you're doing nothing of the sort, hush

it still sets a dangerous precedent IMO

when you sanction killing "for the right reasons", you end up opening the flood gates to "fuck it, let's just kill each other" sooner or later. the friends and relatives of people executed for ethical or just reasoning can come up with equally just reasoning to retaliate. killing humans should simply be avoided at nearly all costs, it's been a magnet for messy tragedies throughout human history, there's no reason to assume it will ever be any different

better to just undermine the authority of these assholes instead, they're too powerful as it is without giving them the ability to give the legitimized death nod

all the Bitcoin/crypto news sites are terrible, a veritable toilet full of turds. the best you can say is that coindesk is the shiniest turd

bollocks



can coindesk.com explain why banks are now buying more gold than ever? their experiment in undisciplined money is coming to an end, and gold buying is a direct consequence



well, maybe normal people should be the traders who figure out what the price of goods should be, how about that coindesk.com? Let's call it, I dunno, capitalism?

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coindesk.com shilling hard for the dying financial industry parasites. for shame, what scumbags

Lightning is in a similar place development-wise that Bitcoin was in 2010 to 2012: usable product, and rough around the edges, but also moving at a decent pace.

I guess the difference was that the Bitcoin devs were "running out of road" and so needed to make sure that didn't happen before it got popular. Lightning devs have a whole network of highways, but the quality of the roads, maps and the direction signs is still a bit lacking.


@DaveF

if you want a GUI, there's:

• Lightning Labs desktop wallet (forgot the exact name :/ )
• Eclair mobile wallet (Android)
• That "Blue wallet" one (Android + maybe iOS)
• A GUI for c-lightning (pretty simple, looks like the standard Bitcoin GUI)

that's wrong

please learn something (anything) about Lightning before you post again

disagree

the corrupt would simply frame honest politicians and officials for corruption crimes when they refuse to participate in or ignore ongoing corruption. the honest would be executed, the corrupt would continue unabated


or at least, the risk of the above is too great. so many of the most powerful politicians are already so corrupt, that finding the right circumstances into which to introduce capital punishment for state corruption would be unlikely to ever occur.


tl;dr sounds right, but it wouldn't work in the world we have

a defining characteristic of unreliability is: it's unreliably unreliable

a USB disk crashing your Pi node is ok when you're only an hour away from where you're running the node. But if you're on vacation hundreds or thousands of miles away, you may find that annoying.

sort of disagree (sort of)

storage is really what holds the Pi back these days. CPU did before, but not since the rPi 2. You can get around the SD card issues by using the most modern rPi's (3B+), as they allow you to boot from a SATA disk, bypassing SD cards altogether.

But really, USB storage, SATA or not, is less than ideal. You can get a Rock64 pro single board for less than $100. You can also get an NVMe or SATA PCI-E expansion card for the Rock64 pro (it has only 1 slot). And there's a 4GB version, you could run a lightweight hypervisor on that, and get a securely compartmentalized home Bitcoin node, + run other stuff in different VMs (it'd have to be without a desktop GUI, naturally)

I agree that UASF was a dangerous move, but I still think it should be done again if the circumstances demand it


Really, the overall pressure to get segwit activated somehow is what tipped the balance. UASF was a part of that pressure, and certainly the most belligerent component.

---

Meanwhile, the segwit compromise is working beautifully.

Bitcoin blocks are hovering around ~ 1.3MB, and have been for a while. People who aren't using segwit are pulling blocks down toward the max 1MB possible if no-ones using it, while people using segwit transactions are pushing blocks up toward the 4MB max.


Compromise achieved. Haters, shut your mouth

Twitter probably manipulates it's platform in various way to control the overall conversation.


That means that they could easily try to manipulate the Bitcoin based conversations that take place on the Twitter platform.


Fuck Twitter, quite frankly. It's against the crypto ethos: don't trust, verify. There's no way of verifying how Twitter controls it's platform, and there's a strong indication that they do just that.


So @Jack Dorsey, @Twitter: We love Mastodon (unmanipulated, decentralised public chat)

@cfbtcman

please stop posting, you're talking total nonsense


this subforum is for cogent questions on and disseminating the technical aspects of Bitcoin, you are clearly incapable of making a useful contribution

ok, that's not really true, but let's assume it is.....



so, make up your mind

either 1MB (you're wrong, it's 4MB) is not enough, or Bitcoin has fewer transactions and spare capacity.


whatever, Lightning still isn't mature in tech terms or in liquidity. On-chain scaling tech (taproot, schnorr etc) is still in the pipeline. Rushing these things risks disasters, and then the network effect in Bitcoin really could be damaged. Hence why I'm talking upthread about how LND should focus on quality rather than quantity.


