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Satoshi isn't coming back y'all.
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Considering transaction fees are getting pretty stupid again, it would be nice if SwC supported Bitcoin Cash.
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I guess Bitcoin Cash is the real bitcoin.
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https://twitter.com/SteamDB/status/938459631449493504Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
DECEMBER 6 - KURTIS
As of today, Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment method on our platform due to high fees and volatility in the value of Bitcoin.
In the past few months we've seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network. For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee. These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin. The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically.
Historically, the value of Bitcoin has been volatile, but the degree of volatility has become extreme in the last few months, losing as much as 25% in value over a period of days. This creates a problem for customers trying to purchase games with Bitcoin. When checking out on Steam, a customer will transfer x amount of Bitcoin for the cost of the game, plus y amount of Bitcoin to cover the transaction fee charged by the Bitcoin network. The value of Bitcoin is only guaranteed for a certain period of time so if the transaction doesn’t complete within that window of time, then the amount of Bitcoin needed to cover the transaction can change. The amount it can change has been increasing recently to a point where it can be significantly different.
The normal resolution for this is to either refund the original payment to the user, or ask the user to transfer additional funds to cover the remaining balance. In both these cases, the user is hit with the Bitcoin network transaction fee again. This year, we’ve seen increasing number of customers get into this state. With the transaction fee being so high right now, it is not feasible to refund or ask the customer to transfer the missing balance (which itself runs the risk of underpayment again, depending on how much the value of Bitcoin changes while the Bitcoin network processes the additional transfer).
At this point, it has become untenable to support Bitcoin as a payment option. We may re-evaluate whether Bitcoin makes sense for us and for the Steam community at a later date.
We will continue working to resolve any pending issues for customers who are impacted by existing underpayments or transaction fees.
-- The Steam Team
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How do SegWit and FlexTrans compare? Flexible Transactions was started as an alternative solution when it became apparent that Segregated Witness was not going to be a viable protocol upgrade. This document attempts to describe the reasons why this is the case and how the two solutions compare and where they are completely different. The reader should realise that the two solutions were both started with a single goal in mind which is to solve the Malleability issue. Where FlexTrans aimed to keep it simple and small, SegWit had as a goal to avoid at all costs making changes that would get the new transactions rejected by old nodes. The reason for this is cited to be that old wallets and nodes have no need to upgrade after SegWit becomes operational. The reality of the situation is that people will need to upgrade their wallet anyway. As Bitcoin gets its value from networking we can see that networking will cause a ripple effect of upgrades. People that receive a payment from a SegWit user will not have any progress reports of that payment unless they have a SegWit wallet. Users pay more to users that don't have a SegWit wallet. The networked basis of money makes it a certainty that practically all people need to upgrade. And that begs the question if there really is a benefit to the SegWit solution. Lets start by looking at the end result. What did the implementations actually accomplish. Features: Feature SegWit FlexTrans Fixes Malleability ✅ ✅ Linear scaling of hashing ✅ ✅ Hardware wallet Support ✅ ✅ Makes transactions smaller ❌ ✅ Supports the Lightning Network ✅ ✅ Signatures can be pruned (in future) ✅ ✅ Double Spend Proofs ❌ ✅ Support future script versions ✅ ✅ No "two buckets" economics ❌ ✅ In the last row this is about an economics issue where SegWit introduces "Two Buckets" with new pricing and new fee bidding. In the design of SegWit the signatures part of a transaction are to be charged 75% less than the rest, making two buckets of data. The designers of SegWit decided that the miners should incur the cost where miners do up to 4 times the work, for the same pay. This is an anti-feature where technical design is trying to gain an influence on economic policy and thus very much worth putting a cross in the SegWit column for. Technical-debt-matrix; This is about the cost of the design. As the term 'technical debt' implies, this is not a one time cost, this is an actual debt that needs to be paid off over time with more engineering cleanup. The actual cost paid is thus in future productivity and stability of the system. Like any company or household, if you don't pay off your debt, you will eventually work for nothing other than keeping afloat and not make any progress.  