It's just a natural correction. USD 10,000,- was a huge psychological barrier. Once it was broken through the market of course got overly enthusiastic and the price grew way faster than was sustainable. So a correction like the one we saw was inevitable.

I'm just glad that this madness only lasted for barely a day. Had Bitcoin kept going like that for another 1-2 days the correction would have been far more severe.



It depends. If BTC stabilizes we might see some growth in the alt market again. Any hefty move by BTC -- regardless if up or down -- is likely to make alts bleed though.

Oh, so that's what happened. I only remember there being drama surrounding the foundation, but I guess I've been out of the loop for longer than I thought. Even more reason to give kudos to the devs then for keeping up the good work.

What's the main source of development funds currently? Donations to the dev team? Donations to each individual dev? Or are they mostly working part-time now?

I'm still looking forward to see one such non-cryptocurrency blockchain in action, so far most other use cases have only been a mediocre fit.




You can't prevent people from investing in bad ideas without heavy regulation -- which would be against pretty much everything that crypto stands for. Actually, you can't prevent people from investing in bad ideas even with heavy regulation. I'm looking at you, Wall Street.

Either way I'd still argue that mass adoption won't necessarily bring more speculators into the game. Most people that we still need to reach just want a safe and easy way to transfer money. Or at least a store of value. Not a speculative investment vehicle. Those people have been onboard for a long time now.

I think you are mixing up monetary supply and block size limit.

monetary supply = capped at 21,000,000 BTC which get issued on a fixed rate per block and act as a miner subsidiary. This is merely an accounting value and has nothing to do with block size.

block size = "physical" filesize of the ledger entry that contains the transaction itself. Dependent on the amount of inputs and outputs, each transaction takes up a certain amount of "physical" space on the blockchain, independent of the amount that is transacted, paid as a fee or burned. The block size is limited in that the collection of transactions that make up a block can not exceed a certain filesize, as to keep blockchain growth -- the collection of files, not the accounting values -- on a viable scale.




Ah... got it. I don't think there's any protocol changes needed for that. You might actually be able to hack something together with Bitcoin's current scripting capabilities. After all this would be just sending meta-data over the Bitcoin blockchain, with some specialized client listening for specific commands. I don't see the benefit of using the Bitcoin blockchain as a command and control server for a filemanagement system though.

Once again... how would this solve the blocksize issue? I probably misunderstand you, but the way you put it, it seems to me like you assume that burning coins would free up blockchain space?



At that point you're not creating a decentralized cloud hosting provider but rather a file timestamping service... for which already multiple solutions exist, all of which are based on the Bitcoin blockchain:

https://opentimestamps.org/

https://app.originstamp.org/home

https://bitsig.io/howitworks/

(Disclaimer: I have no personal experience with any of these services so I can't speak for their legitimacy)

Let fools be fools and simply don't buy into it. Every subsequent money grab will be worth less than the one before until the forkings subside and pump'n'dumpers find a new toy to play with.

Bitcoin is already self-sustaining. In my opinion setting aside a certain amount of Bitcoin's total supply for developers would only be detrimental to Bitcoin's integrity. Most alts that do this are not even worth their premine. There's a huge financial incentive to either break Bitcoin or keep it from being broken, so I daresay it's one of the most heavily audited projects there is, all by itself. There is beauty in Bitcoin's organic way of growth, don't destroy it by trying to shoehorn a centralized entity into it.



Software research is taking place as is. Hardware research would be a waste of time, given that the market is already taking care of that.



Project management is taken care of by the devs. Project development... what sort of projects?



Waste of time, the market is already taking care of that.



What sort of products?



Increased decentralization can only be taken care of by ensuring the protocol remains in a state that enables sustainable decentralization.



As far as I remember, mostly taken care of by the Bitcoin foundation.

1) How is burning coins for transactions on one side, while releasing an equal amount of subsidy on the other side different from simply paying a transaction fee? If you burn 100 Satoshis per transaction, but inflate the subsidy by... say... 100 Satoshis per transaction, you just added extra steps without achieving anything.

2) How does this affect blockchain size?

3) How does this add the intrinsic value that you perceive as missing?

4) How would this enable Bitcoin to become some sort of decentralized cloud provider? (assuming you even want this from Bitcoin in the first place)


Regarding 4) you should probably look into IPFS / Filecoin, Storj and MaidSafe, they might be of interest for you.

There are DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) such as used by IOTA and ByteBall. The fault tolerance of such an approach still remains to be seen though, as -- to me -- it seems not fully clear on how they aim to defend against sybil attacks. So far both cryptocurrencies rely on a central entity to keep transactions on track. With ByteBall these  so called witnesses are an inherent part of the protocol, IOTA supposedly can live without this -- I think it's called the coordinator? -- once transaction throughput increases. I personally have doubts about the viability of both approaches, but admittedly didn't look much into them besides reading the respective whitepapers.

Oh, and there's MimbleWimble: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.md

Nahhh... I'd love to see it, but I think the market needs to cool down first. Reaching USD 10,000,- as soon as 2017 was already beyond my wildest expectations, I can't imagine the market keeping up like this. I'm really bullish, but I just can't.

