@Kakmakr

You spotted the incentive [ DO NOT POST SESC LINKS ]yourself in the "Lightning in 2020" thread[/url]

Although I disagree with the original observation (not your own) that Lightning-routing full nodes can profit, I think it'll only ever be a way to subsidise the costs of running a publicly accessible full node.

You're right, it's just idiots



That's the best reason Venezuelans have not to use this new currency. The Venezuelan government tried this trick at least once recently (re-introduced the Bolivar as the "Fuerte Bolivar"). The "Fuerte" ("strong" in Spanish) version crashed just the same as the original.

Venezuelan people are unlikely to fall for the same trick 3 times.



The Venezuelan government did "simply" ban cryptocurrencies, and it simply didn't work. Now Maduro + cronies want to pretend it was their idea the whole time, lol



Very unlikely. People have already invested in the now "legal" (lol) cryptocurrencies in Venezuela, they've already disposed of the worthless Venezuelan state issued money. They're starting from nothing in many ways, and very unlikely to trust a government managed currency for a long, long time. Hopefully never.

You've made 5 statements, all of which were wrong. That's 0 out of 5.

The cryptocurrency media websites are nearly all either corrupt or incompetent. coinidol.com is mostly in the incompetent contingent.

These jackals (crypto media) promote ICO scams and vapourware tech hype like they're totally complicit in the accompanying pump & dump. And then when real tech improvements come along, they criticise them as much as possible, as if they want to buy whatever coin is the subject of the improvement before it peaks.

Very shady operators, Coindesk.com and Cointelegraph.com are among the guilty.

The crime is because of mass-starvation, caused by too much control. Starving, desperate people don't care about morality, they care about surviving.

And you seem to be misunderstanding the nature of corruption. Corruption is perpetrated by people with control, not people without it. All the problems in Venezuela are being caused by too much control by the state, not a lack of state control.

Many people reject the legitimacy of taxes

• It's involuntary, and hence legalised theft
• Violence (and threats of violence) are used to terrorise people to pay
• Because of the violence, a culture of waste and inefficiency pervades the government offices which spend the tax (why do a good job when the money is so easy to get?)
• Private organisations that receive government contracts also waste money (competition for contracts are often negotiated with corrupt terms and bidding processes)
• Government workers or contractors also simply spend the money on themselves and hide the evidence
• Most egregiously, governments start wars against other governments, drag their people into the wars, and kill millions in the conflicts

Maybe you weren't aware, but this is the reality of taxes.

I'm not in favour of paying someone money under violent threats towards me, then having them spend my money on mass-murder, stealing the property of the victims of mass-murder, spending my money on contract work for their friends, or just giving my money directly to themselves. And lying to me about all these things, that's the most egregious act of all.

Is anyone in favour of the above?

So your basic point is that all cryptocurrencies have failed as currencies. But you're assuming that Microsoft quitting Bitpay (then quickly reversing that decision) or Steam doing the same means every business has quit. That's 2 businesses, so not quite all of them.

Furthermore, can you explain the continuing high rates of Bitcoin transactions? If we take a look at https://coinmap.org, the number of small businesses accepting Bitcoin simply carries on growing. It seems that Bitcoin's use in business is following it's peer-to-peer roots instead of conforming to the corporate business culture which some believe is the only culture that exists.

Except various governments have tried this, and they failed. In the case of Venezuela, the government failed so badly (despite raiding miners), that instead they "legalised" cryptocurrency and tried to place themselves at the centre of the Venezuelan people's positive attitudes towards cryptocurrency (by launching a centralised coin, lol)



Venezuelans fought. They won. You appear to be the one struggling to accept reality. Others will benefit from this democratic change, and you will be remembered as someone who didn't have the courage to stand up for your rights.

you



I didn't



Your interpretation is too extreme. We don't need to regress to 19th century farming life in order to reject government totalitarianism, that's an enormous exaggeration. Just buy from independent businesses. Independent businesses make computers (although their supply chain may not necessarily be 100% free of proprietary components, the changes that can be made today are, e.g. no Windows and hence no licensing fee to Microsoft)

How dumb are these people, lol

The blockchain was designed to verify transactions itself, you don't need anyone to do it except yourself. Established authorities and institutions are clearly terrified; no-one needs accountants, clearing houses or lawyers in a blockchain based world.

