ahhhhh, well that explains it.

I assumed (incorrectly) that listenonion=1 was intended to only make outgoing connections (which is how I experience that parameter on my setup). So incoming connections should work using listenonion/ephemeral hs addresses.

This is a problem with the concept of money itself; it's too sophisticated for most people to understand. That's why money systems are so easily used to trick people; it's easy to fool someone when they're trading with something if they don't understand why it's valuable.

So, you can tell the average person that platinum (or bitcoins) are better money instruments as much as you like, it can be explained very quickly in just 1 or 2 sentences. They still won't bite, it's too sophisticated a concept, they won't get it. Precious metals advocates know this, and so they can tell a much simpler story about gold that doesn't involve monetary theory, and still succeed selling gold to people that don't get or don't care about what gives money value.

The choices tend to unpack like this (although there isn't always the same range available every election):


1. "Centrist", where powerful people just do what they want, but tell careful lies to soften the public reaction. Electorate get nothing, but hopefully stability maintains. Left or right administrations take turns to steer the country in what is essentially the same direction, the political class's direction.

2. "Populist", where slightly crazy politicians claim to sweep away all the BS of the political class, but then the political classes in other countries get in their way. Chaos ensues, then the electorate are convinced by the corrupt media to go back to the political class "centrism".


To me, this is a great way to keep the electorate in the political class's game. "Centrism" basically means "do what we say, and believe our lies, as you won't like what happens when a populist ruler gives you what you think you want".

Democracy is supposed to mean "rule by the masses", but it's just turned into a game where the politicians trick citizens into agreeing to give them all the power. The real answer is to stop looking to government to uphold our rights, as they will only give us the rights that don't interfere with the political class having more rights then we do. If we all start to behave like we have the same rights that governments and corporations do, and we use tools (like Bitcoin) to uphold those rights in a way that cannot be violated, then we will have real democracy.

I'm sorry, I'm not being clear.


So, what I mean is: why is it needed to use a static hs address in order to accept incoming connections over tor? If the bitcoin client can create a new hidden service dynamically every startup, surely it's possible for the tor client to forward the dynamically created address to the tor network in the same way as it does for a static address, along with the port number it's using? It seems like it's just a limitation of the way hidden services function, but is that something that could be added to the hidden service design in future, or is it inherently impossible?



As above, I can't see a reason why the tor client cannot be designed to function in a way that helps p2p software accept incoming connections and have the anonymity of using throwaway hs urls. I appreciate that this cannot be done with tor and bitcoin right now, but is there a more general reason why that will never be possible? An inherent problem with tor seems like the most likely reason (I don't know alot about how tor works)

Right, I'm with you



Don't agree. No-one should be rewarded for making mistake, incentives to do smart things must be in place for everyone, the alternative is to squander resources on people who don't make productive use of those resources. Gaming that would be easy:

1. Invest in high risk high yield asset
2. Lose everything
3. Say "I'm poor, bailout please!"
4. Back to 1

It's always been said that the risk of exactly that kind of cat and mouse dynamic will preclude the disaster, but it seems like a precarious assumption, and it's unchartered territory. And of course sheer innovation may rule it out, although what form that takes is of course unknown except to whoever invents it.

You all sound like you've got a pretty responsible "caveat emptor" attitude toward asset investing. There's a problem with that.

These fools are going to become more numerous over time, Bitcoin's growing popularity is going to make the situation much worse. Eventually though, there will be too many of them, and government re-distributionist types can exploit the situation by offering them their money back. The worst case is serious: imagine a country with existing bad inflation problems proposing to bail out people who lost everything on, say, a next-gen crypto that then went to zero. If solving the problem using central bank credit is considered too high risk, then crypto profits will be targeted instead.

In those circumstances, governments might try to destroy Bitcoin by using confiscation to get the economic majority, then using that power to push a hard fork to centralisation. If you believe you would submit to confiscation of your BTC in those most difficult of cricumstances, then think carefully what you would be risking: not just your own monetary sovereignty, but that of the Bitcoiners who refuse to comply. I don't think this risk is high, but in any circumstances, remember that every satoshi that falls into the wrong hands can be used to push Bitcoin into a centralised hard fork. You have a responsibility to both yourself and the rest of the Bitcoin users, take heed.

Thanks for the help.

Do we know why a static hidden service is needed? It would be so much better if port forwarding worked using a dynamic hidden service addresses (i.e. with listenonion=1), for both ease of use and anonymity reasons. A fundamental limitation of Tor hidden services?

