There is a lot of misinformation out there (i.e. part of BU as being a closed source, which they actually stated that they will PREVENT such thing), so one has to do his own research.
I'm not familiar with the intricacies of it, but I'm probably the only one who doesn't see any problem with miners taking over.
Most people are clueless on how economy works (Andreas included).
Vertical monopoly (as opposed to horizontal monopoly) is actually a good thing,
which would probably lead to a lower fees, so it would benefit both the miners and the users.
(Think of buying a cellphone. The cellular manufacturer forces you to also buy the camera, which if you had bought them separately it would cost you more.)
Users could have BU *and* LN so they could choose the best path for them which means more options to the user. What's wrong with that?
The thing is that people are "all for decentralization" but want BTC to rule... I see it as an oxymoron.
I really don't have a problem with BTC failing. That being said, crypto world is too centralized around BTC anyway.
Everything is traded against BTC and we need some more options. If BTC fails it fails... After the dust settles we would be in a better place.
Decentralisation can mean a lot of different things. Bitcoin is decentralised - we don't need hundreds of Bitcoin rip offs doing the same thing on another pointless network (or worse, the cryptocurrencies that are quite centralised). There's no point going on a website and deciding whether to pay with Bitcoin, Ethereum, DASH etc when even the more original ones like Monero only make petty modifications to the network which Bitcoin should be able to make if needed anyway through the fact that it's open source. I do agree that it's good for miners to have the choice - but they don't really, because they know that if there's a hard fork and other people don't support it they'll be mining nothing. In reality, the economic majority makes the decision as to whether the changes will go through and miners will rightfully be influenced by that majority (which is why, despite Bitmain and others' attempt to manipulate that economic majority with their mining monopolies, Core will continue running Bitcoin). |
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You're looking at it wrong. The hard fork will not happen until BU has a majority of the hash rate (which it hasn't got particularly close to yet), and it's unlikely to happen until that rate rises well above there. It's absolutely not too late, actually it's too early. You should only take your BTC out of exchanges if the hard fork looks close to happening based on reasonable indicators. |
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According to a mining calculator, at current difficulty you would mining a block roughly every 47 days. At this rate, variance would still be very significant and you wouldn't want to live in the knowledge that you could have to keep living on the same block for a much longer time than expected at any point. For that reason, I would suggest using a pool. But since pools can take fees and even if they're low they can be annoying, plus the Bitcoin network needs some help decentralising into a collection of many different pools, the best solution shouldn't be to join a pool but to start a pool. With your hashrate you would already be bigger than some smaller pools yourself, so I would start your own pool with negligible fees (maybe 0.1-0.3%) and then advertise your pool for its low fees and soon enough miners will join to decrease the variance. You should also limit your pool so that it couldn't have more than 1% of the network's total hash rate, in the spirit of decentralisation. Even though with this setup you'd be generating a Bitcoin every ~4 days, you should still have a backup - at least have some skills that could be applicable to other jobs if the difficulty or state of the Bitcoin network changes and it becomes harder for you to earn. |
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From the article: Transactions are slow to reach the needed amount of confirmations to be reliable They always have been fast enough in the past. This is not an indication that Satoshi made errors, it's just an indication that Bitcoin's role has changed since then, hence why Bitcoin's code is open source and there are different solutions being debated to fix the problem. By your logic we need a new currency every time there's a change. People see it more as speculative investment than a useful currency People see it as both. Nothing completely useless can just grow and grow for years and become a huge market - it takes time and legitimacy. Plenty of places online still accept Bitcoin as currency and as it grows more will continue to do so. Once again, you make this judgement based on a current situation rather than the nature of Bitcoin, which can change. Technically challenging to understand and use for the average citizen Download an app on your phone. Buy Bitcoin. Scan address and hit send. A baby could do it. The reason you think that it's technically challenging is because you assume that everyone needs to know. People don't understand the inner works of the banking system, but they don't need to know to spend their inflationary currency. Just because people who are into Bitcoin right now know a lot because of their demographic, doesn't mean that everyone else will have to. Mining is becoming centralized and is already out of the reach of most people or even businesses (mining doesn’t scale well) Okay, I agree with this one, but other cryptocurrencies don't propose viable solutions, and even though ETH can still be mined by GPUs its development itself is too centralised for a free currency. |
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It was pretty obvious that the altcoin surges were just fads. I think that people saw that they were getting pumped and a lot of big money joined in to soar to the top and, now that they've reached it (consistently for several days), they've decided to start dropping out. I still think there are some naive newbies who think that DASH is going somewhere though (ETH probably is going somewhere but never as high as Bitcoin), but they'll drop out along with the people who just want to increase their stake in Bitcoin.
