A few years ago, Aon was ranked largest insurance broker in the world. It's pretty amazing to see legacy giants like that entering the cryptocurrency space.

I'd be curious to see what the terms are like. It sounds pretty pricey:

And yet there's still plenty of BSV shills coming out of the woodworks claiming it's proof of something. At least now we can turn around and say, "Craig Wright is no more legitimate than Wei Liu."

I was hoping this stunt would tempt lots of other people to file similar copyright registrations, proving how silly the whole thing is. Maybe this is just the start.

Fee revenue is essential if there is a hard cap on supply. That was the whole design -- subsidize mining early on to bootstrap the network, then eventually fees will replace the subsidy. Otherwise, network security is utterly dependent on an ever-increasing price, since speculation would be required to incentivize miners. We can't simply assume that price will keep rising forever and that that is a sustainable incentive for miners. We have to consider a future where the design is more self-sufficient.

Consider a context where price is crashing for years and years rather than rising. Difficulty will adjust downwards but if block rewards are also steadily dropping (due to lack of fee revenue), we could see downspiraling hash rates to the point where the network becomes insecure and loses its Byzantine fault tolerance.


This is all a big experiment. The whole idea of "cryptoeconomics" is brand new, and the whole field of economics isn't scientific. We all have different opinions about how things might work out in the future.

My primary emphasis is on the mining incentive, because it's the supreme building block of the entire system. From my perspective, we can't plan on never-ending price increases nor exponentially increasing adoption. But we can ensure that strong mining incentives remain -- at least relative to the system's native currency, if not fiat currency value -- by ensuring that increased transaction demand nets higher block rewards.

If we let mining incentives bleed away to nothing by increasing block sizes -- while still retaining a hard cap on supply -- I don't see a bright future for Bitcoin.

As it turns out, the "Blockchain, not Bitcoin" mantra was a load of crap. Who would have thought?


Putting aside the central bank conspiracy angle for a moment... I expect to see lots of similar statements in the coming years as people realize that Bitcoin may be the money of the future, but that doesn't mean "blockchain technology" is going to revolutionize various industries.

This is a bit hard to believe. Quite bullish for the market if true, though. If I were trying to accumulate millions of bitcoins through Dadiani, I might be pissed off to hear her blabbing to the press like this.

One interesting tidbit about demand:

I remember using these Coinstar machines in supermarkets years ago to turn change into cash. There were certainly fees, although 12% sounds like they've definitely risen over time. It's kind of cool to see them integrating the ability to buy bitcoins but you're right, the process for customers is pretty awful.

It seems like buying bitcoins requires full KYC (ID and selfie required) for any amount, which seems ridiculous. I certainly won't be using them.


I guess it works for the people who think of change as worthless. So, they still feel like they're getting something for nothing. Remember the Lawnmower app? Sort of like that. Lawnmower was way better, though.

Maybe we could afford for it to be a selling point years ago when transaction demand was very low and the block subsidy was very high. Cheap transactions didn't hurt miner incentives when block rewards were 50+ BTC. That's changing. In 5 years, the block subsidy will only be ~ 3 BTC. Shouldn't fee revenue be rising to compensate miners? How long can miners be expected to subsidize users with cheap fees?

I think Satoshi was naive with some of his economic assumptions.

Bitstamp being overly nosy doesn't surprise me. They always took the cake for having the most invasive AML/KYC measures. I wouldn't put up with this kind of invasion of privacy. If you're in Europe, Kraken and Coinbase Pro are some other options that support SEPA funding.


Net worth and annual income are pretty standard questions for verifying accredited investor status. When GDAX had margin trading, I remember using leverage was restricted to accredited investors. Doesn't really apply to Bitstamp, though...

Many people know that McAfee is an unscrupulous character, but they're also happy to see prominent people hyping up Bitcoin or their altcoins. Other people just have blinders on and are riding the hype train too. People will latch onto any minor celebrity who they think will pump their holdings. This is what happens when people become financially biased.

Who said it had anything to do with block size?

Since the OP was asking about SSD adoption's effect on scalability, I suggested that SSD adoption is actually good for scalability because of their efficiency in accessing the UTXO set. It seemed like a relevant observation...

