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Blockchain tech cannot verify chemical purity, it's not a chemical tech.
Blockchains can record results from chemical purity tests, but if there's an error in the result or at the data entry stage, the blockchain will need to have it's contents amended to the correct figures. It will be more expensive to operate than a regular database, and will have the same accuracy (as there won't be multiple independent assessors to test the metal samples).
In other words, this is a terrible application for blockchain tech.
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I heard that in Iceland, the consumption of electricity for mining is greater than the electricity consumption for their whole household residence. The government has not done anything for this but I think that a more sustainable and efficient way of mining should be discovered. Electricity uses up non-renewable energy and unless something will be done, mining is going to hurt the environment. Electricity in Iceland is very close to 100% renewable, so your argument makes zero sense. Miners are able to benefit from the cheap resources and climate of Iceland however the locals within that area may be affected badly. The price of electricity will surely get affected someday and having to pay for an increased price would be unfortunate for them especially for those who may be only low income earners.
Local people can mine BTC just as easily as mining farms can. The overhead costs for being a home miner are far lower than those of a mining farm. This is probably already the case in Iceland, the people there have struggled with a weakening currency for many years, and so are probably not totally averse to risk in cryptocurrencies when they take such risks with the Icelandic kroner every day. |
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Central banks print money that's then given to terrorist groups (e.g. Syrian rebel groups), or to the destructive purposes of hedge funds and banks on the financial markets (e.g. the entire century of financial market crimes we're in right now), or to genocidal rulers killing 100's of millions of innocent people for "peace" (Lindon Johnson, Richard Nixon, G.W. Bush, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher etc)
So, on moral grounds, Jason Bloomberg wants central banks shut down too? And considering how extraordinary their collusion in mass murder, central banks should be shut down first, right Jason?
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I keep seeing things like "SegWit addresses are lower tx fees". Can someone explain why/how that is?
SegWit transactions are smaller in size. SegWit basically 'removes redundant data' from the transactions. This makes them smaller in size -> lower fees to pay (with same fee rate (sat/B)). Not really. Segwit transactions are either 10% smaller (native bc1 type addresses) or 15% larger (nested P2SH addresses for backward compatibility). Assuming everyone used bc1 addresess for payments, a 10% improvement in space efficiency couldn't increase blocks from 1MB max to the 2.2MB blocks that Segwit has thus far made possible. What makes the difference is the re-structuring of transaction data within the Segwit blocks the network now uses. Signatures have been changed in a way that prevents a specific Denial of Service attack (a sighash based attack). This change was deemed by the designers of Segwit to allow blocks of up to 4MB to be safely accepted on the Bitcoin network. As part of the Segwit changes, transaction data & their signatures are priced separately, whereas they were both priced together before Segwit. Signature data is discounted, and that's why Segwit transactions are cheaper. |
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This is a bit of an extreme view. As long as there are governments around, which have powerful militaries, fiat currencies are here to stay. You may argue that the concept of a nation-state is a new one and that three hundred years ago there were no nations - only kingdoms whose boundaries kept changing. But you would need a revolution to change that.
You appear not to have noticed, but the "revolution" you speak of is already under way. Governments have already more or less conceded that cryptocurrencies cannot be stopped, and they are also beginning to compete with each other to liberalise Bitcoin's treatment under their laws (to the point of essentially codifying the fact that they no hope of controlling them, e.g. the German government's recent abandonment of taxing Bitcoin as a captial gain) Meanwhile, government debt and fiat purchasing power are eroding almost as fast as Bitcoin's purchasing power rises. Draper might be over-optimistic on the timeframe, but he's correctly identified the overall direction of change. It could be look actual democracy, where regular people and what they want actually matter, because governments would need our cooperation to get what they want if enough people used cryptocurrency. Why deride that as "extreme"? Did you mean "an extremely good idea"? |
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What would be the point?
SWIFT still won't let you move your money if they say no. Bitcoin can't tell you you're not allowed to move your money. Bitcoin still wins.
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It's sad really.
The Communist Party president in China (Xi Xinping) recently made moves to circumvent the rules limiting his presidency to 2 terms, and big spike in searches for "emmigration" occurred in Chinese search engines.