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Hi guys.
Plz don't kill me for asking.
I see a lot of hype around alt-coins.
When asked, many will point out POS as a plus vs bitcoin.
I was wondering:
1. Can Bitcoin change to POS if wanted to by the community?
2. Is POS really an advantage (if it is - is it an advantage because it saves energy, or because it diffuses power)?
Thank you!
PoS doesn't diffuse power, with PoW you can buy things which earn you the Bitcoin whereas with PoS you buy Bitcoin to earn the Bitcoin, either way there will be some extent of centralisation and fights with the small people. It's also comparatively vulnerable. It needs time to develop. |
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I've received some feedback on my project and I'm happy to provide answers for the whole community. - Poor quality of photos/texts/materials on the website.We're on beta version, it is clearly indicated on the website. While all necessary features present, some glitches are still possible. Do us a favor, let us know what we can improve, we'll be happy to get better. Bear with us, the launch day was yesterday! - How do I know this isn't just a complicated or elaborate Ponzi scheme?Easy - nobody holds any money. Let me explain how we work. A start-up needs money to develop its product, they need $1500 for incorporation, $10,000 for website and $15,000 to hire cool sales team. They're generous enough to give 5% for this money, $1,500+$10,000+$15,000=$26,500. We start fundraising at https://www.TipTopFund.com by selling shares, say, at 0.05 btc per share. Thus, to pass the 1st stage and incorporate the company we need to sell 30 shares. An investor buys 1 share and pays 0.05 etc to a multisig escrow account maintained by http://www.EscrowMyBits.com. Not TipTopFund, nor the start-up touch any money. If we don't sell 30 shares within a certain time period the stage has not completed and everyone takes their money back from the escrow. Well, minus 1%, this is what EscrowMyBits earns. If we do sell 30 shares the escrow releases the funds and the start-up initiates incorporation. The money is released either directly to a company that provides legal service or, if they don't accept bitcoin, we sell bitcoin and pay that company. Incorporation process is transparent as everyone may check status of the company online. TipTopFund acts as a trustee for all investors, it joins the board as a co founder and for $1500 we get 0.28% in the that company. Stage 1 completed. Stage 2 begins, now we raise $10,000. This time we have web developers who agree to do the job and take bitcoin as a payment. So when we successfully sell the next portion of shares to collect that amount the money goes directly to the web developers. Nobody else touches the money! And TipTopFund with investors increase their share in the business on 1.8% and now we own 2.08%. As the second stage is done we have a company and a website and now the business has more value than it had in the beginning. We may want to raise the price of its shares and now to get aboard new investors will pay 0.07 btc, not 0.05 btc. But again, we collect the money on the multisig escrow account maintained by EscrowMyBits.com and once collected it will be released directly to the developer/provider. In our case we will put that money on the bank account of the company and will pay the salary to the cool sales guys who will generate us revenue. We will control the bank account and all investors will see statements regularly. Once we start make sales the value of our business increases again which will reflect in the price of of shares we own. And so on. Thus, the money is always under control: in the beginning it is collected on a multisig escrow account, and once collected it gets released to a developer/provider who delivers services bringing value to our business.Actually it was me that gave that feedback, and I'm impressed with your response. Maybe I was a bit harsh. Will be watching this project. I still think you need to change your approach on some of this though (particularly, stop giving statistics about things that you don't know about or can't be consistent like a 90% success rate or on a comparison between "usual investments" and you). It doesn't come off as a professional or legitimate company, and I know you want to change that. Articles like this and reviews like these don't fill me with confidence about Escrow My Bits either, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that. |
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It seems Eth and maybe dash / Ripple  ? are fast catching up, btc is only 67% market now. The lack of dev consensus in BTC is killing it at an amazing rate.....at some point market share will be lost if this continues and why would people switch back. The big implication being if BTC can not even decide on this issue, what about all the other issues that are going to come up? I wonder when BTC community is going to see this? Before it is to late? Ripple is kind of irrelevant, they're some strange cryptocurrency gateway or something - I hardly understand it, but I know that they only want to supplement Bitcoin. DASH is also kind of irrelevant, just because their market cap is still well under a tenth of Bitcoin's. Ethereum is definitely getting somewhere but it's on its own path. Even if it's price became higher than Bitcoin, it wouldn't have taken Bitcoin's place - it's tiny centralised development team shows its separation from any communities associated with Bitcoin and Bitcoin wouldn't die. But Bitcoin could potentially die from itself (rather than the rise of altcoins). This would only happen if the debate went on for more than another ~8 months without a solution and the cost of transactions kept going way up. Even then I don't think it would ever die, just suffer. |
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A bit late to be talking about the ETF, but true that there are two different ideologies at play.
