Yes and no. Not sure how it's in other countries, but at least in the US there's the... loophole, I guess? that while legal tender must be accepted to settle debt, a business can deny service based on a would-be customer's payment method. That's why it's perfectly legal for stores to not accept cash and go cashless only: If they don't provide you with a service or product, there's no debt to settle in the first place.

I'll leave it as an excercise for the reader what this implies about the value of fiat currencies.

Do yourself a favor and stay away from Robinhood.

First of all they make their money by selling their users' order flow, so it's not really "free", rather the costs are hidden. (i.e. they are another prime example of the old adage that if you're not the customer, you're the product). Secondly during that whole GameStop saga it became pretty clear that they have questionable liquidity and may just run on leverage. If that's their situation with stocks, imagine how their situation with cryptocurrencies may be. No way I'd leave coins with them.

I was slightly amused to see this release happen just a few weeks after I stumbled upon this website on "Software's most popular versioning scheme": https://0ver.org/

Almost as if you guys felt called out However even then Bitcoin was already marked as having left the school of ZeroVer, so whoever runs the website seems to have been aware of your pull request.

A and B don't need to analyze the blockchain in this case. If the situation warrants it, they can contact the authorities, which could contact Coinbase, which could hand over all your transaction data and personal information.

Ich red ja auch nicht von Krypto allgemein sondern von Bitcoin

Je dünner der Markt desto weniger aussagekräftig die Market Cap; aber ich denke das zumindest für Bitcoin und von mir aus Ethereum der Markt mittlerweile groß genug ist um Vergleiche zur Marktkapitalisierung in den klassischen Finanzmärkten zu ziehen. Letztere sind in der Praxis ja auch immer mit einer großen Prise Salz zu nehmen: Wenn die Leute anfangen $TSLA auszucashen wird nicht jeder seine USD 750,- pro Aktien bekommen, genauso wenig wie Milliardenbeträge ausgelöscht werden nur weil der DAX, der Dow Jones oder der Bitcoin einbrechen.

Anders gesagt: Marktkapitalisierung ist zwar eine mangelhafte Metrik, aber nachdem sie in den klassischen Märkten dieselben Schwächen aufweist wie bei Krypto, ist sie bei gegebener Marktgröße meiner Meinung nach durchaus vergleichbar. (wobei die Marktgröße natürlich bei den meisten Alts nicht gegeben ist -- außer man geht in die Pennystocks, dann ist das Spielfeld wieder relativ eben)

Same. Hätte eigentlich gedacht dass die derzeitige Market Cap alleine schon genug Stabilität bringt um Bitcoin vom Rest des Marktes zu entkoppeln, aber anscheinend... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Auf der anderen Seite ist der Bitcoin-Markt momentan sowieso eher bärisch gestimmt, insofern ist es auch nicht verwunderlich wenn der kleinste Furz der Finanzwelt einen Drop verursacht.

prediction #2

EUR 39,190,-
Username: heretik2

Wann entkoppeln wir den endlich vom Rest des Marktes? Wenn schon mein Wertpapierdepot ganz in Rot gekleidet ist dann möchte ich wenigstens bei Bitcoin eine grüne Kerze sehen!

Some of his other arguments are also slightly off. Like the scenario of LN collapsing due to people liquidating and closing their channels during bull runs.

The way I see it unless someone were to liquidiate all their Bitcoin holdings, open channels would be the last thing to liquidate as those are the coins for daily expenses rather than long term holdings. Also given more widespread adoption LN would be the cheapest way to move money onto an exchange which would be another reason why channel closure would be literally the last thing to do when completely divesting.

Some nodes are better connected than others since they exchange coins with more users (i.e. an exchange is dealing with more counterparties than you and me for example), however that does not necessarily make them intermediaries in the classical sense. That is, even major nodes can't block specific transactions (as neither origin nor recipient are known to them) like, say, a bank could. I'm not sure how robust the network currently would be if multiple major nodes were to go offline, but overall robustness should increase as nodes join the network and routing algorithms gets improved.

