Opening and closing of channels happen on Blockchain, in between you can send numerous offchain transactions through LN. When you open a channel you're not just getting connected to a coffee shop, but to the whole network via nodes which includes exchanges, other services/retailers, that's why you don't have to open a new channel for a new purpose, so opening a channel to just make a one-time payment for a coffee and then closing the channel isn't necessary. If your channel runs out of funds you can rebalance it with a single on-chain payment. If a good number of transactions are happening offchain it would solve Blockchain's congestion issues and on-chain fees would be much cheaper. LN is not for large-value transactions, but for small day-to-day purchases.

This infographics would be more helpful, https://i.imgur.com/L10n4ET.png

https://unlikekinds.com/t/bitcoin-s-lightning-network-doesn-t-require-you-to-open-a-channel-for-each-person-want-to-pay

1. Yeah, like fiat, it's not easy for governments to track the movement of decentralized currencies to tax it, but still with stricter rules and regulations, the governments could track crypto to fiat conversions through exchanges, South Korea barring anonymous crypto trading, Coinbase IRS notification, Indian tax department sending tax notices. Governments don't have to accept Bitcoin as a legal tender to tax it.

2. With the fiat system in existence, would any government give legal status to a decentralized currency? Not likely, but yeah, recognizing and regulating Bitcoin as a commodity is a sure possibility.

3. A unique ID and a unique wallet linked to the bank account to track all Bitcoin transactions. A lot more than pseudo-anonymity, Bitcoin is about having total control over your money, you absolutely own it, you can spend it or move it whenever you like. What would be the difference between Bitcoin and fiat if government controls it? Why do we need it?

In the beginning, governments totally ignored the existence of Bitcoin, but now a lot of governments are trying to regulate and integrate it into their financial system. What forced some governments to ban Bitcoin is what is making others regulate it, the adoption rate has increased tremendously, more and more people are getting into Bitcoin daily, more Bitcoin related business are getting launched. There is no negotiation, as adoption increases more governments will take a positive approach and a few the negative route.

A centralized private key exchange-based system, PayPal will be holding crypto in different secondary wallets with respective private keys and predefined amounts, and a buyer swaps these keys with a seller, off-chain transactions. It would work, but rather than Blockchain, would have to heavily rely on PayPal for security and obviously too centralized.

In 1994, Bill Gates had said banking is necessary, banks are not. Although Bitcoin/Blockchain technology does give us the choice to be our own bank, the technology hasn't evolved to the point of offering a whole new level of decentralized banking services ecosystem, for that banks are undeniably necessary/important. A few traditional banks are already working on moving to private banking on Blockchain. Bitcoin/cryptos are an alternative banking solution and as far as I would like to believe it would make banks obsolete, guess it wouldn't happen, but most probably banks would be forced to bring changes in their fundamental business model to provide better services.

I think it's too much unorganized information or misinformation. Last year more than 900 ICOs were launched and 46% of them already have failed, marketing through different announcement sites, social media, press releases, and referral spam. A good percentage of new investors enter the crypto market on hype/FOMO, looking to buy the next Bitcoin on discount and with so much information being spread out about different ICOs, rather than taking a time-consuming approach to do a proper research, most new investors tend to quickly grasp any information that fuels their FOMO psychology, just taking investment advice from strangers.

For the time being, I guess $10K is the resistance point, anything above it is pure hype/speculation.

Yeah, it's impossible to hide backdoors in open source projects, someone will find it out. There were rumors about a possible backdoor in Zcash, FUD. Privacy-centric coins use different cryptographic techniques to achieve anonymity/privacy and I guess Zcash's, zk-SNARKs protocol is the most complicated. A government agency launching their own privacy coin to catch criminals is a possibility, assuming if they used some sort of new or highly complicated privacy protocol to hide a backdoor, it wouldn't be possible to immediately identify it, it's less likely to happen than governments establishing a marketplace to trap criminals. Last year, the FBI, DEA, and the the National Dutch Police shut down two of the largest Dark Web markets, AlphaBay and Hansa. Before shutting down, the Dutch Police operated Hansa for about a month without the buyers/sellers realizing it.

