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Very friendly to Coinbase in this article
Instead of spending 100's of words discussing what Coinbase haven't done or what they might do, why not mention exchanges that do use Segwit addresses, or tx batching?
Coinbase have a record of unscrupulous practices going back a long, long time, they should be described accordingly if "media" reporting is responsible to it's readers
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You forgot something: Segwit addresses are banks. And the old style addresses, banks, all of them!!!  |
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Essentially, it comes down to the same debate that a lot of macroeconomics is about. Who is better at allocating? The collective analysis of millions of market participants or a few government officials, lobbyist and bureaucrats? I side with the market and I think Africans will eventually as well. Wait, didn't anyone tell CNN that Austrian Economics and Bitcoin are racist? They'll soon change their minds about saying free markets are better at running the economy than a bunch of politicians are. I'm sure Africans will see the same thing and refuse this racist free-market economics (that empowers regular people) and monetary freedom (that empowers regular people). Although CNN are strangely correct about the economic principles forming their main arguments in this article, the sad thing is that we still can't take CNN seriously as free-market advocates. If you watch CNN, they constantly prop up the idea that the "professional price-setters" on Wall Street and the other financial markets IS free-market economics in action (when in fact, regular people simply cannot get direct access to those markets, because "it's not safe, they might get hurt", lol). |
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Why did we not move BTC to 2MB blocks while work on the layer 2 scaling was being finalized? As I understand LN right now when a channel is closed the transactions in it get processed by the main chain, thus a bit of extra blocksize would help scale LN even more. Bitcoin had five 2 MB blocks at the weekend just gone. Blocks are regularly 1.2 or 1.1 MB. The maximum block limit is 4MB, and has been for four months. So your wish came true already. |
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Speaking on behalf of the IMF, spokesman Gerry Rice weighed in on the benefits of cryptocurrencies in their use as payments as well as their abuse in money laundering, fraud and terrorist financing.
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Rice added in quotes reported by Bloomberg:
“When asset prices go up quickly, risks can accumulate, particularly if market participants are borrowing money to buy. It’s important for people to be aware of the risks and take the necessary risk-management measures.”
Hmmm, that last sentence sounds like a pretty accurate description of the stock market (i.e. prices going up fast, borrowing to buy, be aware of risks and manage them) Rice did not delve into specifics of the kind of collaboration or policies that the IMF is pushing for. And the "we're looking into it" rhetoric has been going on for how long, exactly? The best they can do is exactly what the existing exchanges have already done: AML and KYC at the fiat gateway side. There's little hope of achieving anything else, once cryptocurrency takes off meaningfully (i.e. more than single percentage points of people are using it), there's not much that can be done. These top-down centralist thinkers should understand the way this ends, they only have to look at the history of decentralised technology to see that if the tech is powerful enough, it changes everything (and the old structures and their centers of power are swept away) They tried stopping it, they're going to try regulating it, as nation states and as regional blocs. They're going to throw everything they can at Bitcoin but they will soon realise that what doesn't kill Bitcoin actually makes it healthier. The EU is the least likely political entity to be able to come up with a unified policy. There are several serious challenges to the EU's overall coherency right now (in Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Italy and probably more). It's incredibly fragile. So no political force that actually cares about Bitcoin is in any position to even attempt a workable policy, let alone actually implement one (which is the whole point really: there's very little that can realistically be done. They can do something ineffectual on their own, or do something ineffectual together ) |
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Opening a channel costs very little when you consider that it can be kept open indefinitely. The amount that can be saved in on-chain fees is pretty large, as long as you're both spending & receiving money (i.e. getting a paycheck over Lightning)
That's nonsense. It costs very much because the mining fees are very high. And who wants to lock up money in a channel he's not using, for a long time? The idea is that you open a channel to use it, not so you don't use it. Then you can make many transactions with other people for tiny fees. And mining fees aren't high if you're willing to wait. You could set up a channel, using a low fee, wait a while till it confirms. Once it does, you have instant transactions (no more confirmation waits) and you'd be very happy with the overall price of transaction fees you could be paying. This is not for beginners though, I strongly advise against using Lightning for the moment (as do the developers of Lightning clients & protocol) |
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The costs of running a Lightning channel are essentially zero.
