Beware of "Bitcoin experts", like Voorhees, that seek to have themselves placed in articles like this or documentaries on Netflix (with it's notoriously biased political propaganda embedded in it's original drama & documentary output)


Voorhees is a big name who has become part of the cast of characters who've sought to derail Bitcoin's decentralised design, using the scaling/big blocks issue as a smoke screen


Notice how the community of Bitcoin developers don't (and never have) offered themselves up to the public like Voorhees and others do. That's because programmers prefer to do their talking with programming languages, not speaking into cameras with faux earnest or concern like Voorhees.

The result: Bitcoin's acceptance and market price. Achieved using well-conceived & implemented software design, not talking.

lol

Central banks: just quit. There's nothing you can do. Die quietly, or cause chaos, the choice is yours. But you are on the wrong side of history now, be careful, and maybe, maybe you could redeem yourselves. Remember, you people still need to live in this world once your influence is finished, and it will finish while the majority of you are alive. The 7 billion regular people in the world aren't going to be very happy (or understanding) with you if you try to cause trouble as you lose your power. Be nice.

A ban is entirely out of the question, the governor couldn't be more wrong


And the title is equally hilariously wrong, the perfect opposite is true: Malaysia’s central bank could not enforce a cryptocurrency ban, it's not feasible for any governments, even if they were to quit pretending they're nice, cuddly megalomaniacs that just want to help you get your life right. They still couldn't enforce a ban.

They can enact a ban. But "enact" and "enforce" are separate words, with separate meanings.

If

Um, can you count?


0.9MB is less than 1MB.

And 1MB is the old limit.

4MB is the current limit.


And the point of hardforking to 2MB is....? (and you're wrong anyway, S2x forks to an 8MB limit not 2MB. 2x is a multiplication, not a standalone figure )

Oh please

This just demonstrates how inept Charlie Lee is more than anything. If the S2x team (well, currently one man) wants to call itself "Bitcoin" and use bullying tactics to do so, let them.

I think re-branding Bitcoin could right now could be a masterstroke by the Bitcoin Core team. What's gonna be the next move if this latest alt-dev hard fork fails? Are they gonna try to hijack the newly branded NeoBitcoin too?

This stuff just becomes so obvious after a while, "big blocks" is nothing more than a thinly veiled excuse to cause permanent power struggles in Bitcoin, and whoever is ultimately behind it doesn't want to give up until they take control of the project. Pathetic. Whoever wants to control Bitcoin are permanently destined to fail, as they have done 3 times already



Oh great, because Change.org petitions are so successful at actually ever changing the object of a given petition What would we do without Charlie Lee, lol

Watch out for countries with a Napoleonic legal system.


Originating (and exported) from France, the Napoleonic legal system is highly intolerant/illiberal. In essence, any act or physical object not defined in a legal statute is illegal.

Obviously this is impossible to enforce, but the state government in such countries use this as a legal pretext to use aggressive force under any circumstance they choose to.

Bitcoiners in all such countries should be aware they are walking on very thin ice. Simply take a look at France itself on coinmap.org, it's the dead-zone of Europe when it comes to Bitcoin merchant acceptance.

The Goldman Sachs firm are only criminals in the sense that they've never been prosecuted for acts that, perpetrated by just about anyone else, would be prosecuted, convicted crimes.

So you're not really seeing this for what it is: organised crime, and Goldman Sachs are the capo di capo of those in the too big to jail category. The US SEC financial regulators are the same organisation that failed to adequately punish banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and that let the employees of those banks escape individual culpability entirely. If anyone can start Bitcoin trading on Wall Street, it's those with political connections. And so that means not the Winklevoss Twins launching an ETF.

You were faintly suggesting that, while failing to mention any of the negatives of the S2x fork. I can imagine someone reading your post, but without knowing all the other relevant information saying: "well, if S2x will be the final ideal blocksize, i guess we should just accept it and kill the argument forever"

Strange how every post you make on S2x or Bitcoin Unlimited or Extension Blocks or whatever other external hardfork is just gently laid propaganda for leading people toward that hardfork. Very strange, and very consistent too. Isn't it.



For what reason? You have no clue what transaction demand is going to be like then, and you seem to be suggesting that Bitcoin is going to hit your postulated final userbase of billions of users sometime between mid 2018 and 2019. What's wrong with you, is it only hubris!?

