That isn't what he said, and you know it.


dinofelis, your only discernible input on this forum is misrepresenting facts in a (kind of) subtle way. Well, you're also good at avoiding direct debunking of the things you say which aren't true.

You ought really to be banned, as it's too obvious that you're not interested in any kind of constructive debate, and never have been (unfortunately, dinofelis is likely the owner of many accounts that have been created with a suspiciously similar style of debate, only adding to the perception that the owner is very intent on wasting everyone's time on Bitcointalk.org)

Wasting what? Answer: their own money. What makes you think you can tell others what to do with their own money? It's not affecting you, you have no cause for complaint.


The pair of you have not gone to the trouble of finding out why proof of work is used in Bitcoin. Don't be surprised if there's little sympathy for your ill-informed views.

Read this sentence: Bitcoin Proof of Work is providing a valuable service. More is better. See if you can figure out why that's true before you waste everyone's time again (ironically, you wasting everyone's time is a waste that is affecting other people)

If there are more solutions proposed than I was aware of, then you get a merit

Sounds interesting, although I'm wondering if this is one of this proposals that's been "on the shelf" for a while? Alot of that sort of stuff on the Bitcoin wiki site was written several years ago.


Still, we should encourage the lateral-thinking spirit: coming up with unexpected innovations often results from trying to look at a problem a different way, and that means not accepting the established assumptions about the nature of that problem. There's be no Bitcoin if Satoshi had given up if he'd assumed the Byzantine general's problem was unsolvable.

There's a common assumption that miners and big Bitcoin businesses want the same thing as the users, because it's supposedly irrational to want to cause any damage to Bitcoin.

This is very short sighted.

Miners and big Bitcoin businesses can:

• Represent other industries that don't like Bitcoin competing against them. They would be strongly incentivised to use miners or businesses as a proxy to damage Bitcoin
• Falsely believe that wresting more control over Bitcoin for themselves is beneficial
• Falsely believe that any damaging actions are not damaging

Users can only control the Bitcoin they want to use by enforcing it's rules on the Bitcoin network. That means some users must be running fully validating nodes, even if some users (i.e. SPV users) are depending on those running full-nodes to look after their interests.

Satoshi's original model turned out to be wrong; fraud proofs for SPV nodes still do not exist, and so real world incentives have adjusted such that a middle-tier of users running full nodes is needed to keep the interests of the system's users in balance.

No, you're wrong. The screenshots you included show Bitcoin (and Litecoin) fees for their respective p2p networks, and the level is chosen for the user by the website you are using. And the website isn't choosing the cheapest fee for you, it's choosing a medium priced fee (they should let the user choose how much to pay, and explain the problems with using very high or very low fees)

This has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself though, that's a 3rd party charging those fees.



People are (over-enthusiastically) using off-chain payment channels already. Fees are cheap (0.00000001 BTC).

It's not recommended right now, the tech is not mature and money could be lost. But some (brave) websites will accept payments this way, so it's not an unreasonable projection that payment channels could be sufficiently well evolved that they'll be more mainstream later this year. Real-world use should help to tease out any problems that need fixing, despite the fact that this is not recommended due to the short-term risks.

Scaling on-chain transaction verification has some candidate technologies, but it's unlikely they'll be implemented on the Bitcoin network this year. But off-chain payment channels do more to add capacity, so that's not such an issue. Hence why off-chain payment channels are number 1 on my list above.

No, fees aren't charged as a percentage. It's misleading to present it this way.


For instance, if you sent 0.0000546 BTC (the minimum standard amount) yesterday with the same fee you paid (0.00083BTC), that would work out like this:


Pay: 0.0000546 BTC
Fee: 0.00083 BTC (1,520%)

That's not such a great deal.


Or, if you sent 5 BTC instead:

Pay: 5.0 BTC
Fee: 0.00083 BTC (0.0166%)

A better deal. Percentages are a misleading way to present Bitcoin fees.