Future growth Bitcoin is meant to be around for many years, even decades. People want a stable money. SegWit has as its only feature for the future that it allows the Lightning Network to be deployed. The capacity increase is a joke compared to the needs of the network right now. It certainly is not a capacity that can be used in the future. Even with Lightning on top, the capacity allowed in a SegWit world will not allow Bitcoin to grow as peer to peer cash. Flexible Transactions is not a capacity increase, it is a separate solution that can be combined very well with any capacity increase. Additionally, it is a format that is made to be extended. Adding fields to the format is expected and can be done safely. FlexTrans even dictates in the specification the allocation of various forwards compatible fields which can be used for soft upgrades. Deployment The main drive for SegWit was to avoid forcing people to upgade. What we see today is that the same authors are pushing people really hard to upgrade to the latest version, even before SegWit is out. Their client refuses to connect to non-segwit peers for half the connections. They even used the alert system to get people to upgrade their client. All this means that in actual fact the 'safe' upgrade strategy of SegWit is not happening. The natural conclusion is that the complexity introduced to avoid making people upgrade was wasted and there is no real benefit in their architecture over FlexTrans. The Flexible Transactions deployment is a protocol upgrade that has as of today not been planned. The likely method is to decide that at a specific time (counted in blocks) in the far future this upgrade will become active. Allowing everyone many months to upgrade. If a user did not upgrade before the date hits his client will give a warning and he will be told to upgrade. Until he does there will be no service. This will guarantee no loss in funds and no loss in security or privacy. Conclusion The Flexible Transactions solution solves all problems that SegWit solves. On top of the features that SegWit has it lists some more which are essential to a healthy on-chain future growth for Bitcoin. Flexible Transactions cost a fraction of SegWit, both in code written and future work to keep the network running. The goal of SegWit that it would be easier to deploy, allowing people to not upgrade should they not want it, turns out to not be reached and it ends up dictating economic policy which is a sure sign of bad design. There is no reason to choose SegWit over Flexible Transactions. https://bitcoinclassic.com/devel/FlexTrans-vs-SegWit.htmlAs a personal note, There is nothing wrong with having multiple clients. Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Classic, and BitcoinXT even Core can work together to make bitcoin stronger. Flexible Transactions is a better solution than SegWit. After the hard fork and the dust settles I imagine this will be where the next bout of discussion is directed. |
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http://nodecounter.com/from_slush_to_bitcoin_com_pool.phpFor a year now (since March of 2016), NodeCounter has been mining at Slush Pool in support of Bitcoin Classic and more recently, Bitcoin Unlimited. However, due to Slush Pool operator's recent statements and slander against Bitcoin Unlimited supporters, we have switched mining pools and are now pointing our hashrate at pool.bitcoin.com. We believe in the free market choice, and not the choice dictated by pool operators (or Core devs), no matter how much they feel they know best. Bitcoin was designed to empower the individual to make his own decisions. As a further note, slush seems to fail to recognize that the Bitcoin Unlimited community does support layer 2 scaling with networks such as Lightning Network and others. These are achievable with much simpler malleability fixes than Segwit (see Flexible Transactions). Rather than attempting to change slush's mind, we are simply moving our hashrate elsewhere. Bitcoin has become far too political. Money speaks louder than words, and that is precisely how Bitcoin was designed to operate and incentivize. HOW SUCCESSFUL HAS THE MINING DONATION FUND BEEN? In the history of our Bitcoin Mining Fund's utilization of slush pool, we have mined over 736 BTC in rewards (also verifiable at the mining reward address 1PTY9f8hbaFBd3EsXfAuixZ2Y5ZxWP4uZa. It is worth mentioning that these 736 BTC were mined from an original 30-50 BTC. The efficiency of this mining pool is very high, and it has proven that it can re-invest for 6+ months off a single donation. Help us bring Bitcoin Unlimited through to the ultimate victory of increased blocksize, lowered fees, faster confirmation times, returned use-cases, higher transaction throughput, and support of a dev team that doesn't utilize censored discussion areas. This is the same Bitcoin we have all known and loved for years. Then we can begin to build the layer 2 solutions that are also needed. - See more at: http://nodecounter.com/from_slush_to_bitcoin_com_pool.php#sthash.QyTKZ1jI.dpuf
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What is a hard fork?
A hard fork is when a block is broadcast under a new and different set of protocol rules which is accepted by nodes that have upgraded to support the new protocol. In this case, Bitcoin diverges from a single blockchain to two separate blockchains (a majority chain and a minority chain).
There will be two blockchains after a fork, is that right?
