There's an abundance of evidence to suggest that Bitcoin Cash was a small minority of original Bitcoiners, not least the way the exchange rate of BCH has dived and dived. 95% acceptance or thereabouts is the best that could be expected realistically, and that's about what happened. Saying "100 people out of several 100,000's didn't agree" is not much of an argument.

This is circular reasoning.

If a majority can agree not to increase the blocksize limit, then that is a consensus decision by definition. The logic wasn't "no increase, because Bitcoiners say no to everything, always". The logic was "no increase, because it's the wrong decision at this point in time, for design reasons".

When a case is made that makes sense to the majority of Bitcoiners, they'll accept a blockweight increase. For instance, Segwit was an increase in blockweight, and Bitcoiners accepted it. So it's already happened, saying "it's never going to happen" is a difficult argument to sustain given this reality.

I think we will see a block weight increase in the future.

But I also think that this should not be rushed.

The first step was to get Segwit which is essential for lot of future improvements including lightning.

But I guess lot of people did not understand that it's not done by just activating Segwit.
It's important that people and companies also use Segwit so it can show it's benefits.

And I think the only way it was possible to force companies to implement Segwit in their services was to reject the Segwit2X fork.

Companies usually first think about their money.
So what is cheaper for them?
Increasing the block weight where they don't have anything to do or hire some developers to implement Segwit in their software.

Of course the companies decide to go the easy and cheap way.

With the Segwit2X I think we would have temporarily solved the full blocks end of last year but I'm quite sure that nearly no company would have implemented Segwit on their side as everything is fine even without using Segwit.
Without the overfilled mempool end of last year (which might be caused by attacking the network with spam transactions), I also think that Segwit adoption by the big companies did not happen that "fast". Because of high transactions fees they were forced to implement Segwit and batching transactions to maintain their businesses.

Therefore I can completely understand that lot of people (including lot of Bitcoin Core team members) were against a block weight increase for now.
But I don't see this rejection of the 2X as "they are against an increase forever".

So in short. Segwit need to get adopted which would be much slower if also a block weight increase happened.
After adoption of Segwit and other soft fork scaling solutions I'm sure we will see also an increase of the block weight (maybe not in the near future, but it will come).

I don't discount the possibility of 100-fold increase at all because Bitcoin can break pretty much any and all expectations. I think the chance is pretty low though.

We know that coins with low market cap are much more vulnerable to pumps. If we think about it in absolute terms, an increase from $15 to $1000 is only an increase of $985 -- an amount that is likely to be dismissed as normal market fluctuation nowadays. I'm pretty sure the amount of money that had to flow into the market for an increase like that is still nothing compared to, let's say, $7k going to $19k.

Bitcoin was also arguably at its peak popularity last December when it reached its current all-time-high, and even then it couldn't even manage a 3-fold increase. The infrastructure you've cited is also a problem as the Lightning Network still looks far from ready for primetime, and its initial release barely created any buzz at all. 100x is probably possible within the next three years, but it's a long shot.

It's a bold prediction for sure, especially when you are looking from the outside in in a bear market.

As you said, you never know how high bitcoin goes in a bull market. It's not impossible for McAfee's predictions to become reality, although, I'd say safely that the chances of it actually happening is very very low.

We haven't seen bitcoin go 100 fold in 2 years before, and I doubt it's going to happen straight after 2017's pumps have come to an end.

Ultimately, bitcoin will reach $1 million, no doubt. But McAfee's prediction is restricted by time, and I think that he may very well run out of time as inflation isn't really that big of a factor in a timespan like 2 years. And when BTC does hit that kind of figure, fiat would have depreciated by a lot.

McAfee should stop making himself look like a clown -- the more he publicly speaks out, the more credibility he loses. I am already happy if we manage to reach the $50,000 level before then end of 2020, which is somewhat of a conservative estimate, but I realistically can't see the price end up reaching much higher than $100,000 by that time. Seriously, what developments before the end of 2020 will be able to justify a $1,000,000 valuation? I can't think of anything within such a short period of time -- we need a more reliable form of growth, not again empty bull runs that aren't holding their position for long. I strongly hope that if we ever reach the $1,000,000 milestone, it is somewhere between 2025-2030. It takes time to build an economy and ecosystem being worthy of such a valuation. That dude only cares about his investment and ignores the crucial aspects of a market in development....

Did anyone clicked the link? I'm not familiar with it and I'm skeptic on clicking it.
Anyway about McAfee's model, I'm not interested to know what type of model he is. He's no longer reliable with what he is saying.
There are other predictors who has sense with what they are saying.
Even without his words, I do believe that bitcoin will reach $1,000,000 soon whether it's on 2020 or longer.
Due to this, I prefer Tim Draper's speculation rather than his.

