Facts are, how is an early release, whether from satoshi or not, going to process a tx from a 'bc' address and accept it the blockchain?
because the "bc1" part is not stored on the blockchain. wallet software glues it onto the front of the address. it's a wallet standard, and so it's never part of any blockchain data |
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Syncing now, it's going faster than I thought.
old blocks were empty, so they're fast (and sync starts with old blocks) blocks 400,000 - 600,000 are much fuller, they're slow to sync. |
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^^^ Strange. Some people on Bitcointalk have this weird habit of doing the conversational equivalent of a massive punch in the face, while they tell you "hey, why so aggressive?" what on earth could their motivation be?  |
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Up to last year I really believed that altcoins would trend down as the growth of LN on paper forms a major threat to any altcoin focusing on fast and cheap transactions, but I couldn't be more wrong.
Altcoins work as leveraged instruments both on the way up and down, and this is what people like about them, no matter how crappy they may seem. All that matters is to enter and exit with a profit and people then shift to another coin. right... but just because it carries on regardless, doesn't make it viable. In this overall growth phase, new participants are literally queuing up to behave this exact same way over and over, but there's no such thing as infinite growth the maturing of the market, a viable sidechain protocol, or both of the former would kill this particular behavior pattern Unless a sidechain can earn you dollars then alts have absolutely nothing to worry about. That's the only reason most of them exist and that's the only reason most people are here.
And it's not as if alts are being used for any actual purposes. If you were serious about your purpose you wouldn't be using one.
No, you've misunderstood The reason that HairdryerCoin or ElbowCoin fail isn't just because they're a cynical marketing gimmick. Very infrequently, someone actually comes up with a genuine purpose-based concept that Bitcoin wasn't designed for. Namecoin is (was) a perfect example: a special new .bit domain name ecosystem, where ICANN and FBI: World Police have literally zero legitimacy, which is resistant to censorship/takedowns (Tor .onions less so) and with which domains can also be bought and sold as a function of the network (Tor .onions cannot do this without trust issues) But truly good concepts for purpose specific tokens also fail, because attracting hashpower is not easy, and makes them vulnerable to 51% attacks from bigger coins using the same hash type. If only there was some way to put these good concepts for purposed tokens under so much hashing protection that that problem went away.... aaaand can you say "hello sidechains"?  But as outlined, no-one's found a safe/viable design for that, yet |
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Only applies for Bitcoin address where it's public key is known something has occurred to me since this all started is it not the case that Taproot/tapscripts output would expose it's public key in it's pubkey script on the chain before it is spent? I'm gonna have to check that out today, I'm not certain If so, I don't think this is some kind of oversight on the part of Taproot's design; as was pointed out upthread, if a QC-based attacker scans the mempool for inflight transactions, the hashed public key offers them zero protection during the time between broadcasting a tx and it getting confirmed. That amount of time could easily be long enough to use the QC to resolve the private key from the (briefly exposed) public key. This post is subject to change if I'm wrong! Re-reading the Taproot/Tapscript BIPs right now... https://github.com/sipa/bips/blob/bip-schnorr/bip-taproot.mediawikihttps://github.com/sipa/bips/blob/bip-schnorr/bip-tapscript.mediawiki |
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The question remains if the setup I outlined is compatible with the Lightning network, i.e. if there is a way to pay offline when there is no direct payment channel between both.
so here would be a way to make it work... set up that private Lightning network, and keep it very exclusive to people within a given area. The crucial part would be: don't use it, except in outage situations. Use uptime of the general internet to store BTC in the private network, but use the regular Lightning network for everyday payments while internet remains up. Maybe a good idea would be to physically assemble people at a certain time every week to top up the liquidity in the private network, that way any disputes about which channel balances on the private local network are valid can be worked out there and then if internet dies coincidently while the actual meeting takes place. Then, when internet goes down, this group of people have a pool of money that can reliably be exchanged in a zero hop fashion, as in my first example. And, if they can set up a meshnet, then they can achieve your suggestion: use multi-hop routing within the local private channel network to increase the liquidity All of the above is possible today with some patching of Lightning software to switch between the mainnet and the private-net, and configuring devices and network routers to be capable of switching to mesh and/or adhoc modes Plus, the organizational task of setting and topping up the private channel network. Channel factories may serve as a fully packaged solution to that, but that's future stuff. |
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Sidechains are altcoins. Nobody has even figured out how to theoretically secure sidechains in a trustless and decentralized way.
yep, there'd be a million side-chains by now if there was a viable way to do it. |
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- Bob and Alice are connected by a payment channel.
ok - Bob (the buyer) sends Alice a signed commitment transaction, with a penalty like in a standard LN transaction, but a difference: the amount of the trade made conditional, requiring a secret to be spent (like in atomic swaps or the technique I just outlined). The transaction includes the hash of the secret.
