right, the hits to Facebook's reputation are gradually stacking up this year, all as a result of them trying to use the power of their network to manipulate both their account holders and their tech business partners.
I think they're on borrowed time from here on in; Facebook was already losing it's appeal once kids realized their parents and teachers were using it to get information about them, that was years ago now. I've never heard of so many people talking about or actually deleting their Facebook account as I did this year.



Symbolically, Paypal's move was much more meaningful. Unfortunately, it was almost as much pure symbolism as the Libra currency; there's no actual way of proving that Paypal are holding any BTC for you, aside from them displaying the balance in your account. Perhaps they are buying BTC somewhere (where? no details exist AFIAK), and people can spend them at market prices at PP merchants... but let's just wait to see how that part pans out. Seeing as Bitcoin is a ready built replacement for the entire Paypal platform with none of it's problems (and issues of it's own that are direct trade-offs against Paypal's model), I get the sense that Paypal's move is most bizarre given the status quo for Bitcoin's network, the risk that some will abandon using Paypal now they've validated Bitcoin's legitimacy seems a little high.

I slightly dispute this!

Since the 2013 bull run, there were a huge number of people that (only when they felt compelled to) dismissed Bitcoin on the grounds that "only government can issue currencies". Pointing out that national banks are often independent of the government (or at least as told in the popular press), or that independent currencies dominated before those issued by kingdoms (or that a king or queen was often the heir of some issuer of independent currency) never helped against the "Only Governments Issue Money" argument; our promulgator of the deference argument would defer again (successfully?) in replying "only governments issue currencies in today's world"

Until Facebook began to talk about doing it, everyone entirely accepted it, at least implicitly. Attempts have been made to issue private currencies, and governments went quite out of their way to stamp them out every time (with the exception of barter based and older commodity based currencies, which one can argue do not qualify as issued currencies).

It demonstrates either the power or the arrogance of Facebook, really. I might suggest both. Certainly, taking on the banking lobby as a registered US corporation is a hell of a power play, but Facebook can use it's network to fight back: simply starting a flood of newsfeed stories about banking corruption, and simultaneously about alternative money systems (even just cooperative or community banking) could really scare the banking lobby into negociating with Facebook instead of threatening them.


I think Facebook certainly have a big issue though, which you allude to: their credibility is suffering, due to biased policing of the network. Policing always needs a bias, but you sure as hell need to pick your biases carefully if your intention is not to run your media platform into the ground. Facebook in 2020 appear to be absolutely confident that losing between 50-75% of their account holders doesn't alter their power base. That could be either supreme confidence, based on information unavailable to the public, or sheer hubris. I suspect again, slightly both: a master stroke in this situation would be for Facebook-heavy stockholders to sell Facebook shares into a toppy market, then quit as the ship goes down. Selling all the public-trust capital (for short term gains) could quite easily be a part of that play, and Facebook in 2020 sure as hell looks like they are selling every shred of credibility they ever had.

tl;dr there will be no Libra, Facebook knows they're circling the drain, but they have helped to open the floodgates to Bitcoin in a small way

as I've been saying all along, I expect the other major exchanges to have their hand forced by Bitfinex enabling Lightning deposits/withdrawals, and Kraken have taken the next step toward that scenario

the Silk Road (and it's copycats) was the first reason that a majority of people became aware of Bitcoin, that was 2011

so criminals using Bitcoin is almost as old as the Bitcoin network


Perhaps the following will also be news to you: people have been behaving unethically using money since money began too. And also before money existed. Money gradually became a popular thing despite that.

there are a few recent developments:

• the coded versions of the taproot/tapscript/schnorr specifications are in the codebase for Bitcoin 0.21.0, this is available as a testing release from https://bitcoincore.org/bin
• mining pools with a collective 82.5% of the Bitcoin hashrate have made positive statements of some kind regarding their role in signalling for supporting the soft fork (they seem to prefer BIP8 signalling)

all that remains is for the actual soft-fork activation parameters to be agreed, then written for a possible Bitcoin version 0.21.1 (or 0.21.2, soft fork activation code usually goes into a minor 0.x.x release instead of a major 0.x.0 release). The remaining hashrate represented by the mining pools that haven't made a statement on the softfork will either follow the pools that signal (as there's a possibility of activation on timeout being included in the activation parameters), or run the risk of mining blocks that are invalidated by other Bitcoin nodes. So they would lose their miners to other pools sooner or later.

Once the soft fork activates, then wallet software needs to be rewritten to sign with schnorr, and to read and write taproot script. This will altogether (fork activation + wallet sf upgrading) take several months, hopefully it might be possible to use the features sometime next year. I imagine early 2022 at the latest.

this

the whole concept of money is about ownership, money is simply an imaginary piece of the real pie. Everyone pretends the money is as good as something with real value; it's a universal mirror of your stake in the economy, a token of ownership.

so if someone else can control how you spend your money, then it's not really yours. People trade their labor for money, and the fewer choices you have with which to spend it, the more that your labor is essentially controlled by that someone else.

traditionally, when someone controls how, where or when you work, or what you can trade it for, your role in that relationship has a specific name....

we can't

either everyone has permissionless privacy, or nobody does. And that's the way it should be: banning tools (or commodities) has been shown time and time again to be ineffective as a means to stopping people using those tools in a dangerous or unethical way. All that happens is that the richest/most powerful corrupt those running the system, and abuse that position to continue to make money from whatever ban, but now the rewards are higher because the ban has pushed up the price of the whatever it is that's been banned.

it's like this for drugs, guns/weapons, banned trade, banned bank account secrecy etc etc. None of this ever worked, because rich and powerful continued to do it in spite of the ban.


