What I'm about to say is pure speculation, but.....


You guys are 100% right, 21.co & Earn.com are garbage companies that likely lost alot of money, and they can only have very little revenue or assets. $100 million is hilarious sum considering the publicly available facts. If you think about how much actual cash Coinbase could possibly have available to afford to spend on acquisitions, it makes even less sense, unless......


....Coinbase are buying Earn.com to conduct some kind of accounting fraud, i.e. hiding profits, or borrowing money, something like that? If so, Coinbase could be setting themselves up for a potential Mt.Gox situation. Anyone reading Bitcointalk.org probably knows already, but if you have a Coinbase account, best to minimize or fully bail on your exposure to Coinbase.

Bisq or OpenBazaar can just take all of LocalBitcoin's previous business, no problem really.

She's (unfortunately) right about this.

Bitcoin's most significant use case, until merchant acceptance grows sufficiently, is as a long term investment. "Saving" is the wrong expression, but hey, economics isn't Lagarde's strongest discipline

Not saying Bitcoin shouldn't be used for commerce, I entirely encourage that. Merchant acceptance has never been as good as it is now, and isn't slowing down. But investment is Bitcoin's number 1 purpose, facts are facts.

This is circular reasoning.

If a majority can agree not to increase the blocksize limit, then that is a consensus decision by definition. The logic wasn't "no increase, because Bitcoiners say no to everything, always". The logic was "no increase, because it's the wrong decision at this point in time, for design reasons".


When a case is made that makes sense to the majority of Bitcoiners, they'll accept a blockweight increase. For instance, Segwit was an increase in blockweight, and Bitcoiners accepted it. So it's already happened, saying "it's never going to happen" is a difficult argument to sustain given this reality.

Coindesk never cease to amaze me with their poor research (or is it simply sensationalist tabloid journalism?)


ACINQ released their Lightning phone app only last week (it has the kind of slick graphics driven user interface that a Coindesk.com journalist would be able to use). But apparently we have to keep thinking about Lightning as something that will happen one day, far in the future, because of reporting on blue-skies projects like NFC protocols that don't exist yet (and that don't even have a written specification)

Meanwhile, Lightning network grows constantly. Maybe it's "clunky", but as usual, people who don't need their software to be as simple as a Super Mario start menu will benefit.



And, oh look, Coinbase are reporting on a real-life payments trend too. That "MIGHT" be happening.
And, what a surprise, the story is basically a massive "advertorial" for bad-actor corporate assholes BitPay.

Where's Coindesk's reporting on the exchange agnostic decentralised payments protocol that Nicholas Dorier is working on? Oh right, that wouldn't be supporting some corrupt relationship between Coindesk.com and it's PayPal-wannabe product placement customers like BitPay.

 
Coindesk.com is little different to the Wall Street Journal or The Guardian: full of "reporting" and "journalism" that's basically advertising for the biggest monopolies in the Bitcoin industry, I'm gonna have to start calling it CorporateDesk.com

Well, pegging the rate between BTC and a sidechain 1:1 could certainly be exploited to influence perception of supply inflation, but only changes to Bitcoin's own input validation rules could introduce inflation directly to the Bitcoin blockchain. The markets would sort out the mess of course (1:1 cannot be enforced in a free market), but the mess could be avoided if the notion isn't popularised.

As I said, I think atomic swaps between Bitcoin and other digital assets (like contracts or domain names) will be truly innovative, but the useful assets don't quite exist yet (I'd be interested to know if there's a popular digital asset that I'm unaware of). The key point being that such assets would be access, ownership, identity or some other data, not abstract value (i.e. money tokens).



The only monetary use case Bitcoin is not capable of is that of the privacy-centric coins, but privacy enhancements will end up being added to Bitcoin in one form or another (aggregated signatures & Mimblewimble are possible future such privacy enhancements). Maybe there'll always be a better privacy coin for enthusiasts, but I suspect Bitcoin will eventually do privacy more than well enough.

In the case of money, some compromise (i.e. a catch all) is always better IMO; history has already demonstrated that only a minority of people will contemplate why good money has a set of definitive characteristics. The majority have always been disinterested in the qualitative difference between this type of money and that type, they just want to adhere to a norm and let those that are really interested discern what that norm is. We're part of a self-selected discerning group, but mainstream use of cryptocurrencies inherently involves those that don't want to make monetary decisions, they'll just want to stick to whatever coin is most widely accepted to simplify commerce for them.
 