Here's a sensible way to look at it: wait. Wait until capacity is truly unanimously judged to be required, then expand capacity. You can't possibly expect anyone to take you seriously when your long-term engineering decisions are based on clairvoyance, or maybe you were talking to Satoshi through a spiritual medium, tell us lol

It's not going to remain sovereign for long, or at least not from the top-down

Article fails:

• To understand the purpose of increasing hashing difficulty (mechanism to prevent a miner using trivial amounts of hashing power to command and corrupt the network)
• To understand the purpose of blockchains (decentralised networks to provide unimpeachable standard of reliable data)
• To prove that the energy is wasted (a consequence of not understanding what the energy is being used for)
• To explain why using energy that's being paid for is a problem in any other way

But then again, IEEE Spectrum is picking up a reputation for bad journalism. I don't think computer science and programming folks took them seriously after they re-wrote the story about Bill Gates stealing the source code for MS DOS (exonerating Billionaire Gates or all wrong-doing, for reasons... unknown. I wonder how the multi-billionaire Gates managed to convince them to change the story )

1. There are no "hubs" and "spokes" distinction in the model, you're misinterpreting what people mean when they say that
2. The basic answer to your question is "yes"


Payments between people without direct channels open between each other can be made by using any number of intermediate channel hops. And so the most used channels will end up very fluid and very hub-like. But that includes anyone whose channel is well connected given a particular pattern of payment routing, all but the most underused channels will play some role in routing at some point.

Who you open channels with will depend on your preferences. Someone you know well or personally (regular businesses or friends) you'll be happy to open direct channels with. The less familiar you are with who you're trading with (a street food vendor on vacation maybe), you might be more inclined to use an intermediary channel that you and your trading partner agree to. But as everyone will be routing payments, calling these intermediaries hubs is just short-hand; the reality will be a continuous scale of hub-ness, from more hub-like to less hub-like.

The 2-2 multisig will increase the size of the transaction compared to standard P2WPKH transactions.

The signature will be larger in proportion to the actual transaction information, so I think that will mean the fee increase is calculated differently than for regular P2SH multisig.... cannot fully remember how though (this is the implications of Segwit in operation, to explain)

I supported segwit activation, including BIP91, what's your problem?  

(and BIP91 was about maintaining compatibility between S2x and Segwit, nothing to do with the NYA as you seem to believe)



So, explain to us again why a blocksize to support billions of users is needed next month, and why we need to hard fork to a different development team to deliver it

So, Bitcoin reached it's "final" ideal userbase numbers, when was it, yesterday?


Forget it d5000, you're still talking technical issues (which are not in S2x's favour) when the fork is still a political move dressed in technical clothing. It always was, and this is the 4th such attempt to make this false assertion about blocksize. And how many times exactly have you personally been involved in blocksize conversations while ignoring the political elephant in the room? It's very tedious, and does your credibility in these matters no good.

There's just no credible empirical evidence that the blocksize needs increasing now, even to the current 4MB maximum, and you do nothing but drone on about future ideal maximums being desirable next month. You do nothing but talk constantly about positive aspects of blocksize increases from as many different perspectives as you are able to summon up. C'mon.

I predict huge numbers of Lightning channels opening in countries with good-enough internet infrastructure and low adherence to KYC/AML

Define "it" and "enough"

Really, you're saying the same thing I am: the EU have little ability to control Bitcoin, just as all states have little capacity to affect it


All you're really saying is that your concept of what world commerce means and how it's dynamics work is pretty limited. And sure, the majority of the EU population is the same. Guess what? The majority of the EU population are not very smart, rich, or educated. Bitcoiners tend to be at least one of those three, so I'm still not seeing it how you are.

And if the majority of smart, rich and educated people only begin to use Bitcoin as an inflation hedge (aka their savings), regular currencies become increasingly less valuable, by definition. Hell, even a significant minority of those demographics could be enough to tip the balance. That's without mentioning the other use-cases you consider to be insignificant, as well as the use-cases you didn't think of.

Better question(s):

How long did the Chinese "ban" last? (answer: not long)

How effective would the ban have been? (answer: not very)


What can the EU actually ever do? (it's nothing)

And let's all think about that a little more clearly: legal Bitcoin in China is actually a drag on the yuan denominated BTC price. Miners sell into the market in large quantities, and presumably take the majority of their profits in yuan. Banning Bitcoin will cause the yuan to crash against BTC over the long term, and banning mining will simply make the crash worse.

It's like this when a government "bans" any good, depressing the supply is easier than depressing demand. And eliminating either supply or demand is not possible.

Well it's very much the nuclear option. I wouldn't expect a change that significant to be rolled out without a substantial period of public dissemination testing, more plausibly:

• Code that disconnects BTC1 nodes on the basis of their fork-signalling bit (I believe that's already running on the Bitcoin network with versions >= 0.15.0)
• Short testing period of a hash algo that's difficult to develop an ASIC for, followed by immediate deployment
• Longer testing period of a the approach using a series of hashing algos + randomisation of constituents, series length and switching interval

The disruption and uncertainty of launching the series + randomisation approach as an essentially emergency measure would be too much even for the sophistication of the Bitcoin ecosystem. It would be difficult to achieve on the timescale currently presented, either sufficient design, testing and debugging or sufficient market contemplation or acceptance. There's a necessary amount of time to deploy the idea effectively, and so steps need to be taken to make that time available as a prerequisite.

But as an ASIC miner ejector seat, it would be rather effective on a more medium term timeframe