I clearly see that you have nothing to do with software engineering, nor algorithm complexity. Scaling on-chain for mainstream is not possible without extreme levels of centralization. This is a fact. I don't plan on fantasizing about miracles in several areas of technology which may somehow enable *more scale* for *less* centralization.
You are right, I am not a software engineer. As for the rest, let's then talk about facts only: as things stand today, scaling on-chain for Visa-like levels is indeed impossible. No, SegWit isn't equal to big blocks. Big blocks are well... Bigger blocks. SegWit separates the Witness thus making more room in the same old 1MB block we know. One approach raises the space we have and the other uses the space we have in a smarter way, both approaches scale. Please correct me if I'm wrong. You don't really understand it. My statement regrading Segwit being essentially a block size increase without a HF is correct. Look at any test net explorer and you can find blocks that are 2-4 MB big. Separating the witness is the method used to achieve this (calculations are therefore done differently, so you seemingly are able to transact more without a hard fork block size increase). Exactly, so it's not a big block, otherwise you and many others would explicitly support some kind of blocksize increase at some point. And yes, separating the witness does indeed allow to transact more, that much I could gather  1) No, I did not imply that.
2) Nonsensical exaggeration (from 2 MB to 10 GB).
3) Any attacker could utilize the maximum block size over night.
1) I didn't say you implied that. 2) I was hoping a nonsensical exaggeration would get my point across, apparently not. Let's make those 10GB, 10MB instead. But I guess I made myself clear regardless. 3) At what cost? Attackers have been known to spam the network with a fair amount of funds so far and gave up without achieving a blockchain stall... I guess this will probably be my last post here. Been reading the thread and it's been a bit derailed... |
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Where are you based? If in the US, Coinbase has a credit card option. Otherwise, I'm not sure if there's anything for you. You can also try Local Bitcoins.
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How can we expect? Just like he remembers the password of his email account... Exactly the same. So I would like to know what technological solutions could be proposed for this problem.
What problem? I don't see any problems or issues here. This isn't certainly a Bitcoin problem, at least... People still have to remember things and exercise their mind. We can't come up with tech solutions for each and every human error or fault. Creating such will only make matters worse. This makes me remember when those cars with autosteer/autopilot functionality crash due to human error and since the system was on, human blames the machine because of "bugs". We cannot blame technology for our faults. If one forgets to make a backup of his wallet or his password, it's sad, but it was his fault for forgetting. A weird idea
can we somehow use our fingerprints as a secret phrase? Any limitations for this?
This is generally considered to be a very weak "secret phrase" as you leave your fingerprint in many places. This has already been discussed a while back. Simple solution:
- do not encrypt wallet.
- use all the letters in the alphabet as password or use your name in reverse as a password.
This is generally not recommended. Simple solution:
- have password hints
This might be bad too. There are many ways, just do what is comfortable for you. Do not let foolishness makes you lose bitcoin.
Good advice  |
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I'm seeing the exact opposite, actually. Preev is showing over $1400, while bitstamp is around $1387. There have always been discrepancies like that, though, because of how small the bitcoin market is and the fact that there are numerous exchanges. Preev should be a composite of them, though. Not sure why they're listing the highest price. That's what I'm seeing, anyway.
I guess there's also an explanation for that: Price data is continually gathered from multiple markets. A weighted average price of these markets is shown by default (based on 24-hour trade volume). Alternatively, you can choose a specific source from the settings menu. |
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Probably. Depends of address reuse and change addresses... There are many websites that allow blockchain analysis, ex.: blockchain.info, Blockseer and Wallet Explorer. You may be surprised with the amount of info you find regarding known addresses or addresses you use... |
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Because buying in person always has a premium. This premium is charged on the basis that exchanging Bitcoin locally and in person is normally much more private than doing it on an exchange.
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The main appeal is ease of use. And no, they're not more secure, in fact it's the exact opposite...
Oops, typo in main post, edited. All right, it's correct now People also use web wallet because, well... they have good marketing, appear on ads and newbies start in the cruptocurrency world by using them... |
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The main appeal is ease of use. And no, they're not more secure, in fact it's the exact opposite...