- Bob and Alice meet in the place without Internet access.
hmmm, not seeing the necessity of this if alice and bob have a payment channel open between one another, there's no need at all for additional commitment exchange, they can perform the zero hop routing operation in an ad-hoc network i.e. out of band at their meeting spot. If both Alice and Bob live in the same area, and both lost internet at the same time, then the exisiting protocol can work just as well offline as online (private channels are essentially doing exactly this. We typically assume they do it connected to the wider internet, but it's not strictly necessary) People with intermittent/zero internet access could always try setting up a smaller private network of payment channels to circulate currency locally, but agreeing on what channels are valid is a difficult problem if they lose access to the internet. Freezing the blockchain state to before the time at which internet access was lost limits lightning usage to devices that were in those precise geographical regions when the outage hit, and potentially different (but contiguous) areas went out at different times. The shorter period of time for which access to the blockchain is curtailed, the more viable a local channel network is. Still though, huge amounts of trade are often local only, so depending on how well connected channels are in a given locality (reflecting high proportion of entirely local trade), it could work pretty well. The correlation of areas affected by internet outages with micro-economies could well be pretty high in practice, i.e. if a whole town loses internet, the whole town may well also happen to do 60-80% of trade internally. Is it not the case that mesh networking is more likely to exist in places with poor access to the corporate owned internet? |
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I don't think that only 15% of all bitcoin is now available to be mined. can you count? actually, don't answer that  But I did not worry about how much percentage to be mined. The more miner that mine in every transaction will make Bitcoin faster transactions, it can bring benefits to Bitcoin itself if there are more miners to mine. have you ever considered playing in the middle of a very busy highway? Or on a high-speed train track? |
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It's obvious that the idea has alot of potential (as well as technical hurdles, hence the distinct lack of Bitcoin sidechains in operation since the idea was first written up) I like the experimental possibilities; Ethereum's EC20 protocol (?) could be viewed like a sidechain system, where many different tokens (that do not necessarily have to be currencies  ) are run in parallel with the underlying Ethereum blockchain (Buterin always said "Ethereum is not designed to function as a currency", and to a certain extent that's true, you're buying shares in the overall platform when you purchase ETH). This direction was originally fulfilled with the "colored coins" approach in Bitcoin, and at least one noteworthy success (Omnilayer's hosting of the Tether stablecoins) has been using Bitcoin's main blockchain for this secondary purpose. Having a sidechain for an internet domain name system, cryptographic shares in companies (even other financial contracts), or just for serving and querying keys (PGP system could use such a sidechain in light of this summer's keyserver flaw) could all be very aptly implemented as Bitcoin sidechains. There's a problem with all the possibility though; freedom to experiment includes freedom to design deceptive or disastrous sidechains, and the corresponding freedom to make unwise decisions about using such chains. I expect that a breakthrough in Bitcoin sidechain tech and a subsequent explosion in marketing of new sidechains is going to lead to alot of fraud and losses of over-excited investors. No-one's holding your hand to bail you out if you screw up, permissionless capitalism means all trades are final, even if "it isn't fair". Buyer beware. |
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How about in a decade or two, when Bitcoin's market capitalization might be in the trillions, or tens of trillions? Valuable enough? sure, but... We're also talking about much more than 1 million bitcoins. It's 5 million+ that have exposed public keys and theoretically the entire supply if QC is capable of breaking transactions in flight. ...the greater percentage of the total BTC supply someone can steal using any exploit: - The more BTC's market value will crash, meaning the attack's purpose changes from profit to an arson-like motive
- The more likely that a majority of previous holders reject BTC in favor of a resistant new coin, even if a fix for the exploit is discovered
The last point (ironically) resembles what's actually happening with central bank money today; people rejecting it for alternative assets because knowledgeable abusers of the system are being allowed to over-aggressively suck all the value (as well as any remaining credibility  ) out of it, while the economists and policy advisers desperately try to appear to be correcting the situation Centralized infrastructure also requires far less coordination to secure. In a zero-day situation, governments and banks could react far more effectively than the decentralized Bitcoin network ever could. If QC broke ECDSA in the wild today, I don't think Bitcoin would ever recover.
