Nice thatched raft. Where are all those people shitting?

I wasn’t referring to temperature control you dimwit: without climate control how are you managing against humidity, corrosion and mold? A dehumidifier is the exact same thing as an AC, without separating the compressor. You can’t store clothes or sensitive electronics or books there. How are you preventing salt spray from crystallizing on the solar panels?

I’ve lived for years on the equator, and sure you don’t get so many typhoons but what about the fucking annual monsoons and dry spells?

How much diesel are you using ferrying everything to and fro?

Your own environmental impact statement says it best: there remains significant risk and uncertainty. The only real mitigation you currently have is your puny ass scale of operations.

Man, I wish my RE taxes were this low.
In TX they are INSANELY high.
$10K on a moderately valued home. It's a high replacement of state tax.
I am not retired, but a typical retiree cannot pay this.

What's the actual tax rate in the states, anyway? In my country it's about 80%. 50% income tax, 25% sales tax and a whole bunch of taxes that are not openly advertised on anything you buy adding up to another 50%.

How much of your labor needs to be taken away before you no longer consider yourself "free"?

Saw on /r/bitcoin.

Food for thought.

You aren’t poor.  At least, you aren’t dirt poor.  You enjoy the freedoms afforded anyone who is affluent in a Western country.  You are probably a white middle class male with a commensurate income.  

A lot of us lefties look at the poor in America and think that the divide is too great. They fear that what happens in America will eventually happen to their country too.  We also have our alt-right and our NeoNazis.

But here our poor have free high quality healthcare and there is a modest social safety net.  No one dies in the gutter. We don’t want to live in a society where people are desperate, because people with nothing to lose are extremely dangerous and violent.  We want a nice peaceful society where everyone has equal opportunity.   Part of that is not fucking over your poor.  If you fuck over your poor you end up with South Africa or Detroit.  Yes you can have gated communities but I don’t want to live like that.  I can walk down the worst street in my large city at 2am and not worry. I like that.  

A big part of the reason is because we take care of our poor, more or less.  Too many libertarians are like Marie Aintonette “let them eat cake”.  We all know how that worked out.

The Poll in here is the best indicator you'll get in this thread. Only when actually more people think we will be going down, we can go up.

So... this is a suckers rally

Unconvinced. My son has been watching the DB series since years. I can't escape it. Near as I can tell, is consists of the same small set of rivals fighting the same battle over and over again.

I can't be bothered to read anyone's arguments about LN back here, but let's be clear about one thing, there is no use quoting what Hearn claimed 7 years ago that satoshi said as an argument for anything.

Yes, Torque - he has every right to ask NATO members to spend 2% on defence, as it's part of the NATO principles (and I cannot blame him) and it's also true that not everyone pays their dues.  However, it is a separate issue to trade and the 'EU" as the EU isn't a NATO member, and NATO is far more than just the countries of the EU.

This has nothing to do with my credentials. I don't need any kind of authority and didn't claim it. I'm telling a simple story about how a decentralized infrastructure like tcp/ip turned to be hidden by centralized, second layer protocols and you don't understand a word of mine.

I'm not talking about LN, I'm against any second layer protocol on bitcoin, I maintain that bitcoin IS NOT an infrastructure it is a complete system, it should be, it is meant to be.

Off-chain/second layer solutions of any kind, by any name are just a statement of failure for bitcoin.

You guys are hypocrites, little, sneaky hypocrites. Instead of focusing on bitcoin as a system, an electronic P2P cash system, you are giving up with it and are rushing to LN as the solution, the shelter.

One use of nLockTime is high frequency trades between a set of parties. They can keep updating a tx by unanimous agreement.  The party giving money would be the first to sign the next version.  If one party stops agreeing to changes, then the last state will be recorded at nLockTime.  If desired, a default transaction can be prepared after each version so n-1 parties can push an unresponsive party out.  Intermediate transactions do not need to be broadcast.  Only the final outcome gets recorded by the network.  Just before nLockTime, the parties and a few witness nodes broadcast the highest sequence tx they saw.

Well if peace means surrender, including siding with Putin against the findings of the Republican controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, then yes. After all, there’s nothing wrong with cock sucking. I’m sure many find it quite tasty. I certainly hope my wife does.

As I understand it, the lightning network isn't supposed to be for large transactions. It might more severely disrupt some marginal transactions that are above the normal denominations of every day users but below what people tend to consider worth doing on chain. And sure if a huge node like that suddenly went offline it would create disruption and force people to open new channels which would bloat the mempool and temporarily increase on chain fees. The point is that the network would heal almost organically and rather more quickly than many would surmise, I suspect.  Even that worst case scinario of one entity routing everything suddenly pulls out, would just heal naturally in time. And destroying your privileged position as largest node on the network just to cause temporary disruption that would heal probably pretty quickly? As an attack vector, it seems like a stretch.


I don't think this is right. A user would only have to find one payment channel that would be willing to route his payment. So if the big centralized node was refusing to route certain payments this would create a market for routing the payments that he was unwilling to route. Smaller parallel payment channels would emerge to serve this market. Even if it wasn't very anonymous, they would stay nimble and mobile and in safe jurisdictions. I'm sure the state could succeed in increasing the fees some what for routing payments like this but probably not to oppressive levels. Where there is a shekel there is a way, as we see with drug prohibition.

IMHO uncertainty has been drastically reduced. There are enough people out there who understand Bitcoin’s purpose and role that it has long since passed the “passing fad” test.  This isn’t Linden dollars. 

Yeah, when you joined it was already too late for the party.

In your own words:

It seems like a good time to talk about how bad of a thing centralization on LN actually is. Because, the way I see it, it isn't that big of a deal, but I may be missing part of the puzzle.

There is this idea in the economics of free market capitalism that, even if an actor is a defacto monopoly, that even though he isn't constrained by existing competition, he is still constrained by the competition that will come into being if he abuses his position. This doesn't always work in the real world because monopolists employ the state to protect them against competition. However in the abstract world of permissionless adhock networks there is no state to protect a node from competition.

Even if there were only one node that everyone connected through, he would be constrained by the knowledge that if he abused his position than competition would quickly appear. He would have to keep fees so low that no one wanted to bother starting a node to compete with him. He would have to route all transactions because the moment he started censoring nodes would pop up to route those transactions. He would have to route transactions reliably and consistently because the moment he didn't new nodes would pop up to compete with him that could. He would have to find a way to be DDOS resistant because if he did not new nodes would appear to serve those who were unable to route through him due to network disruption.

Anyway, I am sure that you see where I am going with this. So I would like to know what if anything I am missing here. What is the fear of a centralized lightning network?