What are peoples thoughts on the effect of flooding in China. that there is no flood (yet) The three Gorges dam has been failing to hold back the monsoon season and threatening to flood major Chinese mining operations.
1. Many (if not all) miners moved from China, due to government threats to the industry 2. Three Gorges dam is the subject of stories about it being weak or failing Please write a new thread when something actually happens, your thread is basically: "Someone said something about something that hasn't happened, and it wouldn't matter even if it did"  |
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For LN to be widely adopted it has to be easy to use and maybe one day it will but despite efforts at least for now it is still way too complicated and buggy. I agree with this to a certain extent. Distressed LN user types- Some people will find the "{route,channel} failed" errors annoying ("don't care Mr. Error, gimme lo feez pleez"), and quit trying
- Others will persist, because using Bitcoin cheaply is something they need to do, even when they don't understand or care about the network errors
But I think an inflection point will come about as improvements to the basic LN node software improves the reliability of the network as a whole, such that the 2 type of distressed users above will no longer occur. I have just read @Bitcryptex walkthrough of the Lightning Network support in the recent Electrum update and for me, it is just obvious that 90% of people will never touch it until everything will be working in the background without them even noticing it. Until we have to set up something and additionally the process involves a lot of steps then there is not much hope for mainstream adoption.
Electrum has always had a somewhat complicated interface, but that's their way. This new release at least puts Lightning into the hands of previous Electrum users who already use it for onchain transactions (and demonstrates the business incentive for wallet developers; you could fund development of your open-source wallet by running a watchtower server for your users). It's also labelled as an experimental feature in Electrum for the moment, you can be quite sure it will undergo improvements in future. I would also echo @LoyceV's post: other LN wallets exist, and some have a far more simplified user interface (Zap/Eclair, and the Lightning Labs desktop wallet, I forget the exact name) |
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Reports indicate that the Corona virus has little effect on a healthy person without a compromised immune system, and there is no risk of mortality.
this is not true. in fact there has been many cases of healthy people with no issue who have died from Corona virus. there are a lot of healthy medical staff that have died, which makes me believe that it comes down to degree of exposure (both duration of amount of virus) rather than the person's immune system. Another problem stems from the fact that 80% of the population has probably developed a natural immunity.
last time i checked this was also not true. initially they said those who were infected by the virus gained an immunity against it but later one when many of them were infected again (some of whom even died) it proved otherwise. neither of you have even one iota of proof for what you are each one claiming you are both trusting reports from the 2 factions that have developed in the wake of this WHO declared pandemic but Bitcoin taught you: don't trust, verify |
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In my opinion Bitcoin was not created for mass adoption. why not take Satoshi's opinion? he referred to both "goldbugs" and "libertarians", two groups which taken together are quite popular, but certainly not a majority of people Its 10 minute block generation time, and 21 million cap will stop that. what possible reason do you have to say that Well I believe that Satoshi was a small tram working for the central banks, and Bitcoin was an experimental project to explore the possible successors to the failing fiat system.
what possible reason do you have to say that |
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Bitcoin's USP is not (and never was) "easy to use"
All the people who started using Bitcoin from 2009-2014 were in it because it gave them better money, the banking industry was already making their type of money easier and easier to use, there wasn't much point in trying to outcompete them on UX (it can only be so easy anyway, what's next? money for people who can't count?).
To make that happen, Bitcoin necessitated an innovative & sophisticated design. So at the beginning, it was never going to be easy to use.
Despite this, programmers are making easy to use wallet software (Lightning wallets like Zap or Blue Wallet focus on ease of use, and really that's all that's needed to make increased adoption possible)
But even the basics require some learning. If you don't want to (or cannot) learn about how even the simplest Bitcoin wallets work, it's not for you (or at least not yet).
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maybe theymos might be amenble to introduce merit-negging for topic starters only. or maybe just for @aminimanish  |
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People don't fully understand how bad herd immunity is. Vaccine is a much better option in terms of the amount of people dead / sick / etc. vaccines and herd immunity rely on the exact same mechanism: the immune system develops anti-bodies that recognize the proteins protruding from the virus Not even talking about the overflowing hospitals we would have if we went about doing this.
no evidence exists that any such thing would happen. evidence quite to the contrary does (countries with high death rates were simply recording SARS-Cov2 deaths incorrectly, the actual typical death rate is similar to that of seasonal influenza) it's a basic fact of epidemiology that deadly pathogens don't spread well, and that as pathogens become more benign they spread faster, e.g. - ebola, guarantee of death is high, spread very poorly
- influenza, very low death rate, spreads so pervasively that it's a fact of life for everyone
sorry to interrupt your death-cult doomsday nonsense, but the facts are (sadly) quite simple |
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Bitcoin was created so that we won't need governments to protect our property rights. exactly if you don't yet understand this, then I bid you a fair and fine welcome to the 21st century (aside, government gangsters typically "legalize" things which they discover they cannot control, so as to make themselves seem relevant/not weak) |
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Can you share the post? I tried search, but all i found is suspicious against default recommended seed.