The user can choose what fee they pay in Bitcoin, it depends how fast one wants to have their money sent. And some amounts are too small to be sent, even with the smallest fee (as in the 1,520% fee example above). All decentralised cryptocurrencies have this problem, real blockchains (Ethereum is not a decentralised blockchain) have limited on-chain resources.


The known solutions are:

1. Abstract the transactions away into a different protocol layer (i.e. off-chain payment channel networks)
2. Improve the scalability of transaction verification to increase the capacity of the on-chain protocol layer

Well, this is what choice looks like.

I choose a system where my money cannot be inflated away, or stolen from me without my consent. If that comes with downsides, then that's a compromise I'm happy with.

You provide no reasoning at all for why you, the bakery, the supplier and the farmer cannot simply pay each other with direct links. Well, except when you say that they need "flow in the same direction", which is precisely what having direct channels between one another achieves. This is a reason, but it disproves your point completely. There are actually people reading your posts sometimes, y'know!

Routing can be achieved by hubs, as you point out, but it can also be achieved other ways (which you suggest isn't desirable or possible). The protocol design doesn't care whether a node uses nodes with high numbers of channels (i.e. hubs), or uses a lot of multi-node hops, or opens a new channel. It only cares about minimising fees (which is in the user's interest).

Your description implies channels can never be closed, they can. Just one on-chain transaction can be used to close 1 channel and open a new channel at exactly the same time, and the new channel can be sent in the direction where no route existed before (i.e to where the money is needed). It's quite simple. And if it's cheaper, or more desirable for privacy reasons, than using a pre-existing route ("hub" or otherwise), that's exactly what users will do.

---

You're also repeating the use of the word "banks" to describe nodes with the highest number of channels (you've been doing this in other threads too). This is inaccurate. How many channels do I need to open to become a Lightning "bank"? There is no way of distinguishing between Lightning "banks" and regular nodes based on how many channels they have, everyone will be opening and closing channels as they please (including their "bank accounts" with nodes that have alot of channels, unlike when dealing with actual banks where one must ask permission to close one's account).

There is no entity in the Lightning network's model analogous to a bank, in any way, shape or form.

Yes.



Yes, to the miners.



Indeed, no incentive to run the blockchain itself would exist, but only if Lightning (or some other 2nd layer tech) had developed to the point where using the on-chain network wasn't needed for anything.

And if the on-chain network wasn't needed for anything, there's no need to mine blocks so that transactions can be sent. Everyone would keep a copy of the final state of the blockchain to ensure people were sending valid BTC over Lightning/2nd-layer-of-the-future. Or maybe there would be a way of avoiding that, bear in mind that we're talking about the year 2140, when it's more likely than not that we'll all be dead, and vast improvements in computer science and cryptography are likely to have taken place.

No, that would have been reckless.

Segwit (amongst other fixes already mentioned) fixed a Denial of Service attack. That DoS attack was increasingly more effective as blocks became larger. This could have been used to force the Bitcoin network into long waits between blocks while CPUs struggled to process the attack blocks.

So, it wasn't safe to increase the size of blocks without mitigating the attack. Segwit constrained that attack, and increased the maximum block size at the same time.

You're failing to mention another option (that may well be the most popular option):


Set up a uni-directional channel. Then you keep your keys, and go offline whenever you like. You're turning into another one of those people that keeps saying the word "bank" as often as it can be fitted in.

What is reckless or frivolous about imposing absolute discipline on inflating the money supply?

And I think you've been reading too much central bank friendly sources of information; the means by which the money supply can be expanded are many, and there is rarely any discipline as a consequence.



There is a dispute between scientists as to whether increases in CO₂ is the reason for climate change anyway. The climate has changed far more dramatically in the past without 0.01% increases in atmospheric CO₂.



There is a dispute between climate scientists as to whether increases in CO₂ is the reason for climate change anyway. The climate has changed far more dramatically in the past without 0.01% increases in atmospheric CO₂.



