There is a very good example of Greg Maxwell's rampant dishonesty.

In your comparison, you are comparing an absolute worse case (likely malicious) scenario with the best case scenario of the "solution" that you are pushing.

That is baseless speculation.

FYI, LTC really does not need scaling, as their blocks are really not full. It is not uncommon for found blocks to have less than 10 transactions...

If a pool is signaling for SegWit, and you are a supporter of SegWit, and an owner of mining equipment, then you might want to have your equipment pointed at that pool. If you are a supporter of BU and/or actively dislike SegWit, then you would probably not point your equipment at that pool, and if you already have your equipment pointed at that pool, you would probably move it to another pool. If you are neutral, then you will probably base your decision on other factors.

The opposite is also true for pools that are signaling for BU.

At the end of the day, the hashrate split of SW/BU signaling is based on the opinions and beliefs of mining equipment operators/owners. Slush is simply allowing owners to have either opinion on the scaling debate and still have the ability to keep their equipment pointed at slush.


The miners will always have a choice. If the pool is not signaling a certain choice that conforms with the miner's choice, the miner will simply point their equipment elsewhere.

So you go from "Bitcoin failing would be worse than other systems failing" to "Bitcoin is vulnerable, so we can't make it useable"

Railroad networks is a good example of a system that contradicts your point. The same is true with GPS technology.

Yes, it does. LN is signature heavy (roughly 4x as much signature space is required to open a LN channel as traditional single private key transactions currently require), and are chosen to be a winner via SegWit.

Do you have any idea how many signature spammers there are out there that post random nonsense? Do you have any idea how many trolls there are here that make it difficult to follow conversations, and that derail conversations? Do you have any idea how many overall idiots there are here?

Your signature implies that you are the shill

You are wrong. There are plenty of systems out that, even a minor hiccup would cause economic disruptions greater than the total market value of bitcoin currently in just a few days.

Also, similar the situation with Bitcoin currently, if the developing engineers designing the above described systems were to plan for absolute worse case scenarios that are all but guaranteed not to happen, then the systems being developed would be very inefficient, and would not work well.

The 'discount' to signature space that SW gives picks winners and losers.

This is not how systems and networks are planned. When an engineer is planning a system, he will make certain assumptions regarding what will likely happen in the future.

It is possible that these transactions contain some kind of information that is being used by some other entity.

I remember a few months back, there was a thread about an address spamming 0.00001BTC, but it turned out that the transactions were acting as some sort of 'anchor' to an altcoin.

Don't get me wrong, it is my belief that Wright is a fraud and a liar, and more importantly that Wright is not Satoshi.

It is just that I cannot authoritatively say that Wright is not Satoshi [as a fact] (I can only say that I believe that Wright is not Satoshi).

Sure, Wright could move known Satoshi coins and it would be known that he is satoshi, however the absence of this movement does not disprove that Wright is satoshi.

The only way to truly disprove something is to prove a certain set of circumstances that would make it impossible for this something to be true. So, in order to prove that Wright is not Satoshi, someoen would need to show that it would be impossible that Wright is Satoshi (one example of this would be to show that Wright was in a coma when Satoshi was posting).

I would say that the current evidence shows that it is highly unlikely that Wright is Satoshi.

What you say is true, however Wright has not been in this situation.

To play devil's advocate, it is possible that someone was able to uncover that Wright was Satoshi, confronted Wright (and attempted to gain access to Wright's private keys), and in order to throw the attacker off his trail, he created this multi-year elaborate scheme that would supposedly prove that he is Satoshi, with the intention of having the story quickly unravel under scrutiny. 

This is invalid logic. I am glad that I have never lived in the city where you worked as a cop (since it would be so easy to prove that I did not steal from the store, since I have not proven that I did not steal from the store, I must therefore be guilty of theft).

I think it can be reasonably concluded that they started signaling for SegWit as a result of the DDoS attack they suffered - I believe this can be reasonably concluded by looking at his Twitter feed and using good judgment.

I personally believe the poll he cited was just a (poor) attempt of covering up the fact that he was being extorted into signaling for SegWit. Although, in theory, it is possible that he polled many of the very large miners who are mining on his pool privately -- I doubt it though.

