one significant downside should perfectly align with the incentives of such a user (who presumably is only interested in the value of their BTC savings): if they want to send an amount that's bigger than the largest unspent utxo, then it's more expensive to do so, because they need more than one tx input to do so. and there are also the obvious privacy issues (which harm everyone's privacy to a lesser extent).

Ideally, custodial services (e.g. exchanges) would permit BIP79 transactions for client withdrawals (and also use them for client deposits). This would save transaction fees, as well as defeat passive analysis of the blockchain to track utxo ownership. A few (not many) custodial services support BIP79 (aka P2EP/Payjoin), hopefully more will in future. Wallet support is also lacking, so it's a chicken & egg problem

oops, sorry Dave. edited



LND uses the same/similar resources? I can see that being the case, golang is essentially just c underneath, so it should perform pretty well if you know how to write it well (I imagine it's more forgiving than c)

didn't consider that possibility, despite corruption being the pivot in my argument. How could these professional mouthpieces possibly know their regulations are even being applied? "look your holiness, the little green tick next to the amount means only nice Americans are paying this money to other nice Americans"

There was recent news from Albania that a gun running organization (supplying weapons to the Syrian war) with wahabist links had increased it's control in the famously violence infested corner of south-eastern Europe.

guess who was helping fund them? (and using which currency/payment network?). I expect you all need only one guess



If Janet Yellen has proof that Bitcoin funded terrorism, it's likely because her partners in crime at the CIA gave her the information, and they only know because they provided all the guns and the Bitcoins for the deals with the terrorists

none of that is necessary, it will not speed up sync in any meaningful way

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the Bitcoin software will get a longer list of peer IPs of other nodes on the network from Bitcoin seeders (mostly the seeders are run by the Bitcoin developers), and then other nodes you connect to give you gossip about nodes on the network to connect to, replacing the seeders' role (really the seeders should be rarely needed, they're only required when you start your node up for the first time)

placing <connect=> blocks in your Bitcoin config comes with a risk: if you use 1 list of nodes from a single website, that website might be supplying you with a list of malicious nodes. This could be used to cut your node off from the rest of the honest participating nodes on the Bitcoin network (to disrupt or censor your transactions), or possibly even to feed you with a fake blockchain (to waste your time).


If the Bitcoin software cannot find good nodes for you to sync from, it's because there's a problem with the software. I've been doing this for a while, and that's never been the problem with syncing speed.

The problems generally are:

• computer CPU speed
• size of Bitcoin's cache (and the amount of RAM available to put that cache into)
• internet speed

even a fast computer with fast internet might take a day or two to sync the whole blockchain

there's also Lightning-qt

and I think there was a Lightning client on Android called "Zeus" that could operate the c-lightning API as a client, but I didn't try it to see how well it worked.

even miners from states considered 'rogues' by both china and the US won't cut it, think of how much illegal indoor cannabis growing still takes place across North America and Europe. I'm well aware that police and intelligence are often involved in or aware of the details of such things, but remember the reason for that: the real world is much more complicated than politicians or the dying corporate media typically choose to present it, corruption of the rule of law is absolutely required by all those who are supposed to be safeguarding it, for a multitude of reasons of such breadth and depth that it would probably all be mind-bendingly staggering if publicly known. Even just a small amount beneath the surface of this veneer, it is entirely publicly acknowledged by e.g. the police that both lying and breaking the law is a necessary part of doing their job ("it takes a thief to catch a thief"), it's police policy to train officers lie to the public to "keep them safe"

I think we're heading into an even more schizoid display of public life (the signs are already more apparent than ever): politicians, the police and business/finance figures will be publicly stating how terrible free and uncensored Bitcoin use is, and those same people will be regularly getting caught doing something stupid that absolutely contradicts what they professed in public previously. Slowly at first, the public will figure out that there's no fighting it

I guess this initiative is asking a fundamental question: how much capital are people willing to allocate to controlling Bitcoin, and how much capital are people willing to allocate to maintain Bitcoin's freedom?

I don't think they have much hope, frankly. As long as the US foreign policy continues to use the SWIFT network to punish it's enemies (and possibly soon it's erstwhile allies), fee-paying transactions will continue to be processed on the Bitcoin network. I can't see the IMF or the BIS making any impact trying to make a deal on this; the balance of power is too biased, their political power is on a downward trajectory anyway, and their enforcement arm (US/EU military) are on thin ice as far as funding is concerned. The lack of major financial crises in the last decade, compounded by the overall systemic rot and 2020's economic malaise, signifies a big (potentially monumental) reduction in the effectiveness of the US/EU military threat.