I didn't have time to find the post, but I remember gmaxwell posting something about a vulnerability in the (NIST recommended  ) secp256r1 curve, and it may well have been a questionable seed value. Maybe someone could make a thread about this, it might be good to clarify this given the time elapsed since then. |
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it's working fine on my windows 7 32bit without any issue.
I'm not sure that's safe, Windows 7 stopped receiving updates for security bugs several months ago. Just fyi |
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1. Double spends aren't possible, with Replace-by-fee or without it. And it doesn't have much to do with scaling really. If you are the receiver of any BTC transaction (RBF or not), wait for it to be confirmed in a block before you consider the money to be safely yours. 2. Mitigations and solutions are/will be available for Flood & Loot, really all the major Lightning node implementations already had mitigations in place, as the basis of this attack was discovered around 1 year ago by Lightning developer Rene Pickhardt (the authors of the Flood & Loot paper describe a variant of the attack that Rene discovered) Don't know anything about the Liquid vuln, but it's slightly irrelevant in the long term if exchanges simply use Lightning channels instead (Liquid was available before Lightning, and is designed to provide BTC liquidity to cryptocurrency exchanges by allowing them to exchange BTC faster than the on-chain Bitcoin network can) It's not really much of a bad sign IMO: - dev finds vulnerabilty
- discloses responsibly to other devs
- mitigations written and implemented
- 1 year later, someone else figures it out and publishes details
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It will be many years after that that we can build a quantum computer which can "hack" a key in under 10 minutes.
statistical variance in mining means any given block can take as long as a miner takes to find it, I think the longest time between blocks is somewhere around 2 hours. Conversely, blocks are often found 1 or 2 seconds after the previous block. It's only the relatively stability of the hashrate that prevents very long durations (i.e. hours or days) between blocks, in the event of a sustained & significant drop in the hashrate, longer intervals between blocks would be quite typical (difficulty adjustments would also take longer, and there's nothing written into the fabric of space-time that says hashrate drops cannot be sustained over multiple difficulty adjustment periods) In discussing two different possible scenarios affecting the Bitcoin network, I would suggest that a sustained hashrate drop is more likely than QC attacks on secp256k1 private keys before significant amounts of BTC are moved to private keys with QC-resistant public key pairs. The former is all but guaranteed at some point, the hashrate cannot grow forever |
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The theory is a quantum computer needs the address's public key to derive the private key and thus do its thing. The public key is only published for others to see when a transaction out of an address takes place. It can't crack information that it doesn't have so as long as you don't move it can't obtain that info. And that's why you'll need to empty your address when you send.
"emptying your address when you send" will not protect Bitcoin users from quantum computers that can derive a private key from a public key, because the transaction must be confirmed in a block before it is safely protected by a public key using a signature scheme that is QC resistant, which takes an amount of time (probably long enough for a QC attack to compute the private key from more than just 1 public key in the list of current unconfirmed transactions relayed across the bitcoin network). A QC attacker can simply spend the BTC to a public key hash under their control but using a higher fee than the user's original tx, before it is confirmed in a block. If the victim notices this taking place (unlikely for many), then the obvious outcome is several rounds of the same process, until the miner gets all the BTC in all outputs as fees. tl;dr: nooooooooooo |
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The author also writes the following: Bitcoin Core developer Wladimir van der Laan told Cointelegraph that he does not know why Satoshi chose this particular curve. He also noted that if someone has discovered a vulnerability, they have not stepped forward to announce it: “I have no idea why Satoshi chose this particular curve, they have provided no rationale anywhere (it seems, in hindsight, to have been a fairly good choice though). Even if Secp256r1 has a vulnerability, no one has stepped forward yet to announce their discovery. If that quote is accurate, van der Laan is referring to vulnerabilities in the secp256r1 curve which is not used in bitcoin, not the secp256k1 curve which is used. It seems the author of this article doesn't understand that they are two different things. it also appears that either Wladimir has forgotten an important fact, or the quote (or the article itself) is incredibly old, because... ...gmaxwell disclosed a vulnerability in the secp256r1 curve, here on bitcointalk, a very very long time ago but Bitcoin has never used the secp256r1 curve, so, whatever Cointelegraph |
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This is not the first time that the bitcoin.org website has sparked controversy
For me, this is an inverted reflection of the Bitcoin movement as a whole: the authoritative view is that of the overall Bitcoin economy/"ecosystem", not of one website that has an easy-to-remember name
In short, bitcoin.org is not and never will be Bitcoin itself, so this latest soap-opera is big on drama, but low on substance
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I reckon the politicians behind the government would have done anything or eliminate what they wanted if they knew how it can be done within the law.
