Hi I'm newbie here. Anyone can recommend a bitcoin wallet to me? I want to keep some bitcoins myself and can easily transfer out also. Thanks.
I recomend Blockchain.info a lot of people use it , have a lot of security measures and you will have the total control of your coins. While there is nothing wrong with blockchain.info (I use it myself for small amounts), you do NOT have total control of your coins. Websites can get hacked, and their owners can steal, there have been numerous examples already.
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For anyone who may have missed it, BitPay are also weighing up the pros and cons of an adaptive blocksize. There is increasing momentum behind this idea, so let's do something positive with it. It will likely need more safeguards and improvements before we can move forward with the idea. Everyone needs to think long and hard about potential attack vectors and ways to game the system and, if possible, provide some solutions to those issues. I'm confident that if we can bolster a few weaknesses and minimise the incentives to carry out spam attacks to artificially inflate the blocksize, we can come up with a good overall compromise. Most users will probably be happy with any proposal that increases the block size, the BIP100 revision also seems sensible. The BU group are anti-segwit/ln (for obvious reasons) but may also be against their own proposal, IE it's just a blocking and/or leverage position. The core group are very unlikely to roll back back their position either as too much time and money has been 'invested' in their solution. Supporters of both groups are quick to blame the other for the downturn in the current BTC price, but they are both to blame IMHO, the fact that no solution is currently likely is just a plausible a reason, but unless you talk to all the people selling there is no way to know for sure. Status Quo, seems the likely winner, and Bitcoin will continue to suffer as a result, maybe it will take that suffering for a consensus to emerge.
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I am of the opinion that BTU will die a natural death very soon.
I concur, I think stalemate or a completely new proposal will win as I don't think either side is currently ready to compromise, and neither have the support currently to force through their version. It's impossible for segwit/ln to get 95% as it only takes one of the top ten pools to block. I suppose BU has an outside chance, but I don't see them doing anything until at least 75% are in favour that seems extremely unlikely and probably not even then. Why would someone trust a centralized crypto as it defeat the very purpose of having a independent currency.
It's already centralised, sorry to break it to you.
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What about we always convert btc to some other Altcoin before sending and recipient can convert it back to btc as per is convenience?
To convert bitcoin to any other altcoin you have two ways; 1. Send bitcoin to shapeshift like service and get altcoin to your desired address. 2. Deposit your bitcoin in exchange, buy alt from market and send those alt out in the form of withdraw. in both scenario you have to send bitcoin to exchanges address which will cost you some fee so how this gonna save fees The only exception for this is that you have to use your exchange wallet or gambling site wallet (which supports other alts and have inbuilt exchange service) as a normal bitcoin wallet, which is not a good practice. But then on top of that even without exchange fees there is always a difference between what you can sell at and what you can buy at, that may cost more that the original bitcoin transaction fee.
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Thank you for those responses Just for the record, is it allowed/ideal/smart to have multiple wallets on a single device. Just like in Electrum for instance, can i have multiple wallets on Electrum in order for me to divide my BTC so that if my accnt was hacked (I hope not ) not all of my BTC will be stolen. Again, i just want to emphasize, is it allowed/ideal/smart to have multiple wallets using Electrum on a single device? It's allowed sure but no it's not smart to keep everything in one place, after so many scams and hacks over the years, diversification is the key, and my rules are simple. 1. Never keep more bitcoins on any website than you are happy to shrug off if lost, so blockchain.info or exchanges, maybe BTC0.1 2. Keep a slightly larger amount in a secure local wallet, Electrum, Core, Mycellium etc, maybe BTC0.1 - BTC1 3. The rest or bulk in some form of cold storage, be it paper or hardware or both, maybe BTC1+ You can adjust the figures to what you feel comfortable with.
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You are probably going to be bombarded with scammers, first thing don't even think about using paypal for anything to do with bitcoin, you can very easily end up with nothing.
Try localbitcoins.com and pick a seller with a large amount of feedback plenty with 20,000+ trades. The site holds the bitcoins in escrow, you transfer money by bank transfer, they send you the coins.
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The second statement is: "Given that the actual bitcoin protocol is blocks of 1MB, and that the only agents capable of modifying this, are miners (they make the blocs !), in order for this potentially to happen, there has to be a huge consensus between miners to do so, and to do so with the same protocol change ; this won't happen, because there is NO incentive AT ALL for ANY MINER to go to bigger blocs and release pressure on the fee market".