I am sure that he has been under a lot of pressure to take a position on the scaling debate, and from what I can tell, he does not like either (SegWit/Bitcoin Unlimited) option. I suspect that both sides were attempting to get him to take their respective sides.

I feel bad for him because of all the pressure he has been under.

From what I can tell, he was coerced into signaling for SegWit.

It is very difficult to prove a negative, and to my knowledge, the hypothesis that Wright is Satoshi has not been disproven.

With the above being said, the evidence that connects Wright to being Satoshi is dishonest/invalid and does not prove there is a connection. Further, Wright at one point said he was going to provide proof that he is Satoshi in the (then) near future, but failed to do so. As a result of the above, I think it is most probably a fact that Wright is in fact not Satoshi.

The actual number of miners is actually a little bit higher than that because some miners find blocks infrequently enough so that they do not show up on that chart.

I do however agree that the extent that pooled mining has become prevalent makes it necessary for more than just mining nodes to exist. I suspect that satoshi did not foresee the efficiency gains that the stratum protocol provides. I do think that there are net benefits to both the stratum protocol and pooled mining, primarily because both have resulted in the orphan rate to decline to near zero, which results in a smaller number of confirmations being safe to accept.

I would point out that a random user running a full node will do exactly nothing to "secure" the network (it may actually make it less secure), as if this random user's consensus settings differ from the rest of the network (primarily those who are economically significant), then the random user's node will simply reject blocks/transactions that the rest of the network accepts, and this random user's node will simply be isolated.

On the other hand, if an economically significant entity, BitPay for example, were to institute certain rules, then anyone who transacts with (or via) BitPay will need to follow these rules, or else the merchant will act as if payment was not received. If BitPay were to reject transactions/blocks that most of the rest of the economy accepts, then it would very quickly lose it's customers -- similarly, if it were to reject transactions/blocks that the miners accept, then it would become isolated and would never get any confirmations for transactions that it accepts that are sent to it, so assuming the miners are all on the same page regarding consensus rules, it will effectively be forced to accept the rules that the miners provide.

If a customer of Bitstamp were to wire USD to Bitstamp, purchase BTC, and subsequently withdraw the purchased BTC, then running a full node will provide them with no benefit because if the coins that Bitstamp sends utilize different consensus rules then what you wish, then you will not have any recourse against Bitstamp beyond not using them in the future -- they can simply tell you what consensus rules they use in advance, and you can make the decision as to if you want to buy BTC from Bitstamp.

If you are going to do this, then I would advise you to run your own (private) electrum server that is capable of handling this kind of workload.

Your electrum client will be able to confirm that that any transaction data returned by an electrum server will be accurate, however you will need to place trust in the electrum server in a sense that they will fulfill your request for data, and if they do not, then your customers could be negatively impacted. Within the electrum servers that public limits, the highest limits among electrum servers generally tops out at 10,000, and I would recommend to create a new electrum wallet when you approach this number of received transactions.

If you run your own powerful electrum server, you can take steps to prevent the general public from utilizing your server's resources, and it may be able to handle requests of this magnitude.

I would also point out that attempting to run *any* wallet software that is monitoring 100,000 addresses will require a very large amount of resources.

Or we could do what most cities that consistently have congestion problems do...increase traffic capacity in as simple and cost effective way possible.

I just checked and it looks like that MoneyGram is charging $36 for an $1,800 payment to Tunisia, which works out to be 2% (not 'well in excess of 2%).

I have no idea what kind of spread MG will charge for currency conversion, however I doubt it is higher than 1%, so with the OP's fee, a potential seller is looking at roughly a 5% discount in total.

When I buy bitcoin from others, the smallest discount I will consider buying at is 5%, and I would make the seller cover any sending fees/costs, so I would consider the OP's offer to be fairly competitive.

The OP remains competitive when looking at offers on LBC. 

I don't think I would go as far as to say that Roger is "compromised"

In satoshi's whitepaper, he referred to nodes as a mining entity, and referred to non-mining entities as "SPV clients"

In practice today, anyone who is receiving a payment of BTC prior to sending goods/services does need to be running a full node.