I hope 2018 will be mostly sideways action, with a slight upwards trend. I fear we might enter a bear market soon. Either way, my guess for when BTC will reach USD 40,000,- will be 2021 the soonest, ie. after the halving of 2020.

Depends on your definition of success. Bitcoin may still succeed, only to get overtaken by a new breed of cryptocurrency / decentralized platform further down the road. I just don't think that any of the alts that we are currently seeing are up to that challenge yet.

Also the whole ecosystem is just now starting to grow up, with Bitcoin still being at the heart of it all. Maybe some time in the future the alt ecosystem will be able to stand on its own feet, but for now Bitcoin is holding everything together.

Individual BTC addresses for each customer is probably the cleanest solution.

If you know how to code (or have someone who does) you could look into Blockchain.info's API. Based on your xPub key you can use it to generate individual BTC addresses and to monitor them as well. May be a viable option since you already use their wallet anyway.

https://blockchain.info/api/api_receive

The question which fiat currency to use could probably be solved by using a composite of the most widely used fiat currencies. In the end I still see 2 challenges:

1) Defining a reliable exchange rate source. So far Bitcoin is pretty much self contained without relying on external information sources. Not even timestamps are fully trusted.

2) This still wouldn't prevent a fee market from emerging. Someone will always be willing to pay a premium to get first in line, regardless of whether you calculate the price in fiat or BTC terms. As a result the fees will still increase according to network load factor.



/thread

Ah, sorry, I guess that came out wrong.

I merely wanted to point out that sometimes the error lies beyond the scope of the application developer, ie. your software can still fall victim to a vulnerability without your code being shit. In either case it should be reported because best case the application has a problem, worst case its the platform's -- or the used crypto library's -- fault.

I didn't mean to imply that Bitcoin's keyspace is even remotely small enough for a collision to occur.

I've seen NZDT (New Zealand Dollar Token) based on the WAVES platform being used / issued by cryptopia.co.nz, but that seems to be only exchange supporting this token -- well, apart from the WAVES trading platform itself, I suppose.

EURT may just be a matter of time, but so far I don't see any likely issuers. The only exchanges that I can think of right now that support EUR trading are linked to the traditional banking anyways, fairly transparent and fully AML / KYC compliant -- which makes issuing something like EURT an unnecessary evil.



Indeed, I also think that alts will get hit harder by a possible USDT collapse than BTC. Most alts are traded on exchanges that can be only reached via BTC or USDT in the first place.

Always double check whether you are sending to a BCH address or a BTC address. Never send Bitcoin Cash to a BTC address. Never send Bitcoin to a BCH address.

You are lucky you sent it to an address that you have the private key for. If this had happened with an exchange your coins would have been effectively lost.

According to Ledger's support page, you should be able to simply log into your BCH wallet and access your BCH there:

https://ledger.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003836734-How-to-recover-BCH-sent-on-a-BTC-address

Unless you sent it to a SegWit address (starting with "3") in which case -- sorry for your loss.



I think OP is referring to Blockdozer, which is a Bitcoin Cash blockchain explorer.

You're not going to get the network any more energy efficient -- ie. higher transaction throughput for less electricity spent -- by simply decreasing the block interval. Apart from the orphan / propagation problem that aleksej already mentioned, this would also cause the blockchain to grow faster than is likely sustainable for healthy node decentralization.



Yes. In practice you can very well accept small transactions with just one confirmation. If it weren't for a full mempool, even zero confirmations would be fine for some cases.



Hashrate will always be a reflection of Bitcoin's price and the size of its block rewards / transaction fees. As long as its profitable to squeeze some more miners in, that's exactly what's going to happen. Block intervals have little to do with mining profitability and reducing block intervals would not cause a decrease in hashrate.

All things equal, the only way to reduce electricity spent on Bitcoin is by reducing the block reward. Which is exactly what is happening every ~4 years. It's just that Bitcoin's price and thus mining profitability has always managed to keep up with the decline of mining profitability caused by the halvings -- and then some.



I don't understand what you are trying to suggest. What, according to your definition, would be the 51st % node? Every node follows the longest chain. Every miner that creates a new block by definition has prolonged the longest chain and thus created the longest chain.

I still think that USDT / Bitfinex is only partially responsible for Bitcoin's growth this year. The market was ready for Bitcoin's re-awakening and that's how we got here.

Still, it does indeed look like USDT is heading for an iceberg. Question being whether Bitcoin is on the same ship or if Bitfinex is going to be the only casualty.

Well, sometimes it does go deeper than your own code:

https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-08-11-android

Either way, if a user comes across such a "collision" they should definitely report it -- albeit rather by contacting the devs directly instead of posting on a public forum.

Also I will now blame you for my newfound phobia of rocks falling from the sky.

Depends on (a) your local government and (b) the amount and type of income.

In some countries, under certain circumstances, there's no tax on capital gains on Bitcoin. However if you accept bitcoins as a form of payment, depending on the amount, you very likely will have to file it as part of your tax report.