They've had a long time to do it, and no external actor has ever succeeded in obstructing Bitcoin's progress, bank or not (it's unknown whether any of the various attempts to de-rail Bitcoin have been sponsored by banks in any way).

And it's not just commercial banks that lose where Bitcoin gains; governments, central banks and card payment providers also lose revenues or business to Bitcoin adoption. That's a line up of exceptionally powerful adversaries. But Bitcoin has continued without serious setbacks for nearly 9 years now, and certainly no interruptions from any credible legal bans, or any other type of ban. Satoshi thought long and hard about how to make Bitcoin's design untouchable, and did a very good job.

Probably there was a bump in adoption once the first Segwit wallet software (Armory) was released, but that's gonna be a relatively small wave of enthusiastic and confident power users (I think Bitcoin Core can also use Segwit with CLI, but that's gonna make up a fairly small proportion of overall Segwit users). Electrum have now also released Segwit wallet software, but there's a limit to how much transacting can go on between early adopters. More time is needed until a majority of users and services are using Segwit as standard practice.



Most services haven't switched over to Segwit addresses (many are waiting for the Bitcoin Core implementation to be released). So I don't think many of them have been using Segwit since it activated.

What "classical" view is this?


The actual classical view is that money is the good that is traded most frequently, for whatever reason. There are good reasons to choose gold, rice, cigarettes or bullets as money, depending on the situation.

One solution exists already (Segwit 4MB blocks), but it's not fully adopted yet. It will take time for Segwit to have it's full impact on fee reduction, as the majority of everyday payments on the Bitcoin Network must be using Segwit addresses for it to work most effectively. Every time the old addresses are used, they consume 2-4x the block weight that Segwit transactions do, limiting blocksize closer to the old 1MB max (which is still in place for old style transactions). So, start using Segwit wallet software and Segwit addresses ASAP to help accelerate the process, and encourage others to do the same.


Really though, 2nd layer networks are the ultimate solution to high fees and the transaction rate. The big mistake that all the on-chain scaling advocates make is that their position is fundamentally untenable, as on-chain scaling isn't actually possible any time soon (certainly not with today's internet, and some argue that it will never be feasible).

On-chain is also not suitable for regular everyday purchases, you can't buy a cup of coffee then wait between 1 and 60 minutes for the transaction to clear, coffee shops and stands could have huge queues of people waiting for their coffee for the next block to get mined so that their transactions confirm. Then the coffee shop has to serve all those annoyed, caffeine-starved people really quickly! (and they'll probably all be extra cranky, waiting probably made them late for something) So on-chain doesn't work well for buying things where you need a quick turn around. 2nd layer networks on top of Bitcoin can be designed to clear instantly, without having to wait for blocks to be found by miners.

And the capacity of 2nd layer Bitcoin networks can be many orders of magnitude higher than the on-chain Bitcoin network. This could take alot of strain off the on-chain, and a new price equilibrium between fees would emerge. Transaction fees for the Lightning Network, to give an example of a 2nd layer Bitcoin network, can be far lower than miners charge for on-chain, as the costs needed to run Lightning nodes is an insignificant fraction of what's needed to mine Bitcoin blocks with included transactions. There's no good reason why Lightning transactions can't have free fees (although some larger routing nodes might try to charge fees if they offered purchase insurance or some other additional service)

No, I think the intention behind the 0.15.1 release was to make sure that Bitcoin nodes could identify which chain was BTC and which was the hardforked chain (as S2X was written deliberately to cause such problems, in the hope that Bitcoin users would give up and use S2X). So, 0.15.1 solves the same problems with similar oligo-lateral hardforks in future.

There's no good reason not to release 0.15.1, not least because the S2X camp have already demonstrated bad faith and dishonesty anyway. Also, only the developers have backed out (AFAIA). There's nothing to stop the miners hardforking without them, despite that possibility being even nuttier than the previous plan was.

I didn't say whether the money was good or not, and deliberately so.


Shells (and other seemingly scarce money, such as paper or coins with a printed nominal value) do appear to make sense as money to those that haven't thought about the issue carefully enough. But experience teaches better than anything else; nominal printing led to notes for millions or billions of currency units in Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe more recently, and Dutch traders successfully bought Manahattan island from North American Indians using shells from sea molluscs that they farmed intensively using scientific methods.

