Lol, I heard that investing in the Nigerian currency (managed by, oh I don't know, is it the Nigerian central bank?) is a bit of a gamble also


To sum up:

• Bitcoin is the "gamble" where people progresively win over time
• Nigerian state money is the "gamble" where people progressively lose over time

Isn't gambling supposed to have some element of unpredictability to it ?

Hilariously bad arguments.

• Segwit made it safer to increase the size of Bitcoin blocks. Big Blockers hated it, of course
• Aggregated signatures would make it safer to increase the size of Bitcoin blocks. Big Blockers will hate it, too. What else!

When Big Blockers don't want tech improvements that safely permit big blocks, and Small-Blockers do, you have to wonder (as usual) what this "blocksize wars" argument is actually all about

Let me put it this way:

1. Chinese government officials would have to be pretty stupid not to take the opportunity to buy the market dip this stimulated
2. Chinese government officials would be averagely smart to only ban trading & ICOs so that they could buy the market dip this stimulated.

Smarter than the South Korean officials, who mis-calculated how short the average South Korean serf's loving citizen's memory lasts.

Strongly recommend against using bitcoinfees.earn.com (which is the same as bitcoinfees.21.co), especially for those that aren't familiar with Bitcoin fee estimating, bitcoinfees.21.co/bitcoinfees.earn.com suggests incorrect estimates for confirmation times.

The text delivering the "answer" is highly misleading: "The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently: 220 satoshis/byte" (which at this point in time is around 10 times more than an equally fast fee rate).

The site's conf-time estimate seems to erroneously deem the "cheapest and fastest" fee to be that which is paid very near to the highest within the top 1MB of it's mempool, when in fact every transaction within the top 1MB will be equally fast (yet not equally cheap).

It's likely no coincidence that 200 sat/byte transactions are heavily represented in the typical Bitcoin mempool. Very little mempool space is occupied inbetween this so called "cheapest and fastest" threshold and the lowest fee within the top 1 MB of the mempool (which is 10 times lower than 200 sat/byte right now).

Their method for calculating fees therefore always presents users with a false impression of confirmation times, and likely distorts the fee market against the user's interests. I am most embarrassed to have recommended this website in the past.

The network isn't setting the price of fees, it's users are.

This is either the result of people using badly written fee estimator websites, or bad wallet software estimates, or even just users blindly picking a fee without knowing or caring how low fees are (people are still choosing 200 satoshis/byte and even 1000 satoshis/byte in the last week, when they could've paid from 10-50 various points throughout the week and gotten the same speed of confirmation)

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue is the best website to use, the other popular websites are misleading or poorly laid out.

Enthusiastic about this possibility, as it actually improves Bitcoin's on-chain transaction scaling (instead of increasing resource usage at the same scale). It also makes increases to the blockweight limit viable, as signature aggregation should reduce the burden of signature validation in every Bitcoin block.

So, the blockweight limit could be safely increased by the factor that sig-aggregation improves validation performance after a MuSig softfork was activated on the network.

Bitcoin can be hard forked, it's a p2p blockchain.

That means if Bitcoin is forked, Lightning might work on the new fork (but that totally depends on what the changes are in the fork, which could include something that somehow breaks Lightning on the new fork).

But this doesn't work the other way round. Lightning is not a blockchain, it cannot be forked independently of Bitcoin

*Transactions* are the same speed they always were. It's *cheap transactions* that are quicker to confirm.

The choice is always:

• Pay higher fees, get faster confirmation
• Pay lower fees, get slower confirmation

If anyone's thinking "but low fees are confirming fast, so that's wrong", then try paying less than 10 satoshis per byte. It'll still take many hours, or even longer than that, for your transaction to confirm.

There's still more than 100 MB of less than 10 satoshi per byte transactions queued in large mempools: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue (check the bottom graph)

There are 3 up to spec:

lnd
c-lightning
ACINQ Eclair

They're all on github.com, and you probably have to compile them, I doubt that pre-compiled version are being distributed yet. If you're not experienced with compiling, this might seem difficult.

Bitcoin blocks are now increased in size. In a soft fork 5 months ago.



Lots of planning is required. All the good candidates of changes for a hard fork should be weighed up, and packaged together.

Then, a gradual roll-out needs to devised to minimise the risks of disruption to the Bitcoin network. It's easy to say "let's hardfork", that's 2 words in less than 2 seconds. The reality is months of planning, and months of transition. There is an entire separate project dedicated to devising a hard fork. Because it's such a large undertaking, hard fork's should be done very infrequently.

In the meantime, soft-forks are still very useful and much less disruptive. A very important tech improvement (Schnorr signatures) will do a great deal to improve the transaction rate & privacy, and is set to be introduced as a soft fork soon.


Hard forks are not magic, they come with risks as well as rewards. The same is true of changes to block capacity, it's a trade-off. What we really need is a capacity increase, and it's best to get that increase using ways that don't compromise Bitcoin in other ways. Block capacity increases are a bad idea, especially when we've only just increased block capacity, the impact of that needs to be checked before it's considered again.

With Lightning already working on the main chain (albeit prematurely), and the Segwit blocksize increase already in place, increases to block capacity aren't really so important any more.