this is very true, and so credit to the developers who have the sense to move slowly and carefully with changes/additions (even competitors to Bitcoin have behaved very responsibly, e.g. the reporting for the inflation bug, or the handling of the recent channel spoofing bug in Lightning). But we're in a virtuous circle here; very talented software developers and computer scientists were attracted to Bitcoin when it was still experimental, and now many of those same people are as motivated to contribute to furthering it's viability as they are invested. Brilliant. |
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I wonder what the next step is.... how realistic is it that we can see full LN nodes run on a phone within 2 years? It's one thing to run a regular node
because the channel map isn't too big today, it can basically already be done, only the software isn't quite there yet... Neutrino wallet does what you say, but it's not finished, and the new-ish protocol it uses (Golomb-Rice filtering) for querying the blockchain efficiently isn't in the main Bitcoin implementation yet (but going in the right direction, version 0.19.0 is being tested right now, and includes the BIP158 half of the protocol, which sometimes is literally referred to as "Neutrino"). You can use it now, but only btcd nodes support it, and there are about 10 or less btcd nodes, so it's not something you can necessarily rely on. And again, the wallet part isn't finished anyway But in future, the channel map could become enormous, assuming Lightning takes off. And phones won't be able to deal with that, it could grow far faster than improvements in phone specs could possibly keep up. The Lightning devs are designing various new ways to make sure phones can handle only what they need from the channel map (sort of a local-view-only mode), and yet could still do routing (and get paid fees for doing so ). It's all a little in flux though, it wouldn't surprise me if a developer suddenly announces a change in the approach today, tomorrow or next month; they're still seem very much in exploration mode, as the potential permutations using the Bitcoin scripting that makes this all possible are wide and varied (and consider also that proposed new Bitcoin scripting operations are part of the planning going into it). these stop-gaps and compromises will be fine in the short term, they amount to the same thing as a phone-based Lightning node in practice (and that's the path I'm gonna follow, don't like the idea of a lightweight Lightning wallet using commercial Watchtowers) but the dynamics of LN I imagine require additional security features and tweaks. Typical phones (Android & iOS) are in many ways more solid security-wise than your average desktop PC, but that's not necessarily good enough. A fundamental problem is the routing issue; if you want to route other peoples' Lightning payments on your phone, you need to let the software use a hot wallet to do so, there's simply no getting around that, as the software has got to be able to sign transactions as fast as it receives routing requests, and that's too fast for the user to check each and every one and authorize it with their Trezor The people at ARM might tell us their latest mobile CPU has some special new tech that can keep cryptographic keys in a special part of memory that definitely cannot be accessed by rogue software. But if the OS can access that special region in memory, then all an attacker needs is to find a hole in the OS (or the wallet software) that lets them access the keys too. There is no definitive solution, only cat & mouse good enough-for-now stuff is possible. Something with better guarantees might one day be devised, but the way the problem looks now it seems intractable. I'm optimistic though |
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Obviously, I realize the wallet files need to be migrated, but I would like to know if any other files besides wallet files require migration from the old Armory setup over to the new Armory setup. only the wallet files are necessary Armory's db format changed completely in version 0.94.0, so none of the old database data can even be used. |
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On the spec page you see this: Android Oreo 8.1
Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 435
4GB RAM
64GB Storage So, how do you get the full blockchain in 64 GB.... prune mode. minimum space needed is something like 3-4GB. But yeah, strictly speaking not a full node It's easy to forget how much bandwidth full node Bitcoin needs too, which is a bad fit for mobile, depending on what your data plan is like. although blocksonly mode can easily keep daily consumption below 200MB, for now at least
can't help myself but say: people laughed when this was suggested (full node on a phone) a few years ago. But as predicted, the barriers keep falling as phones improve and the Bitcoin software gets more efficient (and adds more modes to handle low resources ). There's actually an open proposal to add the code for an Android wallet gui to Bitcoin: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/16883 |
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instability is the very one trouble issue. I like it when my money becomes more valuable over time, even when it does it in a wobbly way second one - is the speed and cost of transaction. for example, let's see typical transaction fee for transfer 0.001 btc, when usd/btc rate is $10000 you will pay $10 for any of your transfer.