You said what I was trying to more eloquently, so have cut the rest out. Can you expand on this paragraph, and the reason you think that pools seem to be the ones driving the charge to larger blocks and thereby releasing the fee pressure. I get that is the reason they don't want Segwit/LN, but then why are they supporting BU or similar alternatives. Is it just the only tool they have to fight Segwit/LN and they have no intention of actually going through with it, ie it's all a big bluff. I don't btw, scaling isn't that big of a problem, and increased usage outweighs any short terms pitfalls, and the pitfalls are relatively easy to manage by just going slowly.
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i am not sure about what are the downsides of bigger blocks but to answer your question, bigger blocks means more transactions in one block and a higher total fee miners can get hence a higher profit. and more importantly it means scaling to match the need of 2017 not remain the same thing as it was back in couple years ago and can lead to more adoption, higher price and again more profit.
You are talking about long-term benefits of bigger block size for all the people of bitcoin ecosystem. But miners prefer smaller blocks as of now for their own benefits like they can enjoy higher transaction fees along with usual mining rewards. Bigger locks will pick more transactions hence there will be no huge amounts of pending transactions so people will start enjoying lower tx fees. But miners will suffer high resources needed for their mining processes. The mass adoption and price increase will not happen in a week nor month but miners need to face losses (compared to their today's benefits) till price increase will happen. In future (after one or two halving) miners will start earning more tx fees than block rewards hence they will always aim for higher tx fees than higher bitcoin prices. As you say miners wan't to earn the most possible, which is why it seems counter-intuitive that they are the ones pushing for the bigger blocks, unless it's long term thinking. With scaling in place, a balance will be found between block size to keep orphans low and high transactions to keep the backlog low. I think fees replacing block rewards was part of the vision from the start, but to do that it has to handle a lot more transactions than at present.
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Since when does sending 32 MB blocks on any version of Bitcoin actually work in reality? Since when does downloading 14.6 TB of data sound enticing? Are you mad?
Since when has there been 6 billion Bitcoin users? Are you mad?
I didn't say it would work in reality, and I'm not claiming there are 6 billion users and I'm not advocating 32MB blocks, so no I am not mad. I am just illustrating that the common argument that larger blocks = centralisation of nodes = bad is rubbish. And even if it somehow did, how many people actually NEED the entire blockchain, and would the network still function if there were only 500 nodes, yes it would. Also, I'm sure there are plenty of ways that the blockchain can and will be stored in the future that don't require you to have it all anyway.
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The original Bitcoin code handled 32MB blocks.
When there were 2 people worldwide using Bitcoin, it could handle 32 MB blocks, but all the blocks were 1 kB or less at that stage. Because only 2 people were using it When dozens began to use it, the same person who allowed 32 MB network messages (there was, in fact, no explicit limit on blocksize at all, it was "unlimited") changed their mind, and added the 1MB blocksize limit. Someone want to check my maths. Currently, there are 457,468 blocks, if they had ALL been 32MB and full from the start that is 14,638,976MB, which is 14.6TB hardly an earth shattering size.
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BU has around of 40% now....so...it's not so much. Another big miner and i think it's done.
Antpool appears to have only moved some of it's servers to Unlimited https://coin.dance/blocksShows plenty of Antpool blocks not signalling anything.
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Where can you find real unbiased information on both though? That's what I find impossible. Is there a blog that's dug through the bullshit and censorship to actually show what each side would like to do? I'm all for running a node but I'd like to choose the side I believe in.
The only thing you can do is read both proposals, and weigh them up yourself. Anything else you read is just someone else's opinion which may or may not be biased one way or the other. I therefore offer no opinion
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This is small, the biggest bug in BU has still not been fixed and is not even recognised as such.
i.e. Emergent consensus failure bug
The 'emergent consensus' mechanism means miners can increase profit by increasing the blocksize.
The only thing stoping increasing the blocksize is the increasing cost of bigger blocks due to orphan rate.
To optimise for profit miners will have competitive pressure to reduce orphan rate and that is easily done by centralisation of mining.