And I heard all the mining chips are still designed and fabricated in Shezhen anyway. I guess the US could, I dunno, crash their economy a little bit to make their silicon fabrication industry competitive? Oh, and they could build some kind of silicon fabrication industry too, they don't have one to speak of as of now. That won't take long! That's not a desperate plan to defend dollar hegemony at all, and entirely plausible! What could go wrong?

supposedly, hash-wrapping the public key is (perhaps) pointless to protect against a quantum computer, providing such a computer is fast enough...

the public key must be revealed in order to spend from a bitcoin "address" (which is simply a hash the underlying public key). When a transaction is signed and broadcast, the scriptPubkey in that transaction contains the public key that a quantum computer would use to calculate the corresponding private key. So, if the QC can listen for new transactions added to it's Bitcoin mempool, and compute the private key before that transaction is confirmed in a block (average block interval is 10 minutes, as we know), then they may also have enough time to steal the transaction inputs by spending using a higher fee to an address they control.

in that scenario, the window of opportunity that exists while the transaction is "in-flight" reduces the protection of hashing the public key to mere security theater

great, roll on taproot activation

trackerless bittorrent magnet link: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:665c5bdc6f49948e47c1098d91ace98bd216150e&dn=bitcoin-core-0.21.0

I'm much more nervous about being over-exposed to cash. I have had a couple of thousand dollars as a safety net in the house for a few years now, and the risk that cash will be banned "because viruses" seems more significant than ever.

You only have to worry about your BTC in terms of it going to zero and never recovering. Given an understanding of why Bitcoin is valuable, that seems increasingly unlikely.

you will also need at least 1 incoming channel, otherwise it's not possible to route through your node (you can only send payments when you initiate opening a channel).

Either wait until someone opens a channel to you, or buy some incoming liquidity using Boltz or Lightning Loop (or even bitrefill IIRC)

there is nothing to activate until nodes begin to run using code that implements BIPs 340-342, there is currently a tiny number of nodes (less than 100 out of 60-70,000) running the 0.21.0 release candidate, and as far as is publicly known, no-one (working on either Bitcoin Core or at the pools/miners) has what anyone considers a final version of activation logic either. So I agree, activation is rather doubtful before the release of a final version of Bitcoin 0.21.1, let alone Bitcoin 0.21.0

as far as 90% being enough to activate, I suspect it will be for the same reasons that I thought 80% would be: miners will take the conservative route of signalling the fork, so long as nodes adopt 0.21.0, not doing so carries the risk of getting any blocks they solve being orphaned from the blockchain using the BIP91 logic that is a part of BIP8 (the candidate activation logic for new soft forks for Bitcoin)

this year has absolutely proved (whatever your stance on the specifics of the issue) that when a big international agency makes sufficiently big pronouncements, then nearly every newspaper, corporation and government gangster across the entire globe jumps to unified attention.


It wouldn't surprise me in the least if some international agency (funded by banks, and with zero citizen mandate to operate) announces international cryptocurrency regulation in 2021. Don't be surprised either.

Whatever it may be, I will give them nothing. "A coward dies a thousand deaths. The soldier dies but one"

true, you would still have a validating node without a mempool using blocksonly=1, good point

that's why we say "Bitcoin is decentralized", there is no such thing as the mempool, everyone on the Bitcoin network has their own mempool.

If you're thinking "but I don't have a mempool", then that's because you're not on the Bitcoin network

which mempool?

every Bitcoin node on the Bitcoin has it's own mempool, with potentially different policies for acceptance into it.

some indeed do, with differing degrees of success (and differing degrees of opting out). The state often (not always) pursues them for taxes on services they did not use. The speculation as to why the state reacts that way is that more and more people might begin to rationalize how their taxes are spent, and would want to at least get more control over what they are spent on, to encourage public spending they deem wise and discourage that of which they disapprove. This would remove alot of state decision making power (and probably several layers of state bureaucracy also)

It would also be more democratic, which I heard was the name of the game we are (supposedly) playing.

Like it or not, alot or people take seriously how their money is spent in the name of the public good, and strongly dislike not being able to prevent spending on areas that have consistent 100% bipartisan approval (e.g. war or corporate tax breaks). These people are attracted to Bitcoin, as it seem like a way to exert the control they seek.


Satoshi (and the other cypherpunks) absolutely knew that this would be one of the most disruptive aspects of decentralized money: it was a design goal. I hope everyone's prepared for the full implications of this, regardless of their own perspective.

it's quite likely that your counterparty in Chile would be able to find someone to trade bitcoin for chilean pesos in cash. Although this may take time.

If you really want to use bank accounts, https://bisq.network is a fast way to do so without needing to wait for applications (Bisq lets traders use their bank accounts directly without transferring money to a website, it uses escrow agents from the system instead). You could also buy bitcoin from Bisq to send to your counterparty.

Also, if your counterparty chooses, they can simply keep the bitcoin, or find something to spend it on, avoiding the step of converting to pesos altogether.

this depends on your perspespective

the entire concept of the nation state is predicated on whether the potential subjects/citizens agree to be governed, it's right there, written in the original philosophies of the modern nation state


if you don't feel that the state is fulfilling their side of the relationship, then you're more than entitled to opt out. What possible other way do people have to defend themselves against governments overstepping the line?