Simpler wallet software will obviously help (and it slowly improves all the time). There's no getting around the security aspect though. Either you're smart enough to secure your own BTC, or you're not. This is equally true of regular banking infrastructure; people fall for scams all the time. The difference being that banks insure certain situations, so they have at least some protection (which some falsely believe protects them in all situations).

A culture of experience is the only thing that can improve people's ability to secure their own cryptocurrency; essentially, experienced people need to tell inexperienced people good security practices. That won't even happen if the inexperienced people still trust the traditional banking system, hence why I said in my first post that a breakdown of trust in the traditional banking system is the foremost prerequisite for more general adoption.

We could argue the profit motive plays a role, but that's already a phenomenon. And a good argument can be made that most people are using cryptocurrencies to make fiat profits, and don't care about the reasons to use cryptocurrencies. The counterargument would be that a gradual exposure to cryptocurrencies for self-interested traders will slowly educate them as to why cryptocurrencies can be a more direct benefit to them when using them as money instead of as speculative instruments.

All 3 of the above adoption vectors share a common factor: time. It simply takes time for all 3 to exert their full potential.

Imagine this situation from the perspective of software companies making products for Windows, using Windows 10 development machines (or non-software companies competing with Microsoft or with someone MS sells your data to). Microsoft just pushed up their running costs a great deal, as those competing companies must now protect their data from Microsoft and the other companies Microsoft sells user data to. Would it be cheaper to ditch Windows completely? Maybe this wouldn't always be viable, but the incentive to support Windows as a platform is reduced now that Microsoft are behaving like this.

The answer is right out there in the real world: compare Bitcoin acceptance in Venezuela to everywhere else

People are willing to learn just about anything if it means they have a more stable currency to show for it. Most people worry about their future as far ahead as next month, then their imagination runs out. Those type of people are forced to figure out which money holds it's value in hyperinflations.

So, the real answer (short term) is: lack of hyperinflation.

This will change in the longer term, there is a huge worldwide asset price bubble just itching to pop. There's a massive amount of inflation stored up in that price bubble, and all that money is going to get re-invested in something else when it happens. If even a small amount goes into commodities, then everyone will experience what it's like to live in Venezuela.

Devuan is a Debian fork that addresses at least some of the problems in Debian Jessie/Stretch. And it's minimalistic too, so it might be a compromise between Debian and the more involving/advanced nature of Gentoo or Alpine. I've used a live version of Devuan before, albeit a desktop version. Not sure if there's a live cli-only Devuan image.

Disadvantages for Devuan is that it's only removed the most egregious anti-Unix software from Debian, vestiges still remain. And also, Devuan is only a few years old as a project. Gentoo and Alpine have a commited development team behind them, Devuan's team and userbase is smaller and not as longstanding (although a significant amount of Debian users and developers have switched to Devuan). Until Devuan becomes truly independent of Debian, it's a difficult distro to commit to. But the trend is positive atm, at least.

Debian:

+ Ubuntu is based on Debian, so life is easy when finding packaged software
+ Well documented on the web, because it's popular
+ Big choice when it comes to minimalism (wide range of install images & forks like Devuan from which to choose your level of minimalism)
- Succumbed to alot of influence from Canonical (Ubuntu's parent company)
- Old versions of software and libraries (but with latest bugfixes), because it's intended as a conservative distro

Gentoo:

+ Very configurable installation means big choice when it comes to fundamental packages (i.e. multiple init daemons and SSL libs are catered for)
+ Very portable to different CPUs (packages compile themselves, given some arch-dependent template)
- Steep learning curve

Alpine:

+ Just minimal
- Minimal is the only choice, at least when installing initially
- Steep learning curve


Maybe Arch might work well too, but I don't know much about Arch (it has a less flexible compile-on-user-side updates system than Gentoo has)

It's much more convenient to setup something like a Raspberry Pi as a dedicated Bitcoin/Lightning node instead of your laptop/dektop. Then you can point your mobile wallet at your node.

It might take a while, but I expect this kind of thing to become more common. There are alot of reasons to setup a little mini server at home, and the number of reasons are growing.

:/ and when political discourse devolves into all groups beginning to accuse the others of being fascists or neo-nazi, the situation will probably get worse before it gets better. It's sad, as I've just proved that even good faith use of such language (despite only implying it) really only feeds such a downward spiral. Maybe we could argue this is a necessary stage, but it's painful to live through nonetheless

It wouldn't be the first (or last) time that other cryptocurrencies have used code developed by the Bitcoin devs if so



Schnorr sigs improve verification performance, or at least the Bitcoin developed standard for the koblitz elliptic curve does



Hmmm, I interpreted Minisketch relay as a means to improve the Bitcoin network's ability to handle the additional capacity that's gradually becoming available as segwit increases in usage (and likewise with schnorr). Arguably it's a marginal improvement, but it still makes the on-chain scaling that's unrealised (but possible) more viable. Still, maybe the scaling label for this thread is a little hyberbolic

Nothing to do with me, I'm just delivering the news

Right, but The Guardian itself is fake, and the article is an execrable piece of anti-Bitcoin editorial bias (for which The Guardian is developing itself quite a reputation).