And this is what I'm pointing out. With this attitude, the thing that will NEVER happen is bitcoin being able to scale to a global demand. NEVER. There is only so much you can stuff through a 1mb bottleneck every 10 minutes. If you take increasing that entirely off the table, anything else you do are just half-measures that won't ever solve the problem. Even if with a bunch of scaling solutions they could somehow get onchain txs up to say 100/sec, that probably isn't nearly enough considered people will still do plenty of onchain txs plus opening/closing LN channels. But if you then add an increase to 8x increase to the blocksize, which is probably doable without risking decentralization and whatnot, that 100 txs/sec turns into 800 txs/sec!! Whatever non-blocksize increase solutions are implemented, adding to the blocksize multiplies them all! If you discount that you very likely discount the future success of bitcoin.

Why would you take a serious scaling solution off the table?? Scaling is the biggest problem and bitcoin will fail or succeed based on it. To say the most obvious part of the solution is off the table forever is saying you don't want bitcoin to succeed. It's the most dangerous to the market sure, but that's why you build a consensus for it before you do it. The segwit2x didn't have a consensus so it was very dangerous, but probably the only reason it didn't have a consensus is that bitcoin core was against it and therefore some other team had to say they were gonna do it. The bitcoin team should be building a consensus right now because a lull in the market is the perfect time to make a hard fork with less danger while most of the world is not paying attention.

Yes, the PoW could generate a seriously problem of centralization in the future, but this still  is not a valid reason to change/update the PoW, we still need a consensus of what type of the algorithm will work better, an example of this is to change the SHA2 to ShA3, invalidating all of the asics, or change the PoW to PoS, which theoretically fishish with the high centralization. But all of these examples has their problem and nobody has certainty if these changes can really improve the bitcoin.

Cobra has the same concerns. I believe some "Bitcoin oracles" were overreacting when they said that he was compromised when he tweeted about buying some Bitcoin Cash.

I personally believe that Bitcoin Cash is good for those people who want to have bigger blocks. But what they should not be doing is claiming that it's the real Bitcoin.

Plus there are some interesting proposals in Bitcoin Cash that should be considered by Bitcoin Core in my opinion, like implementing more Opcodes to add more functionality.

1. Keep that AMD laptop

Best advice right now is to keep pre-2013 AMD and (I think) pre-2007 Intel hardware (which in a stroke of irony are not receiving patches for those kernel memory access exploits that made the news for Intel recently).  


Alternative options to Intel/AMD (which are all compromises of some kind, and all involve more computing skills than x86 platforms):

• ARM chips (not open designs or fully user controllable, & ARM are beginning to introduce anti-features similar to those that Intel and AMD have, so careful research needed)
• IBM POWER chips (which are expensive, & not well supported, but the platform is fully user controllable AFAIK)
• RISC V chips (which are expensive, immature, & not at all widely used, although the design is more open than IBM POWER, and like POWER, whole tech platform is user controllable)

Intel and Microsoft are slowly turning the whole Wintel concept into something closer to owning a Nintendo console than using a proper computer. Using some kind of Unix style operating system on non-Intel hardware will be the only option, eventually.

The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power.  

Yes, Bitcoin will need more changes in order to have more transaction capacity. No one is claiming that the Lightning Network is the end all be all of scaling solutions nor is any claiming that we won't need to do anything else. Those who are don't understand how Bitcoin or the Lightning Network work. It would be naive to think that the Lightning Network would magically solve all of our problems.

To summarise the reasons why payments fail when a counterparty is offline are:
1) transactions require the signature of both parties, and obviously won't work with just one signature
2) the transactions are relayed directly p2p, and there are no other nodes that are involved to store transactions

Why would this be such a big problem? When I receive a payment by bank, I need to be online too, to confirm that I received it. More people than ever are online 24/7, and I doubt this will ever go down again.

The wallet i used its indian wallet and have no sign is feature what i can do that for it. Moreover i never knew that my account going to hack due to bitcointalk data leaks less security system. Its takes month and years to gain higher level membership on bitcointalk

Your exchange can't tax you, however your government can.

It varies from country to country, but in my opinion if you have bought bitcoin and after that you have sold bitcoin you need to pay tax for capital gain.
If you have earned bitcoin in any other way(signature for example) than you have to pay different tax, like income or something.

Still, there are no specific regulations in most countries.

No, he told me they wont punish me when I declare where it came from, he said they wont ask too many questions as long as my intention is to declare and pay anything I have to.

EU new regulation on data, which will come into effect in May is based on “The right to be forgotten”, i.e. the right to demand that personal data is modified of deleted.