No, the cost of running a lightning channel is 1x mining fee THE LEAST (for funding the channel). More realistically it's 2x mining fee (opening and closing), or more, depending on the number of funders. That makes it very difficult to make any kind of profit from Lightining channels. If no profit could be made, then it would fail for sure. Why would you open your channel for routing if you can't make money on it? Nobody would open his channel for routing, so the project would fail from the start. It all DEPENDS on people making money routing other people's payments. The simple answer is that people are opening Lightning channels to save money, not to make money. Opening a channel costs very little when you consider that it can be kept open indefinitely. The amount that can be saved in on-chain fees is pretty large, as long as you're both spending & receiving money (i.e. getting a paycheck over Lightning) |
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Bitcoin wasn't created in a vacuum, it has dozens of failed predecessors, so it shouldn't be strange that after 15-20 years of trying some genius finally came up with a solution for decentralized electronic money. Russians are just paranoid, they see CIA behind every corner, and these views presented by Kaspersky mirror the views of Putin and other leaders who are strongly opposed to cryptocurrencies and everything that wasn't made in Russia. Which is bad often for them, like for example when they didn't want to use standard ciphers like AES and instead came up with their own ciphers, which were later proven to be weak.
Remember that successful cryptography often comes out of intelligence agencies too. And that intelligence agencies have a very good incentive to fund a Bitcoin-like project: Satoshi levels of wealth. Remember also that Putin's western focused television propaganda helped to popularise Bitcoin a great deal. Your interpretation would make alot more sense if Russian government propaganda had been villainising Bitcoin. I agree though, that just because someone like GCHQ or the NSA could have created Bitcoin doesn't mean they did, only Satoshi knows the answer. It will be kind of irrelevant though, if Satoshi turned out to be some kind of bad actor, intending to use vast Bitcoin wealth as a domination end-game, there's nothing to stop the world from invalidating that wealth by starting again from block 1. Not such a great plan, in other words. |
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In which moment would the miner recollect the fees? on putting the transaction on the block, or when he broadcasts a succesful block to the network? Would this be a new transaction on top of each tx, how do the miners exactly recollect the fee?
The transaction fees are added to the block reward and paid to the miner's mining address as a part of the coinbase transaction in a block. This means that all block rewards are "tainted" with whatever fees are accepted by the miner (which can of course be zero fees, i.e. zero tainting). |
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I've always thought that the first half of this interpretation was plausible: I mean, who's got the time, the resources and the motivation to come up with a working cryptocurrency system first? Intelligence agencies innovate some pretty incredible tech (including alot of cryptography), and are even perhaps responsible for more everyday items than we'll ever know.
But it's hardly impossible that a motivated individual came up with the idea too (individuals came up with multiple predecessors to Bitcoin, after all). Whichever is the answer, we may never know: Satoshi made very sure that he would be difficult to trace. Intelligence agencies would be the No.1 people that could find Satoshi, they're the only ones with the resources to do so. And yet it seems that if they did find Satoshi, he was left in peace (at least for now).
But these things are just historical details really, in the end it won't matter. Sovereignty over the money supply has been a highly effective tool of oppression for millennia. That's gone forever now, the genie is out of the lamp.
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This is how Bitcoin should be :
Knock knock, 1 burger please...ok, print this code bar sir...bitcoin transaction sent and tada!
And of course, it was never really like that. 0 confirmation transactions were always a serious risk to the receiver, yet even recently this has been offered as a genuine solution for in-person usage of BTC (or other cryptocurrencies). I've been saying this for a long time about Lightning: it's a very good solution for the physical, in-person use case. Hint: it might seem too early to sell right now, but Lightning is going to make "in-person" specific coins like Litecoin look pointless. Be advised though; alot of people are probably thinking the same thing right now... |
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Bitcoin Knowledge host and notorious advocate Trace Meyer has suggested Bitcoin could hit $115,000 in 2018 after its correction ends.
Why $115,000, despite being a theoretical possibility based on previous behavioral cycles, would be “very overvalued,” Mayer adds. Why “Current (Bitcoin) run very similar to Jan-Mar 2013 run ($7->$266->$90; $700-$20k->$9k) with backlogged new accounts, etc. then Silk Road catalyst (salable supply shock) for $100->$1,200. Mountain of (Wall Street) money lining up,” he wrote in accompanying comments.
WHY If that extra investment would “overvalue” Bitcoin, Mayer suggests that a “fair” value would lie anywhere between $9500 and $14,340 (fuck's sake) WHY man, WHY Before this week’s downturn, Fundstrat investor Tom Lee had suggested a return to $20,000 in 2018, which if managed by June could result in a protracted move into new all-time highs. TELL US WHY “So I think Bitcoin is still something you should own,” he told CNBC in comments January 9. (I know the answer to this one, but still no mention of WHY) I really wish these "market analysts" would actually substantiate their claims about price predictions. The simple fact is, it comes down to pure demand (with wide ranging, largely psychological, factors driving that demand). And all this baseless talking achieves is feeding into people's psychological reactions to the Bitcoin phenomenon, nothing to do with anything technical or empirically measurable at all. Their opinions are pretty worthless, in other words. Anything could happen, and there's nothing these over important fortune-tellers can say now to change what actually happens (though I bet they'll be back on TV, telling us why what actually happens occurred, regardless of whether it conforms to their predictions) |
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So it created the possibility of some institutions starts to work for profit providing large hubs. This is interesting.
