Well, their reply is true enough, but it seems like your problem goes beyond the issue of an unconfirmed transaction. Problem being, that at least one of the transactions that funded your transaction dropped off the mempool -- ie. timed out and got cancelled by the bitcoin network. So your withdrawal transaction will fail and drop off the mempool as well, meaning the funds remain in btcmarket's control.

Maybe you should point out to them that your withdrawal transaction is not only unconfirmed, but has already expired and doesn't show up on block explorers such as blockchain.info any more.

I have no experience with either btcmarket or their customer support though. From the looks of it they've got quite a mess at their hands, so you are likely not the only one and they are probably swamped with support requests right now. Maybe you have more success reaching them in 1-2 weeks. Maybe you need to reach out to them publicly, on Twitter or something. Good luck either way, I hope you'll get your coins back soon.

It seems like btcmarket fucked it up on their side. Looking at the input addresses used there are unconfirmed transactions all over the place, some of which apparently already have dropped off the mempool (eg. 1GMvRMi3PsvTU97kBGP6CM4PWFM88o8kt). The transaction fee they paid for your withdrawal seems to be fine, their internal processing however apparently paid too low a fee to get confirmed in the first place.

The good news is, there's no such thing as perpetually locked BTC due to an expired transaction.

The bad news is, at this point you'll have to rely on btcmarkets customer support. Have you already tried contacting them about the issue?

Thanks for the link! Seeing how there have been multiple proposals regarding dynamic increases of the maximum blocksize I've actually been wondering why there hasn't been any hardfork yet trying to implement one of them -- unless there is, I sort of lost track.

Nonetheless I'd probably just go for a straightforward static periodical block size increases every year or halving period instead of an algorithm based on network traffic. Assuming the latter can be gamed in one way or another (I still need to let your proposal sink in a bit, but I'm not yet fully convinced that it can't be exploited to force the maximum block size increase anyway) this would at least skip the extra step of trying to anticipate transaction workload.

Problem being, once the blocksize is increased, there's effectively no going back. So I do understand Core's conservative blocksize philosophy.

It may hurt short- to mid-term, but I think in the long term BTC will be fine, because...



^ this.

I have yet to see an alt with a scaling approach that actually convinces me. So in the end I personally am still on-board with SegWit1x blocks for a safer, long-term perspective, despite the current short-term problems. You gotta look at the bigger picture. If all goes well these 1-2 years of shitty fees we are looking at right now will be nothing but a minor bump on the road.

The BTC price simply got way ahead of itself.

The growth of the last few months was pretty nice and stable. It was only after breaking through USD 10,000,- that BTC went full on crazy. Ever since we broke this barrier, the price has been incredibly unstable, so of course a correction was due. Accordingly a new bottom has to be established. Hopefully above USD 10,000,- otherwise things might get ugly.

Keep in mind that the fundamentals haven't changed -- BTC is still BTC -- it's just the price that is fluctuating. If you're convinced of BTC's long term viability, short term price drops such as this pne shouldn't worry you.

I guess most people that wanted to cash out for christmas already did so. Or is everyone here a last minute christmas shopper?

I wouldn't be surprised if we'd see more market action than usual around christmas. It seems like large moves always happen when less people are watching (or are supposed to be watching). Which direction is anyone's guess though. I assume it will mostly depend on what floor the current dip settles on.

I doubt that BCH will be able to surpass BTC. I wouldn't completely dismiss BCH, especially if you already hold coins from the fork anyway, but I doubt that BCH's scalability approach will fare well.

The problem with BCH is that feature-wise, it doesn't have anything over BTC. Most issues that BTC is facing, apply to BCH as well. If people were to actually use BCH, a notable increase in transaction fees would likely soon follow.

The one advantage that BCH has over most other alts, is that due to it being a hardfork, people that simply hold on to their coins on both sides of the fork have stakes in both sides. So there is a userbase from the get-go, many of which don't care much about whether BTC or BCH comes out on top. Whether this is enough to shift the market in favor of BCH is a different question though.

Option 1) and 3) are different solutions that both lead to the same problem -- a faster growing blockchain resulting in harder to run nodes. Which means that eg. halving block times would increase node load just as much as doubling the block size.

Option 2) SegWit already is a block size increase, albeit in itself not a very efficient one -- blocks containing purely SegWit transactions are expected to effectively reach as much as 4MB while handling the equivalent of 2MB worth of legacy transactions. Its main intend is to pave the way for decentralized off-chain scaling.

As far as pure on-chain scaling is concerned, I'm afraid that's all there is to it.

You could increase blocksize and solely rely on pruned nodes, but that would weaken Bitcoin security and only solve part of the node resource problem. You could look into sidechains, but then you are by definition off-chain again. You could also move away from blockchains and look into alternatives such as directed acyclic graphs, but those protocols come with issues of their own.

The bigger Bitcoin gets, the harder it becomes for it to grow. The USD amount needed to move the BTC price from 17k to 1,000k is vastly larger than was needed to move it from 0 to 17k. Unless hyperinflation strikes I doubt we'll ever see a 1 million USD Bitcoin in our lifetimes.

1) 5,000,000 coins is a very haphazard estimate and seems to be vastly beyond what the Chinese really hold. The current total circulating supply is at 16,700,000 coins of which most (about 12,000,000?) have been mined before China entered the mining market in earnest. Even then it took Chinese miners still 1-2 years until they reached today's dominance.

