<1%, it's very competitive. But that's a feature not a bug, users shouldn't have to pay a lot for privacy, or to move money to/from a sidechain quickly. Drivechain withdrawals don't share this hot wallet requirement so the return would be abysmal.

We'd care if there was an attack on a sidechain because then we'd lose useful functionality that makes bitcoin worth more, even if you or I don't use that feature. BCH isn't pegged to BTC and it's anything but useful.

13,150 ACKs aren't a major problem because we have cross-chain atomic swaps. If you're going to hodl for 6+ months anyways, then why not collect some fees on top of that like a JoinMarket maker?

200 ACKs seems a little bit low. If I was betting on chain split tokens for a UASF, I would want more time to install the sidechain and verify the alleged theft.

EDIT: The text below was written by someone who bought my hacked account, which I just got back. It's incredibly stupid.

Scalability, transaction fees, usability and also the issue with regulating crypto for government taxes. These are some real life issues right now and we need to find possible solutions to all of them. A single token or project cannot solve all the issues so we need new ideas and minds come together to solve them and move ahead.

Hi, it's the real Explodicle again. I'm just amazed at how stupid the statement above is. Wow.

EDIT: *slaps forehead* I don't know how I didn't think of this.

Although this cost is very marginal now, it does still exist, right? The reason I'm asking is if we did want to increase block size so much that it took, say, 30 seconds to download and verify.

EDIT: knightdk points out the obvious fatal flaw in this idea below. Leaving it up for reference only.

A couple months ago I talked to maaku about mining pool centralization and possible avenues to reduce it. Here's the problem:

Pools have an incentive to co-locate because it reduces the time to download blocks from each other, during which they need to SPV mine an empty block. Right now mining pools don't suffer a major penalty by not co-locating, but this penalty will increase as the subsidy shrinks and would get worse if the block size were to be increased.

---

Let's assume that SPV mining empty blocks is not a sufficient long-term solution. Full-block mining currently requires that miners download and verify the previous block, so they know which new transactions may be included.

BUT, what if we prohibit transactions which use outputs from the previous block? Miners would then be able to SPV mine a full block using only the header of the previous block, certain that it's valid.

Possible attack vectors: an evil miner could either

• Upload a header for an invalid block, or
• Upload a header but not upload the whole block

However, I'm not convinced that these would be cost-effective attacks. The invalid block would still need to reach the current difficulty just to forfeit its entire block reward, and not uploading the whole block would increase its risk of being orphaned. I think these attacks would be as expensive as a 51% attack; the miner is spending more than he costs others just to create a temporary disruption.

This unfortunately adds the annoyance of being unable to receive and spend your coins in adjacent blocks, but you could still do so within the same block. My hope is that coin control could make this limitation less of a problem until lightning channels do away with the issue entirely.

What are your thoughts, technically-minded bitcoiners? Could this work as-is to promote pool decentralization? Is there something you would change to make it better? Is it only worthwhile once low subsidy and/or block size make pool centralization a larger problem? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Without the benefit of hindsight, would that be any smarter than sinking your life savings into bitcoin right now? Now that the gateways have been built, we're just a few soft forks away from global liberation.

You should just post a FAQ:

Q: Why can't you reply to all messages immediately, regardless of wherever you might live or do?
A:

I can't speak for everyone else, but I'm skeptical that you had EXACTLY enough money to survive this whole time. Not so little that you died, not enough that you could have saved literally anything at all. The odds of being within $0.01 of death for 3 years are so low that it's overwhelmingly more likely that you are lying.

There are people out there with no cars and no access to health care whatsoever. They don't just pass out from time to time, they are actually starving and dying of hunger. These people elicit much more sympathy than westerners with days to spend arguing on internet forums.

They don't even have a shitty ancient laptop with which to ignore $5 worth of BTC for 10 minutes labor like you just did. I'm offering you a better rate than I'm getting paid for my own time.

In the last 3 years:
Have you gone to a movie theater?
Have you been using public transit?
Have you cooked all your own meals?
Have you paid for an app?
Did you buy any soda or snacks at vending machines?

You had an early adopter advantage that many here are quite jealous of, and you squandered it.

First of all let me answer your question. The chances are >99% that a joe shmo like both of us had at least ONE PENNY to trade in-person. In 2011 transaction fees were completely optional and you could have literally bought a single Satoshi. I attended a couple very small Bitcoin user meetings, and even a guy off the street with $1 of recycling money could have bought SOME and saved it with a library computer.

below is an optional personal anecdote that doesn't actually prove anything, but I'd like to include it

---

I realize I won't win a poverty contest with you, but I'd still like to explain what this has been like. I was extremely frustrated in 2011 that I couldn't buy more. I wasn't blessed with set aside resources, I was in debt and went deeper in debt to buy BTC. I was living paycheck-to-paycheck and spending 3+ hours a day sitting/standing in public transit and biking. I thought I was "helping" my friends and family by telling them about it years ago, but instead they have been urging me to sell the whole time. I can't really blame them - here's a guy who can't even handle his own finances, spending what little he's got on semi-legal imaginary internet money.
They told me that after the June 2011 rally, the April 2013 rally, and the most recent $1000 rally.

