We can make assumptions on what the reasons were.

Satoshi wanted the supply to be finite, but didn't want to release them all at once, so opted to introduce new ones in blocks. Here now posed the problem that I would assume led to halving;

• If mining reward was left at 50BTC per block, we would have had the entire apply mined within 8 years, after 420,000 blocks. Way too soon.

• This would have caused an issues cause miners will be left to rely on fees was too early and can lead to loss of majority of miners.

• Including halving into the protocol was genius. It eases miners into life without mining (coinbase) reward and also factored in how price changes. Early on when the price was low, 50 units should be enough incentive, but as the price increases, as low as 1 unit or less will be valuable enough to motivate miners.

Analyzing it this way, the idea remains that Bitcoin was doomed from birth to be a coin for commercial use. But that's what it was made for.
I continue to think that Bitcoin can be an excellent tool for commercial exchanges, large or small. I recognize that some existing solutions do not allow this to be as functional as I would like.
Now, I also believe that the global bitcoin community will find a solution to better manage this issue.




I didn't understand, this free one.  

Hi everyone,

My Bitcoin transaction has been stuck in the blockchain for two months and has not been confirmed. This is because I paid a very low transaction fee.

I have read that the mempool will periodically clear unconfirmed transactions. I would like to know when this transaction will be deleted and returned to my original wallet. I no longer want to send this transaction.

Thank you!

Just a soft reminder to philipma1957. ChartBuddy is catching up quite fast. In few days he might cross philipma1957


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats

FYI (for people in US):


https://cryptoslate.com/crypto-tax-rules-now-require-reporting-of-transactions-over-10k/

https://www.coincenter.org/new-crypto-tax-reporting-obligations-took-effect-on-new-years-day/

I think that they are talking about a single tx exceeding 10k (received as your trade or business, NOT the one sent from your own account on Coinbase or Gemini), but check it out yourself.

There is the following valid reason:

someone who successfully finds the private key of one of the low-range puzzles from the well-known Bitcoin puzzle (currently the 66bit puzzle is being hunted) encounters the following problem: as soon as the lucky winner would put a transaction in the mempool to pay out the prize money to his bitcoin address, he runs the very great risk that someone else will cheat him and grab his prize money.

As soon as the public key is known, the private key can be calculated within a few seconds, we are talking about a 66bit range here and this is possible very quickly with the given hardware and resources. Once Mallory knows the private key, (s)he can create a new transaction with higher fees and change the recipient address to his own. Since RBF is only a policy but not a consensus and each full node is free to decide for itself how to deal with RBF, there is no protection mechanism against this attack. The only possibility is to keep the pubkey hidden from the public as long as the block has been mined and made public. A single transaction would suffice. This is not a fictitious scenario, but a real one.

For this reason, my initial question is whether a large mini-pool could be commissioned with the "direct" and thus hidden insertion of the transaction into the block. This would mean that the transaction would never appear in the mempool and nobody would see the pubkey. Only after the block has been mined and made public would the whole world know the pubkey. Of course, a villain could also act trickily in the large mininpool. But there would be mitigation measures for this and the risk for this type of attack could be kept very low.

Hi all, wish you a Happy and Healthy New Year 2024!

Lately I've been contemplating the rapid growth of the Bitcoin blockchain and its potential impact on full-node operators. With the current blockchain size surpassing 500GB (538.09 GB on Jan/01/2024) there's a concern that some of us may be approaching capacity limits to continue hosting such large amounts of data.

Therefore, I'd like to take this opportunity to initiate an open discussion on this matter and find out what solutions or considerations might already be in place. Here are some thoughts that have crossed my mind:

    - Block Size Limit: What is the community's stance on potentially adjusting the block size limit to manage growth? Are there ongoing discussions on this topic?

    - Second-Layer Solutions: How effective are second-layer solutions like the Lightning Network in relieving the main blockchain? Are there experiences or concerns that we can share?

    - Pruning: For those already implementing pruning, how has this impacted your node's resource usage? Any insights or recommendations for others considering this approach?

    - Optimizations: Are there any ongoing efforts or developments within the Bitcoin protocol to optimize resource usage and improve scalability?

Here are some current stats as of today:

Last Value from Jan 1 2024, 22:03 EST:
538.09 GB

Value from 1 Year Ago:
446.05 GB

Change from 1 Year Ago:
20.63%

Average Growth Rate:
118.8%

I believe that by pooling our collective knowledge and experiences, we can better understand the current landscape and potentially contribute to the ongoing evolution of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Please share your thoughts, insights, or any information you may have on this topic. Looking forward to a fruitful discussion!

Cheers,
citb0in

Haha, that was my knee jerk thought as well until I realized they must have accumulated what they want and they are allowing a pump to the plebs now.