There is a dispute between climate scientists as to whether increases in CO₂ is the reason for climate change anyway. The climate has changed far more dramatically in the past without 0.01% increases in atmospheric CO₂.


"The bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it"


Sorry to have to repeat this, but the whole world appears to be a victim of the constant repetition of this unproven CO₂ climate change theory. Scientists are in dispute about the veracity of the claims, but politicians love the idea, because it gives them and their corporate cronies more power over us. The carbon trading scheme being pushed as the solution to this problem puts the big villains of this piece very much in control; big CO₂ producers (i.e. corporate energy giants) can offset their CO₂ production by larger factors than anyone else, meaning they can accumulate the largest number of carbon credits. This gives them the power to set the prices of carbon credits, and therefore the price of the carbon taxes.

It might seem like righteous crusading now, when all you need to do to "be green" is ride a bicycle or buy local seasonal vegetables. But when your already very high tax burden gets increased even closer to 99% (it's typically above 50% now), let's see how you feel about this disputed science then. I'm not convinced, especially when politicians are the only ones that are unanimously in agreement.

Even if Lightning could completely supplant all on-chain transactions (and it can't with the present protocol), the block reward is always valuable. This is fundamental supply-demand economics: if supply contracts, and demand remains the same (or not less than the magnitude of the supply increase), then the price equilibrium point is forced up.

Nice clear reasoning.



Let's leave aside the fact that finding difficult hashes of block headers (i.e. mining) keeps your money safe from rogue miners attempting to re-write the blockchain (i.e. this is what makes Bitcoin uncensorable, so more mining is better, not worse). Let's just park that issue, despite how much more honest and transparent Bitcoin is than central banking fiat as a result.

So, Christine Lagarde doesn't like that Bitcoin costs energy to produce. After all, the IMF and other fiat printing central banks can produce new money supply for a disappearingly small fraction of what that new fiat money is valued at.

But that's essentially the problem underlying the entire world financial system: the privileged ability to create money (and debt) at will has, unsurprisingly, led to a severe lack of discipline amongst those privileged to do so. Anyone familiar with the history of such abuses of monetary levers of power knows how this story ends: badly, and in many flavours of badly. And the current abuses (in fairness, only sanctioned by IMF hubris so they're only indirectly responsible) are probably the greatest ever seen. It's prudent to expect the economic fallout to be on a similar scale.

So no Christine Lagarde, forcing discipline on the monetary supply using a finite and tangible resource is not a problem, it is a virtue. Your practice of approving fiat money printing at essentially zero cost (with correspondingly zero discipline) is a serious threat to the world economy, and the lives of the people who constitute it.

This has been corrected by the authors already, the document now states that Segwit was a soft fork.


Besides, why would anyone take NIST seriously? When choosing the signature scheme for Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto deliberately ignored NIST's published recommendation of the type of elliptic curve to use for signing transactions. It was later discovered that Satoshi was very wise to do so; NIST's recommendation was an ECC curve with security flaws, while Satoshi's choice is demonstrably secure today.

In fairness, I think the Anti-Cen account *is* satire. The posts are often quite funny pastiches of genuine attempts to troll Bitcointalk.org.

That's actual state of the art trolling if so; trolling the trolls with, uh, imitative trolling. I've been tempted to award some merit points


I sincerely hope Anti-Cen starts hanging out with the other trolls, oh and meriting their posts!! Anti-Cen might be a kind genius of a sort after all!

It only took 15 years for Bittorrent to become regulated, so I can totally see this happening


(and the US government ended alcohol prohibition not because it was a complete joke, but because they were being nice )

Bitcoin miners (even in China) are using mostly renewable hydro-electric or geo-thermal energy, because they're the cheapest

Yeah, like I said, I have recommended bitcoinfees.21.co in the past without fully understanding how inaccurate it's estimates can be. And like you said, the raw information on the site is perfectly usable, but those looking for a simple answer are likely to assume the estimation (or even the "fastest & cheapest") figures are good, which they're not.