You see i can agree with this statement as well, which is why i had mentioned about some 'serious thinking and implementation' as larger blocks is not the 'best' solution either, BCH being a band-aid in the same way to the problem you talk about.

There is a careful balance to be struck, and I will admit, I have little clue as to what could be the best solution, simply increasing block size to approach that level isn't viable for the reasons we both stated, off-chain solutions have their own problems but are a potential possibility, like the lightning network.

I am unsure how this will play out in the long term, of course and that is if BTC is to be used as a currency, not a 'store' of value, in which case smaller blocks will suffice. Basically its picking the road it will go down.

Most of the endless 'bitcoin forks' have not put enough effort into this problem, but are merely an attempt to play games with money, Bitcoin Gold proposed ASIC resistance, yet had an insane premine

It is curious to see how this problem will be solved, it is no easy problem to solve. Ethereum will have the same problem re. how many smart contracts can run as they all use the entire network nodes to execute each piece of code.

The blockchain has changed the world, now it needs to scale

Often backlogs of transactions are 'caught up' during quiet times, but when used heavily daily, 'quiet times' may become non-existent and thus there would be a constant 'defect'

I agree people need to use SegWit to take benefit from it. It is a small breathing space, but the endless debate and years in which to solve the problem before 51% consensus became harder to achieve made this problem very difficult. If bitcoin had become fully decentralized, achieving said scaling consensus may have been impossible as many don't upgrade their software.

Even with SegWit, its only a band-aid unless there are larger blocks, or the blockchain becomes a settlement layer, or some other solution, or bitcoin stays as a store of value and another cryptocurrency takes over for day to day transactions for starbucks.

1MB blocks W/O segwit = 7 transactions/second, 4200 transactions every 10 minutes.
Visa handles around 2000 / sec or so, 1200,000 transactions every 10 minutes.

See the sheer block size that would need to be implemented if you do the maths, and you see the magnitude of the problem. And imagine that being used as a currency all over the world. Bitcoin will not be that without some serious thinking and re implementation, or an alternative currency with BTC being kept as a store of value.

yes this is far into the future, but its best to get this sort of thing right early on, depending on what the usecase people intend it to be. A store of value, or digital cash for day to day transactions.

Thing is i do notice fear among users here about any coin that may 'unseat' bitcoin. Yet the endless scaling debate went on for so long, while us users of the currency, the 99% not using forums mostly found transactions getting slower and slower, fees going up and up, all the while the endless debate and deadlock, hence BCH was born.

There have been years in which to solve this problem, or implement some breathing space. SegWit was one example of breathing space that we finally got, but 1MB block sizes simply will not do it, the transaction volume it can process is too small. Unless you wished to keep bitcoin as a 'store' of value, in which case an altcoin like BCH or Litecoin will take over for day to day currency use. I Want to be able to transact with my clients without endless high fees and slow confirmations, and Bitcoin simply does not fit that bill anymore but it can be used to store 'savings' for example. I won't pay a $10 TX fee if PayPal can do it for 50p, or Litecoin can do it for 0.01p.

Bitcoin is awesome, but it will be limited as a digital 'store' of value unless it scales, simple fact.

Centralization is also a big problem, the ASIC arms race and the sheer waste of power, will probably see some hybrid consensus system in the future, POW is simply too energy intense, the power grids of many countries will not handle it, and many hot climates the overheads of running a farm due to cooling issues and more expensive power is concentrating the mining power. Proof of stake will mean only those who are rich get richer, a hybrid system like proof of importance works better as a consensus mechanism in my opinion.

All those gigawatts of power as manufacturers will keep trying to make better ASICs to knock over others to 'stay in the game' and get more profit than those using older ASICs for a while until they upgrade, rinse, wash, repeat until we hit the end of the silicon road then it changes a bit

You can't say in truth that there are no disadvantages to ANY system, that is a form of bias A disadvantage of Bitcoin is: Confirmation time of 10 minutes would greatly slow checkout for large purchases in shops, risk of double spending if they left the store instantly is high.

Small block size inhibiting transactions, transaction fees too high for 'cup of morning coffee' purchases in fact higher than many bank fees for some transactions (BCH, LTC and NEM attempts to solve this).

The need for users to be responsible with their keys, which most will not be. A few in my college laugh at me for the idea of hardware wallets yet keep £4 - 5k on an exchange wallet.

There are many advantages too, such as trustless, no censorship, essentially digital cash, no worry to the merchant about chargebacks (as an online shop, i closed shop due to this very problem, even a single customer charging back can cripple the cashflow of a small business. I for one as a merchant would love irreversible transactions, just like cash, provided you can trust the merchant. For speed of confirmations, though Litecoin and NEM are superior in this regard. For throughput, BCH is.

The scaling problem is going to cause problems as there is no simple solution. Do we want the blockchain as a worldwide payment system or a settlement layer? Try processing the volumes of visa and mastercard using the bitcoin code, and you may just find blocks of several hundred megabytes, the blockchain size would be insane, leading to the need to somehow prune it.

Unstable price is a current disadvantage, too. I personally think the most stable asset to secure assets is silver, gold being at an all time high, higher than platinum and bitcoin all over the place. If your your average Joe blogs, the safest investment is a permanent roof over your head = home ownership. Whatever the fluctuations in the housing market, once its paid, THAT is your security.

