As fees are high right now and have been this way for quite some time now, it seems like Bitcoin is becoming very expensive to use for everyday stuff.
My worry is that it will stay this way at least until Bitcoin Core starts fully supporting segwit, which is supposed to be in May in version 0.16, if I am not mistaken?
I want to hear serious objective opinions on this situation, without any finger pointing.

Primarily the issue I am seeing is that very dedicated users who tried to build Bitcoin into a widespread standard currency used in everyday life are now perhaps dependent to some extent on Bitcoin being used for such purposes., as some are selling their products for Bitcoin so they can increase the adoption.
Also some might be buying certain products in Bitcoin exclusively, but they are likely to be able to switch more easily, unlike merchants.

I do like Lightning Network and segwit as solutions for the scaling problem, but it seems to be taking some time and that is probably hurting our most dedicated users. Perhaps having a quick solution that is simple to implement is not that bad. May is still 4 months away and it is always possible for deadlines to increase.

Svaka anazliza zasnovana na matematici i dobro rasprostranjenim podacima (grafik cena npr) se moze implementirati u programe. Kao sto odavno jeste.
Tako da ako ucis stare nacine da analiziras cene na osnovu grafika, cisto da znas da je to vec odavno implementirano i samim tim vec utice na cenu.
Ako oces da analiziras, prilicno je logicno da moras da smislis nesto novo prvo, a pogotovo sto to novo mora da bude korisno.

A ovi sto se hvale sto su zaradili na kriptovalutama, msm svaka cast. Jest da je svako ko je imao bitkoin zaradio, ali ono, i to je neki uspeh sto ga nisi prodao.

Cesto ljudi kad se hvale na trgovini kriptovaluta pricaju koliko su zaradili u dolarima, a ne u bitkoinu. Jer je sam bitkoin skocio mnogo.
Tako da je to mozda dobra stvar, ali ne koliko se ljudi hvale da jeste. Moras da razumes da ako jednostavno ulozis u bitkoin i cuvas, imaces vecinu njihove zarade. Isto je i za rudarenje. Sve je to zato sto je cena bitkoina skocila, pa je profit veliki.

I understand that Core is not developing LN and that it is not their job, but they are supposed to make Bitcoin scale.
If they put all their bets on LN then they are responsible if that doesn't work out.
You can't really say that Core is just supposed to kick back and relax if LN doesn't deploy.

I understand that LN is being developed (did some tests on testnet with it). But it definitely has a lot of critical bugs, even the most developed implementations.
Personally I got segmentation fault when using c-lightning developed by Blockstream. And fees are already way to high on Bitcoin and don't seem like they are going down anytime soon.

I still like these solutions, it is just worrying that it takes so long for even Segwit to be implemented in Core, which is their responsibility.
With Segwit we would be fine with fees until LN gets developed, but segwit is not going to be fully implemented in Core before May in v0.16.
So we have few months of practically unusable Bitcoin, at least. Which is quite of a kick in the face for people who supported Bitcoin for so long and tried to implement it in their everyday lives and now they are left without it.
So these people (everyone who uses Bitcoin regularly) suffer from taking a long, but still perhaps optimal, solution.

I am not saying anything against Core, they know far better than me about Bitcoin, I am just saying that it worries me personally that vast majority of Bitcoin users suffer from unnecessary perfectionism. And I tend to be perfectionist myself, but sometimes I have to fight it for the sake of reason and priorities.

You got any more info on this? What CPUs are hardware wallets using?
Spectre is pretty wide reaching, even some ARM chips are affected, so I am quite curious about architecture hardware wallets use, since there are not many CPU manufactures in the world.

Moj ti je savet da ne kupujes altcoin-e na duge staze (ja ne bih ni na kratke, ali ako volis da rizikujes, sta da ti kazem).
I sam Bitkoin ti je rizican, ali je najsigurniji od svih kriptovaluta.

Bisq is the only decentralized fiat exchange. It works very well and has been around for some time.
You just download the app (or compile it from source) on your PC and you can trade fiat and altcoins, as long as there is BTC,LTC or Dash (called base currencies) at one side of the trade.
This is because it needs to lock one of these coins in a multisig with the other trader and the arbitrator. It requires a security deposit that is returned after the trade in one of these coins.

To jest jako los izbor reci, slazem se. Mislio sam naravno na sve ostale faktore koji uticu na cenu, a nisu marketing.
Otprilike...

It is quite worrying that such transaction congestion was allowed to happen even tho it was simple to fix.
I like Segwit and Lightning Network as solutions to the scaling problem, but if they knew that Bitcoin Core would not be able to implement even Segwit in time, it seems quite logical to increase the block size in the meantime.

It is simply not optimal to make Bitcoin unusable for a while, until the most optimal solution is fully developed. There are a lot of people over the years who integrated Bitcoin in their daily lives and this is a sort of a punishment for it, which shouldn't have happened.

