imaginiing channels
users who may budget they only want to spend $50 a week ($200 a month) will NOT want to put their $200 into 4 channels incase one of the route to a peer goes offline. because that $50 gets locked or cost them on unchain fee to get it out again.

users will end u choosing a hub (bank branch) to connect to and just throw the whole $200 in knowing its just 1 onchain fee they will need to worry about if they need to exit. and decide a hub is less likely to go off line than random users.

again users will not want to set up multiple channels. so the hop model of multiple routes wont work.
(its worth people running scenarios, it helps)
 and the HUB (bank branch) model begins to shine.

take youe own bank account. would you prefer your wages going into one account and then using that account to pay all your bills. or have 8 bank accounts and when you get paid you then have to pay a wire transfer(onchain fe) to then redistribute ur salary into 8 accounts dedicated to each paying a bill.and then knowing if something goes wrong with bing unable to pay a bill it then costs you another onchain fee to move funds again.. most people end up for convenience just throwing it all into one well connected reourse and letting them sign have joint control of your funds
.. this is how banks formed in the first place
even now looking at the LN network overview you can already se many users with 1-2 channels. not 4-8 channels.. and those 1-2 channls are betwen hubs in most cases.. and the hubs that have way way more than 8 connections. are what will bcome the new bank branches.

even before the 1mb that satoshi put in during 2010. satoshi had a 32mb limit. this was called the "message size limit"
the reason for 32mb was due to technical stuff outside of blockchain stuff. and more about the internet technical issues

ill leave you to google the technicals but in short its easier to send data in clumps of under 32mb due to increased risk of packet/data loss which can cause propogation delays because so many packets would need to be checked and re sent the bigger the file gets

again this was not a bitcoin/blockchain limitation. it was a internet data transmission procaution to reduce delay, double transmission and other issues.
this is why you see so many image upload services, microsoft word upload, email attachments that have 32mb limits (if they want superfast service withleast chances of data retransmission)

but as i said ill leave you to google the technicals
bigger files are possible but then it requires extra code to double check stuff and need more code to rebuild lost packets etc. so it was simpler to just avoid going that high, to kep the system efficient.

what you actually find is that decoupling altcoin<->btc is the cause of the stagnation

in the past to get ether/other coins, you first needed to buy BTC with fiat (btc fiat price goes up) and then btc is taken off the btc-usd market to hand btc to ether market. (again less btc on the USD market, btc fiat price goes up)
those selling ether for btc then hold btc. thus keeping supply away from btc-usd (again less btc on the USD market, btc fiat price goes up)

but now people can buy ether direct via USD, so the arbitrage to ether via btc has not occurred.

that said. btc's price has seen health climbs
2016: never below $300
2017: never below $900
2018: never below $6000

and as the 'buyers remorse' support gets tested. where people refuse to sell for less than it cost them to obtain it. and also the impact of hashrate rises causing mining cost to rise we shall se positive movements in btc.

but with all that said. we really do need devs to stop trying to develop crap features that only help altcoins and offchain multicoin networks grow. and instead concentrate on real bitcoin onchain scaling and scurity and usability

yep and segwit addresses BC1q were not designed as a sole btc feature.
LN was not designed as a sole btc feature

the bc1q addresses were designed to identify btc tx's when the bankers add their hyper ledger system to LN so that they can tell the difference between a btc address and their atomically swappable fiat coins.

bankers running the hubs 'for convenience of users' is already in the works.

even the layout of hubs is the same network layout as bank branches. the co-signing requirement is the same as bankers authorised payments.

so your worry about spam is empty

how can you argu about spam. then argue there is no spam because blocks are empty.
whats next worry that cars can b overcrowded because you sen a comedy clip of 30 clowns walking out of a mini car.. but then argue that cars should only have a drivers seat because most of the time thers only one person per car.

hint: an near empty block of 0.2mb does not lock off 32mb of hard drive space. it just uses 0.2mb of hard drive space. but allows the rules of allowing mor transactions in without 2 years of debate.

its better to have 32mb limit and not need it. than to have 1mb limit and argue for 2 years how to expand it
its better to 4 seat car and not need it. than to have 1seat car and argue for 2 years how to upgrade the car

take you pc. if you only intend to store 1 jpeg image on the PC world you specifically ask a PC retailer for a pc with a hard drive that only stores the operating system+1jpeg. or woul you want a hard drive that has the capacity for alot more knowing you may needd more in the future, and dont want 2 years of hassle arguing about upgrading your pc.