The biggest challenge for Lightning to me is security. I'm probably exposing some ignorance here, but it seems to me that having unencrypted private keys in the memory of permanently online machines is risky. Maybe there's a way of mitigating that, or perhaps that mitigation exists already.

Hash pre-images for BTC denominated transactions, that are valid if redeemed on the Bitcoin blockchain?



You got that part right.

Hey EU, you can save all that wasted time (& money!) using these simple and innovative method of creating a single free market :

• Stop interfering in peoples businesses, then calling it a "free market".
• Let people trade stocks and commodities without special permissions, you're not "protecting" them, you're protecting the financial market cartels.

This resembles the whole extension-blocks model, and I believe it's flawed (I'm not the only one). The flaws are too serious, but that hasn't stopped strangely persistent promoters of this idea from pushing the concept (Drivechain devs for instance).



Exactly. There's little difference (in scaling terms) between blockchain + auxilliary blockchain and blockchain + limit increase. Worse, the monetary and security differences only make the situation more dire: pegged units in a different chain essentially inflates Bitcoin's money supply, and the network rules are subject to the whims of whoever owns majority hashing power on the auxilliary chain.

Monopolist miner manufacturers will love the sidechain "scaling solution" approach, they can create secret or proprietary hashing tech, use clever marketing (and every other underhand tactic) to convince people to swap onto their chain, then they have their own private Bitcoin adjunct to play all sorts of further games with. Hmmm, why does that description sound so familiar....



I think cross-chain atomic swaps make alot of sense for swapping digital assets in a peer-to-peer way, that's revolutionary. There aren't many to choose from to make that happen just yet (.bit website domains, perhaps?), but that will come in time. Swapping other cryptocurrencies makes sense in the short term, but the market is likely to favour a single dominant currency in the long term (unless there is a fundamental reason why one cryptocurrency cannot fulfill all possible use-cases in the long term).

As a scaling tech, it's simultaneously risible and deceitful.

You said it better than I did.

DooMAD, I've proven you use deceitful arguments to promote bad ideas before. Where's your proof for any of your claims?

The fact that you're now reduced to using obvious lies ("sidechains are Bitcoin layers", lol) only demonstrates how desperate your position has become.

This kid (and his dad) clearly don't understand that allowing other people whatever they like, simply because they're a majority that agree (a.k.a "voting") is not only against libertarian principles, but also against moral principles.

I would call them different cryptocurrencies to Bitcoin. I suspect I won't be alone


Calling them "Bitcoin layers" is wrong. Different blockchains are by definition using different rules, and employing different miners with different incentives. Suggesting that different blockchains are somehow layers of Bitcoin is dangerously wrong.

You can describe different cryptocurrencies with different Blockchains as "layers of the Bitcoin blockchain" as many times as you like (gee, I wonder whether you'll try to repeat this falsehood again in future? :/ ), it will never be true.

In order to be a layer of Bitcoin, a protocol must use valid script of the Bitcoin protocol, and valid/spendable inputs/outputs from the Bitcoin blockchain. Please do not attempt to mislead people with your "undermine Bitcoin by any means necessary" rhetorical tricks, you've been told enough times already.


There would be no point to your scheme anyway, blockchains scale tx throughput badly, adding blockchains to blockchains therefore cannot improve scalability better than simply adding real additional protocol layers to a blockchain (which are not constrained by the same resource costs as the blockchain base layer, hence the orders of magnitude improvement in tx scaling).



The fact that you diverted attention from someone talking about genuine on-chain scaling improvements only serves to highlight the dishonesty of your argument further (which is remarkable considering how dishonest the semantic tricks in the content of your post was)

1. Keep that AMD laptop

Best advice right now is to keep pre-2013 AMD and (I think) pre-2007 Intel hardware (which in a stroke of irony are not receiving patches for those kernel memory access exploits that made the news for Intel recently).  