not much I would say. you're making a common mistake Choose: - fast, expensive transaction
- slow, cheap transaction
there is no "slow expensive" option, you're right, that would be dumb but if usd/btc will be $100 000, the cost of transaction would be $100, this is too much..
default fee has changed before, as has the minimum amount. Big increases in Bitcoin price are exactly what provoked the change. But you can do something yourself before that.... You can't set a lower minimum amount in the Bitcoin software, but you can reduce the minimum fee. If more people did this, pressure would increase for the fee floor to lower |
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Bitcoin's decentralization would have been a great thing if there is no central authority that governs each of us. It is also one of the biggest hindrance of Bitcoin adoption since government frown upon something that they cannot control. And for Bitcoin to go mainstream, it needs the government approval whether we like it or not.
simple experiment: watch people at a busy crosswalk alot of people wait for the walk light, afraid of being spotted and fined for jaywalking. But it only takes 1 snowflake to start an avalanche: 1 person crossing when the light says don't walk will embolden 3, 4, 5 then almost everyone waiting to just step out onto the empty road. A handful of extremely risk averse people remain, and they're in a very small minority. Seriously, watch crosswalks and this exact pattern takes place over and over again. |
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As miners get close to the maximum volume of bitcoin, their reward gets smaller. But even though given that fact, we are still considered close to maximum, and demands would start to rise. The price would continue to rise as deflation would occur, which is I'm not really sure if it would be good or bad to the future of bitcoin. If it's value goes too high, then people will just hoard and bitcoin exchange would slow down. If no one wants to use it, then that could impose threat to bitcoin in the future.
this is just armchair speculation. In the real world, people do use both inflation and deflation to their advantage, but there are also many other different pressures on their decision making all the time. If you have Bitcoin, but want a better lifestyle, big jumps in exchange value will always cause you to consider spending some on whatever you've been coveting. If you keep Bitcoin for a lifetime, and have resisted all temptation to lifestyle upgrades before retiring, then there's a good chance you will change your attitude, as you are more aware than ever that you're dying It seems to me that the whole "Bitcoin stops spending argument" is just a very negative way of saying that Bitcoin makes you choose your purchases super carefully. Oh no, Bitcoin will stop people spending their money on crappy products that stop working or break after 2 years, how terrible that's gonna be! People want to save BTC more than they want to spend it, what a stupid thing to do, huh?  Do you work for a pension company, or some low-cost household goods manufacturer? Sounds like it, because those businesses have alot to lose from everyone switching to buying quality products or investing in good assets for their old age |
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this is rather like asking:
"are people losing interest in good investments?" or "are people losing interest in trading?"
what do you think the answer is, OP?
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If you trust your distro official binary packages, you should know most distro sign their packages after compiling and the package manager verifies this in case they have been somehow tampered by a rogue mirror or such. This simple concept has somehow evaded the windows world, like forever, which is why they have to do it manually, which of course given the laziness of the average windows user, they never do. Right, but it's difficult for me to forget how recently this was broken... aptitude package manager (Debian, Ubuntu & derivatives thereof use aptitude) had an issue in springtime 2019 where an attacker could bypass the signature checking on packages. Combine that expolit with subversion of DNS resolution for an aptitude repo and then an attacker could serve bogus software updates and packages to all Debian based boxes (not hard as aptitude was still recommending configuring http links because signing packages is infallible!) fixed now of course, but does anyone really know whether a malicious actor knew this beforehand, and now every Debian based machine has the latest greatest rootkit installed? fixing aptitude doesn't matter in that worst case scenario. That situation immediately got me looking for alternative models; source based package managers, such as those in Gentoo, FreeBSD, Crux, Nix, Guix etc are looking very attractive. Nothing stops bugs in these package managers either, but the situation with aptitude demonstrates that having a limited number of repo mirrors serving package binaries is a more fragile model than I'd previously considered. At least a similar such bug in source based package managers would also require a simultaneous attack against dozens of different source code repos too (although targeting e.g. gnu git servers would be simple but effective in those circumstances, all easier said than done of course) And is the Tor Browser even available through Linux software repos? It's available through the