So now here I am, still working hard every day. I've got even less to show for it than I would have if I had never heard about Bitcoin... except for a dusty cold wallet, encrypted and split up - which might not even be worth anything by the time I finally decrypt most of it. It's not even a particularly enormous amount of money (hence the 4am job) but at least now it's something I feel is "significant" or "worthwhile", not the pocket change I squeezed out in 2011. Yes I'm still saving most of it, because it's been a good idea all along and most people still fail to understand what it's capable of (decentralized crowdfunding, prediction markets, entire legal systems, etc).

---

/anecdote

Gavin's Bitcoin Faucet was giving out like 0.05ish BTC in early 2011, so each visit would be around $25 now. And right now $25 would be a smart amount of money for a broke person to save in Bitcoin. You can go to some faucets and save at least some small amount for three years from now. Just don't choose to tell me you don't have choices - don't tell me it's more worth your time to argue with me.

Or you can draw me a nice color picture of an octopus riding an elephant while they are both holding balloons, and I'll send you 0.009 BTC. Offer valid only for skottiejay until 2014-05-31

I found out about Bitcoin about the same time as you, and I've got real-world money problems too. The only difference between us is that I made sacrifices (and continue to) so I could buy and hold.

Did you go out to eat, or go out to the movies in the last 3 years? Just giving away coins for free wouldn't be fair to people who see it for what it is and made a personal sacrifice to save money. No one with an internet connection complaining here is living on a subsistence wage.

I've got unemployed and disabled family members, massive student loans, and start my hazardous job at 4:00 in the fucking morning six days a week. If I were more bullish I'd retire on Bitcoin right now, but plan to work through a few more bubble cycles and keep saving money. Because excuses won't put my kids through college.

If life was easy I would have bought more in 2011 too. Sorry to be so harsh, but I honestly don't believe you couldn't have saved just a few bitcoins over three years, and acting like it's impossible is trivializing the efforts of everyone who did. Again, I apologize for this overly-emotional response.

It was a mistake I corrected a couple minutes after the post - I meant to type unearned rent.

Ok, so Bitcoin speculators aren't getting unearned rent, right?

Just so I'm 100% clear - which assumption was incorrect?
A) Maaku was saying ALL unearned rent was evil, not just those projects
B) You and maaku think that the income one gains from deflation or increased adoption is unearned rent

I used to respect the Freicoin community's decisions while I felt I was a part of it. That ended with the beta, when you guys drastically changed the scope of the project. If the Bitcoin developers decided one day that everyone should start trusting them even though it wasn't absolutely necessary, how would you feel?

Whether or not there is matching is irrelevant - the foundation must decide either which charities are elligible, or who gets to vote on which charities are elligible. And the decisions to hold the coins pending a full plan, and to give them to charity, were both made without a vote.

Seigniorage is the difference between the cost to acquire a good and its market value. If Bitcoin has any seigniorage at all, it tends to zero just like mining profits. That's such a far cry from 80% seigniorage that when you first said this to me months ago, I was so disgusted that I remained silent until now.

There are two reasons I haven't forked:
1) I'm not skilled enough to maintain it properly.
2) I'm not convinced that demurrage is beneficial in the first place.
If anyone reading this does start a "equal rules for all" fork, please PM me and you'll have found your first speculator.

Apparently maaku thinks the "evil" of Bitcoin speculation IS on-topic since he brought it up. I've tried to bite my tongue, but this is so blantantly antagonistic that I just can't leave it be. So by all means, discuss the crowdfund/software and keep your moral judgements of the Bitcoin community to yourselves.

Says the man sitting on a huge pile of Freicoins he earned just as much as any pre-mined coin developer. Of course, this time it's different because charity is good and lending capital at great risk is evil. You're entitled to seigniorage because you hold a moral high ground - you're a better person than those evil Bitcoin speculators.

Gee where do I send my money.

Are there any actual examples of double-spends happening to someone who accepts 0-confirmation transactions in the wild? I've always attributed Litecoin's success to being the first Scrypt coin with a fair launch, consistent rules, and good community support.

+1 for each. For what it's worth these are the only Bitcoin investment suggestions I actually listened to, I'm happy with the result, and it has given me balls of steel during the latest crash. If anything should be purged from our vocabulary it should be "stop loss"; selling low because you have reason to be afraid.

This isn't professional advice, don't blame me if I'm completey wrong and the price of  Bitcoin crashes!

It seems to me like the price is low because of exchange problems. I think once decentralized exchanges are more user-friendly this will no longer be an issue, so long-term the outlook is good. If we assume the Open-Transactions Holy Grail is completed in 6 months, then I'd guess another big price increase (over $1000) in 9-12 months.

Short term I have no idea, I just invest based on how I expect the usefulness of a good to change over time.

I feel like the 38% to repeal vs 50% unfavorable is an interesting statistic. It implies that 12% of Americans know Obamacare isn't working correctly, but think it will be fixed in the future.

Maybe the "left" knew it would never work, but also knew that Single Payer would be politically feasible once we already had an equally socialist (but less sane) system.

I'm getting waaaay too out of touch. It's starting to shock me how OK Americans are with socialism so long as we don't call it that, and so long as it doesn't actually help poor people. We're willing to pay a high price for our pride.

(Snip)

Have you asked them which part of the service they find horrifying? I haven't heard anyone say the problem is that it's too affordable. IMHO it seems like most people here don't like it because it's mandatory, but if health care was optional and affordable they'd be happy.

How much is spent protecting the fiat currency system? All those guns and drones... If bitcoins are ever worth $1M each, it means people will be wasting less energy on fiat.