Exactly. Lightning is a very situational scaling solution: It only scales when e.g. two parties are often transferring money to each other. The final settlement is still done on the chain.

Looking forward to Schnorr signatures.

Why would you trust an American company like that? They can literally MITM all traffic if they want to (or are forced to by subpoenas).
Using CF would kill all trust in this service.

The end is nigh.

Here are my general thoughts and some speculation regarding libra. Just to be able to say in the end: I told you so.

Don't take anything of the following as a fact. This is just my opinion and expectation.

1) Libra will use delegated proof of stake.
This means that there will be a very few master-nodes. It will be impossible for a normal person like you and me to run a full node. Instead, those 100 companies, which paid 10.000.000 USD will all run a node => 10m USD license fee to run a node.

It won't be truly P2P. Instead, you are required to trust these parties. Trusting 100 for profit companies - most of them are US-based - does not sound like it is decentralized.


2) Data is the new oil.
Facebook is analyzing your habits to place targeted advertisements. These ads aim for you buying a product or service of the advertiser. But tracking whether the user did buy or did not is hard.
Libra is worth gold in this case.
Facebook will be able to track every transaction you make. Every product you purchase. This is worth gold.

3) Reskinned PayPal.
To me it does not like a cryptocurrency which follows Satoshi's spirit of financial freedom. Instead, by using it you will lock yourself into an ecosystem primarily controlled by for profit companies which do not care about privacy at all.

Marcel is a very nice person. Smooth and fast trade. Thanks again.

I have a small business running where I sell virtual goods in exchange for money. Although the goods are low priced with a price range from 4.99$ to 29.99$ (the average amount of purchase is 9.99$), around 20% of my customers choose to pay with cryptocurrencies. This is surprising to me as credit card fees are much lower for such microtransactions.
However, it shows me that many people actually believe in the idea of a decentralized cash system and do not just use Bitcoin as a store of value.

In my opinion people who only use Bitcoin to speculate did not understand Satoshi's vision as a peer-to-peer cash-system. You can see this as a byproduct in any currency however. Just have to look at traditional currencies, where forex trading is a thing as well.

Unfortunately all backups of the source code and binaries have been taken down from [1] Sourceforge. The README.txt states that the code moved to github.com and that the project would be available on bitcoin.org (which implicitly redirects me to bitcoin-core.org), however I was unable to find the original reference implementation of Bitcoin by Nakamoto on their websites. The eldest version I found is [2] v0.9.2.1 in the Bitcoin Core Repository.

Has anyone a backup or knows where to find the old sources? Archive.org didn't help much either.


Best regards,
mccorrinall


[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/
[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/v0.9.2.1