The concept of watchtowers is often critized (for example in the video you linked), but they are not necessary for using the lightning network. They do shine a light on a bigger issue with lightning network though, which is ease of use compared to on-chain transactions (i.e. watchtowers are mostly meant to help with that). Nonetheless I do believe usability will get better in time, just as is the case with any software.

About the alternatives: On-chain approaches like sharding or the good old big block are unfortunately largely prone to centralization and stand to offer a lesser increase in transaction throughput than lightning network does. Opinions on this matter widely differ of course, but that's a different can of worms.

As of today the lightning network is rather decentralized:
https://explorer.acinq.co/

There will always be some nodes that have more channels than others (e.g. exchanges and payment gateways) however the rest of the network doesn't necessarily rely on them so the threat of centralization seems rather limited.



How would Taproot lead to more centralization?

Not surprising since VISA has been providing the infrastructure for a handful of crypto-based credit cards for quite a while now. Accordingly I also believe that the market impact of such news would be rather limited as it's likely already priced in. Still, increased acceptance is always good news!

Also OP should be aware that this won't result in less electricity usage overall as this would result in more miners coming online, supplanting the less efficient ones.

Thanks for the links! I'm mostly interested in 2012 and whether the claim of someone mining Bitcoin with ASICs in 2012 is actually plausible, because from my anecdotal experience it was incredibly hard to get your hard on ASIC mining hardware until at least the latter half of 2013. And that is assuming you even bet on the right horse and not on one of the many ventures that failed to deliver.

Friedcat and Avalon having specifications as of September / October 2012 means they still had to get the chips produced, as from my little understanding of the chip design workflow you're still working with simulations at that point (either software simulation or hardware-based using FPGAs).

So at least according to the public record there were no (SHA256) ASIC chips until December 28, 2012:


And even then the chips were still to be tested.


So in conclusion -- Am I missing something or does it seem unlikely that someone was mining Bitcoin with ASICs as early as 2012? Because given the technical challenges and capital requirements it seems weird for someone to produce ASIC chips without scaling production for either themselves or for sale to the public, either of which should have made a splash back then.

While reading this thread about Mastercard acquiring CipherTrace I came across the following claim:


Which had me wondering -- is there any record of when the first ASIC miner prototypes started mining the Bitcoin blockchain? From what I remember the first to actually ship ASIC miners, albeit in a very limited capacity, was Avalon in early 2013. I'm aware of Friedcat / Bitfountain and Bitfury starting development on ASICs as early as 2012 but if I'm not mistaken even they weren't able to start mining before 2013? Not to mention Butterfly Labs...

Anyway, any insights on this? Was Shannon Holland connected to any of these projects or were early prototype chips made available to parts of the community before the blueprints hit the foundries? I'm genuinely curious as that part of mining history eludes me and I remember ASIC miners being kind of a big deal when they first entered the scene in 2013.

Sind sie, Danke!

That could be mitigated by working the other way round -- keeping the paper wallet by yourself and sending the wallet password by future email. Good point though.

Have you thought about giving a Python 2 to Python 3 converter a try? Since it's just a handful of files it could actually work pretty well:
https://dev.to/rohitnishad613/convert-python-2-to-python-3-in-1-single-click-2a8p

Here's the docs on the 2to3 library:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/2to3.html


Also of course there's the tool that the Python source is based on:
https://iancoleman.io/bitcoin-key-compression/

Use the above for testing only, for everything else fetch the source here:
https://github.com/iancoleman/keycompression

That was my first thought as well, I guess deep inside I have a higher confidence in Bitcoin's long term existence over Google's.

The other points seem rather likely as well though. Google has shown little qualms about shutting down projects and features in the past and many didn't live for more than 2-3 years. Accordingly that could happen even sooner than accounts getting closed for inactivity or providers becoming defunct.

Holy Shit!

Das war mega spannend! PM ist draussen, nochmal danke für das Gewinnspiel sam00!

Hut ab mole0815 und Soonandwaite, ein showdown zu high noon wär auch nicht ohne gewesen!