Yes, that is correct. Some argue that having two chains is problematic, but that is only the case if you believe that the minority chain will survive and have more market value than the majority chain.
Is a hard fork bad?
Hard forks are just protocol upgrades. If you want to have a better designed Bitcoin protocol, periodically you will have to upgrade (fork) to make it happen. A planned fork is nothing to panic about. In fact, just like with Bitcoin halving every four years, protocol upgrades can be celebrated too.
What will happen to my bitcoin when a fork happens?
Don’t worry, your bitcoin is safe! The most important thing as a user who wants to control their own money (bitcoin), is that you will want to store your bitcoin in a wallet where you have control over the private key. As long as you do that, post-fork you can spend your coins however you’d like. But if you leave your coins on an exchange for example where you may not have control over your private key, post-fork the exchange will have to determine which blockchain your coins belong to.
When will the fork happen?
Every fork is different, so generally speaking there isn’t one answer that can fit every scenario. Most recently the protocol upgrade that has caused the most news has been Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) and the consensus mechanism emergent consensus, which removes the temporary Bitcoin block size limit like the original client and lets the free market decide what block size is best, allowing for on-chain scaling. BU doesn’t have a set activation period. Once there is consensus among Bitcoin user nodes and mining nodes that signal an acceptable block size using BU, the blockchain will begin to diverge. For more information for miners on how to safely fork to BU, please read the ViaBTC Miner Guide.
Has a hard fork ever happened before?
Forks have successfully been implemented often in other cryptocurrencies. In fact there are very few instances of hard forks failing. On the Bitcoin blockchain there has already been one successful hard fork in the past. This hard fork was carried out in response to a serious bug found in Bitcoin that could be used to create billions of bitcoin. A hard fork was planned and carried out in a short amount of time to fix this bug.
Why is a hard fork likely to happen?
A fork is likely to happen due to a fundamental disagreement between different groups of the Bitcoin community on how the Bitcoin protocol will progress in the future. A long and important debate has carried on within the community for the past several years and consensus has been unable to be found on a path forward. A hard fork is one method for finding a way forward using using Nakamoto Consensus; read the Bitcoin Whitepaper to understand the underlying architecture of how Bitcoin was built.
I’ve heard about replay attacks when forking, what are they?
When there is a chain split, you may end up with coins on both sides of the blockchain (two coins), for example Bitcoin Core (BTC-C) and Bitcoin Unlimited (BTC-U). A replay attack is when a user broadcasts both coins on both blockchains, taking advantage of exchanges that might not have protection against these attacks. Recently Exchanges have reached out to the Bitcoin community for suggestions on the best way to handle these situations.
How can I keep track of the ongoing consensus finding of the fork?
There are many sites to keep track of how people are voting within the community. For example you can see how people are Economically voting, how miners are signaling and how user nodes are signaling
Visit /r/BTC For further uncensored discussion.
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What is a hard fork?
A hard fork is when a block is broadcast under a new and different set of protocol rules which is accepted by nodes that have upgraded to support the new protocol. In this case, Bitcoin diverges from a single blockchain to two separate blockchains (a majority chain and a minority chain).
There will be two blockchains after a fork, is that right?
Yes, that is correct. Some argue that having two chains is problematic, but that is only the case if you believe that the minority chain will survive and have more market value than the majority chain.
Is a hard fork bad?
Hard forks are just protocol upgrades. If you want to have a better designed Bitcoin protocol, periodically you will have to upgrade (fork) to make it happen. A planned fork is nothing to panic about. In fact, just like with Bitcoin halving every four years, protocol upgrades can be celebrated too.
What will happen to my bitcoin when a fork happens?
Don’t worry, your bitcoin is safe! The most important thing as a user who wants to control their own money (bitcoin), is that you will want to store your bitcoin in a wallet where you have control over the private key. As long as you do that, post-fork you can spend your coins however you’d like. But if you leave your coins on an exchange for example where you may not have control over your private key, post-fork the exchange will have to determine which blockchain your coins belong to.
When will the fork happen?
Every fork is different, so generally speaking there isn’t one answer that can fit every scenario. Most recently the protocol upgrade that has caused the most news has been Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) and the consensus mechanism emergent consensus, which removes the temporary Bitcoin block size limit like the original client and lets the free market decide what block size is best, allowing for on-chain scaling. BU doesn’t have a set activation period. Once there is consensus among Bitcoin user nodes and mining nodes that signal an acceptable block size using BU, the blockchain will begin to diverge. For more information for miners on how to safely fork to BU, please read the ViaBTC Miner Guide.