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Either nothing or the given % for the POS coin in question, as far as I understand.
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There's no way to scale bitcoin to mainstream levels on-chain, there's just no possible way, because it would take insane levels of block size
Insane levels? Why? That's a very weird question. Are you familiar with basic math, i.e. one being done in primary school? 7 TPS in theory, 3 TPS in practice at 1 MB. That's ~300k TXs per day (current statistic). To serve 1 billion people, you'd need at least a capacity of 1 TX per person per day (which can be used as some average, as some will do a lot more while others won't transact each day). 1000 MB blocks brings us to 300 000k TXs per day or 300 Million per day (~3000 TPS). In comparison, Visa does 2000 TPS on average and is capable of doing at least 10x that. It's just nonsensical to even attempt this after a certain size if you want to retain decentralization. Are you familiar with calendars? What's impossible today might not be "tomorrow". Only way to not scale on-chain is saying we will never scale on-chain. If we don't try, we'll never know. If we reject it from the start, it's definitely not going to happen indeed. Hasn't SegWit been developed? Won't it tidy up transactions on the block? You have no confidence SegWit or similar can work in the future or that it can't be further developed or improved?
Do you even understand what SegWit does? It doesn't seem like you do. SegWit is equal to big blocks essentially (if used and ranges from 1 to 4 MB depending on said usage). SegWit scales down the complexity of validation time from quadratic to linear. That's the only significant improvement related to bandwidth, propagation, storage, RAM or processing which are the constraints for big blocks. No, SegWit isn't equal to big blocks. Big blocks are well... Bigger blocks. SegWit separates the Witness thus making more room in the same old 1MB block we know. One approach raises the space we have and the other uses the space we have in a smarter way, both approaches scale. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Blocksizes won't increase drastically overnight.
Nobody says that they are. You need to be prepared for the worst case though, even if it means someone filling up the maximum block size from day 1. Saying that hardware won't keep up with network needs is implying that blocks would be 10GB each overnight if we allowed them to be like that. It's a recurrent theme on forum posts lately. I do agree we have to be ready for worst case scenario though (thus dynamic block approaches have been suggested). New hardware will always appear and get cheaper, so consumers will eventually switch when their hardware becomes slow, unsupported or obsolete, so that's a plus for Big Blocks. Availability is pretty high (many people have slow, but stable connections), so that's a plus for LN.
Incorrect generalization. RAM and SSD prices are currently rising due to shortages. This is of course, temporary, but invalidates your statement. SSD prices are decreasing in the long run and capacities are increasing. There's empirical evidence on this for those who usually browse hardware retailers websites: disks tend to get cheaper and lower capacity disks are being discontinued. One of the stores where I usually buy hardware just recently slashed prices and discontinued SSD's under 120GB. Prices do increase slightly every now and then due to chip providers going bankrupt, other shortages or simple increases in demand. Some price increases aren't noticeable by the end user because stores already have their prices set with quite a nice profit margin. I'm sorry if I haven't made myself clear, prices do decrease in the long run, unless something really out of the ordinary happens. A quick search shows us this, if you have more recent data (anda data about RAM), please do post it (actually interested on it for things beyond Bitcoin). Price decreases are why I constantly delay migrating from HDD's to SSD's... |
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If you want to make a career out of Bitcoin then you have to set your plans straight and know exactly what you want to do, just like in anything else. If you've got it sorted out, put your mind into it and you'll have success... This applies to pretty much anything.
