Anything countries can do, people can do. Countries are really just groups of people. Countries aren't necessary.

You're gonna have a painful adjustment period once cryptocurrency goes truly mainstream, if you continue to believe in state government as the religious believe in God.

This is probably just a way of promoting the Earn product, the real URL is likely still https://bitcoinfees.21.co

Sadly, https://21.co hosts other inaccurate and/or inept Bitcoin network statistics too.



You should also add transaction weight to your list of factors. This is probably part of how https://bitcoinfees.21.co are getting it so wrong.

Possibly an "Advanced User" option could be added, to depict the effect of transaction weight on the outcome.

yep, 400,000 wouldn't be possible without Segwit transactions, even if they're still only a small percentage (4-7%) of the total.

The closer we can get to 100% Segwit transactions, the closer we can get to doing 700,000 or 800,000 transactions per day. Please try to use Segwit addresses, and use services that let you pay to Segwit addresses.



Impossible.

You can choose:

• Fast confirms with a high fee
• Slow confirms with a low fee

If your high fee is rejected by one miner, a different miner will confirm your transaction instead. There's no good reason to make people wait a long time if they pay high fees. Miners are trying to make more money, not less.

It cannot be both. There's a choice:

• Low waiting time, High fee
• High waiting time, Low fee

High waiting time high fee would mean paying low fees to get low waits. Bitcoin never would have become popular if that's how transaction fees worked.


So, if you pay low (9.5 satoshis per byte), you'll get slow confirmation times.

No, you're arguing that it's a good idea to trust Apple's ability to protect people from scams. This incident literally proves that Apple either don't have the resources or the competency to protect their users, this story literally proves that Apple's AppStore model doesn't work.

I didn't say that Apple shouldn't be allowed to do any model they like; they should. What's wrong with me saying "Apple's model gives people a false sense of security, and encourages them to be lazy"?

Especially for people that don't understand why we use money (like this NYT journalist), raw confidence is the most important part of what makes a given type of money valuable.

e.g. People in Greece or Cyprus don't value Euros in a bank account so highly, because they lost confidence that the banks will actually let them use their own money.

e.g. People in Venezuela or Zimbabwe don't value the Bolivar or the Zim Dollar, because they lost confidence that those paper tokens would be worth working for today to buy things tomorrow.


As soon as people stop using their emotions (i.e. confidence) or appeals to authority to reason with about what's good to use as money, they start choosing something that works as money for them, not for banks or government treasuries.

The power that central banks and governments hold over people when all people use their system is about to go. I hope they don't get too pissed about it, because in the end, they can't win. This will be a genuine revolution in bringing power back to regular people, you know, that elusive quality that voting and governments always promise and never deliver.

No it isn't.


This approach:

• Encourages everyone to be lazy and/or ignorant
• Gives Apple the power to censor as well as moderate
• Further entrenches the controlled AppStore^TM culture

People should take responsibility for themselves, or Apple could change their authority-based responsibility into politicism. If Apple started moderating Apps on the basis of "societal norms", Bitcoin might end up censored from Apple devices (again, it happened in the early days due to legal concerns).

Apple is anti-freedom, Bitcoin is pro-freedom. This can't end well.

For 2 years, Coinbase (& others) claimed that blocksize increases were an urgent matter.

For 3+ months, they've had a chance to implement bigger blocks with both Segwit or Bitcoin Cash. They've had nearly 1 year to prepare for Segwit and several months to prepare to handle Bitcoin Cash. They've done nothing. At best, they're outrageously incompetent (and these people got their license how, exactly?)


How can anyone not question Coinbase's intentions?

Hmmm, this is all a bit self-fulfilling when it comes to an immature hard money market like Bitcoin. And what may also be self-fulfilling is how much the price corrects after the speculative peak.

Demand needs to be economic, not speculative, in order to sustain any valuation when it comes to a medium of exchange, however innovative or novel. Where is the actual analysis that supports the possibility of any of these predicted prices?

All we hear from these so-called experts are dizzyingly high dollar prices, and nothing about how sustainable the valuations are, or what any basis is for the predictions. I'm a big Bitcoin/cyptocoin advocate, so I have no problem with people becoming a part of the Bitcoin economy; the BTC price will improve as more economic activity is added, everyone wins.

But these bullish TV market "gurus" are no better than their bearish counterparts: senselessly shouting ever bigger numbers like autistic parrots.

Oh, did you not know that the reason hypnotists never use their superhuman mind-control powers to do bad things is because all hypnotists since the dawn of time have been such ethical, nice people

You can help, if you want to.

Test the Lightning software. Try to find bugs. Report those bugs to the developers. Then, when Lightning is ready, you'll be ready to use Lightning. You won't need to learn how to use or open a lightning channel if you already know, and you'll be able to help others do it too. And you'll be very valuable to the progress of the network: running a Lightning node, routing transactions between Lightning users.

Open source is like this, it needs motivated volunteers. You sound motivated. Will you volunteer?

Money is a economic good, like anything else. Economic goods are traded on markets.