Please don't reply, we're already off-topic, and you're already wrong in so many ways.

I suspect that these characters are not unhappy to cultivate this kind of softened image, it deflects from their family origins: gangsters of various types from various eras in British history


The anti-establishment press are not unhappy to help them either, British satirical newspaper "Private Eye" often published derisive articles referring to Rees-Mogg (and in turn to the book in the OP) as "Mystic Mogg"

Gresham's law is fallacious, it simultaneously implies a free-market context, and a context where people are being forced to accept a certain type of money. Both cannot co-exist.

History tells a different story to Gresham:

• bad money is bullied into people's commerce
• bad money is popularized through deception i.e. bank notes
• good money is bullied out of people's hands

if an example exists where people willfully chose a poor form of money for any significant length of time, it was followed by an economic collapse that taught them about the effects of bad vs good money



And we do in fact have just clutch of exemplary precedents: in Venezuela and Argentina, Bitcoin has above average popularity. Even in less drastic cases such as Brazil, there is interest (someone in this thread was making exactly your point, BTC is less volatile proposition than the Brasilean Real).


In fact, Bitcoin's volatility has only seen holders make long term gains. When one considers the full extent to which the price of everyday goods or company shares are manipulated on financial markets (in a so-called capitalist system), it's tempting to say that Bitcoin is one of few (or even the only) traded item that has any real price discovery. So it only appears volatile because we are all too coddled by artificial prices.

And of course, as we know from experience with Bitcoin: what happens when someone manipulates prices? After some time, the market participants figure it out, and the price snaps back, in the opposite direction. Yay price stability.

Edit:

think about that final point.

Your food prices are heavily subsidized, and a part of those huge, growing government debts represent the price you are not paying for your food. That cannot last forever.

even if it were true, there's clear favoritism going on: several banks have been caught violating money-laundering legislation over the years, and many more have likely got away with it.

And yet those banks are considered "institutional", and are given an incredibly light touch punishment. Fines they can easily afford, and no individuals are held responsible, regardless of how brazen the violations were.

It's the equivalent of not bringing a letter from your parents to miss gym class, but instead of afternoon detention, detention for the entire rest of your life. With murderers. As I was saying, who do these people think they are to behave like this?

There's a limit to how much the UX can be streamlined or simplified. Part of that is because both Bitcoin and Lightning are still under massively active development, and with Bitcoin that's 10+ years of work (and that's not even counting all the ruminating on possible designs that Satoshi possibly did, then the prototypes attempts, all before Bitcoin itself was worked on).


And what that's demonstrating is that we've (Bitcoin users) all adapted to Bitcoin's most simplified concepts, despite how technical and sophisticated those remain. All in the name of independent money. I'm sure that automobiles or telephones or firearms were criticized as overly complicated at their advent, but the potential advantage to be gained was too tempting, and so instead people wanted to learn. And now we're all driving around, busting salvos of M16 fire into the air out of rolled down windows, with cryptographic gold kept in electronic wallets on our keyrings


So I expect Lightning's perceived UX issues to ameliorate a little, but mostly through familiarity-driven self interest.

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/pull/2842#issuecomment-515336677

I see this (as I said already) as something of a prioritization issue; LND has far more devs, and a far larger project than c-lightning. If they spent more time fixing bugs than developing new features, we might see fewer of these compatibility issues. This is not the only time this sort of thing has happened, just a recent example.

In fairness, I doubt anyone's implementation is perfect. But as the most popular Lightning client, LND have arguably more responsibility to ensure their software is a good neighbor, which means being more cautious overall.


Instead, the (superficial) impression I get is that the LND team are trying to go too fast. There's a risk that a strategy like that will backfire badly if they make mistakes that are any more serious.

the "chicken & egg" problem


New users to Bitcoin cannot directly receive Lightning payments to get involved, they must first buy BTC, then open a channel. Only then can they receive (or send) over Lightning.

Solutions

• the "Statechains" concept can apparently solve this problem, but comes with it's own compromises
• negotiate a channel opening, buy BTC from a seller that sends to you to settle the deal, send the BTC to the channel opening address to establish the channel

so really the solutions are not ideal, and Statechains depend on eltoo. Needs a better solution.

what to look for:

• NAND cell tech - SLC is best, MLC 2nd, TLC 3rd and QLC 4th in reliability/longevity. Pricing corresponds; SLC based SSD devices are expensive, QLC cheap
• Over-provisioning - a larger over-provided pool of flash cells will improve reliability and reduce performance. Some SSDs let you reprogram the amount of over-provisioning via the firmware

there was another factor also, but I've forgotten it for now