It's important to understand that XRP isn't a blockchain but a database. It only needs a small number of nodes to agree that your transaction is valid in order to have it be accepted as such. It indeed translates into a fast and smooth user experience, but that applies to mostly all projects nowadays. XRP isn't anything special in that regard.

Realistically speaking, it will take some more time in order to have Lightning be liquid and stable enough to provide consistent transactions from small to medium, or even large. Also, the term satoshis is being used out of convenience. If you want you can switch the unit format to BTC or mBTC or USD, EUR, etc depending on what client you use.

Mr Carlton, the elite poster. If he considers someone not worth talking to, then oh well, no one should. Right? The way you refer to bbc.reporter is ridiculous to say the least.

I am genuinely interested in his side of the story. If you aren't interested, which is all fine, then just don't get anything started.

It's not Bitcoin's fault that you had to wait a day for your campaign payout to confirm. It's your campaign manager who chose to go with a low fee. Add low fee and you get unreliable confirmations. Add appropriate fee and you can almost accurately get your transaction confirmed by the next block or the one after that.

As for your main question, Lightning payments settle in a matter of seconds depending on the number of hops, but generally, 1-2 seconds is a pretty reliable estimate. However, currently it's mainly used for smaller payments due to the lower channel capacities and the overall liquidity. With some time that will drastically improve.

I don't see what the actual problem is? Lightning in no shape or form has been said to be totally secure at this stage, hence the reason it is continuously stressed that you only use small amounts when you experiment with it.

What you do is blame beta code for containing bugs. Let me tell you, every critical bug that is discovered at this stage, is going to make the network exponentially more secure in the long run. This is the time these bugs should be discovered and fixed, so don't be surprised if we get to see more bugs be exposed in the forthcoming months, because the more use the network experiences, the more likely it is for people to spot them.

I don't see why that's so funny?

They might own Eth for the purpose of moving USDT and some other stablecoins back and forth, which you need to pay for gas. Another aspect is that they might tokenize their fiat currency and have it run on Ethereum. If you also take into consideration that Ethereum will very likely switch to POS eventually, that will make them a powerhouse if they hold a lot of coins.

Don't forget that not everyone is a Bitcoin purist. It might be hard for Bitcoin bulls to believe, but there are a bunch with great interest in altcoins too.

That would suck badly, but probably not nearly as much as how Laszlo must feel thinking back about his 10,000BTC pizza transaction. It's cool and all that he will be remembered for that for ever, but I can't imagine that he isn't thinking about it from time to time, calculating how much his coins would be worth, where he could have been in life, etc.

Spending Bitcoin without replacing every single satoshi is just stupid, especially when you don't have the guarantee that you will earn them back because of how the price keeps going up.

It would be cool to see exchanges come up with an app or something that tracks your purchases and automatically replaces every spent satoshi. I recall Roger Ver to have plans to add a feature like that to his shitcoin dot com wallet, but meh, not going to use that to buy 'Bitcoin Core'.......

Yup. In fact, CZ once was the CTO of OKCoin (now known as OKex), an exchange known for its manipulation of metrics, and that from the moment they went live. CZ has all the knowledge he needs about how to make volumes look as organic as possible, which is why Binance gets away with these periodic reports about organic volumes softly.

Even for an exchange such as Binance, their current +$700 million 24 hour volume is too much on a boring saturday. I only follow exchanges such as CoinbasePro, Bitstamp and Kraken to get an idea of how active the market is. All these USDT exchanges have done nothing but signal shadiness.

As an alternative to CMC or Coingecko, Messari seems to do a better job in excluding as much nonsensical volume as possible.

I'm truly glad for Bitcoin to be an option we can tap into, but we have to look at how it is impossible for people to have all their funds in Bitcoin so that we have total control over what we own. Volatility is a major concern right now and will be that in the forthcoming years as well. I wouldn't even put all my money in Bitcoin if it has Gold's 'stability'.

What we need is a decentralized unit of account that maintains its value no matter what. I like the DAI stablecoin because it aims to solve that problem. The only thing we can't solve is scalability, therefore have to accept that Bitcoin and other cryptos will likely never reach a state of total mass adoption. Perhaps that we can have some sort of a workaround through interoperability between various networks, but we haven't seen it be put to the test yet.

Fundamentally there is no difference between North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba. It's not the people there who are rogue, but the leaders and their elite minions. North Korea is taking things to another level, but we also shouldn't forget about the US propaganda machine that's out to make North Korea look like a threat to the western world in every possible way.

I have seen the US commit more crimes against humanity than any other country most people seem to fear. People however are too ignorant to look through that to read between the lines.

There is a shortage of legacy institutions offering a secure and more importantly, trusted way to buy Bitcoin. I have been in Bitcoin for years now, and I still don't feel too comfortable wiring money to any of the current top regulated crypto exchanges. I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are only willing to step in when they see the household brands of the legacy financial world offer these services.

People have ridiculous expectations of Bakkt so early on. Calm down. I am confident that Bakkt will do at least 1000BTC per day on their monthly contracts before the block halving kicks in. That means brokerages have had the time to sign up to Bakkt, get the paperwork done, and offer these futures to their own clients. The more brokerages tap into Bakkt's platform, the more clients there are to reach who not knowing what Bakkt is.

The funny part about that bull run was that it didn't really feel like such.

Early 2017 people got excited for a while about the pumps, but then they started to get used to the increases and considered it to be normal. It felt more like the price was trending up instead of a bubble that was forming to pop in people's faces. Right now we look back and say ahhhhh, what a bubble that was and that we should have known better, but you can't really blame people for not spotting it beforehand.

