It just dawned on me. You used to be able to quickly and easily do a forum-wide search by keyword. And that's the most intuitive way to search a site. Now if you try to do that, you get: "Select no more than 5 boards at a time." It's not an excuse, but I'm guessing this drives some noobs to make new threads rather than figuring out how and where to search for their question.

Служба не доступна для жителей США. Как насчет возмещения? Если учетная запись была связана с IP-адресом США, может ли пользователь учетной записи регистрироваться через IP-адрес, отличный от США, для использования услуги или снятия? Извините за Перевод Google ...

Service is not available for US residents. What about refunds? If account was linked to a USA IP address, can account owner sign in through a non-USA IP address to use service or withdraw? Sorry for Google Translate...

Yes, a Segwit-compatible wallet must support P2SH (BIP16) and its address format (BIP13). To receive payments, the wallet must be able to create a P2SH address based on a P2WPKH script (and be able to recognize payment to such addresses).

So, Segwit addresses have a prefix 3, like other P2SH addresses. (As opposed to the the standard prefix of 1)

Okay, but what about ten or twenty years out? At the rate that cryptocurrencies are growing, they could be mainstream in most of the world by then. I think central banks fear cryptocurrencies, not necessarily because of what they are, but because people are losing faith in their national currencies. As investment money continues to move into BTC and other cryptos (and away from assets tied to stagnating national economies), this will become more apparent.

I think commercial banks could do fine in this environment, as long as they are adaptive enough to offer cryptocurrency services.

There is an important distinction to be made here between commercial banks and central banks. The OP referred to a warning made by a central bank, and we have seen this several times before. Central banks should be very opposed to cryptocurrencies because they have even less avenues to control it than they do other commodities markets like gold and oil.

Commercial banks, on the other hand, will do anything they can to make money as long as it doesn't put them at odds with banking regulators and the like. So they will be happy to interface with BTC, as long as they have the green light, legally, to do so.

Segwit changes the 1MB block size limit to a 4MB block weight limit, so that's not true. It definitely allows blocks to have more data.


That's only if you don't account for witness data. Taken altogether, I'm pretty sure Segwit transactions are slightly larger than standard transactions. Future optimizations can make them smaller, though.


Block explorers are a mess right now if you try to look at a Segwit transaction.

Maybe Bitcoin was never ideal for micropayments from a design perspective. They worked initially because there wasn't much demand for transaction confirmations (not many people used the network). Now that there is so much demand, we need off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network, which don't compromise the trustless model. LN's model may be different and off-chain, but it is trustless and fully compatible with Bitcoin. That's good enough for me.

I think that's a misrepresentation of what happened. If you kept up with the mailing lists and discussion on Github, the vast majority of developers were opposed to Gavin's scaling recommendations. Yes, there was a lot of debating for years, but it was nearly two years ago that Core (a collection of many dozen or even hundreds of developers) agreed on Segwit -- particularly because they wanted to address scalability (including fixing transaction malleability for the Lightning Network) without the messy consensus issues associated with a hard fork.

The obstacle was the miners, who refused to activate Segwit for the better part of a year, until BIP148 forced the issue.

What proof could he have? I guess he could sign a message using a key from the genesis block, stating that Craig Wright is not Satoshi. Even then, this is not definitive. Control of a private key does not prove your identity. For example, it's possible for "Satoshi" to sign such a message from the genesis block coinbase address key, and for Craig Wright also to sign a message using the same key.

What would that prove?

Give it time. Segwit is locked in and will be activated soon. Much testing has been done on the Lightning Network, and conceivably, transacting on LN could be much cheaper than transacting fully on-chain. And without any trust involved! But without Segwit, it will be much harder to implement. Even Segwit itself will provide a capacity increase, lowering fees in the interim. I'm not too worried.