The market seems to disagree, so when do you expect a "flippening" type event to occur? Years, decades?

By the way, it's a 4MB block weight limit now. It's rare to see blocks < 1MB anymore.

That's utter nonsense. No altcoin codebase is more rigorously tested than Bitcoin. No altcoin network is more secure. Altcoins are much more centralized in their mining or staking distributions. Some altcoins may have shiny new gimmicks -- most of which aren't worth porting into Bitcoin -- but "far better than Bitcoin" is simply wrong.

SSD storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. Between that and the use of pruning, I don't think there's much concern here. Efficiently accessing the UTXO set is a much bigger concern. So, transitioning to SSDs should actually be a good thing for scalability. From the Bitcoin wiki:

It won't just be Bitpay and Coinbase -- in fact, I think they are underdogs in this game. Within a decade, I think we'll see legacy retail banks like Chase, Bank of America, etc. offering cryptocurrency deposit and investment accounts alongside fiat accounts. We're seeing the institutional side take off already, with involvement from Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, the ICE, CME Group, etc. When Bitcoin gets big enough, this will expand into the retail sector.

It's a shame, but that's the direction I see things heading.

It's a legal grey area. I haven't seen any regulations passed that specifically affect mixers. I'm sure they are used by some people to launder money, but even in the Bestmixer case, Europol seems unsure of the extent. Notably, no one was arrested in that case, either.

I imagine Bitblender was spooked by the Bestmixer bust, especially if they have operations in Europe. If so, hopefully they're planning to relaunch under a new name and from a new location.

No, miners must comply with Bitcoin's consensus rules, which are enforced by all full nodes on the network.

For example, miners could begin mining a chain that inflates mining rewards beyond 21M bitcoins. The network of full nodes, however, would ignore that hard forked chain as invalid and the mining rewards would be worthless. So, miners will only build on a chain that the Bitcoin network accepts as valid.


Effectively, it was done by two pool administrators who used their collective hash power to 51% attack Bitcoin Cash to reverse previous transactions. This does suggest Bitcoin Cash is pretty centralized since it took very little coordination to successfully attack the chain.

That logic may have applied in 2010 when bitcoins were worth very little. I have a hard time believing many people today are going to forget where their thousands or millions of dollars worth of coins are stored. I certainly know where all my copies are.

Still, you point out good reasons why it's prudent to have multiple methods of backing up cold storage -- in case of things like corrupted storage or forgotten encryption keys. And also perhaps a system in place for transferring ownership in case of sudden head injury or death.

But I don't see these things as justifying the use of hardware wallets. Whether we're talking about supply side attacks or physical robbery/$5 wrench attacks, general purpose hardware is a safer bet.

Their main site (binance.com) doesn't have fiat trading pairs -- only stablecoins like USDT. However, they recently launched a separate site based in Jersey (binance.je) which has EUR and GBP trading pairs for Bitcoin and Ethereum.


It has the best liquidity you can find for altcoin and stablecoin markets, and it also has the best KYC policies. It did suffer from a major breach recently where around 7,000 bitcoins were lost to hackers, but they fully covered customer losses and seem to have bounced back well.

The best cold wallets can't be recognized in plain view. Things like encrypted wallet.dat on general purpose storage (like thumb drives). Seed words can also be hidden in plain sight, mixed in with ordinary media like books and magazines.

Aside from my discomfort with the potential attack surface, this is the other reason that hardware wallets bother me. They announce, "I own crypto! Rob me!"

This watch does the same thing -- to an even further degree, since it's a luxury watch that costs tens of thousands of dollars.

The estimated rate required will frequently be changing as network congestion waxes and wanes. A fee rate that gets confirmation within 24 hours today may not work the same next week.

That's why, like o_e_l_e_o mentioned, you should use a site like Johoe's Mempool Statistics. For your purposes, I would visually look over the last 24 hours of activity, then manually choose a fee rate near the lower bound of confirmed transactions.

Over the last 24 hours, we've seen the mempool completely cleared many times, so right now 1 satoshi/byte is probably enough. You might add an extra satoshi or two per byte just to be safe.