I understand that some small portion of people might not want to update their clients, but the choice was either they will not be able to use Bitcoin or most of us wont.

There isn't any good reason to leave Bitcoin in this state for months until Bitcoin Core implements Segwit and they are planning to fully support it in May.
It just doesn't seem sensible to me.

Nije bas da ne pravi smisla. Rast vrednosti kripto valuta pravi savrsenog smisla. Korekcija takodje.
I odnosi vrednosti izmedju kriptovaluta cesto imaju razloge, samo nekad je taj razlog kratkorocni marketing, nekada prava vrednost neke valute.
Postoje stotine kriptovaluta koji nisu nista znatno razliciti jedni od drugih, a opet za svaki od top 10 tokena je lako naci objasenje zasto su bas tu na vrhu u tolikom moru kriptovaluta. Nije Ethereum tek tako tu, kao ni ostali.


Patenta? Na sta tacno se odnosis ovde?

Ne bavim se spekulacijama, ali sam veoma siguran da DOGECOIN nece rasti mnogo u skorije vreme. Jednostavno nema sta da ponudi.
Tako da 1000$ je sigurno neizvodljivo.

The problem with this transaction is that it is dependent on this huge transaction 82c12079724478950b08c7e95a46dd21e95e88ed79583ec10b662c2cf3dd4efe that seems to be coming from some kind of service, like an exchange or online wallet or something, because of it's size and volume.

Responsibility of this transaction should be on that service for making such huge transactions with fees not big enough. If you remember from where you received 0.1 BTC to this address 342NGGYnhqu4m4ABocZGu9LAwwWogT6BCc, then you should ask them to use CPFP method or pay for acceleration.
It is not fair for a single user to bear burden of such huge transactions that involve so many other users.

Dobro pitanje za Zuper777
Inace nije pre mesec dana, nego jos 2012-e. Sto znaci pre nesto vise od 5 godina.

Tor is as much of a honey pot as is Bitcoin. Only reason why Tor was given to public (it was developed by US Navy) is because you can only be anonymous in a crowd, so government agencies needed general population to use it and some government agencies are still funding it.

You are probably afraid of it because of a lot of stories about dark markets and all that, which is exactly why some are afraid of Bitcoin. scared they will be connected with terrorists and criminals and whatnot.
Neither Tor nor Bitcoin are very anonymous, there are better ways to be anonymous on the Internet with botnets and there are better ways to fund terrorists with cash. It is just that they are developed to be the best they can for the general population. There are reasons for existence of both of these technologies, not everything is simple like that. For certain use, they are both very good.

All modern chips are affected by Spectre vulnerability. Including AMD and even ARM chips on your smartphone.

Just accelerated the other one as well. The first one got confirmed earlier as well.
You can close this topic now, as the second one will confirm very soon as well.

Whenever someone poses a question like this, I always reply with "soap and toilet paper".
You can boast about antibiotics and vaccines all you want, but if you can't use soap or TP, you will have a lot of troubles and by using them you will not even need these medicines in the first place.

As for the wheel, well Inca never got eradicated because of their lacking of wheeled vehicles, but because they died of smallpox.

And all these electrical things, who cares?
It is cool and all, but if you are dieing of tuberculosis, Internet and light bulbs doesn't really sound that impressive, does it?

All of this is very possible, but let's not get ahead of ourselves like we have the proof already.
When people accept something as a fact without proof, even if they are right, they stop looking for proof as hard as they otherwise would.

Also there wasn't one "kid", there was a whole team of researchers.
And the "BITCOIN is NSA" part, a bit of an overreach, not that it would mean that Bitcoin is bad even if it was true.
Let's not forget that Tor was developed by US military and also the Internet and neither was a secret nor was bad for humanity.

Sometimes government agencies want to be anonymous as well. Especially if they like getting involved in other government's business.

It is not that black and white. Sometimes governments need to mask their operations by hiding in the crowd, so they gift the weapon to all, so no one knows when they use it and when their weaker enemies use it.
And when their weak enemies use it, it just gives them more justification for their existence.

Compression will be very useful for some specific transactions, but for most it will not, so it is not worth it.
If you ever tried compressing entire blockchain, you will quickly see why. It takes a lot of time and it results not so impressive decrease in size, not even half the original size.

Transactions use a lot of cryptography and in good cryptography results are most often very random looking.
This goes for signatures,keys, etc. It just tends not to be very secure if there is a pattern.

Not even the slightest. Changing the address has no effect on the protocol as on the protocol level, addresses don't even exist, it is all about UTXOs.
So no, using the same address or changing it will have no effect as the address is simply something for humans to understand, but for the blockchain it only matters to reference transactions where you got coins.

I just accelerated 16ec484870fdc320e49b56035e1a625f447c4490606e3a7749ba3919744dff9c for you.
It should confirm very quickly, after that you only have that child transaction to confirm.