I don't think that the two are mutually exclusive. Bitcoin is still dominant among criminals on the dark web (with some use of Monero as well), and is arguably used for money laundering as well. But while it facilitates criminals, its deflation and convenience makes it ideal for ordinary use and investors as well. It's the broad use of Bitcoin that makes it so great, and it improves the privacy in society while having the ability to develop into the mainstream.
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Surely a BTU altcoin would be the cleanest option. And I have already said in other threads that it may not be the worst for the Bitcoin Unlimited supporters. Above all if they base the initial distribution on recent Bitcoin balances, like the "Clams" altcoin did, and maximal coin supply and reward schedule are not changed.
They may not get an user network like BTC from the beginning, but they could demonstrate their technology works and doesn't lead to centralization. At the same time, they could continue to advocate for Emergent Consensus in the "true" Bitcoin, but without holding up the hard fork threat.
I know they want to change Bitcoin, but even that could work at the end: If their EC system works well in the wild (where I unfortunately have my doubts) they would have two "success options" that could make them profit from this strategy: 1) BTU becoming a strong cryptocurrency 2) their EC system having chances of being adopted in BTC, too (that would be difficult, but not impossible, as their opponents would lose a major argument if it works well).
BU already is Bitcoin. SegWit is a whole bag of new bullshit rules - imposed upon Bitcoin. SegWit is the alt.Look at you, you have big font so it must be true. SegWit represents new rules and the potential use of a far more convenient Lightning Network - it is a change to what Bitcoin currently is, but it would just be an update to the code which is entirely normal and wouldn't change anything about what Bitcoin actually does. BU would be a new coin - Bitcoin owners would automatically own it but it would still literally be a new coin. As CCN reasonably defines altcoins, it's any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin - which it would be, it would be BTU, not BTC. |
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As I get it, BU is going to use the same blockchain that Core now uses, right?
And if I understand that point correctly, I should have the same amount of new bitcoins as I had at the moment of split since the new blockchain will basically use the same addresses and balances (so, nominally, I should become twice as rich). It heavily reminds me of a philosophical problem that rises when someone is copied atom by atom (split mind). So what will happen to my balances, say, in my personal wallet, Coinbase wallet, and an exchange account? Let's assume that exchanges start listing the new Bitcoin, will they recreate wallets which would match the ones in the old Bitcoin (with all their balances)?
In your personal wallet, you'll own the amount of Bitcoin you owned before, plus an equal amount of BTU. In your exchange wallet, BTU would be listed as an alt and withdrawals would be processed in Bitcoin, so it's likely that you would just have the Bitcoin that you left in there and not any BTU (as the Bitcoin was all that you decided to put into the exchange), but I can't be sure of that. Coinbase is a lot more of a grey area because they didn't agree to list BTU as an alt. With Ethereum, they essentially took the ETC part of their users' holdings, so who knows whether they'll do the same with BTU or BTC, or whether they'll let their users have both. If you have any sense, take all of your money out of your exchange and Coinbase wallets if a hard fork actually seems imminent. Not that I expect it to happen. |
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BCC vs. BCU  This is different, I'd say it's based on the thought that the fork will never happen rather than whether traders support it. Imaginary BU coins obviously won't trade as high as Bitcoin unless they're being pumped by a few whales who want Bitcoin to be centralised like Jihan Wu (and I'm surprised that they're not being pumped but I guess they're focusing on screwing over small miners). Still obvious that BTC is far superior to BTU though, since no one actually trusts Bitcoin Unlimited enough to run nodes from them with all their incompetence and bugs. |
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So not exactly sure if I'm in the right place, but I was wondering about localbtc trading, as far as what to look out for in event of scams and what not. From what I've seen it seems pretty safe, but always would rather be careful. If I'm in the wrong spot I do apologize, totally new here.
