Well, Lightning does actually permit milli-satoshi values. Which is, essentially, splitting the smallest unit (100 millionth of 1 BTC) into a thousand smaller sub-divisions (100 billionths of 1BTC)

Has it really taken 3 pages of the thread for someone to mention this?

That's pretty ridiculous.


The real value is in Bitcoin's various security attributes:

• Supply cannot be arbitrarily inflated (fixed inflation schedule)
• BTC cannot be arbitrarily seized or ownership altered (owner's consent required)
• Taking control of the overall Bitcoin system is difficult, and becomes increasingly difficult as it grows (decentralised network)

These qualities make Bitcoin very useful as a form of money. If some people adopt a superiority complex, it is a consequence of how secure their money is, i.e. a secondary effect.

I'm not sure if lack of Segwit use can really be described as "spamming the network". But Coinbase have always had a unnecessarily high fee for customer withdrawals onto the actual Bitcoin network, maybe that could be fairly labelled as spam. I think Coinbase still don't even aggregate withdrawals into single larger transactions, which would also be pretty spammy

KFC must be pretty stupid.

Bitpay just stopped accepting regular Bitcoin addresses on their webpages, no-one will be able to use this period if they're doing the same at their POS terminals. Also, Bitpay will probably still be using mainnet 10 years after everyone already switched to Lightning (these fee problems wouldn't exist if Lightning were used). So the timing is pretty terrible, as Bitpay are highly unprofessional, and Lightning isn't quite ready yet. 

I bet KFC cancel this in 6 months, saying "NO 1 IS USING BTC WITH US ", 2 days before Lightning goes live (and KFC misses out on the more profits than they could ever hope for )

Larger blocks would have to be far too large to permit micro-transactions though.


Also, Bitcoin now has larger blocks, blocks between 1.1 MB and 1.4 MB are a regular occurrence. ~ 2.1 MB is the vaunted max for current usage patterns, and Lightning will likely push that up higher (as open/close channel HTLC transactions have a higher weighting than typical transactions), within an overall 4MB maximum blockweight.

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Your arguments ignore the drawbacks of block size can-kicking: efforts must be made to mitigate the effects of the additional verification resources required for increasingly larger blocks, otherwise there will be a compromise to other aspects of Satoshi's overall mission statements. These cannot be ignored or wished away, Satoshi wanted a decentralised network and p2p cash-style transactions.

Segwit's solution for non-linear sig-hashing was the beginning, but future innovations to improve the performance of block verification and propagation (e.g. MAST and signature aggregation) will be needed in order to ensure safe increases of the block-weight limit. Scaling-up blockchain tech actually involves changing the performance of the Bitcoin network at larger scales, not just "making everything bigger". That's not scaling.

I forgot about fibre. So compact blocks is not a factor at all today? (in propagation performance for mining)



Ah, so this is not so much a performance-gain based strategy, but more a performance mitigation strategy? Would "To-Big-To-Scale" pool software also account for the same pool mining 2 consecutive blocks, the 2nd of which is empty? (I seem to remember Antpool recently mining 1 full block quickly followed by an empty block just recently)

There is a good reason not to do this.


No Lightning wallet software developer has released their client. As of today, pre-release development and testing is still underway for all Lightning developers. Anyone using Lightning payments today is taking a significant risk that they will lose money.

No money has been reported lost as a part of testing the Lightning protocol, but that doesn't mean that there are no flaws in the software that could let that happen.


I'll be very happy when Lightning is up and running, but using pre-release software with real money is reckless. This is premature.

You're missing the point really, Danny.

I'm not making distinctions between the specific nomenclature of software used in mining at all, as it doesn't matter when talking about the reason that empty blocks are created.

Suffice to say -

• mining pool software
• solo mining software
• hybridised solo/p2p mining software

...could all 3 be designed to mine empty blocks, under given conditions. What we're interested in is the conditions under which that happens, please read the OP.

There's Eclair wallet and lnd. Both are Lightning only, no regular wallet software has Lightning payments integrated that I'm aware of.


You can use Lightning right now, but at your own considerable risk. Well-known websites don't yet accept it. The only reason to use it is to pay between yourself and others that are willing to take the risk that an undiscovered bug might eat your BTC unrecoverably. It may be difficult to use the Lightning software (because it's incomplete).

Again, trying Lightning wallets now is a massive risk. Best advice is not to try Lightning until it's been released officially by the developers working on these wallets. It could be months till that happens.

I see, so how does the miner broadcast a block they solved if they never know which transactions to include since the last block? All blocks would be empty if that was true.


amaclin, you made an abrupt decision to start distinguishing between ASIC software and mining software, which are indeed different, in order to make a childish point about nothing except your tiny ego (that distinction has no relevance when explaining this phenomenon). Please don't return to the thread, you're not very helpful

If one defines block N as the most recent block, and N + 1 as the subsequent block to that, and that a given miner has a solution for N + 1, then said miner can successfully relay their solution for block N + 1. You clearly didn't understand my sentence, otherwise, you wouldn't be trying to imply I said something which I didn't say.


