Interest rates mainly exist to counter inflation.  In a currency which isn't inflationary until adoption slows down and the block reward is still higher than the amount of lost coins (unlikely to happen for a long time) there's no point in interest-paying systems.

It also just acts as an incentive for people to store excessive amounts of Bitcoin in centralised services.

Obviously the banks are too clever - they can't ban Bitcoin, so what do they do?  Just pay people interest for holding Bitcoin with them instead of actually owning it, operating a credit system, preventing illegal transactions from their "accounts" and boom, the only difference to fiat money from their perspective is the limited supply.  

Because you don't own your private keys and you don't own your coins.  You also can't sign a message in any other online wallet as far as I know.  Your best bet is to go with a software wallet or a TREZOR instead.

The key here is to realise that everyone is stupid, including you.  If you can't trust anyone else at all to be right no matter what their experience is, you should never trust yourself either.

Blockchain is a crap wallet, but you can pay whatever fee you like.  It doesn't affect the fees being insanely high.

Even with just one input, the transaction fee for anything under several hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin is more than Visa and other payment systems.  As it says in the whitepaper:


If the cost of transaction fees, which frankly doesn't need to be any more than 0-20 satoshi per byte for many years, is dramatically higher than conventional payment systems, there's no incentive for people who are less aware of the banking system's evils to get involved in Bitcoin.

The number of regular people will regulate itself.  The fees are too high due to a mix of spam and excessive people, so every time people leave the fees will get lower and more people will join again.

I think you're missing the point here.  You're arguing in favour of a decrease in difficulty as opposed to an increase in block size, but when it's now been made clear that it's many times more difficult and more damaging to do that, you're now pointing out what would happen if no scaling was done at all, which is irrelevant.

Actually a different point for people to consider:  it's completely irrelevant.

Whether blocks are full or just packed with spam transactions doesn't matter because the effect on users is the same - it results in fees rising and some transactions failing to confirm because the network can't handle all of them.  As much as we'd like to think people can't keep up spam forever, the reality is that they can and, with a different face, it might happen forever.

Satoshi pointed out that it's easy for governments to shut down centralised networks like Napster, while peer-to-peer systems like Tor and Gnutella tend to stay online.  He's got a point.

The difference is that in order to influence centralised systems a government just has to say "do this or we'll ban you".

To influence decentralised systems, a government has to say "you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you..." and they can't get a majority to agree with changes that are bad when they can't force such a huge amount of people.

Ledgers, TREZORs etc tend to be compatible with phones as long as your phone has USB on the go.  You'd just need to take your TREZOR/Ledger and a USB cable when you intend to go out and spend.  They're pretty small so it shouldn't be a problem.

Well, it's mostly experience and a little bit about risk/reward ratios.

If you're good at trading, the rewards will be highest for the Forex and cryptocurrency markets.  Cryptocurrency markets will also have higher potential rewards than Forex as the fluctuations tend to be more wild.  However, crytocurrencies' fluctuations are extremely hard to predict and the art of technical analysis isn't usually accurate but it has to be used when most of the coins you're trading have never been used in a store in their lives.

If you want steady income, precious metals and stocks are probably the best, but often inflation and risks outweigh the actual reward with stocks so you have to be wary about what you choose and make sure not to hold all of your money in fiat at once.

Doesn't look like something that an ordinary user who has only earned ~0.2 Bitcoin in five months would just casually write.  Still, it does look like a pretty reasonable affiliate network.  

I would say that actually just directly doing work is nearly always better than these things unless you're a real professional.  It's just like doing PTC services which earn you nearly nothing except you get some other people to do the clicking for you.

How much do you usually earn from a click?

Well one of the key arguments against an increasing blocksize is that it can cause centralisation of nodes.  However, the amount of data it takes to run a node should be measured relative to how much data people are willing to use or how much data people often have on their devices.  

A proposal with a varied blocksize which is limited properly, like this one, probably won't actually cause a decrease in node users, simply because the speed at which people's hard drive sizes typically increase is likely to match or exceed the speed at which the blockchain grows.

Therefore, this is a good short term solution, before when Moore's law stops being possible to apply - when it does, there will be more than enough space in the blocks for LN to be implemented and for the majority of Bitcoin users to use it, with onchain transactions for sending more Bitcoin and private channels being often used as well.