The interesting part was that the demand for Bitcoin didn't just come from spot buyers looking to hold Bitcoin, but spot buyers buying up Bitcoin to invest in ICO's. In other words, a double stream of insane demand that drove the price up to levels people would expect to see somewhere in 2020 after the block halving.

Likely to control the majority of the total circulating supply. Bitmain started with less than 100,000BTC on its balance sheet, but ended up holding well over 1 million BCH. The very fact that BCH is still where it is today in terms of market cap and price, comes from how a few entities control most of what is in circulation as we speak.

1BTC gets you like 33BCH today. Roger and Jihan (and I'm sure there are a few others) can slowly usurp all these BCH with little to no effort. This will explode one day. I'm guessing somewhere before the block halving kicks in (which is scheduled to happen before Bitcoin's halving due to the massive inflation they had due to EDA). Same applies to BSV even though their finances don't quite compare.

It's pretty retarded for anyone to even consider selling Cas coins through Ebay. What usually happens with these coins is that the owners list their coins just for the sake of getting that exposure, then settle the transaction in real life or in a different manner, everything but through the regular way items are usually purchased through Ebay.

There was a stunning 10BTC Cas listed on Ebay for $300,000 not that long ago. Not sure if it got removed because it sold outside Ebay or that the owners removed the listing because the price went down.

This. I have helped a relative last year after complaining about the process of 'downloading' blocks taking too long, and that with a 100mbit cable connection. Turns out, the validation process is what took him so long, and this is directly where most new people go wrong. They assume that downloading the blockchain is similar to downloading a movie file or something.

People have no clue about how heavy it is on the system to validate every bit of data that goes back like 10 years. In Bitcoin's history there have been almost 460 million transactions and 1.23 billion outputs. If people start to understand how much computing goes into validating that data, and how regular hdd's further slow down that process, they will probably refrain from running their own node and just go with an SPV client (which for most ordinary users is the best option).

It's important to take into consideration that miners haven't sold much of their coins at all, and they aren't likely planning to do so based on the previous years of what they did with their coins. Bitcoin's transparent nature allows us to follow how many blocks each miner finds, and how many of these coins are actually being sent to an exchange. It's just a matter of following their mining addresses.

Hashrate-wise, miners haven't stopped mining at all. In fact, the difficulty is about to make a new all time high with a near 7% increase being due. The thing that has to be said though, if the price doesn't increase much in the forthcoming months, people shouldn't be too surprised seeing the difficult go back down a bit. It's all perfectly normal and part of Bitcoin's economical model.

Most people here do the exact same thing. If we go down by 5-10% people directly refer to it as a great dip to buy, and they repeat that as long as the price keeps going down. It starts with them saying that it is a great dip to buy, where it then changes into it being the last opportunity to buy Bitcoin below this or that level.

In the end, the actual goal of the person buying Bitcoin is what matters. If you're only interested in a short to medium term flip, today's prices are probably not interesting because it looks like we will go lower. If you're dollar cost averaging to build up a position, then buying at today's prices isn't all that bad. This important bit of context is what most perma bulls don't usually highlight.

Not surprising at all. Despite all the critics only highlighting the decrease in liquidity, the Lightning ecosystem is growing stronger ever single day. I'm pretty sure that the critics are either nocoiners trying to trash talk Bitcoin, or the altcoin camps that worry about their projects because you can't compete with Bitcoin anymore in terms of speed and cost.

Benefit of the price going down is that it will make people focus back on development and whatnot, so I expect more liquidity to flow into Lightning in the forthcoming months. Another aspect is that merchants have less incentive to cash out to the mainchain, which means less outflow of existing liquidity and more inflow of new liquidity.

I have seen so many people brag about their prized winning method of playing dice, but they all ended up losing every penny they put into it and some even more. It's completely and utterly retarded that there are still people thinking that you can beat the house and generate consistent profits on a weekly or monthly basis. Luck isn't everlasting. It runs out and so will your balance when you don't wake up.

As for IEO "trading" (I assume you refer to buying into the initial distribution stage and to sell when it becomes tradable?), that's what I consider high risk too because you're investing in blatant scams or the idea of someone nicely presented to you through a website and whitepaper. It costs them $500-$1000 to get all that done. Don't fall for these scams. It's called gambling since you either win or lose.

I don't have much of a favorite youtube channel in this segment (I am more of a book reader when it comes to economics), but one thing I can say after a while of watching some of the more popular channels, it's better to avoid those who are offering courses, memberships, guides and whatnot, because all they care about is to make you pay for them without actually making much sense in the end.

Some interesting (non crypto) titles for starters that I enjoyed reading;

Economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlitt
What has government done to our money by Murray N. Rothbard

Especially the one from Rothbard is quite an interesting one to read, because it perfectly describes the problems that we are still dealing with today, and that after decades of progress on so many fronts. It makes you aware and sad at the same time that literally nothing has changed on a fundamental level. It also makes you appreciate Bitcoin more.

It's getting harder and harder with how we have yet again had another bearish daily close. If that wasn't enough, we didn't just have another bearish daily close, but we closed even below the 200MA. Currently we have the 200SMA left to form some degree of support, but if you look back historically, once we dip below the 200ME/EMA/SMA, we're going to be bouncing up and down below and between them.

Don't take my word for it, just pull out the daily chart and add these moving averages, you'll see how much of a vital role they play when it comes to longer term price development.