That's some weird logic. What do you think is happening when price is increasing, more people are investing, media attention/FUD, governments issuing warnings, regulations? Adoption. Bitcoin did start off as a niche currency, all the above things happening are part of it becoming much more than that. Bitcoin should stay low and a few people should talk about it and that too for what, recovering losses

25% of black market transactions in Bitcoin, $44,000, that's an interesting figure.


I do agree, speculation is a zero sum game. Buy the dip/HODL/If you had bought back in 2013, how they are ponzi techniques, more like market strategies or market sentiments either driven by emotions or fundamentals. These terms are common in crypto community, I wouldn't say really a means of promotion, but simply the market participants expressing themselves, not enforcing it on anybody and if a new crypto investor enters the market on FOMO, without understanding the fundamentals and blindly takes up a strategy and ends up in loss, blaming these participants doesn't make sense.

Bitcoin is getting adopted as an investment, but yeah, promoting Bitcoin as a currency is necessary, speculation is a zero sum game, utility changes that. Hope with LN, apart from the HODL meme we would be seeing the return of the popular 2014's Western Union meme.

Why would there be any need is based on the assumption that the transactional volume wouldn't increase in future. If right now, Bitcoin network had the transactional demand as in December and with 20% Segwit adoption, the fees wouldn't be anywhere near 1 Sat/byte. Segwit is just the first step towards implementing a lot of scalability innovations. Schnorr signatures is a scability implementation while confidential transactions/Bulletproofs is privacy-centric.

Yeah, Bitcoin started as a currency, but it's more of a commodity now. One has to wonder if Bitcoin got more traction as a currency would it have been as popular as it's now as a commodity? Would Bitcoin prices have been much more stable than now where users would have been using it for day-to-day lives? Not likely. Not about Bitcoin vs fiat, but if you're living in a country with a strong and stable economic conditions, Bitcoin doesn't serve much purpose as a medium of exchange, other payment systems would do the job, unless Bitcoin transactions are that cost-effective, but yeah in a hyperinflated or a nation with a broken economic structure, that's where Bitcoin serves its true purpose as a medium of exchange.

The countries that have regulated Bitcoin have classified it as a commodity, apart from Japan where it's considered a legal tender. I think governments planning to regulate Bitcoin would take the commodity route rather than recognizing Bitcoin as a currency, better a commodity than accepting a decentralized currency they can't control. It's about stability, less volatility, currency or commodity, what matters is how mass adoption will be achieved. Bitcoin can't only be digital gold without utility, and so far apart from volatility, scalability concerns have been limiting Bitcoins potential as a currency, but with LN, there are a few good reasons to believe that the next phase of adoption would be utility/currency driven.

Like gold, Bitcoin is scarce, durable, mineable, but anti-counterfeiting, divisibility, and portability properties does make it somewhat better than gold. While gold is preferred as a safe haven for its stability as a long-term hedge, Bitcoins price volatility is far greater than that of gold. It's because of Bitcoin being a new technology and just a decade old, in these years we have seen that Bitcoin could be a good a store of value, but still not reliable. People invest into gold not expecting massive gains, but preserving/protecting wealth against any turmoil. In that sense, IMO, Bitcoin market is still somewhat too volatile and speculative, but evolving/maturing and with underlying utility as currency, it can be better than gold.

Just for fun entered my address, I have visited a few websites with Coinhive captcha, but this one session did last a lifetime The timer you have set for one browsing session is a bit too long for beta, with the timestamp, it looks like more than an hour, users would leave without even completing a session.

One out of the 333.333.333 tickets has the chance to win the 1 Bitcoin. Do you think anyone would be wasting their CPU resources against such big odds?

You haven't mentioned anywhere on your website how the winning ticket will be drawn, will be pulled, no transparency.

Improved layout, adding a clan, more like group of miners, gamification with badges, interesting. Good luck getting some users.