Anti war? The Guardian consistently makes the case for "humanitarian" wars that make corporate interests rich, then labels genuine anti-war advocates who criticise them as "conspiracy theorists"

Pro-human rights? The Guardian wants people to have rights, as long as they're chosen and delivered by institutions and corporations people don't even want to use.

Want to protect your own rights? The Guardian will call you a neo-nazi


Being tarred with the same brush as neo-nazis is kind of ironic, as The Guardian are probably the worst kind of authoritarian establishment mouthpieces: that which cloaks itself so cleverly in faux-righteous rhetoric that most people don't notice. When you're a corporation, and you work together with government to control people, there's a word for that

Right, but average block size is still not consistently above 1 MiB. Those days are coming though (if Lightning became very popular, there could be regular periods with a consistent 24 hour average blocksize of >= 3 MiB blocks)



Major features are usually added in 0.x.0 releases; bugfixes, softforks and minor feature backports comprise any 0.x.x releases. Minisketch relaying seems like it would be considered a major feature, so older versions wouldn't get it.

wut?

So... seeing as network transaction volumes haven't changed much for maybe 18 months or more, and exchange volumes have increased over the same time period, what is this supposed to actually mean?

coinidol.com is so terrible that it always seems as if they couldn't get any worse, yet they always manage to get worse somehow

I agree to a certain extent, but I'm still conscious that we've not yet seen the full impact of the segwit block capacity increase. Minisketch relay for both transactions and blocks would mitigate that, but it will be a while before we reach average daily sizes of (say) 2-3 MB, and the overall blockchain will grow even more between now and then. I agree with achow101 that there's still initial block download to consider (using a rolling UTXO set could be used to make a contrary case, but that's for another discussion)



Fixed that, apologies


Right, but there are very few upgrades can be made to Bitcoin where old versions can benefit from new features.

libminisketch was published last week: https://github.com/sipa/minisketch/blob/master/README.md

This is a software library that can be used to allow set differences to be encoded and relayed using less data than before. Bitcoin currently relays blocks using a different technique known as "compact blocks" (BIP152), but Minisketch should improve on the performance of compact blocks by several factors (also, compact blocks fail if the amount of transcations a node needs to reconstruct a given block is lower than a certain threshold).

This type of technique has been suggested as a scaling technique in the past, but the suggested method (IBLT, inverted bloom lookup tables) has probabilistic decoding performance, and hence has an associated failure rate. Minisketch always decodes successfully.

Not only could Minisketch reduce the amount of data needed to relay blocks between nodes, but could also be used to reduce the amount of data needed to relay transactions. Current relay can use 200-300 MB bandwidth per day, using Minisketch as part of the tx relay method will reduce this considerably (alot of redundant inventory request/reply messages are sent with the present relaying logic, i.e. nodes use significant bandwidth simply asking each other "which transactions have you got")


It's obviously early in the Minisketch story, but this is a p2p layer change that doesn't require a soft fork to implement. Along with other potential improvements to help the Bitcoin network's resource load (Schnorr, taproot, MAST, rolling UTXO set), we could be using a significantly leaner network this time next year.

If it's not explicitly designed to do so, another LiveOS might allow some session data to survive, but this is only possible if using a writable medium like USB flash (and hence why I mentioned using CDs as a failsafe; you don't even have to worry about Tails having a data persistence bug if you run it from a CD, it's not possible for any data to be written to the CD accidentally or by design)



Ah, I didn't know that.

This would work nicely, except under one important circumstance: if everybody uses this method, then everyone knows how to find everyone else's seed, look through their books with an ultraviolet torch


When you come up with a way of storing your wallet seed in a hidden way, take this advice: don't tell anyone (in particular, don't tell the internet )

Again, be careful

If that point of view was popular, guess what the European commission would do? Give everyone the vote. They know how to manipulate public opinion, and it would only make the commission more legitimate, not less. And it would also be one more step on the road to changing the EU into the United States of Europe.

It was pretty funny seeing the photos of Tymoshenko getting out of prison. She was wearing her trademark hairstyle (a circle of blond pigtails on the back of her head that resembles an angel's halo ). But she didn't have hair dye in prison for her real hair, so the halo (which was just something she clipped onto her real hair) was still super blond, while her real hair was mouse brown.

That works, of course. But there's no particular reason to use Tails, since you're staying offline. Tails is only different from other live os'es when using it online, any live os would work for this purpose.



Or just use a USB based CD drive. USB flash drives are susceptible to their own class of malware, CDs are a better tech if security is the aim (CDs can be made read-only)


Also, if you're already feeling paranoid, burning USB drives (or computers) in your back yard (or anywhere) could make you feel worse. And also make you appear a little suspicious to anyone who notices you doing it.

Careful.

If there were elections for major roles in the EU parliament, it will help to legitimize those positions. If you don't want a strong EU, don't vote on EU matters, or encourage more EU elections.

---

The EU could have avoided all these problems if the EU hadn't bred it's own class of politicians. If the EU parliament and the European Council (and the Euro) had never happened, then the EU could have realistically maintained their claim that it was a pro-democracy endeavor. Free trade and free movement of people is good for business.

But the politicians were greedy, they saw a chance to create a centralised top-down political structure, and are now pushing that on people that don't really want it. People in Europe know already that national government is corrupt and self-serving, concentrating that corruption into one place over the 30 or so states is obviously going to make corruption and unaccountability worse, not better.