funny part is any coin, even btc can prevent spam. simply by having a fee priority formulae re-established. that makes it harder/more expensive to spend fresh utxo that have not matured for long(low coinage/confirm count=expensive), that alone will solve people trying to churn through transactions by spending them as son as they are confirmed.

but anyway. btc has stagnated onchain. and all devs care about is LN so that they can grab peoples BTC using punishments and exsivvive onchain fee's to tempt them not to leave LN until thir channel is empty. or get kicked to a crap coin so the hubs can get all the btc.
typical banker mindset

i still laugh at the above.
but nice wordplay windfury. it seems your indocrination into that group has taught you how to twist words.

adam back paid his devs to PREVENT increasing the legacy blocksize to satisfy HIS groups political agenda

only problem is you slipped up. how can bitcoin core not increase the blocksize if increasing it is some groups aganda..
remember you pretense that bitcoin core doesnt control anything. so how can they prevent it

this is where windfury has to admit core (adam backs paid devs) do have control.
just check out bitcoin.org/en/download   oh look core and only core is mentioned.
(notice hypocrisy yet)

yes they are mining at a loss in some places. which is why if you check some of the charts. some locations with high electric have turned off a few rigs.
but some will still mine even at a loss, because they just hold for a long time due to paying lectric as a yearly contract so dont need to cash out instantly

some pools with low electric and are using the new gen asics have added more(20% in some cases) and making profit even at this mis $6k range of prices.
but that only accounts to at most 1800btc a day of support line. however before october there were 16+m coins in circulation and it seems the majority are refusing to sell below the $6k bottom line that begane in october 2017. and that $6k line has been tstd many many times and people have had ample oppertunity to sell down if they wanted to. which shows that the 'churn' from old buy to new buyer has already occured of those willing to sell below $6k and now the holders are happy to hold above $6k and wont sell for less

mining pool BTCC were biggest advocates of segwit from the very day it was thought up. thy even decieved the network by their mandatory activation and jjoined the ranks of blockstream to get it activated.. but today, they still fear putting their coin rwards from mining onto segwit addresses
(funny right)
https://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000000021865b070933943fb8b5959678542998bb99d5721b4e3b
notice coin reward -> 13TET...  not bc1q...
2 years of advocating and propaganda that segwit is the best thing for bitcoin.. and they refuse to use it themselves..

gotta laugh
"A transaction that spends one or more SegWit outputs is considered a SegWit-transaction. "

so a TX of
in
1addressR4nd0m
1addressR4nd0m
1addressR4nd0m
bc1qrand0maddr355
out
1addressR4nd0m


where only 25% of 'spend' are segwit.. they class as a full segwit tx (facepalm)

what there needs to be is stats of how many UTXO are using bc1q addresses.. that would show true 'adoption'
not the stupid biased in favour of segwit indntification that site uses
in most cases the single bc1q address of these biased tx's only include a bc1q address not because a user is paying another user from funds they intentionally wanted to use segwit with. but the "change" address has defaulted to created a segwit change address (by default rather than user intentionally chosen) thus users are kind of duped into gtting their change back as segwit. thus this stat is not adoption rate(choice).. but fostering rate(not intentional choice but default result)

..
the segwit stats of that site. is biased stats like they do in saudi arabia
legalising female drivers. but knowing most saudi males dont want thir wives driving, stats realistically are low. so what they do is employee femail public bus drivers. and so every bus passenger is then classed as a communter with a female driver to bump the stats. yea not one femal per bus(journey) but 1 female per passenger. thus a bus of 10 passengers would be 10 communtes with a female driver. not 1 communte

again whats needed is a UTXO breakdown of legacy vs segwit utxo

tether is only useful as a method to arbitrage 'dollar' between exchanges. thus instead of a price rise happening on one exchange. and it taking old wire transfer 3-5 business days to move dollars across to impact other exchanges. tether can do it in seconds/minutes.

but.. guess what. people were arbitraging before tether. i was doing it in 2012 between exchanges.
we just used a different alt as the dollar substitute
it was not manipulation. it was just being faster than FIAT swift network
arbitraging happens every day and its legal and standard practice for traders.

so its not tether thats to blame. its the fact that its easier to arbritrage price movements across exchanges in crypto.. its faster than standard fiat world

as for hodlers.. you cant blame them either.
if you look at the cost of mining. which depending on electric and generation of asic used is $6k-$9k region roughly per btc.. the price has NOT tanked below a healthy cost of creating btc.

so although there may be many holders(including myslf) that have coin from as far back as 2012, it doesnt show that people are willing to sell all the way back down to 2012 prices. (yep even i still have my hoard from 2012, i didnt sell)
the 6month low has remained above cost of mining minimum. so it has shown very good support.