So abundant money stuffs are actually common in history, and also the status quo. The status quo that Bitcoin is disrupting right now.

It isn't obvious at all.

The blocksize has already been "upgraded", 2 months ago. And the new limit's not even close to full yet.


And that makes it sound like constantly full blocks necessarily requires an increase; there are good arguments that the blocks should always be as close to full as possible for a proper fee market to work.

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So saying "it's obvious" without even saying why doesn't really add much to the conversation. But here's what Mike Belshe (whoever he is) said:


So even S2X representatives are tacitly admitting that the S2X fork wasn't needed right now anyway. 4MB is the blocksize today, and the 8MB (and not 2MB as the S2X people even now incorrectly state) increase proposed by Segwit2x would only invite problems when even 4MB isn't being used yet.

And once again, Bitcoin and it's community have demonstrated that social engineering (i.e. armies of paid liars cowering behind their anonymous forum handles) is the only weapon anti-Bitcoin wrecker have really got. And they keep failing. This is the 5th time (Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Cash and then S2X) that big blocks forks have tried and failed, and:

• Bitcoin Cash is now the Bitcoin with the magic big blocks (8MB max) that supposedly solves everything. And no-one's even using it (blocks are consistently less than 1MB)
• Bitcoin itself now has 4MB max blocks, twice the size of the "it's only 2MB FFS!!!" screechers' wishes. And no-one's even using it (blocks are consistently less than 2MB)

Note that despite 4MB blocks in Bitcoin, big block psychopaths still refer to Bitcoin as "the 1MB Bitcoin".

The Daily Telegraph (sadly) takes itself seriously publishing such articles. This is, frankly, hilarious.


The reason why Bitcoin is experiencing such explosive price growth is because people are free to trade it in something that's as close to a free market as the current banking system allied with the internet allows. It's difficult to understand that when controlled markets dominate.

Daily Telegraph financial journalists live in a genuine bubble (although not a price bubble): the markets they typically report on are excessively controlled by a financial and legislative elite, and guess what, the rules are written in a way that benefits the writers. This is not free-market capitalism, as the Daily Telegraph and their cohort might extoll, but essentially privatised communism. Assets are traded on these so-called markets, but with such an excess and combination of limits set on that trade that it is reduced to a form of glorified price-fixing, little different in practice to the way the Soviet Union handled pricing (except far more deceptive, of course). But the genuinely economically competent players in the financial markets know that the rigging cannot continue forever. Secondary price trends can be suppressed with a million different tricks, but one day, the primary trend finally takes hold to remind the blissfully unaware masses that infinity doesn't really exist, and "shock" market crashes happen.


Bitcoin is just the start of a new paradigm in the financial world, where corruptible humans can't so easily force their self-serving rules on the participants. So or course, the professional echo-chamber at the Daily Telegraph serving the Independent Ministry of Fair Pricing doesn't get it. They will.

Hmmm, what about all the times Bitcoin was used as currency before you wrote that though? Do you live in some alternate reality where the past doesn't exist? Must make simple stuff difficult to do, like remembering the words to use in order to speak total nonsense, for instance.

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Trichet has made the quintessential bankers mistake: telling people what is money and what isn't money. Bitcoin is living proof that this is not how it works.

Gold, salt, shells, teeth, stones and all sorts of other objects have all been considered money in the past. People with loud or powerful voices can pretend that it's their words that makes something money, that's happened many times too.

But what pre-dominates monetary history is choice. When a critical mass of people use something as money, that thing becomes money. It's as simple as that.

No, at a minimum, the sovereign Bitcoin comment is actually a fact.


Jeff Garzik began talking about "safeguarding stolen BTC" and KYC/AML shortly before he and Gavin Andresen left the Bitcoin project a few years ago. I expect his views haven't changed, and he was always espousing and defending authoritarian & illiberal political views before that.

lol

Given that scenario, I don't think anyone would care which coin is called Bitcoin and which is called altcoin. People who are making informed investment decisions, (i.e. investing based on the tech, not on what it's called) aren't going to choose "compromised centralised Bitcoin fork" over "uncompromised decentralised Bitcoin fork". Subtle semantic arguments make you look very manipulative d5000, the truth is that both B2X and BTC are altcoins if they both hardfork

Simply using language like "fork" or "altcoin" is not as effective as more objective descriptions, such as "centralised" or "KYC/AML sympathising".