torporject repo... but we're coming onto the topic of Tor Browser itself further down... A typical windows user is used to the idea that binaries are downloaded from random web pages, the concept of an official repository is alien to them. Microsoft attempted something with their software shop thing, but with little success. (Bad) habits are hard to break, especially when reinforced over decades of IT malpractice. yeah, these people would be very easy to manipulate (hence the internal Electrum popup, which alot of people just assumed they could trust, because they didn't understand that popups could be coming from someone who is not the Electrum devs). Do you still get pop ups? I'm surprised, none of my browsers are allowed to do it, and my Desktop Environment seldom does it, except the occasional Want to save? prompt if i forgot saving a document or such. In Windows i remember some malware faking the whole popup so even the "close" button triggers whatever it wanted to trigger, its just a lost cause, there is no salvation for that OS. "unsolicited" popups literally haven't happened to me in years, it's possible I might be easier to trick because of that, provided the trick was clever enough. There is Tor, and there is Tor Browser, which is Firefox with Tor bundled and a bunch of preset settings. I don't particularly like Tor Browser, as you can point any browser to Tor anyway, but it was made for lazy people, especially in Windows where its harder to explain people how to configure things properly. It beats me how could people use Tor in Windows to begin with, kinda defeats the whole idea, but even Satoshi apparently made that mistake, ugh. Well, it's true that Tor Browser is little different than the regular Firefox browser. But even for users who don't use the tor network daemon from the Tor Browser Bundle (such as me), configuring Firefox to use Tor Browser's settings and plugins is not to be taken lightly... a large part of the Tor Browser set of presets is to make the browser difficult to fingerprint, which is a vast topic (which extends beyond the browser into the OS and the underlying hardware), so any small mistakes or oversights in a self-configured Firefox are guaranteed to weaken your anonymity. As for satoshi... I get the feeling that maybe Windows was a way for satoshi to help obscure his/their identity further. It's pretty common for *nix users to also be proficient Windows users, or just capable of quickly learning the Windows way of doing something. What you're saying only underlines this point more: if satoshi really was using Windows the whole time while developing Bitcoin and communicating here on Bitcointalk.org, the chances that he was being surveilled by intelligence agencies are pretty high. It seems more likely that either being a Windows user was an elaborate smokescreen, or that satoshi was working with or for intelligence agencies all along. whether that's good or bad depends on what the objective of the Bitcoin project was I don't mind the 70ies, it also brought us the C language and the Unix kiss principle. Microsoft and others actually got into shortcuts, and some other not very fair practices such purchasing companies to deliver products they never had in the first place (See historical IBM/Microsoft DOS deal).
Yep, the Unix fundamentals and the C language are still incredibly relevant today. Android phones, all Apple devices and your home router are running and relying on those Unix basic components, and are reliable and secure in a large part because of Unix. And it's fundamentally the same as it was in the 1970's. Microsoft are (and always were) a bunch of lazy crooks that won initially because they were well-connected in business, not because they had good products. Even if they produced some decent software since then (and I emphasize the "some"), both the foundations of their OS and their basic business ethics are irreparably rotten. |
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If you aren't curious enough to explore various fields of interests that play a big role in today's society, which the internet is a huge part of, then you're basically fucked. this This is a major reason why the mass adoption of Bitcoin will probably take decades. It also translates into wealth inequality because the dumb will end up being as poor as they have always been, where the smart money and those who are technically adapted will be the new elite.
I have this sense that being at all inept using computers could be the difference between life and death. Robots and AI are soon going to be a part of daily life... fuck, really they already are in a nascent stage of it. Asimov and Philip K. Dick et al warned us about this stuff, and something like the bottom 90th percentile (and that's optimistic ) of the world haven't even caught up to Edmund Bernays and George Orwell. And the 20th century was such a thunderous bitch-slap of sophistication that it's no wonder, really. so while I'm pretty disappointed in myself for being so slow to see some of this, when I think of these typical Facebook zombies... it's hard to have any sympathy for them, trying to impress this stuff on them out of a sense of humanity is more likely to cause problems than anything else The potential for the world to enter into an era that's actually worse than all of dystopic fiction rolled into one is a distinct possibility, and almost everyone is expendable drone fodder in such a scenario |
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