In my reading and googling about the Lightning Network, I believe franky1 and I have the same understanding of the system. Now this is how it will usually go when payment hubs are set up, it will encourage centralization gravitating towards the larger ones to have more efficiency since they will have more "free BTC" and open channels. In other words the Lightning Network system will tend to have as minimum number of hubs possible with these larger hubs containing larger amounts of free BTC to maintain more channels. In the real world the institution that holds a lot of free capital are the banks. So in a way banks could be the perfect candidate to run payment hubs.  

Trump is not misguided nor is he a politician. He's an entrepreneur and a businessman and in my opinion he is right about protectionist policies but only to a point. For the US domestic economy to be revived and be rejuvenated he needs to impose policies that would restrict imported goods and make policies to encourage for manufacturing done in the country.

The same with services. Companies should be discouraged from outsourcing jobs out of the US and start improving the educational system and make training programs so that those jobs would be given to the American people. It will not be easy and there are hurdles but it is not impossible.

Once America recovers and becomes great again, then Trump  can open up the country's more competitive economy again to the rest of the world. China did this for hundreds of years, they were closed to the rest of the world then they opened up, look where it brought them.

The prediction could be 2 years off or more. In the 2008 financial crisis Michael Burry was one the the first people, if not the first person to notice and predict that a crash was bound to happen. That was as early as 2005 or 2006 if I have my facts right. When the banks were bailed out what did they do? They received and got their bonuses and went right back to what they were doing. Common sense would tell you another crash will happen sooner or later.

If the slow down is really a sign of worse things to come then this would definitely an opportunity for Bitcoin. Not as a payment system but as a hedge and as a store of value. Before I was not convinced that Bitcoin was going to be very a long term instrument of investment. Now it looks like it is if you look at the all time chart and that we have not really seen how high it can go for the very long term.

It is interesting that you look at it that way. I look at it as a repetition of what happened to the past. Remember the time when gold and silver coins were used to transact with each other? Those coins are considered sound money. Then the banks stepped in and held all the gold, which is sound money, and issued IOU's to be used in its place. History is repeating itself in the Bitcoin world it seems.

To answer your silly question, McAfee probably thinks that altcoins are not worth mining. You already know the answer why that is. There are already a lot of debates in the altcoin world and most of them are mentioning that most or even all of the altcoins are nothing but scams. Any serious business man who wants to enter and willing to compete in Bitcoin mining will not give 99% of all altcoins a second look.

I was doing some research about the Lightning Network solution and I have question and I hope to get an answer from the more learned people in the community.

The question is about fungibility, so let us assume that the Lightning Network is already operational and I open a channel in it and have locked Bitcoins days ago when the price is at $615. Then today we see that the price is already going up around $625 - $630. Won't this discourage the people from using the network because their purchasing power is weaker using it than using a regular Bitcoin transaction? So in a way it is affecting fungibility. The value of the coin inside Lightning could go higher or lower than the value of the coin outside.

Yes there are only 21M Bitcoins but do remember that they are divisible into 8 decimal units. The design was built for payments on the internet without any middlemen involved aka banks.

It is very arguable that most, if not all of the people would be using Bitcoin as the only cryptocurrency solution 40 years from now. Banks are also interested in the technology to remain relevant in online payments. So we might either see Bitcoin evolve to become the dominant solution for online payments or we see it replaced by something else.

Or maybe we would see Bitcoin become as a sort of commodity and as a store of value.

This should be viewed as some sort of temporary solution because limiting your connections to only nodes that are already in sync really defeats the purpose of running a node. If everybody started doing that then I could imagine the frustration of a new node trying to get in sync with the rest of the network. This is one of the biggest reasons why people give up setting up a node these days. So people here should start thinking about bandwidth and the blockchain bloat. Solving the storage problem is the easy part.

That brings me to a question. What would be the price they had in mind to release their coins to make it worth it for them and how long are they willing to wait for Bitcoin to get there? The costs of mining today are very high now and unless they are risking their own money which is unlikely, they loaned money to start their operations.

