And me

Let BU fuck off and fork, the Core chain difficulty will plummet as the biggest miners are supporting BU, and for a while at least, the smaller guys can get some decent income, may even have GPU mining worth while for a short time.

I don't have the skill to make it happen, but I have had an idea about a crypto currency that by design does not reward more work, but rather rewards simply being a part of the network and making it work. Things like this could never happen.

Santander are a crock of shite anyway, this news being true or not

Maybe someone sat on a breaker for the spam-o-tron server and it's just rebooting

It costs so much to mine the damn things, plus the amount of coins that are being kept just to sell later on for profit inflates the price. Increasing demand and people willing to pay the high price keeps the price high.

Some things need to be ruled with an iron fist, and currency is one of them. Look where Bitcoin is, 2 groups with different ideas slagging each other off, blaming each other for the transaction backlog, trying to implement 2 different sets of rules, it's not helping. I'm hopefully starting a Crypto payment processing service this year, and I've had to drop support for Bitcoin and move elsewhere. It's all to volatile at the moment, I'd rather wait until either the chain forks, or this crap gets settled and things stabilise again.

I think Bitcoin will stay the way it is often described, digital gold. Mined, traded, but not used for transacting on a daily basis. It lacks the capacity to process transactions fast enough to be a serious currency for daily use, another coin will take that place. One with a much lower value, higher availability and less of a focus on being 100% peer to peer with every part of the network untrusted.

The mining process should not be rewarded by the creation of money, but rather rewarded with small fees on very large transaction numbers, and the unit of value will need to be created at any point to allow other currencies to be moved into it, but only by trusted parties with witnessing and consent.

Trying to make an exact copy isn't really the right way to go about it. If a business partner fucks off with all the rights to a product, stealing it back isn't the best way to go about it.

Pope of nope. I can keep using the Bitcoin testnet for the moment as I have 10BTC on it, and mobile apps that I know work properly. The software is modular so changing coin on the back-end is easy.

I guess when I have a more substantial prototype system working trying to work on an inter-service blockchain for off-main transactions would be a possibility. Not going to look into that yet though, someone else may have sorted it by the time I am near a working system.

..

I'm looking at Litecoin at the moment, having issues getting the Testnet blockchain to download though :/

I was going to use Bitcoin as it has the largest user base, is easy to get hold of and is unlikely to vanish any time soon. To  be honest I am considering focusing on the hardware and payment processing side, and trying to find an existing and trusted Bitcoin service provider to handle the back-end Bitcoin transactions and keeping data secure.

Kind of like tracing cash and finding it was deposited in a bank, then suspecting every customer that ever used that branch in case they had that cash now.

You don't get sent specific coins, at a network level there is no such thing as coins, just values that get moved from private key to private key.

Unless you are doing something dodgy with Bitcoin, there's nothing to worry about.

If you put 100 inputs and 100 outputs into a single transaction, there is no way to link one side to the other. I believe this is how a mixer would work, not really needed to look into it though.

I just made my first "payment" using Bitcoin on an Ingenico iCT250 using a card and PIN system. The video I made was 30 seconds long as I was having to balance the terminal, enter a card and operate the hardware with one hand. Still 20 times quicker than waiting for a single confirmation on the network

There was no actual transaction made, however that is just a case of pulling more data from the database, constructing the transaction and sending it to my local node. As a proof of concept, it works and the server generates an on the fly user balance from the available UTXO's rather than an account balance in a table

I considered a Direct Debit type system where by if a user wants to buy Bitcoin, it's takes from the bank account as a DD on the understanding that Bitcoin will not be given to them for a set time to prevent an immediate chargeback. Still has issues with a user being able to go to the bank quite a while after payment has been made and get it back. The bank reverses the transaction, then investigates.

You can always ask for a deposit in BTC, they can get this from an ATM or buying in cash. The max amount they can ever pay for using your platform is the same as the deposit. That way if they pay, then make a chargeback claim when they get the Bitcoin, you take the deposit and ditch them as a customer. I guess from a legal point, if they make a chargeback after spending the Bitcoin they bought, they may have committed an offence in the form of stealing. I believe the UK has some guidance on Bitcoin, but nothing is law yet. A lawyer is the best place to go.

There seems to be a rather large dislike towards off-chain transactions and wallet services holding keys on here, but as the block reward keeps going down, fees are going to go up. Bitcoin will most likely end up as nothing but a digital gold. No-one transacts with gold any more, and the cost of doing so is too high for smaller amounts anyway.