Unfortunately, at least some Chinese people actually believe that the worsening levels of authoritarianism in China don't exist elsewhere. But people who live in so-called liberal democracies are seeing the same erosion of their (government provided) rights too.
"Liberal" is supposed to mean "not interfering in other people's lives, so that no-one wants to interfere in yours". "Democracy" means that people are in control. Do you think your life isn't being interfered with? Do you think you're in control?
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Hmmm, even tiny off-shore banking centers are acting threatened by cryptocurrencies? Interesting.
(note how there's no question of "looking seriously at regulation", lol. At least some of these governors have the humility to know when they're beat)
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Bill Gates has also recently joined the chorus of self-proclaimed Austrian economists & gold bugs, stating that another great financial crash is on the horizon (caused by debt increasing instead of receding since 2008).
Seeing as Gates is among the first of those with mainstream credibility to start warning about a "new great depression", it's possible that this represents a new milestone in the overall dynamics of the economic system. He's wrong about crypto anonymity (of course), and he may well be wrong about the immediacy of market crashes too.
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What prevents wallet software from spending from non-segwit addresses using the segwit address corresponding to a common public key?
Nothing. So that means P2PKH or P2SH inputs could be spent respectively as P2WPKH or P2WSH? Transferring to segwit addresses isn't strictly necessary, as wallet software could be programmed to write transactions using the segwit address corresponding to the common public key of legacy addresses holding funds? |
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I am not a technical person nor an expert Then you probably won't attract many technically skilled people to comment before you amend the thread title to something less sensational. Most of Peter's gripes are with specific implementations, and his only issue with the protocol itself is version specific (not to mention just a general worry, Peter Todd has not found any actual attack vector) |
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But the private keys of the segwit addresses (both P2SH and bech32) are the same as those of a legacy address when you export a private key from a segwit address in Bitcoin Core and import into Electrum, it appears that you imported a legacy address instead of segwit P2SH or bech32). Do the tests yourself
That is a known problem. Fixing it requires a new private key format because the private keys do not actually specify what kind of address you should create with them. It is important to note that private keys only create public keys, and a public key can be transformed into several different addresses now. The private key does not specify what kind of address to create from the public key. What prevents wallet software from spending from non-segwit addresses using the segwit address corresponding to a common public key? |
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It's not withdrawal that causes people to pay those size fees, its getting deposits confirmed quickly enough to get into a trade.
You're very wrong. Users control the fees when sending to exchange accounts. So they can pay < 10 satoshis per byte and get their deposit confirmed in the next block (any time earlier on today, at least). |
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I'd love to know the answer to this question:
Who is paying 200, 500, 800 or even 1000 satoshis per byte under these conditions? WTF
Why even pay 50? Why 10!!!?
You don't trade, do you? I'm not seeing 1000 satoshis per byte fees to withdraw from any exchange websites I'm currently registered with, to answer your question. |
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I'd love to know the answer to this question:
Who is paying 200, 500, 800 or even 1000 satoshis per byte under these conditions? WTF
Why even pay 50? Why 10!!!?
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i would never trust a coin made by Venezuela government
yeah much better to trust some random coin made by unknown people  The whole point of Satoshi Nakamoto's cryptocurrency design is that trust plays no role. The code tells you exactly what it does, therefore you don't trust anything or anyone, you know how the coin works. |
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Right. I'd like to think that tech like the above could be leveraged to create a database of author attribution (although I must stress: not the laughable "copyright" concept). It'd be a great way to promote the generalised use of cryptographic signing keys; anyone who believes their idea might be falsely attributed to someone else can submit a signed hash of their original works to a blockchain.
One of the side-effects of the rise of ASICs has been that Bitcoin is sharing its PoW scheme with only a handful of coins, signifcantly reducing the number of possible targets to alternatively point hashing power at. Nonetheless it is of course impossible to predict how the world and cryptocurrencies will look like a 100 years from now, given the latter still exist.
