Lightning network uses real Bitcoin transactions underneath, you just don't broadcast them but instead use them as your to keep track of your balance. So, it's not some token or virtual coin, it's real Bitcoin.


Yes, kinda like that, when you choose to close your channel, you are just broadcasting the latest of these unbroadcasted signed transactions.

A hedge is supposed to at least crash less than the asset it works against, and it's supposed to be predictable. Of course, nothing is 100% predictable, but some things are more predictable than others. So, gold is a good hedge, because it never crashed hard during the global market downtrends, and it reacted predictably to them.
But Bitcoin is not guaranteed to show the properties of hedge when the time comes, we all remember how it crashed by 50% together with other markets, then had an unrelated bull run that reclaimed all losses and even made additional gains. Hedges are supposed to reduce risks, Bitcoin increases it compared to any other traditional investment.

This sounds like the american definition of socialism - socialism is when government does stuff. And by the way, corporations have received far bigger share of covid-19 relief funds than the citizens, so does this still count as socialism or not?


This heavily varies from country to country, but generally the poor are actually getting richer too, just not as fast as the rich. Being poor in the US sucks though, so no wonder that leftism s growing there.

Can you explain why you think that the world is going towards socialism? It's a big statement and it's rather not self-evident, there's not much countries in this world that are officially socialist, and even less that are actually socialist. And even the word "socialism" starts to mean different things, from marxism to welfare state.

I personally don't see how this can be true, maybe leftist ideas become more popular in the US, but in the rest of the world nothing much changed in the last years. Socialism has been on decline globally since the fall of the Soviet Union.

What's preventing me from using Bitcoin is that none of the services that I use accept Bitcoin payments, and since most of them are big companies, there's no point in asking them, cause my voice won't change anything. And the second problem is fees, when there's a lot of market activity, the fees tend to get to a few dollars on average - no way I'm paying that for my consumer transactions, unless the deal is so good that it covers the fee.

There's nothing that suggests that Satoshi is Japanese, "Satoshi" is just a pseudonym, he could be from any country.

No, Satoshi can't stop Bitcoin, no one can, the worst thing he can do is publicly prove that he is Satoshi, denounce Bitcoin, then dump all his coins. This would be a very bad scenario for Bitcoin, the confidence of many users will be shaken, and the price will plummet to extremely low levels. But people who understand Bitcoin deeply would continue believing in Bitcoin, and with time it will recover.

This is the worst case scenario, it's extremely unlikely to happen.

I doubt that a lot of people view Bitcoin as some sort of reserve asset, for that you'd need to have be skeptical of the US dollar and fiat system in general, which overwhelming percentage of the population isn't, and pandemic isn't changing it. If inflation is going from 2% to 2.5%, people would barely notice it. You'd need a swift currency devaluation by 30-50% to make people start looking towards BTC, but even then it's not guaranteed. A lot of countries in the world experienced big drops in their currency since Bitcoin was created, and their population didn't choose Bitcoin as a method to counter it, they choose US dollar. If US dollar will start falling, gold is the next thing to choose.

So far the idea that Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation is pure theory. There's no practical evidence for it. And Bitcoin has other factors that affect its price, the biggest being pure speculation, and this factor is so big that you can't strongly tie Bitcoin to any big events.

Here's the recent example. The US announced that they will allow inflation to raise above the previous target, Bitcoin got a small bump, then lost it all minutes later.

Medium articles by some no-name guys aren't the best source of information.

LN has limitations to the size of transactions, and not everyone would want to put every single one of their transactions on LN, so there will always be demand for on-chain transactions. Even now we have huge congestions from time to time, and we aren't even close to mass adoption. So, I wouldn't worry that there will be not enough transactions on chain to create profitable enough fees for miners.

Another crappy article from another crappy site. I wonder why they keep emerging, the sites, is it really so profitable to make clickbait articles and shill for shitcoins? I guess the DeFi hype creates some demand for them, like ICOs did in 2017. The article is seriously lazy, this level of laziness is only tolerable for a forum or social media post, when there's no strong obligation to make quality content.


Yeah, no data to back this statement is shown.


Again, no source.


And this is just some shitpost. "Bitcoin is decentralized so it's uncorrelated". Decentralization = magic that makes everything better. And the author must have forgotten how Bitcoin crashed by 50% when the global markets were falling.