Bitcoin was designed to make everyone equally capable of using private money with incontrovertable ownership, so that none of these things mattered any more.

so sorry @otkana, but the issue here is that you're applying 20th century values to a 21st century tool, not realizing that the way we used to think about these issues was causing the problem. You're still arguing about what to do about wolves around the campfire _after_ someone invented steel pointy sticks

@BitcoinFX

you do realize that whether the filename is "satoshinakamoto.asc" or "satoshi_nakomoto.asc" makes precisely zero difference to if the key works or not?


you're _literally_ arguing about "what color to paint the bikeshed" here

this seems like a big defeat for the Nigerian gangsterment, because there would be no need to take these "legalization" steps if people weren't widely ignoring the previous legal status, lol


The Nigerian people won, they legalized Bitcoin, not the government. This is quite typical of these crooks in power: if everyone just ignores what they say, they have no choice except to have a miraculous about-turn on the policy, so that they do not appear weak or useless

at least we may set a slightly more convivial precedent with activating BIPs 340-342 in repect of the timeframe, it rather seems as if there's no substantial objections (not that there ever was for the previous soft-fork, depending on one's definition of "substantial"), and a healthy majority of (expected) miner signalling. I'm looking forward to an expedited BIP Sig-Agg

also US based miners who construct their block templates themselves

if the US taxation plantation were an energy producer of some caliber, this would be slightly more credible. slightly.

there's a c-lightning plugin that does that, it automates quite alot (including channel re-balancing and soliciting incoming channel liquidity)

it's available only as C++ source for now, from the ZmnSCPx character's github (I may have spelled the name wrong....)

you basically start the plugin, and it more or less runs your node for you (but it's still possible to intervene manually)

in light of these new developments, I'm looking for clarification about sig-agg using (future) witness v1 inputs:


it would be a shame if witness v2 (or possibly higher?) addresses were necessary for sig-agg, but I also get gmaxwell's point from the linked thread about trying to be expedient with packages of soft-fork upgrades. It's possible that v1 will mostly get used for opening and closing channels, which would certainly still be a big win of course. Other uses are possible, but I would argue unlikely to take off in the medium term (I'd love to be proved wrong, naturally)

The following mailing list thread suggests that any future witness versions would use a new address format: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-December/018298.html

Can we assume from this that signature-aggregation (which includes cross-input aggregation the way I read it...) will not be possible using witness v1 inputs (i.e. 1st gen schnorr inputs), assuming that the changes discussed on the bitcoin-dev mailing list come to be? It seems to me that not just the signing/verifying code needs changing to make aggregation work.

it's weird, like @brethberie I also don't quite understand the architecture differences. I remember from my Windows days (now so long ago ) that 32-bit binaries worked no problem on 64bit systems or OS'es (but 32bit binaries could still only address a maximum 3GB physical address space). At a guess, I would say the actual CPU instruction sets of ArmV7 and ArmV8 are mutually incompatible.

anyway, glad you got it working brethberie. be sure to make a note of all the suggestions everyone else contributed, as they're all great tools to solve linux config problems

I heard that these people have a job titled "politician", I think it's some kind of court jester type of role, where people that own or run large predatory business enterprises (and the various hired thugs thereof) use these "politician" people like sock-puppets in a children's story show, where gullible regular people watch the theatrics in the belief that the clowns on the stage are running something called a "nation state" (it's like a village or a tribe, except without any of the personal relationships that make it function in a way that all the members can trust in)

you will have to forgive me if these details are slightly wrong, I'm largely disinterested



as usual, the opponents of Bitcoin can't get their arguments in order.


this is yet another concession by the banking cartels to Bitcoin: they know they cannot conceivably stop the network, or prevent people from understanding it's value. So now they want to tell us how to run the network, these people are full of good jokes!!! The whole vibe is spectacularly desperate, in 12 years they've come up with this plan?

The internet has ultimately become the great leveller, and it is now quite clear that this has been terrifying the incumbent industry chiefs/warlords for quite some time. Bad news guys: you're pretty much finished

this part may be your issue                                                    


what you want is bitcoin-0.20.1-aarch64-linux-gnu.tar.gz

NOT bitcoin-0.20.1-arm-linux-gnueabihf.tar.gz


you appear to be using the arm-v7 arch, when in fact you would need the arm-v8 64-bit arch build, the RPi 4 uses the arm-v8/aarch64 ISA

no that's spending money for almost no gain

AWS VPS instances are run out of the same datacenters occupying the same range of IP addresses, and they're overwhelmingly over-represented as part of the overall infrastrcuture of the internet. The purpose of people running their own Bitcoin node is of security/reliability through redundancy, and since there are probably several hundred+ Bitcoin nodes running on AWS instances, you wouldn't be diversifying the distribution of the Bitcoin network at all, rather more you would be concentrating Bitcoin nodes in the datacenter intranet of just one very large (the largest) hosting company.

sure, use a VPS. Don't use the biggest hosting company for VPS's, that's not making the Bitcoin network in the slightest bit more resilient.

I think he's talking about full nodes that mine blocks.

Maybe he will eventually figure out that the world outside the USA also exists (as the New York licensure authorities discovered after their hilarious 'BitLicence')