And as for "pretty hard to convince most users to change", you're underestimating the support for the Core team, and entirely forgetting that Bitcoin started with only 1 user. Cryptocurrency is a meritocratic, capitalistic environment, and the capital and the merit aren't going to follow 12 or 15 corporate CEOs that add very little value to the crypto platform they support.

All that money laundering laws ever did was enable the most rich and politically connected criminals to keep their profits with impunity.

Bitcoin simply levels the playing field; if billionaires and international officials (UN, IMF etc) can avoid paying any tax, and organised crime bosses (with government friends) and military intelligence can ignore the implications of money laundering, then why should anyone have to live by these so-called laws?

Yeah, I just don't wanna cheer too hard for rich middle-class New Yorkers when this makes more of a difference to people that are struggling to live.

Note: the government has only ever banned it's serfs diligent adoring citizens from owning gold. The government, of course, permitted itself to own gold, all in the name of keeping everyone safe (from owning money that had any real value).

This is a real Bitcoin victory; a well-known business (a Montessori Schools... franchisee?) accepting BTC and refusing VISA/Mastercard payments.

I'll be happy to see more of this, although maybe we should be celebrating Bitcoin's successes in Zimbabwe and Venezuela more. In failing economies, Bitcoin has the potential to defeat the government where physical means alone seemingly cannot.



Bitcoin is faster than debit and credit cards, credit cards especially.

But it's not as fast as cash (yet). Only the Lightning Network (or some other 2nd layer network on top of Bitcoin) can be as fast as cash. And LN could also be a major game changer in failed or failing economies as described above.

If that were true, then maybe the Bitcoin 0.2 or Bitcoin 0.3 network is the "real" Bitcoin. Because a dozen or so consensus rules changes have happened over the years.

(note: there are no Bitcoin nodes existing on the network less than version 0.8, just to highlight how far we have to stretch reality to make this true)

No.

• Bitcoin now has 4MB (not 1MB) blocksize
• Segwit2x increases to 8MB (not 2MB)

Your friend:

• Doesn't understand how money comes into existence in the first place
• Doesn't understand how central bank issued fiat money comes into existence
• Doesn't understand the sovereign bond system, or it's long term implications
• Doesn't understand the difference between fiat money and commodity based money
• Doesn't understand the difference between privately owned money versus institutionally-held deposits (and how well guaranteed the deposit insurance is for the latter)
• Doesn't understand the benefits of a hard money supply (and likely doesn't appreciate the significant drawbacks of a centrally controlled fiat money supply)
• Probably reads too much financial media without reading economic theorists, and so fails to think about how subtly corrupt the financial media is

I'm gonna be honest: there's an almost religious adherence to things that aren't true that make oneself more comfortable to believe things that are objectively/demonstrably false. People say that about the Bitcoiner perspective too. And it's hard to force someone to learn all of the relevant topics I've outlined.

I guess you could take the approach of gently pointing your friend towards the facts they are unaware of, slowly over time. Crises in sovereign bonds, debt markets overall, currency values (dollar and yuan especially) and banking stability would be good catalysts to the conversation. But there's always going to be a significant minority of people that will refuse to believe what's really happened once the cryptocurrency/cryptographic era is fully established. Not much you can do for these people, really.

Yes, that method could work. You didn't mention using LockTime in your original post though.

It's not ideal, even still. The user will pay quite high fees to feel confident that the LockTime won't expire before the transaction confirms, and there are still no guarantees even then.

No, that's totally wrong.

Blocksize limit increased already. It's now 4MB.


Since it increased, biggest block was 1.5 MB. There's no space shortage in blocks at all.

I guess people must want to pay high fees, there's not really any other explanation (unless they don't know how to get cheaper fees, their responsibility if so). Miners will, of course, accept higher fees for transactions. Why not?