once you cut away the very temporary speculative drama that caused the hype bubble of october/december. and then realise the january-february was a COREECTION and not a 'loss'.. you will see a healthy VALUE line for 2018 of $6k+

seems the articles 'expert' in zing zangs link cant grasp simple maths
the expert does a very weird way of working out his estimate. (facepalm)

. but here is a more straight forward way

 if you take the ~35exa hash this week for the network
thats 2,500,000 s9 miners running all the time on average
at 1.3kw/h per asic=3,250,000kw/h for the network

3,250,000kw/h (3250mw/h   3.25gw/h   0.00325tw/h) =28.47tw/year

no guess. no estimate. just plain math

regulations solve nothing
if you actually read whats required to get the "regulation" stamp of aproval, very little is about the rgulated entity bing ethical. 99% of regulations is about authorities getting the business to create their own policy on how the business will police their customers.

think about it. the bank/mortgage industry is regulated. in 2007-2008 were they punished or were they rewarded. banks done some illegal, immoral and unethical crap but no one was jailed. instead banks pleadd poverty and got large sums of funding, wile also screwing people out of their houss so the banks could also keep all the mortgagepayments AND sell the house aswell.. triple win.


SEC does not police businesses. instead they just fine businesses that are not paying the SEC for policing its customers. EG if your licenced you can get away with crap. but if your not licenced but are ethical and dont steal from customers. you will get fined simply for not being licenced and not policing your customers.

we should not be demanding rgulation. as its MEANINGLESS
we should be asking for consumer protection oversight yes the 'insurance' part you requested (which is the 1% function regulation does have) that way consumers can have an agency that actually does police businesses.

creation. in simple terms
bitcoin is created everytime a block (batch) of transactions get validated and locked into a chain of blocks(block validation / tx confirmation).
the work rquired to lock these transactions into blocks and chain them together to previous blocks requires special machines called asics to create the lock. these asics do alot of mathematical computations that would today require hundreds of millions of pc's cpu power to lock one block.

the owners of these pieces of equipment are called 'miners' and they pool all their asics hard work into groups which is why there are so many asics doing the job colectively, but from different locations.

what gives it value in simple terms
the cost of the asics and the electric can be calculated. and as such miners decide logically that its not worth selling coins below the cost of gtting their coin rward for validating and locking a block

so call this first layer of price support: mining cost

their is another layer of price support which is from buyers of previous coins. they too know how much it cost them to buy the coins and would not sell for less.

so lets call this second layer of price support: buyers remorse

these two support layers give bitcoin its intrinsic value.
then separate from the value. is all the emotional illogical nonsense of random choice. which is called speculation. this can cause alot of hype wher the price jumps up alot higher than value. causing a big temporary spike. or it can cause people to think all hope is lost and people sell as cheaply as they would dare risk.

the mining and buyers remorse support area is around $6k -$12k
the speculation area is anything above that.

imagine the price like a bathtub of water
the 'cost of obtaining' support lines is the waterline of value. but above the waterline is where things get stirred up by spculation and creat bubbles. this is why although 2018 never dropped below $6k, economics guys were screaming the price was a bubble when it reached $20k
(they were saying there was upto $14k of bubbles in the $20k price.. NOT that there were $20k of bubbles.. just like housing, when house prises double for no reason the housing bubble is the extra price that cant be explained)

the bottom $6k price point has been tested dozens of times since october 2017 and seems to be holding nicely so intrinsic value (cost of obtaining support) seems to be settling above the $6k range along with the averag mining costs which for the last few months has been varying the price below the $12k range

unless mining costs drastically dropped due to a drop in how difficult it is to mine. we should not see much change in the $6k support line. but speculation and emotion of foolish people who sell at a loss or buy at a premium can change the price to go down or up. usually spculation doesnt knock prices below support lines much but does send prices up way higher.

the positive flip side of this is that as it becomes more difficult to mine and more asic miners add more asics to the network the costs will rise. which should help keep the underlying value increasing.

ther are some signs..
EG the BTC peak was mid december. and then the ether peak was mid january. so yea it seems those that sold btc then bought ether.. which is the token most ICO's are tied to.

but what you have to realise is that the initial btc spike to $20k was a fluke...
if you cut away the october/february spike and correction of btc.. and pretend that the december event did not happen. you will see where real value is more observed. and you can then see how things like mining costs increased. and then as people bought what was being sold a new bottom line of value became apparent.

eg
2016: never dropped below $300
2017: never dropped below $900
2018: never dropped below $6000

these are the values that get tested often and found that people refuse to sell their coins below this price.