I guess that condition could still exist, compact blocks do not change the probability of solving blocks seconds after the previous block, and so there is only a marginal case where compact blocks improve the window of opportunity to win the propagation-race of a full block v.s. an empty block. I assumed that transaction re-ordering for a large mempool was the contemporary reason for empty blocks without considering this.

that means "the next block". English is not your first language, that's always been abundantly clear.




Hmmm, I discounted this specific situation due to how long BIP 152 (compact blocks) has been available, my understanding was that new blocks now propagate so fast that orphaned blocks (the result of trying to propagate new block solutions with transactions from a previous block) are exceptionally rare.

So, I figured that with such a big mempool these days, re-sorting transactions for inclusion would be a more significant factor than knowing which transactions are now invalid in a new block. But in essence, it's propagation latency issues (i.e. the block race) that cause miners to mine empty blocks. Which latency issues are relevant today, I am not completely sure of.

Well, it kind of is backed by one thing: government violence, forcing you to pay for things you don't necessarily want. But of course, this is a strange kind of value-backing, the holder can't redeem taxes to the value of the bank note (lol).

It's called "government" when they do it. It's called a "protection racket" when anyone else does.

Some miners have mining code that works like this:

If they solve a block very quickly after the previous block N (i.e. only a few seconds later), then they simply relay an empty block N + 1 (there's only one transaction because a single transaction is the minimum required to pay the block reward to their mining address).

The rationale is that if they wait for their mempool to re-sort the remaining transactions, they risk some other miner solving block N + 1 during the time it takes to choose the transactions to include in their solution for block N + 1. Since the block reward is still fairly high in comparison to fees, this is considered to be an economic strategy.

This highlights one serious problem with central bank currencies.

Central banks want to push the idea that legal tender law is somehow the magic that makes money valuable. The Venezuelan currency, as well as countless other government-run currencies throughout history, prove something else: controlling the (supposedly capitalist) economy is why centrally administered currencies are pushed on the public, nothing at all to do with legitimacy or value.

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Having an organisation to manage a currency will always end up as a mistake. All such centrally-run money systems have always failed. The fact that the dollar, yuan and euro have lasted so long is actually a reflection of how bad things are, not how good they are.

Every dollar, euro or yuan that exists is owed back to the central bank, and interest is charged on that debt. The debt is traded on financial markets, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out it's not ever repayable, the math is simply impossible. But financial traders are so cynical that they have always been willing to buy the tranches of debt that can be realistically repaid (i.e. newly issued short term loans). But that can't last forever, especially when governments are printing and borrowing money faster than ever before. Like I said in my previous post, the central banks that printed the money in the first instance are buying over 90% of government debt these days, so the point where no-one really believes that governments can pay all this money back has already been reached.

Central banks always claimed they will eventually sell the government debt, that they're not just printing money to kick the can down the road. Everyone is still waiting for them to start selling.

Lol

Currency didn't need any legal backing for thousands and thousands of years. It didn't need it when legal backing was introduced either, it's simply a way of taking the power of the currency business away from regular people, i.e. creating a monopoly on who can produce tokens of value for trading.


Central banks are terrified, and justifiably: their currencies do a whole lot to enrich themselves and their close buddies in the financial and commodities markets (and, supposedly, many important Central Banks are in fact owned by large corporate banks, although the precise identity of the shareholders is a secret to the public they ostensibly serve).

What are they afraid of? That the people of the world stop recognising their money product as currency. When the bond markets finally figure out that sovereign debt has no buyers except the central bank that issued it, inflation is going to go crazy, worldwide. Trillions of extra currency have been printed since 2008, sometimes tripling or quadrupling government debt over 10 years, where the debts in 2008 took 100 or more years to build up. This can only cause huge price inflation. This is happening already really, the massive 10 year rally in stock and real estate is an indication that the value of central bank currencies is going down, not that the value of stocks and real estate is going up.

Here's the big question these professors are ignoring: how?


How will governments successfully regulate cryptocurrencies, even one tiny bit? Peer-to-peer & decentralised technologies have a long history of forcing governments to change their policies, not the other way round.

• The printing press helped dismantle the power of Rome
• The fax machine helped dismantle the Soviet totalitarian government
• The tape machine, the CD burner, p2p file sharing networks (and soon the 3D printer) helped dismantle copyright

What reason have these professors posited that there is any reasonable expectation for an even more powerful peer-to-peer technology to be defeated, when all previous examples ended in the defeat of government repression?

Lol, you just described money:

• sensible people save it
• reckless people spend it

Uh, what about where the writer says that New York agreement was "to give important factions a vote"? Or where they say transactions are slow and expensive? Or where they say Bitcoin has 1MB blocks? It goes on and on


This is the usual clever anti-Bitcoin propaganda from Cointelegraph. Well, not so clever: full of totally incorrect statements, too many to list

There are various ways to alleviate the situation. Here and now: are you sending from your Segwit addresses yet? If not, start today. If your service provider doesn't use Segwit addresses, switch to one that does.

Later, features like Lightning, Schnorr signatures and MAST (I'm not clear on how MAST helps yet), are set to improve capacity.

But until then, say hello to reality. Transactions are using a limited resource, and limited resources have a price. If there's more demand for that resource, price goes up. People pay what they think it's worth, always.