What about investing in acres of land? There is a saying "God created land once and he will not create any more of them."

If there was a scarce resource in this world then it would be land. Land with a clean water source would be most valuable especially in these times that climate change is threatening the world with famine and drought. I would not mind having my own piece of land and try to live off the land.

Did some of you see the "Big Short" movie? Remember the weird character portrayed by Christian Bale? He was the guy who first knew that the financial crisis was coming but he was off in his timing. He believes water is the next big investment to enter.

A Bitcoin wallet is only as safe as the focus and attention you put into it. As long as you know how to use Bitcoin like the people in the darknet markets do then I would consider that as safe. Being "safe" is not only about protecting yourself from theft. It also should mean that you are protecting your privacy and hiding your activities well enough to make you truly safe.

Here is an alternative if you do not want to spend over $50 for a hardware wallet. Buy a USB and install Tails Linux in it with persistence. Here is a guide on how to do this using Virtualbox.

https://www.deepdotweb.com/2015/06/05/in-depth-guide-to-tails-persistence/

It already has an Electrum wallet preinstalled so you do not have to worry about anything else except saving your seed words safely. Tails also operates behind the Tor network so all your activities on the internet are anonymous.

Bandwidth is a much bigger problem in the future as the size of the blockchain grows bigger and bigger. I seem to notice that most of the people visiting this forum do not include that in the discussion. They seem fixated that since storage is getting cheaper than it will be ok. I will not be ok. The blockchain bloat is now seen as some sort of flaw in Bitcoin's design while others some see it as a trade off if you want to use a peer to peer payment network.

These are baby steps taken by a possibly huge mining operation in the future. I see that the article in the OP did not mention that  Erik Voorhees and Roger Ver are both part of MGT Capital as an advisor and the other as the company’s advisory board chairman respectively.

This might be a long term plan to get some control of Bitcoin's future to their hands. I believe both people mentioned are supporters of Bitcoin Unlimited. I also believe that the Chinese miners are a hard nut to crack in terms of getting support away from the core software.

Thanks again. I have received the payment.

I did some research and some reading on Ethereum Classic and Ethereum and thehistory behind them. I think Ethereum will hard fork to fix the replay attack issue and the DOS issue that it is going thru but it will not remove the difficulty bomb. They have already planned and commited to make the switch to POS Casper.

Ethereum Classic must also fork to fix the DOS issue because they might be next to be attacked. They also have to fix the replay attack issue and remove the difficulty bomb.

Do not put too much attention to it. If there ever was a correlation between a market cap line being above a price line and profitability to trade the cryptocurrency then it would have been discovered already. The best indicator if you are looking for a cryptocurrency to invest in is the team behind it. A team full of "A" players has a better chance to be successful.

My first cryptocurrency investment outside of Bitcoin is Ethereum Classic. I was attracted to the developer Elaine Ou's talent and I believe in her. If she sees something in ETC then that makes me confident in the platform also.

If I had $1M I would set up a sportsbook/casino/poker site. I know there are already some sites available but I believe that the potential of a Bitcoin poker site has not been truly acheived yet. Just like how the porn industry has made the VCR adopted by the masses in a large scale, it is also possible that gambling will make Bitcoin be adopted in a massive scale too. The gambling sites of today have the hassle to go through regulators and payment processors to serve their customers. Bitcoin will allow them to get past that and serve their customers directly.

Maybe we can even raise the bar by setting up P2P gambling. How will the regulators go after everyone? It will be like bittorrent for gambling.

I agree, especially when a financial crisis is about to become another great depression just like during the 1930's, the US government does not fail to bail every big bank and every large corporation out. So that only means that there is more and more fiat in circulation. Sooner or later growth must come to an end and an economic collapse will happen. When that collapse comes and we all have this fiat in circulation, what now?

It was John Maynard Keynes that championed the theory that state intervention is a must to control the boom - bust cycles in the economy. But that will only take you too far.