so yea although alot of speculative funds moved over to ICO's . real value baselines have grown since last year. so its not like bitcoin has lost value. its gained value but lost speculation

most hacks are not hacks. they are exchange owners retirement schemes (run off with funds but blame a outside stranger they cannot name)

that said multisigs with time locks can prevent third parties from just taking the funds because it needs the users signature which an exchange wont store.

but ethical exchanges that dont have the retirement plan to run off with peoples funds can adopt the most basic of security. which is to not put private keys on the same server as thir website front end. thus if a hacker gets into an exchange server, there are no private keys to steal.

this can also be expanded where users register a public address where withdrawals have to go to, again preventing funds going anywhere else. all controlled off server where the front end exchange server just acts like an engine for trades and the off server acts as the deposit/withdrawal engine.

which can be managed in milliseconds to know who is a valid withdrawal requester or not. all by use of signature recognition

first of all the article says blockchain will become obsolete.
secondly this title says bitcoin will become obsolete
thirdly it says in 100 years

in short.. the cities at continent coast lines can become obsolete before blockchain

now in detail. the article mentions how encryption can become weak after 100 years. which is true. BUT what is not mentioned is that bitcoin and blockchain are not fixed to always us the same encryption for those 100 years.
instead of 256bit encryption things can move onto 1024bit or 2048bit encryption over 100 years.

with that said yes many may see bitcoin as myspace and current blockchain as analog 56k internet. but things evolve upgrade and get better.
at the moment yes the core devs have not done much to bitcoin and are instead adding features which are just trying to push people onto another network thats not blockchain based but does allow other cryptocurrencies to communicate together (LN) lets call LN simply paypal2.0 allowing many websites(crypto's) to advertise and markete themselves on one network.

and yes if btc's fee's/tx count limit(myspace membership/features) are not solved onchain(onsite), many people wont want to return and use myspace(btc) directly and instead prefer to use paypal2.0 and then move away to facebook/amazon/google(a new crypto)

but there will still be an evolution of the internet(blockchain) as a whole and many new cryptos(websites) will develop to meet peoples needs

i know many will argue and defend bitcoin until the sheep have been well fed. but unless the devs announce they will never do another consensus bypass mandatory bilateral split, and instead get back to the original consensus of decentralisation as oppose to distribution(DLT). then btc's risk to becoming 'myspace' is higher
and people will start to look for a replacement else where

no
barry silbert (coindesk) HIRED 3 lambo's for the few days and parked them outside. it was just a publicity stunt.

doesnt need 50% of nodes.
august 1st proved that the protocol can change without 95% of miner support and without 50% of node support.

simply mandating a date that blocks will be rejected on august 1st was enough to change the protocol even when pools did not even update their software. they were blindly told all they had to do was change a 'message' in a version number to act like compliance. and bam. the network changed even though the network was not at the time using the new rules.

for instance after 2 years of promoting segwit. and 10 months since the mandated date. BTCC pool is stil too afraid to put its block reward on segwit keys
https://blockchain.info/block/000000000000000000213def61fb6432460b24ac109f6c8c7276b3efab31c251

illegal manipulation is creating ghost accounts filled with balances that had no real deposit/withdrawals.

the report says that bitcoin and tther(dollars) flowing in and out. so its saying that no "spoofing" occured
any 'manipulation. is not illegal just out of the ordinary. and yea because tther was used to skip the 3-5 day usual fiat delays exchanges were able to arbitrage in seconds instead of days. again this is not illegal, just something that is new to the fiat market becuse they are not used to being able to move fiat value in seconds.

the hype bubble of october 2017-december is definetly out of the ordinary speculation/hype/ not based on true value. but not based on illegal 'spoofing'

.
after re-reading the article a second time i came to the conclusion th NYTimes theen trid to take credit for a change in the price of 5% due to the releas it made.
funnly enough though is that bitcoin is known to have 5% variace often so that just made me laugh that NYTimes wants to grab some glory. it shows how desparate they are to try making themselves look like they are well involved in something, which they are not

publicly audited chains are called blockchains
privately audited chains are called distributed ledger technology (DLT)

the data these 'blocks'/ledgers hold do not have to be financial. they can be identity, location, product ID, batch numbers, vhicle information, biomedical information.

basically any data that needs to be stored in more than one place for a 'place' to utilise the data efficiently will benefit from blockchain/dlt as it ensures the copies are valid and equal. it can help to ensure remote locations have data but dont have control of editing the data without certain permission/audits done automatically via the protocol