Right, I intended to include a question about that, namely:

If the IP of the incoming connection is that of my tor proxy, will misbehaving peers still be banned effectively? It seems to me that without knowing the originating IP, they can attack my node by getting my proxy's IP banned instead of their own.



Right, so 127.0.0.1 is the IP for the bind setting?



Ah, that's good to hear, in a way. So just need to wait a little.

When you say "at least 10", do you mean 10 incoming connection, or in total?

Trying to get incoming connections over tor, and it's a mixed success.

I have a static hs for the node (and so I have -listenonion=0), and I got just 1 incoming connection that actually used the NETWORK service (also BLOOM and WITNESS, all other nodes were crawling nodes without any services). That was a stable long lasting connection, so maybe it's working...

But there are alot of debug messages like ...so it seems that there could be something in the config that's preventing the majority of peers connecting to the node.

Also, trying to use bind=<proxy IP> gives this fatal startup error: What is error 99?

Or, should I simply be expecting low numbers of incoming connections over tor?

There's a suggestion that Armory may support BIP39 directly in the future. But not today in the current version (0.96.4)

Right, I agree pretty much. But that doesn't change what I said really; if you're pointing a gun at a trespasser, and you shoot them in a space like a house, it doesn't matter how hard you try, the chances of killing them are pretty high. Presumably you would go for the head shot though, right?

There's about as much chance of succeeding with attempting to kill as there is of trying to do minimal damage. Let's put it this way: if I confronted an intruder and they were a safe distance from me or anyone else, I'd warn them to drop everything and get out, without shooting. But if the confrontation happened too close for comfort, I think I'd just shoot them quickly without a word.  

So really, heed your own words. If this actually happened to you, would you really turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 'roid rage? Or would you do everything to prevent the situation escalating to something more dangerous? I think you'd be more likely to come out of it better if you don't deliberately take extreme or risky courses of action.

"Cult" is just a perjorative way of labelling a culture (it's essentially the same word). Typically, anything labeled a cult has obviously unhealthy social/systemic dynamics to those observing from the outside.

Satoshi made that same observation, but about the culture of mainstream banking and finance. Time will tell how accurate these mutually biased observations are, but it's very tempting to state here and now: Bitcoin has been a gradually improving success since it's existed, while the mainstream financial system has at best been treading water.

Unfortunately, you'd be surprised how many people on bitcointalk.org support the democratic government concept in 2018 (it used to be far less than that 5-6 years ago).

Exactly, the idea is to protect your property from theft and trespass, not to take revenge for the robbery they were prevented from committing as a consequence of killing them. That still carries a high risk that they will be killed, of course. 

So, when an improvement to a new paradigm is on the table, that's somehow a reason to want other people to invest time and energy into contemplating an extension of an old paradigm? That doesn't make any sense

Yes it was, and it was the point I replied to. I would never reply directly or indirectly to the user you were talking to (who I think is a banned user evading a ban)

I'm pretty sure the code itself contains logic that responds to forks, but I'm not at all familiar with it. The reason why that sort of thing hasn't appeared on the Lightning mailing list is that it's not about Lightning as a protocol, and presumably would be discussed on the bitcoin list instead



If we ignore the fact that removing the tx replay attack has been proposed (and so might be rendered irrelevant in future anyway), I agree that the effects of hard forks not by the Core devs will be negligible, and may even make such forks sufficiently more difficult to execute that they become less realistic (at a minimum the potential for forking changes to the consensus code becomes either narrower in scope, or more difficult to write in a way that maintains the stability of payment channels that exist on the new blockchain post-fork)

When it comes to hard forks that the Core devs design, I refer to my previous answer: both sets of devs, both for Lightning implementations and the Bitcoin blockchain are aware that problems are possible. If Andreas Antonopolous wasn't prepared to answer that question, then that's not a significant thing to happen, he had less than a few seconds to consider the implications and answered a general question with a decent general answer. An accomplished cryptocurrency programmer would almost certainly have provided a more substantial reply, but that's not Andreas' job.

Andreas Antonopoulos doesn't know the answer to a question, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO


I'm not sure if anyone's noticed, but Andreas is just a guy who ends up in common Bitcoin based videos on the internet. He's not a developer for any implementation of Bitcoin or Lightning, or for anything. So what has his lack of preparation for such a question, 1 time, got to do with anything at all?

FYI, Lightning devs are aware of the issues with hard forks. Maybe the real problem is that you're not looking for information in a place you could actually expect to find answers.

I wouldn't be so dismissive of the "black market", that's a biiiiig market, and it's always going to be there.

And the more Bitcoin is improved, the more the black free market will improve too. Bitcoin was designed to be an anti-government, free market tool.