UASF is a technical joke, that if implemented will do nothing other than make a bunch of nodes not work until they go back to a compatible implementation. 

No. The Chinese government does not make loans to private companies. It is theoretically possible that Bitmain has debt, although this is unlikely (beyond short term accounts payable type debt) because it is fairly easy to figure out their BTC holdings, and the amount of bitcoin they hold has been growing over time.
I have never heard anything along these lines before, so I would say it is probably safe to say that this came from a random newbie on bitcointalk

I think it is interesting that the dirbag jratcliff63367 agreed to say that he personally know that Roger Ver was employing an astroturfing firm, attract a bunch of attention, only to later admit this was a baseless claim with absolutely no merit.

I wonder if the above was one of blockstream's troll/smear campaigns and how much that dirtbag ended up getting paid to say that.

Not derailing this thread. The OP is looking for a service, you offered your services, and I told the OP it is not a good idea to utilize your services.

In other words, I am right then.

No. You are outright lying now.

Nice ad hominem there.....that isn't even true, but that isn't the point.

Why don't you clarify then?

I don't think that LN node operators will let any of their channels get to a state in which the counterparty's balance is 0 because this would result in a situation in which the counterparty could attempt to close the channel in an "old" state, and would be risking nothing in attempting in doing so.

This would entail a lot of extra processing all for a few extra measly cents in a transaction. Normally a node will receive a transaction, and if said transaction is valid per the blockchain and does not conflict with another transaction in it's mempool they will accept said transaction, regardless of the attached fee. You are proposing that a (mining) node accept a never before seen transaction, not relay said transaction, and if a conflicting transaction is later received, to drop the original.

This has the potential to result in lower overall transaction fees because the public transaction may have a lower tx fee attached, and if the private higher tx fee transaction was broadcast, then other nodes would have rejected the conflicting public transaction.

It most likely would get relayed. Pools do not want to harm their reputation by confirming a double spend transaction, so they will broadcast any transaction they receive to the rest of the network, and will not accept any transaction that conflicts with other transactions in their mempool.

Just an FYI if you use this person as escrow -- a few months ago he was acting as an "escrow" in which significant sums of bitcoin were lost due to his gross negligence. Funds were eventually recovered, however prior to recovering the funds, he had publicly said that those who had entrusted him to act as escrow were going to have losses totaling 100% of the bitcoin that was lost...in other words he took no responsibility in even attempting to pay any of the losses out of his own pocket.

If you are in need of an escrow, I would suggest that you look elsewhere.

It is my understanding that as a Multibit HD user, you need to pay a small fee to the Multibit devs in each transaction. This not only increases the costs of using Multibit because of this fee, but also because of the higher necessary TX fee as a result of the extra output (and sometimes extra input in order to pay for this fee).

It is not a good idea to run any kind of wallet software that is generating any seeds and/or private keys and/or signing transactions on a VM as VMs have very bad random number generation.

Someone that wanted to setup, say 100 nodes would only need to download the blockchain once. They could then rent cheap VPSs in various datacenters, and set their blocks to 'blocksonly' and enable pruning to some very low number. If you really know what you are doing, you would not even need to send each of your VPSs the blockchain, as you could simply program your node to accept 0000000000000000001523891872bed55d9cfdb60702a47722fc016e503b9602 as the hash of block 460909 (or whatever other actual hash of whatever other block number).

These nodes would really not be *actual* full nodes, however no one from the outside would be able to tell the difference.

https://twitter.com/f2pool_wangchun/status/850053367988592642
https://twitter.com/f2pool_wangchun/status/850060922349432833
https://twitter.com/f2pool_wangchun/status/850061625059024896

The last one appears to effectively be a vote of no confidence for core

The founder of f2pool recently tweeted something that effectively said that he is not going to support SegWit. This was not long after Greg Maxwell made unfounded claims that Bitmain's miners were reverse engineered by himself, and that Bitmain was actively engaging in using ASICBOOST, and that this is why they are against SegWit.