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-violate-fundamental-human-rights-new-report-finds

Key findings include:

Nearly two-thirds (65% percent) of incarcerated people report working behind bars—amounting to roughly 800,000 workers incarcerated in prisons.
More than three quarters of incarcerated people surveyed (76%) report facing punishment—such as solitary confinement, denial of sentence reductions, or loss of family visitation—if they decline to work.
Prison laborers are at the mercy of their employers. They have no control over their work assignments, are excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections, are unable to unionize, do not receive adequate training and equipment, and are denied workplace safety guarantees despite often dangerous working conditions.
As a result, 64% of incarcerated workers surveyed report worrying about their safety while working; 70% percent say they received no formal job training; and 70% percent report not being able to afford basic necessities like soap and phone calls with prison labor wages.
Incarcerated workers produce at least $2 billion in goods and $9 billion worth of prison maintenance services annually, but this number is not closely tracked and is likely much higher.
Yet, most states pay incarcerated workers pennies per hour for their work. Seven states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas) pay nothing for the vast majority of prison work.Other states pay on average between 15 and 52 cents per hour for non-industry jobs. Prison laborers often see up to 80% of their paycheck withheld for taxes, “room and board” expenses, and court costs.
More than 80% percent of prison laborers do general prison maintenance, which subsidizes the cost of our bloated prison system. Other tasks represent less than 10% percent of work assignments, including: public works projects (like road repair, natural disaster assistance, forestry work, and maintenance of parks, schools, and government offices); state prison industries, agricultural work, and coveted private company work assignments.

Jim Cramer says: BTC is a reality. It’s a technological marvel, and people need to start recognizing that it’s here to stay.



>>> https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1742201268687245635?t=anPyrgao4Qsj1dO8nMLHqQ&s=19

---

Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of the Genesis Block - the first block of Bitcoin that was mined on January 3rd, 2009.

I'm not giving any semantics, I'm just saying that what you want is not viable at the moment. I didn't discard any message, I just didn't mention something that I didn't consider relevant.





A forum like Bitcointalk is quite demanding in terms of resources. Unfortunately, the best servers for this purpose are in the USA or Europe. Therefore, it is difficult to try to find a mirror outside of these locations that is minimally viable to operate. And between Europe and the USA, perhaps the USA is still the one with the best guarantees.

Here are the blocks Foundry mined the last two epoch by date:

10  37    26 48
11  48    27 36
12  34    28 33
13  43    29 37    
14  35    30 31
15  35    01 49
16  44    02 43
17  43    03 45
18  43    04 53
19  50    05 30  
20  53    06 40
21  53    07 29
             08 30
             09 37

Last epoch Foundry had it's three lowest block digging days in the last 5 days, just because something happened once it doesn't make it a rule Phil.

Second, if Foundry was now back at it's full power, then it means it has run underclock forever!

Current reported hashrate is 148 Exahas, Foundry never had this hashrate ever till now, their November one day high is 140exa, so where would this extra hashrate come from? New gear and luck, the same new gear that is making them have the biggest share of the pie in months:
https://explorer.btc.com/btc/insights-pools
They are at 37.12% over the last theree days and compared to 28.24% over 1 month!

Third, don't you think it's really a bad strategy to mine more block on Friday and Saturday right before a holiday, when the reward will probably hit record lows?

I read somewhere that a solo miner mined a block. As big a gamble as that is, I'm considering solo mining with just one machine. I'm not bothered if I never mine a block but I just want to give it a shot. Is there a guide somewhere on the best miner to buy and how to set it up. Has someone here tried solo mining. I just need some sort of guidance. Thanks.

Your post gave me an idea like what we seen Binance and Stake have their own dedicated sites for US jurisdiction. If bitcointalk.org is subject to US laws, maybe we need a second domain like bitcointalkall.org that's subject to friendly country laws. Maybe Cyrus might be able to help , not sure if Romania is friendly with privacy, to be more specify a tumbler.

I agree that looks more possible than wanting a decentralized forum, not even to mention epochtalk.

What answer do you want me to answer?
How am I going to talk about a technology that doesn't exist today, or rather that isn't viable for a forum of this size, mainly because I don't have the resources to invent something like that?

What I can say is that creating a decentralized forum today is impossible and completely unfeasible.

The example I gave was torrent, not BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a torrent client, which is clearly not decentralized.
Do you know how torrent works? So imagine the same for the website. How can an ordinary person access a website, without having to install specific software, download the entire database that can be larger than a 4K Blu-ray movie, and then browse?

But wait, it only takes 1 byte to depend on one person, so it won't be decentralized.

Is Bitcoin decentralized? Yes, yours because anyone can set up a node and run it. But, Bitcoin is linear and not dynamic. It is mathematical work, always the same, that always produces the same type of data. A forum is highly dynamic, where all users produce different content, where features change over time, and many other things happen in a matter of seconds.

It cannot be compared when the type of data transmitted is always the same, with other services that are very varied in terms of data. The greater the data variation, the more complex and longer the processing process.

I'm not saying that in the future there won't be something really functional that makes this type of site decentralized. But at the moment it doesn't exist. Therefore, I cannot demand the forum to become decentralized.

Bring it on!!!

$45k+

Racing to $46k...

Only thing missing now is a "going to zero" post by proudhon.