You need to look at it from the point of view of an average person. First, they have heard in the past that Bitcoin is a bubble, a ponzi, a tulip bulb, and other unpleasant things. They also know that it's prone to rising fast and falling past. They also know that it isn't used very much in real world, cause otherwise they would encounter it. So, why invest in something so fundamentally risky,  if you have stocks that at least can be approached from some rational point of view by looking at the company.

You don't need blockchain for fast settlement, you just need to upgrade your ancient software and maybe start using some existing solution. If modern banks have instant transactions, why can't these airlines have it too?

Blockchain is immutable and was created to achieve decentralization, and there obviously be no decentralization here, so it's just a misplaced over-engineered solution for this use case, or just a PR statement at this point.

Better to just not buy anything that isn't from big, recognizable brands. These small cheap brands can be too fresh to have a negative reputation, so if there's no much negative reviews it's still not a guarantee that the device is safe.

And good brands aren't that expensive, with the exception of apple, even Samsung phones can be bought for $100 or a bit less. And you don't have to buy this year's models, the phones from 2-3 years ago are nearly as good as the new ones, the progress has slowed down already.

If security will be low, 51% attacks would be cheaper to execute, and as the result all users will require more confirmations for transactions. If right now 1-3 confirmations are sufficient for nearly all uses, in this theoretical future with low security 10+ transactions would be the standard. that's ~2 hour wait, which can be pretty bad for some uses, but if by that time LN would be widely adopted, it shouldn't be too big of a problem. So, maybe Bitcoin could guarantee enough security for most purposes with transaction fees alone.

Eh, I worded my post a bit poorly, the OS isn't the main problem, there are open source OS for mobile platforms, the problem is hardware, unlike with desktops, it's much harder to install another OS on your mobile device, so what's actually needed is independent, privacy-respecting hardware, but there's no market for that, so it would be really hard for such company to compete. Though maybe in the future it would be easy to make DIY phones, based on microcomputers like Rasberry Pi.

That's what I'm saying, why do investors need a blockchain token for equity instead of the traditional approach? There's not much advantages but there are risks. If this method was clearly superior, you'd see a lot of big names doing this, but it has been 5 years since Ethereum launched and no big companies or traditional exchanges rushed to adopt it for their operations. And 5 years is a lot in tech, it's more than enough time to adopt new frameworks and protocols if they clearly have advantages.

Sounds like typical useless ICO - first invent a problem, then slap blockchain/token on top of it. I never heard "transparency" being some big problem in the field of finance, exchanges, equities, cash flows. Even if this projects works, it's still worse than the proper way of doing it with regulated securities, because there's always some risks to tokens - hacks, exit scams, bugs, failures of the underlying platforms, etc. And if that happens, I kinda doubt investors will be as protected as they are on fully regulated markets.

Watched the Epic Games' video from the article and found it a little bit distasteful. There's a genocide ongoing in China, North Korea has been a real-life 1984 for decades, and people get tortured in Belarus for going to protests right now, but when a private company decides to cut ties with another private company, that's the dictatorship, right?


Independent from whom? There are smaller OSs, you can already use them if you want. And if they will grow as big as Google and Apple, they'll probably engage in the same shitty practices.

And from practical point of view, there's always workarounds to such software restrictions, there are ways to install apps that aren't on app store, with or without rooting.

A mining pool is just a server, if it's located in China doesn't mean that all the miners that work for it are located in China too.

Reversing transactions is very expensive, so the most realistic scenario is only reversing like 3-10 latest blocks. So, in this hypothetical scenario when the US sends monetary aid to an all, it would be hard to actually cause some harm, because a lot of time can pass between the moment this transaction is confirmed and the moment the funds are used to buy something. For transactions equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, parties would be waiting for hundreds or a few thousands of confirmations before treating them as final. No one will ever reverse that. This is the beauty of PoW, even if miners are malicious, the costs of attacking are still there.

Now, let's ask a question, how likely is that the XRP network is centralized and its nodes can act as one entity to reverse transactions?

Not until LN is available and widely adopted. Just imagine spending BTC for daily purchases today - a few dollars of fee if you want your tx confirmed in next block most of the time, ~10 minute wait till your transaction confirms - how that would even work, do people have to stay in the shop until their transaction gets confirmed?

For now, if you don't want Visa and your bank knowing what kind of butter are you buying, you should stick to cash. It's better to convert your BTC to cash once a month and spend it, inflation doesn't matter on such a small scale.