Yeah, crash of like $5.  Kwukduck's dream has basically come true  .

Bitcoin's growth is cumulative from our point of view.  Naturally we look at it as a percentage rather than an amount, so going up $50 in one day is only special if that's a particularly high amount of the total, which it's not.

Yes.

For the ordinary user, SegWit is backwards compatible.  It needs a majority of the hashrate to avoid a chain split, but by default it doesn't cause one (as I understand it).  Therefore it would be an upgrade of Bitcoin with a consensus, and if in the future there was a split that separates from consensus that was agreed before, that one would be the "new coin" to put it that way.

Feel free to correct me on that but I'm pretty sure that I can call it backwards compatible.

I've tried it.  If you're lucky, you'll get a couple of dollars worth of Bitcoin per day.

Unless you're in poverty and all you have is your computer it's really, really not worth it.  Just don't do it unless you like the idea that you're doing something when you're basically being lazy.

The trends aren't exactly like that and aren't predictable, but alts are definitely traded in relation to Bitcoin - so a drop in alts can mean a flow into Bitcoin, and a drop in Bitcoin can mean a flow into alts, but there could be any number of other reasons which go against these tendencies.

This isn't guaranteed, but often an overall altcoin pump like now will look like this (chronologically):
-Rise in alts
-Drop in Bitcoin, making some more newbies flow into alts
-Rise and alts and Bitcoin together
-Eventually, drop in alts and continued rise in Bitcoin

The price was up anyway, it's irrelevant whether or not the number of BU nodes went down.  The BU nodes are only a tiny percentage of the total nodes anyway because Core is the reference client.  It really is pointless to pick out a correlation and argue that it means something.  A meaningful correlation would be something like:  "Known Bitcoin users' average lifespan is decreasing and the amount of lost coins is rising".

Note to franky - SegWit is a backwards compatible protocol upgrade.  It's impossible for it to be an altcoin.  Hard forks, however, are not backwards compatible.  Equally, people who owned Bitcoin in 2014 automatically owned CLAM as well, doesn't make CLAM Bitcoin.

While that specific percentage is meaningless, it is repeatable.

For example, you have 1000 Bitcoin and the price is $1.  You sell 970 of it, and five years later the price is $1000.  You sell 29.1 of it, and five years later the price is a million (much less likely  ).

No real reason to only hold 3% though.  With any stock I would only sell a small part at a time.

I see your point here.  Maybe I was hyperbolic, but here's something that the whitepaper says:


He's right, but mediation only results in higher transaction costs if the alternative can handle the transactions at all.  A decentralised peer-to-peer cash (which I admit is working in the most basic sense, as you pointed out) is seldom appealing if it seems like principle over practicality.  Whether people like it or not, any altcoin could provide these scaled solutions from the start (admittedly none have done it very well yet bar litecoin), so Bitcoin's immutability should only apply when it's something worth keeping.

Note:  Mempool spam are still transactions.  Sometimes they will be inevitable which is why it's important to have a system that works (d5000 knows what he's talking about when referring to a combination of extension chains and LN), instead of just having transaction capacity in the most basic sense.

Yeah, they're busy being extremely questionable.  They might just be processing withdrawals for small amounts to keep up customer satisfaction and stalling with bigger amounts as much as possible.  They definitely have a big problem anyway, so I'm fleeing to Bittrex.  How much did you withdraw?

No, it doesn't work as intended.  The average transactions per block have been steadily increasing since the beginning.  The miners' revenues have also been rising and there's absolutely no reason why people should be paying anything other than tiny transaction fees with the mining revenues as they are.  And by "tiny transaction fees" I mean <20 satoshi per byte.  Transaction fees are meaningless and they only make up 10% or so of mining revenues anyway - they should only matter for priority transactions until the block reward is so small relative to the price that transaction fees are 100% necessary to secure the network.

Bitcoin objectively needs scaling.  It's not just a case of paying higher fees because that means that these pointless fees will be a competition to get into a block and many people never get their transactions confirmed at all.

The solution is SegWit + LN.  That's the only way which results in infinite scaling instead of just handling an increase in transaction volume until it gets too big and ordinary people can't use nodes.