Your solution is highly unoriginal: voting. It's never worked, as individual people can't simply elect the government they prefer. And at least 51% of the electorate reliably believe politicians who lie about what they'll do if elected. Your advice is no different than the same advice we've been receiving for 100's of years. It's never, ever worked.


I did offer a solution: refuse government everywhere and for everything. Refuse corporations everywhere and for everything. People are beginning to do both in increasing numbers, without me saying a thing.

As long as people using Coinbase (and I should stress, not everyone does) don't also sell using Coinbase, then they have alot of options as to how to obscure what happened to their BTC after they withdraw their funds to a private wallet. That makes the evidence that those people realised capital gains difficult to discover.

This is an incredibly loaded question, bbc.reporter

There's no mention of hate, simply statement of easily verifiable facts. These may be unpalatable facts to some, but it's entirely correct to say that police in pretty much every western "1st world" country behave oppressively towards members of the public that they should in fact be protecting from bullying behaviour. The problem may be more serious in the USA, but it's happening on a small scale everywhere.



Be the change, etc. With Bitcoin, we're already doing something very important, using a private system. Try to live your whole life without using government services, and encourage others to do the same. If no government will ever honestly decrease waste and corruption in public services if they are voted for, then we should vote instead with our money for services that are properly incentivised to serve it's users.



All states are police states to some degree, as they all rely on threats, theft and violence to ensure people pay for government services.

The magic is in how this has evolved; as recently as the middle ages, governments didn't even try to pretend that they weren't bullying people to steal from them, taxes were collected exclusively for maintaining the position and lifestyle of royalty and local lords. But as the education of regular people became more widespread, and possibilities in infrastructure and industry improved, government gradually changed itself from the previous system of obvious open theft into a more benevolently styled system. It's no coincidence that the power of the church simultaneously waned; all the best liars could earn a more attractive wage constructing lies for governments than they could as church ministers. The psychological control of the masses switched from church to state.

The truth is we never needed them. Most people treat each other well without the threat of state punishing them, they value their reputation (and simple reputation is a more effective policing system than ever in the internet-age). We're paying alot of money to the government for very little improvement in our own lives, when we could simply pay for what they do provide (far cheaper than the corrupt deals they make) directly.

And we can avoid paying them to start fights (i.e. wars) with other governments that threaten everyone's safety, and in the end only serve the needs of their friends who pick up all the contracts to rebuild the destroyed cities or to steal the natural resources from the previous owners exploiting them. Or you could just believe all that BBC reporting that says governments invade and bomb other countries to pieces because of what nice people they are.

The limit on the size of blocks was changed to 4MB as a part of that.

You make it sound like the limit wasn't changed, it was. Over 6 months ago.

It's a little more complicated, but it's for security. Greenaddress can't send your money themselves with this design, as you hold 1 of the keys needed for sending from your Greenaddress wallet. That means your money can't be stolen from Greenaddress if their website is hacked, the attackers would need to hack your computer too to get your signing key.



I've not used GreenAddress (I run a Bitcoin node myself to access the Bitcoin network), but they've been around for a few years now without controversy. They're reputation is, as of now, that of a good actor in the Bitcoin industry.

Interesting that fiat currency ETFs do exist. Presumably, settling in more obscure currencies is more difficult, and so ETF's help provide more trading liquidity for those currencies (i.e. more volatile currencies whose respective countries don't have significant domestic stock markets)

This is the same fear-mongering nonsense you were talking about in another News thread


If what you're saying was true, all exchanges and businesses using BTC transactions are operating illegally. They're not. You seem to believe that anything not explicitly legalised is illegal by definition, but this is only true in the small number of extreme authoritarian governments around the world. The majority of more liberal governments are not that tyrannical, as bad as they are otherwise.

You're right, scaling debates are for the qualified professionals, really. Not for politicians (or salesmen)

There's little point in using the ETF concept for Bitcoin, it's a digital format that can be settled directly when trading. There are no ETF's on the Forex markets that I'm aware of, for the exact same reason.

Private companies are contracted to mostly do all that work, they could do all of it. The government essentially just takes (very high amounts of) middleman's fees from the contracts. It's completely corrupt, the government chooses their best buddies in the industry for the contracts (the infamous "no bid" contracts), and we get to pay the extra money they all gift themselves with.

Prosecutions require evidence.

The IRS need to do a much better job than usual to actually present any real evidence. There will be a high number of situations where the evidence simply doesn't exist to conduct a successful prosecution. This could be very resource consuming for the IRS with little success.