Paying tens of dollars/pounds/whatever is OK for a transaction with a dollar/pound value of thousands, but where the technology can really show value is in smaller transactions. Burger vans, small cafe's, mobile traders etc, Bitcoin is an ideal solution for them to accept digital payments, but if the fee for a burger is a third of the price, it's not worth it. The trader won't accept that loss, and the customer won't pay that much extra either. There is also the confirmation time. You could potentially wait hours for a transaction to be confirmed if you pay the "normal" fee, if there's investors or exchanges paying higher fees to get their transactions on the chain ASAP.

It is a fairly new technology with a strong community, and a lot of places (as in real physical stores) do accept it as payment, but it's nowhere near as quick as waving my phone on a terminal and paying in 2 seconds. That's what people want. Simple, easy and fast. I'm actually putting a lot of time and money (that I  don't really have at the moment) into creating a payment system that has the convenience and speed of EMV/EFT, but also keeps away from the "PayPal for Bitcoin" concept. I even have an idea to, even in the event of all servers and backups being destroyed, give users a way to get 100% of their Bitcoin back (not accounting for pending transactions that didn't make it).

What could work as a solution is a second block chain. Optimised for fast transaction times and used for transactions between exchanges/payment processors etc. Coins mined on this chain would have no value, and it would require all participating services to partially trust each other. When a user wants to use one of the services on this chain, they would send funds to a multi-sig address with a key held by each participating service provider. The user is then given a pre-mined coin to that BTC value and it can be transacted as normal. On wanting to take funds back to the main chain, x amount of providers will have to agree that the user doesn't have any outstanding transactions to be confirmed and the amount they want to take out is correct. They then sign the TX on the main chain and the user gets their "real" Bitcoin back.

Of course, mining for no reward would be an issue, however that could be worked out, likely.

Not when dealing with electronic payments. I mis-worded it as a flaw as it is how it works, what isn't sent to an address is the transaction fee, but it is an easy mistake to make if you don't know that.


I know all to well what a mistake can cost. If you lost your car keys in a shop somewhere, would you just walk away and accept that you may never see it again, or do you go and ask if they've been handed in? Possibly visit local police and give them a description and hope that whoever finds them doesn't just drive away with your car, but does the honest thing?


As I said, the bank will be able to get funds back, even with inter-bank payments. If crypto currencies are going to be more than a speculative tool and store of value and be of every day use, there needs to be mechanisms to protect against monumental user fuckups. Even the banks do that, Android pay often gets me to enter my PIN when I use it in a new place or for a higher than normal amount. Granted that's also to prevent my phone being stolen and used for buying things, but it wouldn't be too hard for me to lean over near a card terminal and get unlucky and pay for something accidentally. Pretty much anything other than McDonalds is an unusual transaction for me

I do agree with what you are saying, Bitcoin itself can't make mistakes, only the user can, but it would only take a few people that made mistakes to post around social media. The mistake of 2 or 3 people would become "Bitcoin, the currency that keeps your $10,000 dollar mistake and leaves you to it" if the media got hold of it.

As I've posted recently in other topics I'm working on a payment system and am currently using Bitcoin as the value carrier.

I've been trying to keep everything on-chain while providing a whole range of transaction initiators (smart cards, RFID, mobile app, web, QR, biometric, you name it ) and also speed up the confirmation times in a similar way to Visa. Post will be coming soon with more details

The issue is network fees for small transactions that could end up meaning that when added to the service fee (1-2%), the merchant gets (may as well be) nothing.

I don't want to be a Paypal for Bitcoin by taking payments and just moving balances around in the database until someone wants to withdraw, but with current and possible future high fees for smaller transactions, it may be the only option for some transactions.

I'm asking the community as a whole, if you were considering trying out such a service, would the fact that transactions may not happen on the chain, but just be a number in a database be an issue for you? It would likely be an automated calculation that if the service fees plus network fees are more than x% of the transaction then it is processed internally only.

This would only apply to transactions made at a payment terminal or other merchant device, and the service fees are on the merchant side not the user. Straight user to user transactions would only incur the network fees, same as regular banking really. Free unless making money from the service, and even then I want to make it dirt cheap.

I posted something similar in the other thread. Nodes should check that fees don't exceed the average of the last 10 blocks highest fees. If it's significantly higher, send a return message back asking for confirmation of the fee. Nothing to do with miners as it is on a node level, and in theory, a mistaken fee shouldn't enter the network beyond the first node it reaches, which would hold it and require a signed message from the sender to confirm it is correct.

I'm not too clued up on the core protocol, I use nbitcoin and BitcoinLib for making transactions and sending them off to the network through my testnet node, so not sure if it's possible without changes to the nodes and wallets.