Controlling markets isn't capitalism. If you're in favour of communism, where markets and economics are all controlled, Bitcoin is not for you.

Talking about governments controlling Bitcoin or any other cryptographic currency is futile, they were designed to be resistant to interference. Capital is the strongest force that can be employed in the Bitcoin market, not government stealing or violence. That's what makes Bitcoin so valuable, and also so controversial.

Strange isn't.


Services like Blockchain.info and Coinbase were pushing so hard to change the Bitcoin developers to some of their friends, er, I mean to fork Bitcoin to a bigger blocksize.

Now? Bigger blocksize is available for over 3 months, but Blockchain.info and Coinbase aren't making it available to their users. Interesting.


Why cause massive arguments about blocksizes, then refuse to use a feature that let's people use extra blocksize??

This is just another part of the psychology of hypnotism I'm afraid, these experiments prove nothing. Saying "it" doesn't work under this condition or that condition belies the fact that defining "it" is impossible. There is no scientific basis for hypnotism at all. It's most similar to religious belief: proponents and defenders tend to say "it doesn't work on people that don't believe in it", i.e. pure circular non-logic. The same thing is said of fairies, werewolves, leprechauns, gnomes, ghosts, ufos and unicorns. One theme unifies all: no-one's ever produced evidence.

But hypnotists, clairvoyants and exorcists have for 100's or 1000's of years made a tidy business from convincing those that "want to believe". It's sad, but people are their own worst enemies sometimes.

And saying that there is no gain for paid actors to submit false experimental data to hypnotism studies is just mind-blowing.



It will hurt one's pockets even further, you'll lose more money and never get the password.

Hypnosis has zero basis in fact, it's a stage-show trick performed by actors. Hypnosis has never been been proven scientifically, it's total nonsense.

2nd layers are the only way of scaling blockchain networks, if they are to remain independent and decentralised. No-one is being forced to buy or hold Bitcoin, you can change to a different cryptocurrency if you wish. Payment channel 2nd layers will only make that easier, but like all good things, the software development of this network tech has taken time (recent successes in live testing suggest they may be rolled out next year sometime).


May I make a suggestion? Be more positive. Presenting problems in a fashion that implies they cannot be solved, and vaguely implying irresponsibility being a cause is not constructive. Some are taking steps to actually solve the problem, you could help too if you would like to.

Hurray!


Finally, face-to-face bricks and mortar stores will be able to use Bitcoin without worrying about blockchain confirmations. And finally, the scaling debate will be squashed for good.

No, that's not blockchain technology. Shared ledgers and blockchains are not the same thing.

You're right about one thing though, the concept of using databases where merkle trees verify successive data entries has existed for a long time before Bitcoin. This is one of the concepts that Satoshi combined to create Bitcoin.

Maybe Satoshi too should have gone down on bended knee to beg for permission to do something innovative?

You've missed the point completely. Bittorrent was never illegalised because it would have been too embarrassing to governments to be seen as so powerless. Instead, torrent sites hosting copyrighted content were chased. Ineffectively (I just checked, major sites such as isohunt.to and thepiratebay.org are still up).

Meanwhile, intelligent artists are coming up with new business models to fund their careers instead of chasing the (now) failed copyright model. Bitcoin will do to taxes what Bittorrent did to copyright, and there's nothing any government can ultimately do about it (except make themselves even more unpopular during the process).


So sure, maybe select countries will ban Bitcoin or mining. Some won't. And Bitcoin will continue to be mined and transacted from countries in which it's banned, just as it is now in Venezuela where both mining and transacting Bitcoin is illegal.



You're still missing the point.

Think about it logically: where are the resources going to come from to actually stop people using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? It's an impossible task, and it's even more difficult than the previous impossible problems governments set out to solve, due to the resources required to attempt effectiveness.

They have little choice but to roll over, cryptocurrency represents a genuine change in the power balance between governments and everyday people.



Precisely. If exchange sites being banned in the most totalitarian major economy cannot affect the Bitcoin price, I expect nothing can. There is an effective counter measure for just about any attack government agencies can attempt, and each failed attack will only make Bitcoin, and it's demand, stronger.

"Market capitalisation" makes zero sense applied to Bitcoin. So it makes zero sense comparing the Bitcoin network in terms of business market caps.


Bitcoin as a system cannot be bought, it is not a company. Bitcoin is it's own currency, monetary system and electronic payment network, and because anyone can play any role in the Bitcoin network without getting approval to do so, it is impossible to buy the whole network. To further explode these old metrics seeking to categorise or value the Bitcoin system, Bitcoin is also a networking protocol, and a carefully defined programming/scripting environment. The way the software was designed is a deliberate measure to prevent any single entity from gaining overall control of the network.

The most suitable way to describe the figure for BTC supply multiplied by $ exchange rate is "monetary base", but even that is complicated by pre-existing definitions of monetary base (Bitcoin can only ever represent what monetarist economists refer to as the "M1" money supply, as money in the Bitcoin system can only be created as assets, not as liabilities)