2) What makes you think that these coins can't be traded and are stuck in China? How do you believe Chinese mining farms are able to finance their ongoing operation?



As long as the world runs on fiat it will literally never run out of money.



After 2016 this wouldn't even faze me.

You had me at chemtrails

I wasn't aware of this site before and holy shit it's a comedy goldmine. It would be funnier if they weren't serious though.

(also, wtf is it with conspiracy theorists selling dietary supplements?)

No one is forced to follow core. And no one has the right to force open source developers into a direction they themselves disagree with.

Open source is not a democracy in that you are entitled to have features implemented the way you want them to. It's a democracy in that anyone can pull up their sleeves and fork the codebase or support the development team that is closest to their own understanding of how the software is supposed to work.

Yes of course. That's one very important point that often gets overlooked when arguing about LN's viability.



Single on-chain transaction will still be possible, just as before. It's not a change of the Bitcoin protocol, just an addition on top using existing Bitcoin scripting capabilities

While transaction throughput will be heavily increased with LN's increasing adoption, single transactions will likely still stay relatively expensive, at least long term in a scenario where a huge part of the global population transacts money using Bitcoin. Short to mid-term I could very well imagine single on-chain transactions becoming cheaper again, just not as cheap as LN transactions, naturally.



As mentioned above, yes.

The on-chain transaction to open a payment channel is treated like any other Bitcoin transaction, so the fees are pretty much the same -- except that it can get used for multiple transactions instead of just a single one. So yes, it would probably make sense to have a payment channel ready before entering the coffee shop.

Taking transactions off-chain is likely to free up blockspace however, so 0-conf transactions may become viable again. However I'm not sure what possible attack vectors would come with accepting 0-conf transactions for opening a payment channel.

Very much appreciated, thank you.

An interesting issue, but I'm not fully convinced of its practical implications as I don't see how this could be pulled off without triggering a hardfork due to non-colluding miners and node operators -- the very opposite of a subtle attack. But maybe there's more to it, thanks for the input.

If there's a meaningful counter-argument to my post above please summarize it in a sentence or two, as I'm not going to shift through 38 minutes of video based on what seems to be a misunderstanding of how SegWit works.

The signatures are still stored on the blockchain.

They have been put in a block section of their own, but they are still stored in ohe blockchain, hence you can't simply change transaction signatures after the fact. No data is lost. SegWit is effectively a blocksize increase, even though the blocks still get treated as 1MB blocks.

So much misinformation...


The NSA were not the only one researching in this area. A lot of Bitcoin's building block have been studied in academia for decades, most of which were independent researchers or had roots in the cypherpunk movement of the early 90s. This has little to do with the NSA.

For more details, see here:

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559



There's pretty much no crypto whatsoever that hasn't been touched by the NSA at one point or another. Without the NSA we likely wouldn't have crypto in the first place. And without computer activists and hackers we wouldn't have secure, widespread, public crypto as we know it today. Or cryptocurrencies, for that matter.



The sidechannel attack mentioned in this section has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Hell, it doesn't even have to do with cryptography.

Quantum computers are not magic devices that suddenly break everything. Worst case, quantum computers manage to derive the private key from the public key of an address, the latter which is not known until a transaction has been made -- hence, single-use BTC addresses, as by the original design, are unlikely to be affected by quantum computing.


Gotta love the conclusion though. I mean it sounds like the worst Sci-Fi movie ever, but it would make for a fun South Korean flick to watch while being stoned.

You can be a legal resident of Germany without being a German citizen. If as a result you have to pay your taxes in Germany, you'll also get the tax benefits that come with it. However if due to some tax treaty between Germany and your nation of origin you still have tax obligations to your home country -- as, to some extend, seems to be the case with US citizens -- you're shit out of luck.



I wouldn't get my hopes up for exchanges taking care of collecting taxes for you. If it were only about capital gain taxes, maybe. However in many cases income tax applies, which exchanges are not able to determine due to not having insight into your income and tax status. Add to that cryptocurrency being a global phenomenon with people from various countries trading on exchanges of varying legal status it is close to impossible to find a one-size-fits-all tax collecting solution, unless the exchanges operates and focuses on only a single tax territory.

You don't need to open / close a new lightning channel everytime you make a transaction.

Single bi-directional channels are just one part of the equation. The other is that these bi-directional channels will enable routing between multiple parties, meaning you can use the same channel to pay your local coffeeshop, Amazon or the buddy that you split your lunch tab with. So even if it's just a one off payment, you can still use the same lightning channel you use for regular purchases as long as a payment route is available.

In the end you only need to pay transaction fees for opening and for closing the channel, regardless of the amount that gets transacted for the duration the channel is open. Whether that duration will be one day, one week or one month will be up to you and the lightning client you will be using.

This article series by Bitcoin Magazine goes more into detail, especially the second part about building the network topology should answer some of your questions.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-building-a-bidirectional-payment-channel-1464710791/



The Tangle is an interesting concept, but I'm highly skeptical of IOTA as long as it requires a central authority to protect itself from double spends. As far as I know even IOTA's tokens are centrally issued, but that might be a misconception of mine that I'll gladly have debunked by someone with more insight on IOTAs architecture.



The original post this article refers to is based on faulty assumptions, making the mathematical proof a pointless one.