I don't know the details about difficulty, but it is has dropped a lot for BCH vs. BTC. There are sites that track the difference in profitability, and Antpool is now implementing an automatic pool switcher depending on profitability. This is the biggest drop in the BTC hash rate I've seen in a very long time. It's bigger than any drop I can see in the 9-month chart. No matter how profitable it is to mine BCH, Bitmain is likely behind the majority of this drop.

The peaks on Bitfinex were .26 BCH/BTC and .244 BCH/BTC. The recent highs were about the same on HITBTC. It may have spiked higher on some of the Asian exchanges, but I don't have a feed for them, nor can I trade on them.

Remember, it's a pretty illiquid market, so it could just be pump-and-dumped like other altcoins. It would take a bit more money considering the value and market cap, but it could be done. Buyer beware...

Bitmain is going full speed ahead promoting Bitcoin Cash. First, the pump. Then the "automatic BTC-BCC pool switcher" from Antpool. Hash rate is falling for BTC -- 1 block is being generated every 10.7 minutes. And now they are back to spamming the network: https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions Blockchain.info is showing nearly 100k unconfirmed transactions (almost 100 BTC in fees).

It won't have the most cumulative proof of work. And for now, the BTC hash rate has only fallen to the level it was at 2 weeks ago. Blocks are being found every 10.2 minutes (a tad longer than usual). So no major changes yet. https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

It's true that things will get pretty interesting -- and fast -- if some real hash power starts defecting to BCH. And unfortunately, Bitmain probably has enough hash power to tip the scales in favor of BCH.

Since the difficulty is much lower for Bitcoin Cash, it can't be the "longest chain" simply by mining a shitload of easy-to-find blocks. It needs the most cumulative proof of work (that's how Bitcoin works). Technically, they aren't in competition because BCH is not "valid" per the whitepaper.

Anyway, for BCH to have the most cumulative proof of work vs. Bitcoin, it will take quite a bit longer (given that we are already a few weeks out, and BTC still has a very significant majority hash rate).

Honestly, I'm worried, and all the more because of the November fork. If BCH continues to be more profitable to mine, and Antpool (and presumably other Bitmain pools) point more and more of their hash rate at it, that's going to disrupt the BTC network. Longer confirmation times, stuck transactions. More importantly, the network will be secured by increasingly less hash power.

And what are new investors going to think of all this? In a way, if you don't understand the intricacies of blockchains, it looks like Bitcoin can just be printed by forking the chain.

Great point. Wow, this hadn't occurred to me. The BIP148 + POW algorithm change threat from small blockers and Segwit supporters definitely could have played into this. If a stable network and market with decent liquidity can be created around Bitcoin Cash, then Bitmain has indeed shielded themselves from the Luke Dash Jr. contingent of bitcoiners who have been pushing for a POW change.

When you add this to the matter of Asic-Boost and the interests of companies like Bitpay, all of this makes sense.

I recall hearing that Satoshi said that if Bitcoin caught on, that it would be worth millions of dollars a piece someday. So he definitely considered the network effects if BTC managed to catch on and go mainstream.

As for his influences, he published the whitepaper and code on a cypherpunk mailing list, so there's a starting point. He also referenced the 2008 bank bailouts in the genesis block.

Nothing. A hard fork guarantees that the network will split -- to what extent is unknown and can only be determined after the fact. A soft fork is miner-enforced, so a network split can be prevented as long as a majority of miners support the upgrade. No amount of hash power nor user support can prevent a split from occurring in a hard fork, though.

This experience is sure making the November hard fork look a bit more complicated now...

I'm guessing that Bitmain can. Someone paid dearly for years spamming the BTC network, to promote the cause of larger blocks I'm sure. I think that's why, during the BIP91 drama, the spam stopped and mempools were empty. At that point, it was better for Bitmain to support the status quo and give the appearance that Segwit wasn't necessary.

Roger Ver is just a sideshow here. His and Bitpay's interests pale in comparison to Bitmain's, in regards to AsicBoost. I think Bitmain's investors put in obscene amounts of money, and AsicBoost is world-changing for them.