To be honest it's not that safe. It's a good place to do it since it's P2P and you're not dealing with a big company, but there can be a lot of scams on LocalBitcoin. LocalBitcoins has a trust system so that you can deal with trustworthy members, but that always leaves the possibility of account farming open just like on Bitcointalk - so you end up with a lot of people buying accounts both for legitimate means (for getting trades easier) and for scamming people, so you can never be sure that even trusted users will be legit. To keep yourself safe there's only a couple of rules which you need to follow: -If you go face to face with cash transfer, make sure you meet up in a public place. You don't want to be messing around with someone really dodgy, they could well be a thief or other criminal, especially when they want the anonymity of cash. - Don't sell for PayPal at all. PayPal is really reversible and easy to charge back - loads of people try to scam you with PayPal and even would buy trusted accounts to scam with larger amounts of money. -If the person is uncomfortable with paying first and you're not meeting in person, you should find a trusted escrow to use as in many cases neither of you would want to pay first. |
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If you want to avoid taxes, I would think that the first thing you should do is put it into a software wallet. Once no one else (like Coinbase or anyone) is responsible for your coins and can't track your activity, they won't be responsible for anything you do related to taxes. I think even Blockchain.info is good enough for this as I don't know any record of them interfering with people. The second thing you should do is cash your Bitcoin out into cash on LocalBitcoins. If you cash out your Bitcoin in cash in an anonymous method like that there's no way that the government can find out where you've put the money as they can't access your wallet and track how much Bitcoin you have to see that you don't hold it anymore - so they'll only have record of you buying. Then you don't have to declare it. Viola. Nearly no one actually declares earnings in Bitcoin for tax purposes, recently there was an article on Press about it which I think was saying that less than 1000 people have actually declared Bitcoin for tax purposes - the truth is that it's easy to get around and they're not actually that interested in finding out about what you've done with your Bitcoin unless you throw it right in their face. |
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I am looking for a small investment Cost repayment time for both would be helpful  Before you can get an accurate response you need to answer some questions: -What is your electricity cost (cents per kWh)? -What are the solar panel subsidies in your country? -How much electricity do you use otherwise (because the two are not mutually exclusive)? -How much money are you willing to invest? Solar panels can be a pretty expensive investment if you want to cover your whole electricity cost and you'll probably only manage to cover a small part if you only have a small investment. You'll probably only save enough to get ROI with solar panels in >5 years. Miners can be a good investment even if you only have one or two miners. If you have low electricity costs (<8 cents per kWh) then you can expect ROI before the next halving in 2020 even if the profit from mining goes down a fair bit. You'll probably be better going with a miner, or if you have really high electricity costs you might be better off with a combination of the two (although there would probably be much better investments to take part in if you do). |
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Bitcoin is Bitcoin Core now, because that's its development team. SegWit is just a scaling solution update created by Bitcoin's current development team. BU would have a new name, but that's partially because it would be a hard fork and people (reasonably) want the original Bitcoin to keep the name. But it would have a similar name, and the word Bitcoin in the name is enough for it to have the credibility which Bitcoin has built up, and even a complete name change would be fine if it was publicised enough.
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So you're saying that whenever you copy an address the same address gets pasted? That most likely means you've got a virus and you need to run some scans. Those viruses are pretty annoying because if you forget about them at any point and copy/paste you might lose your Bitcoin. You could look at this guide for compromised computers (although that kind of virus probably won't threaten your security). |
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The developers, nodes, markets and the media do not have the control of the blockchain.
Only you can determine which is the real blockchain.
Shut up. Miners' own interests are to keep Bitcoin alive, not to choose a scaling system that gives them the most profit. Their interests are subjective and if they choose something which the markets and the nodes don't like, it will collapse. The markets have the most power of all because they can decide to make miners' earnings worthless if they want to. If miners go and choose BU and no one likes it they'll be mining dust. IMHO I suggest the following plan:
1. Hold meetings of miners in private (the same interests).
2. You must reach a consensus of a Mining Alliance of +75% to solve this crisis (zero-sum game).
Miners don't all have the same interests or believe the same things about what's in their own interest because they're still people. The fact that you think something so toxic just proves that you support Bitcoin's centralisation (as if a meeting of a few miners would make up 75% of the hash rate). |
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Even if you have free electricity, you'd be lucky to make that much with those machines, ever. Look up some more modern miners like the Antminer S9. Even then, I wouldn't simplify it like the article does, success isn't guaranteed because of variance and if you join pools that are too big they'll take a lot in fees like Antpool - plus electricity costs can be higher than earnings if you don't think about it beforehand. |
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Actually I think the slider should go to higher than 200 satoshi/byte, in case the recommended fees go through the roof at any point or if the user really needs to get the transaction confirmed quickly. Maybe 400 satoshi/byte or so would be good (after that it gets ridiculous, not a lot of people would use Bitcoin if the fees were higher than that).
I think the recommended fees have been >220 satoshi/byte recently and for all we know it could get a lot higher.
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