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A funny post to alleviate some tension accumulated on the forums... That's exactly what I want to do to some people...  Fortunately not many! |
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No risk in selling/buying/owning tainted Bitcoins. Many dollar bills have traces of drugs and there's even the term Contaminated currency. Do you not accept fiat bills because of this? Same goes for Bitcoin. If you did nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear, either with tainted coins or contamined bills. |
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You can get impressions from other users regarding this here, here, here, here and probably a few other threads. For me, it definitely changed for the better. |
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There's no way to scale bitcoin to mainstream levels on-chain, there's just no possible way, because it would take insane levels of block size
Insane levels? Why? Hasn't SegWit been developed? Won't it tidy up transactions on the block? You have no confidence SegWit or similar can work in the future or that it can't be further developed or improved? and no, the hard disk capacity and network speed will not catch up on time with the block size needed to deal with all the transactions a global mainstream scenario would need.
Blocksizes won't increase drastically overnight. Big blocks can be decentralized if internet bandwidth, storage and CPU/RAM costs (needed to validate the tons of transactions in big blocks) go down significantly. At this very moment, a 100-MB-block Bitcoin could be enough to serve 1 billion users (the maximum potential I see today: first-world households and the upper-middle class of third world countries), but that would be definitively too much for consumer hardware, mid-scale businesses in first-world countries could probably handle up to 8-10 MB.
A decentralized LN depends mostly on availability of 24/7 stable internet connections, less on bandwidth. Because LN is not 100% trustless, clients must be online 24/7 to avoid being scammed and to enable a decentralized routing. That's not a problem in big cities and well-connected countries, but it could be one in rural areas, especially in third-world-countries.
This is pretty much what came to my mind while reading the first post. This makes big block decentralization on par with LN decentralization. New hardware will always appear and get cheaper, so consumers will eventually switch when their hardware becomes slow, unsupported or obsolete, so that's a plus for Big Blocks. Availability is pretty high (many people have slow, but stable connections), so that's a plus for LN. However bandwidth and investment in connections by ISP's is very relative to areas and willingness of the ISP to invest... and that takes a lot of time, so that's a less for both.. I think things even out. |
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I wonder what is happening in bitcoin network.
Nothing. What's happening is lack of scaling. Workarounds are above... |
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Beyond the obvious comments of "this guy doesn't really know what he's saying about Bitcoin", there are some remarks left to be made. "The short of it is what you do instead of computers burning electricity to mine you have storage space that's mining." He's late to this "storage mining" trend, that has already come and gone (reminds me of Burst and Storj). Not sure why he thinks he's developing something entirely new. Joystream is also being developed, although at a rather slow pace (but at least it works via Bitcoin testnet already). Anyways, it will be interesting to see developments on this, although upload credits had quite a few people against them in early p2p years... It will all depend on how they implement this. If they do it right, it may be a way to support big uploaders. I hope they factor in not only just upload speed and GB uploaded, but also time spent uploading or at least available to do so. If there's an attempt to monetise torrenting, the torrenters will simply say fuck off and do their own thing. That's why they torrent.
I don't think they'll say no for a small reward if they keep files online. Yup, because torrents are kind of hosting illegal files so BTC definitely has some degree of anonymity associated with it.
Incorrect, you should read up on torrents. |
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The software is public code, hosted on GitHub, as far as I know. From my short incursions to the Mining subsection, I remember seeing modified versions of the software for some devices. The code can, and is probably audited frequently. According to antbleed.com The commit date for the backdoor kill switch is July 11th, 2016 Why was this only discovered now on the height of the scaling debate? Having a backdoor is a serious issue and "forgetting" to delete code an even more serious one. If they couldn't develop the feature further, they could have just deleted it entirely. But making this a smear campaign against Bitcoin Unlimited and saying that SegWit supporters were "cooking" this for a while is just outrageous. With this attitude we're not going anywhere. This has to do with mining, not with scaling. Note that people from both sides are confusing things up to get their propaganda going. Some posts on reddit (both /r/bitcoin and /r/btc) are made with the goal of over-complicating things. This forum is way better but still a bit "twitchy"... Are we going to take advantage of this to make a bigger smear campaign? |
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Good to see LTC have developments This should probably go under altcoin discussion, not sure if they're already talking about LN there. |
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Bad that payments in Bitcoin are automatically converted. Artists should have a say regarding that. Also, not sure if this is the right section for this... The main part of this thread isn't about Bitcoin.
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