With centralised mining Bitcoin is led to a permanent failure mode as it devolves into a fully centralised system. Centralised mining and centralised nodes.
This is a massive, massive, catastrophic bug that would slowly kill Bitcoin if the network would run on BU (unlikely). This still has not been fixed by Bitcoin Unlimited.
Can you explain how miners increase profit by increasing the block size, this doesn't compute for me. Currently miners are gaining the most out of everyone from the current status quo because of the rising fees. They could be thinking long term ie lets not make $1 on 100 transactions, let's make $0.001 on a Million transactions, but that's a long long way off and might not ever happen. Orphans with bigger blocks would be a problem sure, which is why from what I have read, any increase that comes about will be done slowly and incrementally, again they have the most to lose if they move too quick and get orphans. The days when everyone could mine in a significant way have long since passed, and we just have to accept the reality of what has happened, mining is now fairly centralised amongst a number of very large private farms, I don't like it much either, but it's a done deal and I don't see any way that 'bitcoin' can change that now. Centralised nodes is just a red herring, even if blocks jumped to 32Mb tomorrow which is not what will happen, most nodes would cope just fine, and for those that can't maybe pi users with small cards then prune is available already. Although I run 2 nodes (one of each btw) I'm not convinced that they are that important anymore and most people don't need the full blockchain anyway.
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I`ve never used blockchain.info and i hate web wallets,but we have to use them unfortunately. Every exchange trading platform is an online wallet and we have to rely on them. I`m not very familiar with cold storage and offline wallets,but i should move to some offline wallet. Diversification is the key, after so many scams and hacks over the years my rules are simple. 1. Never keep more bitcoins on any website than you are happy to shrug off if lost ( BTC0.1 perhaps). 2. Keep a slightly larger amount in a secure local wallet (maybe BTC0.1 - BTC1) 3. The bulk in some form of cold storage, be it paper or hardware or both ( BTC1+)
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I'll go with the latter for starting it, then 'mistake' for the follow up with badly programmed trading bots not being able to handle the sudden huge swing.
It was a fun rollercoaster that's for sure
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Now that was either a big spike or my charts went haywire :-)
And now they are all being sold again.
Someone's trading bot is about to get a stern telling off I think
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Higher block size = more tx per second and lower fees (most likely)
These are good, don't think many object even the big pools who gain the most out of fees haven't an issue with bigger blocks But bigger blocks = damage to centralization
I have seen this said by quite a few people, how is this conclusion reached. The blockchain will be bigger for sure but storage space is ever expanding and cheap, I bet most people into bitcoin have enough computer equipment around to run a node with multiple TB's of data and other minor technical difficulties (higher chance for orphaned blocks).
True, but I would expect all pools to increase the sizes gradually, not jump straight to 2,4,8,16 or whatever size it could be
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With the current transaction backlog, sending urgent transactions is currently (almost) impossible on your site. You give no indication of the transaction size so I can't work out what fee to put myself, all I can do is take what you recommend, add some to it, ignore the warning that there is 'no need to spend this much' and then still sit waiting for 4+ hours for the damn thing to confirm. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr Here endeth the rant.
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Mining scrypt with Titans is profitable. Capital costs amortized over the lifetime of the miner are less of a factor than many assume. Operating costs (electricity) is what matters most. I'd expect that most Titan owners have recovered their initial investment by now and are earning 30% a year on their capital with potential for improvement.
Indeed, for those of us who prior and just after their arrival of machines thought that it was a huge $10,000 black hole, it has turned out to be the best piece of mining equipment for both profit and longevity that I have owned. The big profit came from holding all the litecoins it made and then dumping them during the run up before the litecoin halving, but even here in the UK with our ridiculous energy costs it's still making me about $12.50 a day, not a lot but considering the lifespan of all the other machines I have owned that is impressive. There is a lot of animosity towards KNC, but every machine I bought from them made me a profit, and that is based on BTC Received - BTC Price Paid - Electricity, whilst other machines from Bitmain/Spondoolies etc have been profitable they have relied on BTC received when sold to make them so, or things like the insane profits during the Paycoin XPY bubble.
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Question: From the command line is it possible to screen over to see the cgminer process running? I'd like to find out the error rates.
Yes, you need to login with username 'pi' instead of 'admin', then screen -r will bring it up.
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