Has a hard fork ever happened before?
Forks have successfully been implemented often in other cryptocurrencies. In fact there are very few instances of hard forks failing. On the Bitcoin blockchain there has already been one successful hard fork in the past. This hard fork was carried out in response to a serious bug found in Bitcoin that could be used to create billions of bitcoin. A hard fork was planned and carried out in a short amount of time to fix this bug.
Why is a hard fork likely to happen?
A fork is likely to happen due to a fundamental disagreement between different groups of the Bitcoin community on how the Bitcoin protocol will progress in the future. A long and important debate has carried on within the community for the past several years and consensus has been unable to be found on a path forward. A hard fork is one method for finding a way forward using using Nakamoto Consensus; read the Bitcoin Whitepaper to understand the underlying architecture of how Bitcoin was built.
I’ve heard about replay attacks when forking, what are they?
When there is a chain split, you may end up with coins on both sides of the blockchain (two coins), for example Bitcoin Core (BTC-C) and Bitcoin Unlimited (BTC-U). A replay attack is when a user broadcasts both coins on both blockchains, taking advantage of exchanges that might not have protection against these attacks. Recently Exchanges have reached out to the Bitcoin community for suggestions on the best way to handle these situations.
How can I keep track of the ongoing consensus finding of the fork?
There are many sites to keep track of how people are voting within the community. For example you can see how people are Economically voting, how miners are signaling and how user nodes are signaling
Visit /r/BTC For further uncensored discussion.
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More and more miners catching on.  No single development team has the final say in the direction the protocol takes. Consensus is determined by the miners and where they vote with their hash power. The writing is on the wall. Core's lies and censorship will not save them. A Proof of Work change will not save them. Bitcoin is stronger than even its poisonous developers who tried to hijack it... Goodbye Core, and good riddance. Hello Bitcoin Unlimited. |
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That's it? Seriously?
I'm not against moderately larger blocks (though I am more concerned than some about blockchain bloat); I wish core had pushed out a blocksize increase some time ago and then kept working on segwit and LN, etc., without skipping a beat. But you are not going to reach anything like mass adoption or meet the needs of bitcoin-friendly merchants with larger blocks in an era in which Moore's Law has long since ended.
I'm not against layered solutions, off-chain, etc... as long as the market can decide for itself, not have it forced down our throats. Core could have increased the blocksize long ago and chose not to. imo, they thought they could control and dictate their roadmap. in any event, here we are. How is core forcing anything down our throat if, for example, LN implementations become available? I can still pay the miner fee and do my TX on-chain. It's not like the bitcoin network is going to know who is who and blacklist anyone from making on-chain TX. Core is simply working on making LN available. They are forcing it down our throat demonstrably by sticking with a 1mb block limit. They are using what originally was an anti-spam measure to literally force transactions off chain at the benefit of themselves and blockstream, and the detriment of everyone else. |
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BU = Nakamoto's Consensus
As described in Satoshi's white paper.
I'm not suggesting one thing over another... but it is quite funny/scary how quickly this sort of thinking can lead to an almost religious type of thinking that puts Satoshi on some sort of pedestal. The wonderful thing about open sourced projects is that it's open for anyone to contribute too. The critical and very important part of this is if someone in the project disappears from the face of the earth, the project can still continue; and therefore the project itself isn't centralized. It gets dangerous when you try to read into stuff that's in the white paper and apply it to today's situation(s). Same goes for Jesus fanatics... Consensus as described in the paper doesn't leave anything to "read into". They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism. Miners are beginning to vote. It gets dangerous when people forget that Bitcoin is a Peer to Peer currency. |
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Bitcoin used to be fun. Now with all this strife I am just really, really tired of the shitstorm.
Tell me about it.  But its going to get better. I promise  |
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Just less than a percent to BU for passing the SegWit. https://coin.dance/blocksBU = Few Chinese controlling majority of hash
Can't believe anyone would be ok with that.
If that is what Satoshi wanted, guess he wasn't the genius I though he was. Too bad he's not around anymore.