I am unsure of the legitimacy of Magnr, and cannot reasonably advise if it is some kind of scam or not. It looks like they are offering 1.28% APY on BTC deposits (per year), which is not much more than what you would expect to earn in a single month on bitfinex. For this reason alone, I would advise against depositing BTC there as you will almost certainly earn much less than alternatives, and will have less access to your funds.

I had never previously heard of Toro however I would advise against doing so. First of all, their website looks like little effort has been put into it. Secondarily, it looks like when you "invest" in this site, you are more investing in traders' actual positions (if they make money, you make money, if they lose money, you lose money), which is much riskier than giving a loan to fund traders' positions that gets repaid first when positions are closed.

BitMEx offers futures trading and AFAIK, no actual BTC is actually borrowed.

The number of nodes is meaningless. It is trivial for someone to spin up 100's (or thousands, or more) nodes with little to no cost. This is especially true when discussing short term trends.

Fair enough. Although the longer term trends to point to faster internet speeds.

I would also point out that a full node will do very little for you if those you are trading with are not trusting you to send first to them. (at least in terms of security, it will help somewhat in terms of privacy, although I believe this is probably mostly marginal). If you are buying BTC from coinbase and subsequently spending that BTC over time at merchants that utilize BitPay to process their transactions, then using a full node to validate transactions from coinbase will do little good, because if coinbase were to cheat you, they might as well send you nothing, and full nodes do not need to validate that a transaction that you sent has confirmed.

1 - they could degrade the influence of blockstream by implementing BU (which they are doing) and/or implementing another scaling solution that blockstream does not support

2 - I don't think Bitmain even sells LTC ASICs. However the market for BTC ASICs is much larger than the market for LTC ASICs.

See my responses in red above.

It doesn't look like there is very much data available for this measurement. It looks like unit costs of internet declined by ~1/3 in 2015 and 40% in 2014 though. I would be surprised to see those levels of price declines to entirely reverse in the span of two years.

Why would Bitmain not want a larger max block size? Larger blocks will ultimately lead to additional total tx fees (and in turn higher overall block rewards), both of which will lead to greater profitability of those who run their equipment, which would theoretically lead to higher market prices for their equipment, and most importantly, more profits for them.

I am not quite sure where you are getting this number.

The current max block size is 1 MB, and the difficulty adjusts so that on average there will be 144 blocks found every 24 hours. This is 144 MB per day if you are using the 'blocks only' feature.

144 MB per day times 30 days is 4.32 GB per month if all you download is blocks and do not accept incoming connections.

If you start to accept incoming connections and have 8 peers at any one time, then your bandwidth grows to 34.56 GB per month.

If you want to receive 0/unconfirmed transactions as they appear on the network, then you would roughly double required bandwidth to ~75 GB per month for each of upload and download -- you would want to obviously disable RBF, and would want to set your minrelayfee (or whatever it is called) high enough so that you do not receive transactions that are unlikely to confirm.

You would need some unknown additional amount to account for serving new nodes old blocks.

Looking at cox communications, it looks like that their 'fair use' threshold is at 1TB per month, and effectively only applies in a few cities. This is 3x above your claimed 300 GB per month requirement to run a full node, and ~13x of my above calculations.

I would also point out that it is unlikely that 3MB (or 13 MB) blocks will be full over the long run currently, so even if the max block size were increased to these amounts, you would likely not be in danger of hitting the 'fair use' limits.


I am not sure about this. Over the past ~4-5 years, my internet speeds have been growing at a much higher rate than my internet bill. (I don't have specific numbers).

Longer term trends show that residential internet speeds are growing faster than what moores law would anticipate. Again, looking at cox pricing, it currently costs ~$100/month for 300 mbs of internet download speed, and 30 mbs upload speed.

If you counted the price of both the additional required phone line and the ISP service, it would cost ~$50 for a 28.8k connection about 20 years ago. Using round numbers, the unit cost of internet speeds (download) have decreased by a factor of ~5000x over the past 20 years.