Last year, Cointelegraph had published an infographics on how corrupt governments tend to be more hostile towards Bitcoin and I think there is a correlation between these. So far countries with strong governance and healthy economic growth have recognized Bitcoin with some sort of a regulatory framework. And the corrupted ones have been on the sidelines for obvious reasons, decentralization, capital control; customer protection, and illicit activities are secondary reasons.

The Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Bill was cleared by the cabinet couple of days ago and will be introduced in the parliament shortly. This has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, but ponzi schemes offering fixed returns involving real estate, jewelers, and chit funds. The good thing is, Department of Economic Affairs has already constituted a committee to work on cryptocurrency framework so at a time when the government is working on protecting the interests of investors and Blockchain technology, we can expect that there will be regulations by the end of this year.

If you had sent a transaction lately, you would have noticed that the transaction fees/charges has come down considerably lower than what it was a few months ago. From around $40 by the end of last year to around $1 for small-sized transactions now. Although Segwit transactions are still around 14% only, the whole transactional demand has decreased and it's likely once the transaction volume increases again like it was in December, Segwit adoption would have reached more than 50%, with major exchanges like Coinbase and wallets like Blockchain rolling out Segwit within the first quarter and also batching.

I didn't get what do you mean by high transactions fees and miners not getting paid what they should be Maybe I failed to understand the whole question Self-moderated thread, wrong answer, do delete it.

There is a repetitive pattern since 2011 to now, boom/bust/bottom out/stabilizing, and the cycle repeats again. It was from $6000 to $19000, the last boom and then bust to $6000. I am not an analyst, but after each boom/bust pattern the stabilization point has always been higher than the last bust point so I am assuming $10000 is the new sustainable stabilization point from where the next boom cycle will begin.

Bitcoin market is highly speculative, price predictions based on pricing patterns, TA, can to a large extent predict the existing trend, but again where news/events can have a sudden impact on the Bitcoin market, TA does have its limitations.

I believe this is the page, https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Donation-accepting_organizations_and_projects

I guess you have already confirmed your email, but if haven't activated your wiki account and got editor status then post your Bitcoin Wiki username on this thread, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1025908.0

That above page is fully protected, administrators might only have the editing rights, to prevent scam organizations from being added.


https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Talk:Donation-accepting_organizations_and_projects

I went through their FAQ section, currently their services are available in only 5 states and right now they don't support coin withdrawals or coin deposits. Considering their crypto trading just went live and with more than 1,000,000 people in line, they might roll out these features soon, but still IMO with getting over 4+ million sign ups (compared with 13 million Coinbase users) they should have gone live with coin withdrawals and deposits. Getting 4+ million sign ups and their free trading model does bring competition to the crypto market, an edge over fee-based exchanges and that will get them more users, but to compete with Coinbase, I guess it would be more about credibility.

https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000088663-Crypto-Transfers-Deposits

I think the biggest impact would be regulations/legalization. IMO, most people aren't investing into Bitcoin because without regulations or a clearer stand by a government creates an uncertain environment, makes Bitcoin more risky, where a government can decide to ban exchanges and negatively impact the price, for example what happened with China, Korea, or India FUD. Regulations would not only give more legitimacy, but might also bring more stability and encourage risk-averse individuals to be a part of Bitcoin ecosystem.

Yeah, gold market share, even if Bitcoin captures 5% of gold’s $8.9 trillion global market cap, we are looking at a price of around $26,439.35 per BTC.

And of course, another major factor is technological developments/upgrades, lightening network could be Bitcoin's way to getting a good share of global payment processing market.

As an investment, gold/precious metals/stock market, currency/lightening network/e-commerce/remittances, regulations/legalization. No just as an investment, but the overall usefulness of Bitcoin that would be deciding its long-term value.

Hey mate, partial repayment, https://blockchain.info/tx/54acfa106abe066e9a39976333efb2062c48f26339f96f54a9439ba8a46fde5a

Thank you.