invite you to run the numbers yourself. If you'll notice the times when the red line agrees with the solid green level, those are times when there have not been empty blocks and they do not affect it at all.

Let me turn it around a bit. One of the complaints the small blockers have with BIP101 is that despite there being a 75% of 1000 requirement for BIP101 to activate, random chance would mean that that could be achieved with much less than 75% of the hashrate. This is true. Likewise, even if on daily average, blocks appear to be much less than 100% full, random chance can (and has started to) mean that at random times, the blocks *are* full and users experience congestion. One full block is not really all that big a deal but we are starting to see, two, three and even four full blocks in a row. That's potentially a confidence destroying poor user experience. This is happening now.

Bear in mind, we *don't* have RBF, we *don't* have Lightning Network and we *don't* have segwit. What we do have is a fairly straight-line log plot that showed this was coming and warnings from several people, ranging from 2-5 years ago that this would have to be addressed.

All you had to do to get rid of me was keep pumping the market until I had liquidated all my holdings, but no, you couldn't keep doing that, could you? Too many people saw through the smallblocker bullshit.

Anyone following my lead has made money in the last month. Anyone following yours has lost about 15%.  Who's adding value here?