The costs of running a Lightning channel are essentially zero. That makes it very difficult to make any kind of profit from Lightining channels. There's more routing potential in multiple independent nodes than there is in one node with lots of channels, so it makes no sense from a business perspective or a technical perspective. |
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isn't bech32 to legacy possible? this is backwards compatibility, so what was the point of nested address?
Im asking because in that 22 output transaction there are coin sent to 1 legacy address so it seems to be working.
bech32 -> legacy = possible (but wallet software that isn't Segwit compatible may have problems decoding the address, and possibly spending the BTC too, don't try it) legacy -> bech32 = not possible with wallets that don't support Segwit (Segwit wallets can do this though). That's why nested Segwit is needed, people from non-Segwit wallet software can safely send and receive to & from Segwit addresses. |
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infinite block size limit is not an issue. I honestly cannot understand why he added the 1 MB limit.
Use Bitcoin Cash @OP, I agree with your argument. As per game theory and the assumptions you have made, I don't see a reason why the block size limit has to stay at 1 MB.
Newbie question here, is there any way to change the block size limit? How feasible it is to do? Would it require a hard fork?
Use Bitcoin Cash By putting a hard limit on block size, you actually increase drastically the effect of spam, as we saw. Once the block is full of spam, transactions are hindered. This is an efficient DDOS of bitcoin. If the blocks are elastic, you can spam a lot, that will increase the size to some point, but transactions can go through unhampered, and you'd have to spam like crazy in order to have an efficient DDOS. Hard limits make DDOSsing of bitcoin in fact much easier.
Use Bitcoin Unlimited (and maybe you should troll more consistently, you were arguing for months about how 1MB would be the blocksize forever. Until it was replaced by the 4MB blockweight, and now you're not Mr. 1MB, you're Mr. Infinite. Riiiiiiiiight) |
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But after all it uses the blockchain technology, so will the miners accept it? Will they accept to have way less fees?
Miners should be equally interested in a high BTC exchange rate. Lightning will add orders of magnitude to potential BTC value, as it permits orders of magnitude increases in transaction rates, plus all Lightning transactions occur faster as there is often no block confirmation to wait for. This means vastly higher velocity of money for Bitcoin than would be possible otherwise, and so commensurately higher value to the BTC units on the network. Will miners care about a 50% reduction in fees if the Bitcoin price increases to $50,000 or $0.5 million? They shouldn't. |
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YESS!! Even in the Lightning Network Whitepaper they were looking for a mininum of 133mb block size and never imagine there would be SOO much resistance to a gradual increase in block size. No. That was to accommodate billions of users, not millions. Bitcoin only has millions of users right now. Yes the damn' blocksize needs to be MUCH larger to bring down these transactions fees which are discouraging even wider usage (and don't give me, like this one jerk on Reddit did, the argument that transactions aren't high) Lightning will let us do 10's of millions of transactions per second with the 4MB block weight Bitcoin has right now. And it was only increased to 4MB less than 6 months ago. That's going to be enough for now. Hard forks need to be planned very carefully, there's a whole lot more to consider than just the block weight. There are so many changes that could or should be made, and hard forks are so delicate that those changes should be taken with exceptional care, otherwise we may invite chaos to destroy Bitcoin's reputation (and value). I think we can all agree that stable limited utility and slow consensus building towards a sensibly planned hard fork is much better than the chaos of big blocks fork-of-the-month shouting matches. |
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Don't look at the market cap to say that Bitcoin is losing popularity, because it's simply not true.
Exactly. Bitcoin wouldn't have transaction scaling problems if it wasn't popular. Complete this sentence everyone: other cryptocurrencies don't have transaction scaling problems because ________________ |
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Well how about PLAYING with it? Like, let's play with it nothing moving over $1USD.
Beta Lightning protocol already has upper limits (max 0.16777216 per channel, and 0.04194304 per transaction). Higher than 1$, sure, but that should give you an idea of how the developers feel about this (and those limits are intended to stay once Lightning is officially endorsed for use by the devs, although they're set to be revised later) I guess the same advice maxim for investing applies: don't put into Lightning more than you can afford to lose (0.16777216 BTC is alot of money these days) |
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In order to benefit from the reduced fee from segwit, all the addresses in which you are sending the money must be using bech32 addresses to receive the bitcoins, or it only depends on your end? (using bech32 to send the bitcoin, then even if you are sending it to a legacy address, you still get the same reduction of fees) No. Only the address sent from needs to be Segwit (and bech32 is only 1 option, you can used nested Segwit if you need to pay someone not using a Segwit address) I assume that both ends must be bech32 to reduce the size of the transaction? There is no reduction in size, more space is allowed in blocks for segwit txs. For the nested (i.e. backwards compatible) address type, the transactions are slightly bigger than regular compressed key txs. |
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