And this is one facet of a very significant reason to not switch POW algorithms. Thank you. Don't you mean this is the reason not to be holding any coin using the PoW algo to which Bitcoin's PoW algo is switched? No. First off, the existing investment in ASIC hardware benefits Bitcoin security insofar as it locks miners into mining Bitcoin (or scamforks—hmmm). If Bitcoin miners were forced to dump their existing investments in the trash and restart from scratch, they may very well decide to play the market with altcoins—especially since they might feel betrayed (and in the case of some of the better miners, they might have a point). Moreover, the existing ASIC base provides a formidable hashpower which could not be rebuilt overnight. Meanwhile, network would be relatively weak. Lesser hashpower equals lesser resistance to anybody obtaining 25%/33%/51% of it. There is a trade-off involved: Mining is now much too centralized; and installed base obviously benefits incumbents. But on the other hand, a switch would most benefit whomever could rapidly build out a new installed base. That very well could be the same incumbents. Eventually, kakistocracy could overwhelm Bitcoin. S2X only failed because not enough people are presently foolish enough to swallow stories about politically motivated emergency hard-forks to different consensus rules defined by a different dev team. At some point, the balance of fools running Bitcoin nodes could be right for that to happen. PoW change is the only possible way to fight that scenario. Although I hope that won't be necessary, I can see how some kind of technological improvement in semiconductor fabrication could decentralise mining with SHA-2 PoW. I would also point out that it would be surprising to me if SHA-2 has infinite longevity, but maybe that's a long-term problem. Any alt already using the hypothetical new Bitcoin POW would be potentially crushed out of existence, unless the new POW could be merge-mined. Then, both blockchains would share a mutually beneficial symbiosis; and the existing alt would receive a security boost from the flood of new miners. Of course, I don’t see great prospects for this unless the coins are not economic competitors; observe that Namecoin, inventor of merged mining, does not compete with Bitcoin as a currency. Yes, this is what I meant. Unless other cryptocurrencies using a hashing algorithm that Bitcoin uses have some in demand use-case that isn't duplicated by Bitcoin, then they're set to lose significant amounts of hashrate (assuming Bitcoin is still the dominant cryptocoin) |
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The blockchain works great for currency systems, and to an extent, smart contracts (provided they are not needlessly complex, or else you risk losing all stored funds to a bug/hack/unintentional loophole). This can be summed up by saying that blockchains are only useful for abstract information that benefits from being uncensorable, of which money and contracts are examples. Other examples I would include would be ID systems and data timestamping (Satoshi proved this in an inverted way by adding the famous "The Times 3.1.2009, Chancellor approves 2nd bailout" text to the genesis block, any data referenced in a blockchain can be verifiably proven to have existed at least after a verifiable time/date). But when the 21m BTC supply was mined, miners will surely shift to a more mining-profitable coin that can lead to a lower Hashing power.
One of the side-effects of the rise of ASICs has been that Bitcoin is sharing its PoW scheme with only a handful of coins, signifcantly reducing the number of possible targets to alternatively point hashing power at. Nonetheless it is of course impossible to predict how the world and cryptocurrencies will look like a 100 years from now, given the latter still exist. And this is one facet of a very significant reason to not switch POW algorithms. Thank you. Don't you mean this is the reason not to be holding any coin using the PoW algo to which Bitcoin's PoW algo is switched? |
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I can imagine someone throwing 1 Bitcoin in a hub, getting a million transactions per year, and earning a million Satoshis (1% of his 1 Bitcoin).
I can imagine all (or most) of the 11,400 Bitcoin node operators thinking the exact same thing. That would be 11 billion transactions that they'd need to process in aggregate to earn their 0.01 BTC. If we assume that a generous 600,000 per day vanilla on-chain transactions (i.e. 1 signer, 1 input, 2 outputs) are possible, then the 11 billion transactions needed to earn back that 0.01 BTC for each node would take around 50 years to occur at today's rates of use. Lightning could be far more utilised than that, that's just a little perspective based on historical demand and on-chain technical limits. I can also imagine how much more popular it would be to run a Bitcoin node that routes Lightning transactions, if this really was such a big money spinner. Any significant profits will be, like with mining, limited to the first movers. Even now, there is at least one very well connected Lightning node that charges 0.001 satoshis per transaction. |
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Nope, the debate ended already.
Conclusion: changing the license isn't going to do anything useful, permissionless innovation (however un-innovative) is a feature, not a bug.
n.b. a non-developer brought the idea up, the actual developers unanimously rejected any such change
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