Bitcoin is good as part of a diverse portfolio, however. Certainly gave me a better return than savings in a bank

Another downside is always focusing on the 'community' aka forums surrounding a coin and decisions which are made, when practically 99% of users won't even touch a forum about their currency, they want to use it as just that, a currency. Most who use it havn't a clue how it works, be it the fiat banking system, or Bitcoin. Wallets and systems will need to make it easy and simple to use, and secure. Using a secure enclave on modern devices to store keys is a must.

For use, this is an apples to oranges comparison. Ethereum and Bitcoin are two different beasts, all together.

Don't make the error I did and cash out 90%. Sell half, keep half if you feel you have made enough by cashing out.

Fiat, i would say is the best way to cash some of it out for use, otherwise, i would say put it in Bitcoin.

Thing is, don't forget this was using ASICs mostly, to crack passwords with that kind of power, you would need to create an ASIC for that purpose.

I would say, potential supply/demand economics is the reason for the price rise, with some manipulation inbetween. Out of 21 million coins, many have not been mined yet, many are lost, and many are early coins that have not moved.

Leaves quite a finite supply.

Don't wish ill on people bud, yes you want it to crash but don't wish harm on anybody. Yes many people on here are greedy and some even cocky/arrogant, but many on here are also just people trying to make a living for themselves, don't tar all with the same brush, and even if people are greedy, thats their free will.

Don't wish ill on another, did you miss out?

That's what I said above, the private keys are the same on both chains.

I offer video transfer services as well as audio transfer services. I can do any quantity of tapes, from a small to a large batch. I can burn them to DVD or send them as audio files.

It will work out at £6 a tape for a raw transfer, or £10 a tape with enhancements such as de-noising. Files will be sent on physical disk with your tape. Price includes a disk.

I can do 10 tapes raw transfer for £50, or 10 enhanced tapes for £65.

This does not use an el-cheapo USB capture dongle, but a proper capture card and a well-maintained VHS machine.

Return shipping to the UK is £4.95, or £7.95 if you would like insured return shipping via special D. Customers from abroad please query return shipping costs. Copies are kept on our hard drives until you have received and verified your tapes and copies for protection agents loss.

The process is simple, you ship your tapes to me, I will evaluate them and then you send me the payment in BTC, LTC, BCH, or ETH/ETC. I also accept PPCoin and UNO.

I will then transfer the tapes for you, and do any enhancements if desired. I will then ship the tapes and media back to you.

I am happy to have payments in escrow with ognasty or psychoticboy until work is complete and you have you tapes and finished media back, if you would prefer. Buyer pays fee.

You would never make $200 back on an S5, unless you solo mined and got lucky with a block

I would say the safest way to sweep them would be to use a trusted android wallet if online, or do offline transaction signing on an air gapped PC, as android if unrooted is much less likely to be compromised than a PC running windows thats online.

I know there is a lot of stigma on android wallets like coinomi, but if you have safely backed up the seed, its much less likely to be compromised than a PC running windows, by far.

Once swept, move the funds to a hardware wallet.

If you sent it to bitmain as BTC and not BCH, contact bitmain to let them know, as they will be in control of the private keys to that address, which is the same on both chains.

Browser history should show you exactly what wallet provider you used.

There is not currently any BTC in the wallet minus a few hundred satoshis:

https://blockchain.info/address/14V6pKw3AaPcyRpqvff26B2eLdiNRJSz8b

Makes me wonder if they have moved its some kind of exchange or something.

If its not in your history, one final shot is to narrow it down by going to CMD, typing ipconfig /displaydns (DO NOT FLUSH THE CACHE)

It will take a while and probably display hundreds of entries, but it will narrow it down, drastically what site you need to search for, if its still in the DNS cache. Do this ASAP as it is often flushed automatically.

EDIT: I think this is a spam, the wallet hasn't been used for at least two months.

Thanks a ton for that, i think after spending hours on it i overlooked that option, worked fine, thank you!

I have an older electrum 2FA wallet with some old funds i want to move to my present wallets (BTC already moved), and i imported the seed to disable 2FA. I have tried electron cash with the wallet file with 2FA disabled and seed directly with no luck, but the BCH shows at the address on block explorer and on electrum coins as being there. The wallet file just makes electron cash crash.

I cannot sign a transaction with electrum using a BCH server to broadcast, as it throws an error about the signature hash, sigfork hash ID... something to do with replay protection me thinks...

There is no option to import a 2FA seed into electron cash, trying to import it as a standard seed is no dice.

I manually got the xpub and xpriv keys from my electrum wallet files for the multisig addresses (imported the seed into an unpassworded wallet to grab them), and I also have the original 12 word seed with the two of three keys embedded in it.

How can I import this to electron cash or some other method so i can get my BCH out using either the seed or the xpriv keys? I have 2 of the 3 Xpriv keys and all 3 xpub keys to this multisig wallet, with 2-of-3 required.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I think we need to do it, Bitcoin Diamond is apparently something else coming... Bitcoin Shit - BTS is something we so need to make xD

Me and my uncle bought about 40 PPC at $1 each. Plan to hold them long term, felt it was a good investment because it is the first POS coin, im amazed its not gone up before now to be honest.

I would say its supply/demand economics plus some whales here and there. With a 21 million supply, supply/demand will always be a problem, 7 billion people vs 21 million full bitcoins, makes sense to own at least one while you can. I prefer to buy the coins over mining even.

Not counting all the bitcoin to which the keys have been lost.