So according to Bitcointalk and other discussion boards, "Core=Few Chinese controlling majority of hash" and "BU=Few Chinese controlling majority of hash". So, Bu/SegWit = Few Chinese controlling the majority of hash. Both look same. And whatever who will be the winner the result will be same. It seems like BU will be the winner.  Core (SegWit) = a hostile take over of the network via maintaining a 1mb block limit. This was originally just an anti-spam measure. The Core developers are literally being paid by outside actors to maintain this limit and cripple bitcoin. BU = Scaling Bitcoin On-Chain transactions as originally intended. 2nd layer solutions are still possible. So are you saying a few elite Chinese do not control the majority of BU hash? Does this not concern you? Does Chinese centralized mining not concern you? The only thing the Chinese have done is mine bitcoins. They're not trying to make policy. The only people doing that -in an authoritarian way- is Bitcoin Core and Blockstream. |
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What happens if there is 50/50 between BU and core and there is a hard fork? Do we now own bitcoin 1.0 and bitcoin 2.0 or do you have to switch your coins to one and hope you made the right choice? I've never been through a hard fork with bitcoins (or any alts tbh).
BU will not activate until it has 75% hashing power. Once activated, the hard fork won't go into affect for some time, allowing miners who have not yet transitioned over to make the change... or be left behind. |
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It seems to me that BU will take over Segwit. I dont know if it's good or bad.
But the inability of the devs to figure out a solution faster is leading to this. Plus, we are tired of huge fees.
So whatever can fix the fee problem, I will stand besides it.
If we dont fix the fee problem, we wont have any bitcoin to debate about, so better choose now, and risk bitcoin, than to lose bitcoin altogether over some other coin.
It's a good thing. Core and Blockstream don't think there is a fee problem. They want to kick regular people off the network by maintaining 1mb blocks, a limitation originally intended as an anti-spam measure. Bitcoin unlimited isn't against 2nd layer solutions (look up flextrans) but not to the determent of normal people using the Bitcoin Block Chain. |
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Unlimited somehow caught up in pool support, but blocks mined with it are still way lower than SegWit. %'s seem to be really close, sometimes SegWit on top, sometimes Unlimited. This data mostly means nothing, at least up until now, but it's still interesting to follow...
It caught up because Ant Pool one of the largest mining pools, has begun transitioning to Bitcoin Unlimited. In fact, there is a trend developing:  |
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Just less than a percent to BU for passing the SegWit. https://coin.dance/blocksBU = Few Chinese controlling majority of hash
Can't believe anyone would be ok with that.
If that is what Satoshi wanted, guess he wasn't the genius I though he was. Too bad he's not around anymore.
So according to Bitcointalk and other discussion boards, "Core=Few Chinese controlling majority of hash" and "BU=Few Chinese controlling majority of hash". So, Bu/SegWit = Few Chinese controlling the majority of hash. Both look same. And whatever who will be the winner the result will be same. It seems like BU will be the winner. Core (SegWit) = a hostile take over of the network via maintaining a 1mb block limit. This was originally just an anti-spam measure. The Core developers are literally being paid by outside actors to maintain this limit and cripple bitcoin. BU = Scaling Bitcoin On-Chain transactions as originally intended. 2nd layer solutions are still possible. |
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Core is poison, and so are you.
How much did you pay for that account, Roger? My name is Dustin Freeman. I've been involved with Bitcoin since early 2012 after hearing about it on HARD[OCP], and subsequently reading Satoshi's white paper. I did not doubt that Bitcoin would be success until Core's abrupt about-face on that white paper. But Core does not control Bitcoin, as much as they would like you to believe. Check the edit. The fact that you shilled for XT actually pisses me off. You are calling out Core devs (which are the only reason bitcoin continues being as solid as ever) while you shilled the disgrace called XT, with some fucking moron that wanted to be the "beneavolent dictator", someone that was clearly anti privacy: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-xt-fork-can-blacklist-tor-exits-may-reveal-users-ip-addressesand someone that dumps the coins then ragequits to crash the market latter, then goes to work in R3cev, and R3cev is a failure, then bitcoin breaks the ATH months later. LOSER lol. Mature. Ignoring the facts. You worshiped XT, an altcoin that wanted to be controlled by beneavolent dictator XT, and wanted to crack down on TOR users. Therefore, all of your arguments are invalid (not surprised you are dumb enough to support BUcoin) Here's a fact for you: |
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