These guys want money and power and are willing to do practically anything to get it. This group wants (and has currently) power over the money supply via the Fed in the US and similar institutions around the world. They can surreptitiously steal a few percent of everyone's wealth every year forever and most people don't notice the hidden tax of inflation. When you are talking about trillions in assets, that adds up quite quickly. Not to mention, they have the power to create money at will and lend it to favored groups, politicians etc. Anyone that can be bought and then control a huge government. This is why bitcoin is critical, it prevents the power-hungry politicians from controlling people and stealing from them. this Many politicians, particularly the ones who are in it for money and power over other people, will do anything within the law or without the law to defeat the people who want liberty. Look at how far some of the politicians went to defeat Trump in 2016 and then again to delegitimize him after he won. They were willing to break the law to "unmask" people, attempt to entrap people, lie to the people in public (e.g. Clapper and Brennan - based on the congressional testimony which was opposite what they were saying on CNN/MSNBC etc). ...but not this I've always been more of the mind that president Trump as a phenomenon is some kind of reality-show-as-real-life power play conducted by the US elite to manage big changes to the typical way of life for people living there (and all indications thus far suggest that Trump's period in office is on track to be just that kind of presidency) If Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul could both lose the candidacy race despite being by far the most popular candidates, there's no reason at all why Trump couldn't have been similarly prevented from acceding to the Republican candidacy. It makes far more sense that the Republican Party and the US media were largely play-acting, as Trump has been intended to play the role of a highly divisive leader who can act as a scapegoat for acts that other establishment figures (e.g. the Federal Reserve) in the US do not want to take responsibility for. |
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significant step forward for the Lightning ecosystem, nice work from electrum team (and also an enterprising idea to offer a watchtower service) ...but, craeful gang, Lightning is still quite fresh  |
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They can act on it all they want - this is what bitcoin was designed for. No third parties, decentralized, censorship resistant. I might even go so far as to say the US government trying to "shut down bitcoin" could give it a huge boost. A government like the US' trying and failing to shut down bitcoin does two things. First, it shows that bitcoin does what it claims - that it really is decentralized and can't be controlled by governments. Secondly, it demonstrates why bitcoin is necessary in the first place - because governments don't like their citizens having freedom.
If a government tries to shut down bitcoin, all they will end up doing is justifying its existence.
I've always speculated that this is at least part of the reason why no serious attempt has ever been made to target the Bitcoin network. The biggest risk of failure in such an endeavour is that of drawing attention to the failure; that Bitcoin is too resilient for governments to disrupt. Also, governments who wish for more influence in international trade/finance have alot to gain for using Bitcoin as a weapon to destabilize both the USD and the SWIFT network, but simultaneously threatens a new financial center of dominance from being assumed by those governments who wish to do so. The tolerance of Bitcoin mining farms in China is the most clear example; it's quite likely that the PRC party leadership didn't fully appreciate the power of Satoshi's cryptocurrency network design, and saw it as a costless and convenient avenue to threaten the USD system. When they realized it was an equal threat to their own control of China's banking system (and their partitioned currency system), they put miners under their yoke on notice to dial down the pressure, but notably continued to permit the mining hardware firms to operate. China is the perfect distillation of government Bitcoin policy; they cannot quite decide whether they ought to issue an outright & comprehensive ban, or fight for a stake in the system Perhaps I misread it, but I didn't see him advocating elimination bitcoin, merely stating he thinks some governments will (attempt) to do that. Merely because you see something as a potential event, doesn't mean you necessarily agree with it. Let's not forget that wealthy investors with a public persona are very likely using their influential status to try to move market sentiment when they make public statements (in interviews such as in the OP), and for any number of reasons. Maybe Rogers wants to help support the fiat currency market, in which he is no doubt at least somewhat invested. Maybe he simply wants in to the Bitcoin market at a good price. |
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If you think that LN is still far from being widely used, then the role of this protocol is almost non-existent in terms of influencing the next bull run. Let’s be honest, the average user still doesn’t know what SegWit is, not to mention the native vs. nested versions, and LN is even too complicated for slightly more experienced users. sure but how much trade do average users conduct on exchanges? The clients with the largest amount of trading activity will also be on the more sophisticated end of the scale when it comes to technical abilities, and regular traders are more incentivized to cut down marginal costs of business (represented here by the risk of keeping funds in exchange controlled accounts and trading/depositing fees) All such friction can be done away with if a p2p trading platform implements Lightning. This would mean first solving the costless call options problem, which is inherent to the HLTC-based channels that power the lightning network. If that happens (maybe someone already has?), then a blazing fast p2p marketplace could enable near-instant inter-cryptocurrency trades settlement, putting centralized exchanges at a significant disadvantage when it comes to setting the price of cryptocurrencies (imagine a trustless version of the old shapeshift website if you don't understand what I mean). Such a platform would then force the more questionable centralized/fiat exchanges to introduce Lightning deposits too. This would help to shift the volume of cryptocurrency trading completely away from the exchanges who comply with regulation regimes, and so I imagine they would eventually find some politically expedient way of following suit, or lose their influence (and thus importance) in the marketplace. I don't see the final stage of these predictions taking place before the next bull run, but it's not even a sure thing that we will see a bull run when everyone is expecting it (indeed, it's perhaps more sensible to expect it when the general sentiment is against it) |
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I used BlueWallet for the lightning network which allowed this transaction to be confirmed instantly, and have zero transaction fee!
really? Is this some kind of promotion where the restaurant (or their payments firm) are paying customer transaction fees? That would be a smart move seeing as it's not going to cost alot to do so. Congrats, although I suspect that while this is the first youtube video, it's probably not the first time someone ordered food using Lightning |
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