Alternative options to Intel/AMD (which are all compromises of some kind, and all involve more computing skills than x86 platforms):

• ARM chips (not open designs or fully user controllable, & ARM are beginning to introduce anti-features similar to those that Intel and AMD have, so careful research needed)
• IBM POWER chips (which are expensive, & not well supported, but the platform is fully user controllable AFAIK)
• RISC V chips (which are expensive, immature, & not at all widely used, although the design is more open than IBM POWER, and like POWER, whole tech platform is user controllable)

Intel and Microsoft are slowly turning the whole Wintel concept into something closer to owning a Nintendo console than using a proper computer. Using some kind of Unix style operating system on non-Intel hardware will be the only option, eventually.

Bisq exists, decentralised cryptocurrency exchange running for ~ 2 years.

But there isn't any kind of equal access way to list new cryptocurrencies there. Bisq's developers control which new coins can be traded, as code needs to be added to the software to accommodate new coins.

Maybe it would be a good idea if that development model was changed; some kind of basic interface could be coded for the developers of new coins to add their new token themselves (instead of this ICO model that attracts so much attention, where it should really be derided). I guess the Bisq developers would have to agree, although I can understand the quality control argument behind their current approach (although there's no reason why discretion couldn't simply be exercised on the basis of each individual pull request for a new coin, this would free up more of the developers time for other stuff).

"But you can't use Bitcoin for anything"

"Now that the Chinese gangsterment has banned Bitcoin..."


Remember these naysayings?

But for some reason, regular Chinese people are still using Bitcoin (despite the so-called "ban") and presumably to their benefit, considering the risks (and the overheads, using mules sounds expensive).



Conclusion

• Banning by world's most totalitarian gangsterment == ineffective
• Still huge demand for a currency that's supposedly unusable

I wouldn't worry too much. Without financial freedom, what's Bitcoin's selling point? Traders won't be able to set the BTC price on thin volumes of trade, which is what they'll end up with under such an arrangement. Exchanges that don't use KYC Lightning hubs will exist, and they will set a more reliable price.

Consider the inverse then: your reply suggests that Lightning is unregulated, which is not necessarily true, depending on one's perspective.

While Lightning (like Bitcoin) is unregulated by purpose-built regulatory agencies, it is regulated by it's design (i.e. theft using old channel states is too risky to exploit). This can be regarded as a combination of code-level and peer-to-peer regulation. Possibly incorrect descriptively, but the outcome is the same: users are protected from fraudulent behaviour.


If Lightning (or Bitcoin) is promoted as being "unregulated", then all that does is validate stories in the press about "the wild west of cryptocurrencies". If some people insist on looking at all things Bitcoin from the regulatory perspective, then it's much better if the common knowledge is that the software itself provides the regulation, which makes Bitcoin difficult to corrupt (unlike human regulators)

Right, although the "someone" who has unfettered access to a computer with Intel ME is Intel themselves (and anyone else holding the code signing key for executing code on the ME processor). I think exploits were discovered last year where an attacker circumvented the use of the Intel code signing key, but I forget the specifics.


tldr: Intel owns your computer. Stop using Intel (AMD won't help you, they have a similar tech on newer CPUs too)



There's alot of skepticism about whether ME cleaning/disabling is of any real benefit. It's better than nothing, but the ME and it's firmware either still partly exists after cleaning (only something like 95% of the ME firmware can be flashed, otherwise the CPU refuses to initialise hardware components so the BIOS can load), or still exists completely after disabling (disabling is a feature that Intel designed, we're essentially trusting that the feature does what Intel claims it does).

Intel defined several negative numbered control rings for the ME to use. This means that the ME can function like a rootkit that forms an intentional part of an x86 computer's design. It cannot be removed completely, and so all Intel machines should be considered compromised hardware. The ME could lie to you about anything your machine is really doing, and surveill what happens on your machine. So the Intel ME could be used to steal all Bitcoins from every machine with an Intel ME, one can only speculate Intel must have those ME code signing keys under very limited access and very close supervision within the company.

Ironically (considering the title of this thread), hardware wallets mitigate this attack vector, as Bitcoin private keys on a hardware wallet shouldn't be accessible to the ME if a hardware wallet is secure enough. But don't let that comfort you too much, i reiterate: Intel are behaving in bad faith with their ME tech, please stop using Intel CPUs.


tldr; This should be (and may eventually become) a far more controversial scandal than Facebook selling user data to 3rd parties; Intel can collect ALL data from your machine, not just some of it. And Intel can lie to you about what your computer is really doing.