It's not obvious what you mean by "not to run software without developers behind it", the developers were firmly behind the increases to the block limit introduced.

And Core did increase the block limit. It's quadrupled. Since nearly 5 months back. That's what Segwit is. That's why Bitcoin had several 2 MB blocks recently, which were impossible before the soft fork. This was a result of overwhelming user support (which those users long campaigned for).

So you're 300% wrong, blocks are now increased in size, and the developers and users supported it. Please check your facts before posting entirely false information.



Just wait for the fees to drop (they are dropping, you're must be using bad wallet software, or poorly designed fee prediction website). Or sell your Bitcoin if you think it's heading in the wrong direction, no-one's forcing you to buy or hold BTC, there are plenty of alternatives using a different approach. I don't recommend it, but if you're unwilling to use any of the options available as a Bitcoin user, it's difficult to know what else to suggest to help you.

Should be called "Lightning Grease"

I'm not aware that there is any alternative Lightning forum to go to.

You need (in order):

• Bitcoin Core installed
• A sync'ed copy of the Testnet blockchain
• Some Testnet coins (there are faucets available, I believe)
• A lightning node installed

Ask if you need any help with these main steps

Which makes the checking service limited in value. Sending to re-used addresses should be as equally discouraged as soliciting payments to used addresses.

"Pseudo" means what exactly?

There's been around five or six 2 MB blocks mined recently. All Segwit compatible Bitcoin nodes (which is over 90% of the network) added every byte of those 2 MB blocks to their copy of the blockchain. This will be no different for 4 MB blocks either, if you're not downloading the full blocks, you're not running a full Bitcoin node.

It's possible, but the software engineering to do it is extensive. Even then, I think mining nodes still need the complete tx history. The developers have a plan to design such a mode, but they can only do as much work as there is time to do it. I *think* Pieter Wuille had the most promising idea to do something like this, but I can't remember what the details are right now.

Bitcoin remains the most efficient way to move money out of China. Explain how that's happening if the ban was effective.



Japan is taking slow steps towards independence (which is really a military issue). US political influence has never been popular in Japan, and is continuing to diminish.

Besides, you're failing to see that Japanese people have the same power to hold onto their Bitcoin that anyone else does; the situation in China or Venezuela proves that the most  repressive state actions still cannot stop decentralised cryptocurrencies. What's so magic about the US government bullying the Japanese government into failing to control people using cryptocurrency in Japan?



This is an exaggeration, Bitcoin has already become popular in parts of Africa. People needed computers for that to happen, those Africans had basic necessities already.



I'm using Segwit, and so are many people I know. The idea behind Bitcoin is deeply rooted in taking control of your own life. It's not necessary to wait for the largest Bitcoin businesses to make changes, you are actually allowed to look for others that do business how you want to do it. This is called "the free market".


Overall, you seem obsessed with the idea that Bitcoin isn't a tool more powerful than government violence. It's simple really: you're wrong. The governments of the world cannot stop it. They can make things "uncomfortable", in your words, but they're already making our lives uncomfortable, that's the reason Bitcoin exists at all.

No, they tried and failed to enforce a ban. Banning things seldom works.


You're forgetting too that other significant economies have something to gain from taking a unilateral stance (Japan is a likely candidate here), and also that government is much softer in many parts of the world.

Africa, for instance, is becoming an economic battleground between the US and China, and almost all of Africa is so under-developed that the old style of cash economy is dominant. Bitcoin could easily become a common currecny across Africa, or even the de facto pan-African currency, which would severely damage government power across the whole continent. Note that the breakdown in government power and legitimacy in the EU is happening in the peripheral countries, i.e. geographically adjacent to Africa.

Then, factor in the financial industry, which is either equally or more powerful than government anyway. It doesn't really matter what scenario is analysed, not all globally important actors will agree. Especially when they'll all be aware of how ineffective a ban would be (with China and Venezuela being the test cases: all that was achieved was making Bitcoin even more valuable in those countries).

Cryptocurrency cannot be beaten, and so there's no choice but to join it. The central banks in particular must be very unhappy, but what are we gonna do? Carry on riding horses when someone just invented the flying car?

You're forgetting that those three systems are in conflict.

The euro is fragile, and depends to some extent on the dollar. And the dollar's structural importance is being eroded, the chinese government are attempting to encourage the yuan's use for settling trade between it's trading partners (which may begin to include EU countries if the dollar begins to have serious problems).  This is likely to escalate considering the US government's increasing belligerence. The IMF can't rescue the situation either, it's not seen with the same reverence as it is in the western world (the IMF is considered to be biased towards the west from the perspective of the eastern powers)

With an intractable conflict taking place between 3 major currency groups (all 3 weakening in various structural ways, and all 3 increasingly inflated away), they can be as "unbearable" as they like. Military rule in authoritarian Venezuela cannot stop cryptocurrency, and neither can a totalitarian dictatorship in China.


I seriously doubt anything can, if it was that easy, why hasn't anything effective been done already? The kids (regular folk like us) are in the process of taking away the "adult's" (government's) credit card. They should be going crazy, but instead they "want to talk", or "intend to unite" . That means they're going to lose as long as we stand firm.

It was increased, 4 months ago.