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Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

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361–370 of 381 posts

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#361

What time zone is "GMT+0100 (IST)" supposed to be? India Standard Time is something like GMT+5.

That would be the time zone configured on your device. In this case, Irish Standard Time. Which, unlike the American nomenclature for time zones, is a Daylight Saving Time time zone (Ireland uses GMT outside of DST).

Note that the page has "2017/08/01 00:00 UTC" in the source, but uses a "Localize dates" JavaScript function to change that to your configured time zone.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#362
post #360
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With a larger block it will outpace the storage advances and will not be downloadable for the average user This has nothing to do with the block size. The size of the chain is proportional to the number of transactions. Whether those are sliced-and-diced into small blocks or large ones is completely irrelevant to how big the chain is. The only thing the block size influences is how many transactions can be mined in…

No. If a block is 10MB, you might as well keep spamming the blocks to centralize the node operation when the storage starts to require TBs. Why do you think Satoshi's gave it an artificial 1MB limit if it didn't matter?

Huh? That makes no sense at all.

I have no idea why Satoshi chose a 1MB limit. Probably for the same reason he chose a 21M BTC limit on the total number of bitcoins that can be mined: both are arbitrary numbers that he pulled out of a hat. But the next time I see him I'll be sure to ask.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#363

Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement. Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur. Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees. Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being "increase the block size" and "muddle through by discarding less useful data" (aka Segregated Witness/SegWit). Ho…

I think this is the most neutral and the best description so far of what's going on with Bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that SegWit allows companies to insert themselves as middle men in the system who provide fast transactions.

This is probably exactly what will happen, because the chain will not be able to support transactions directly in quantity, and so we end up with a plethora of middle men who are responsible for opening and maintaining payment channels. That scales pretty well, but a hybrid solution is probably best. Moores law and all that.

Moore's law and all that?

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#365
post #88
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you get the same amount as leas as you have gold. In fact, now you have gold and lead. One will turn out to be a storage for value.

I think there is a third scenario - both forks become worthless.

I think in the short term it's going to be A or B. But my bet is on within a year you'll turn out to be right that Bitcoin is going to tank.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#366
post #362
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If a block is 10MB, you might as well keep spamming the blocks to centralize the node operation when the storage starts to require TBs. Why do you think Satoshi's gave it an artificial 1MB limit if it didn't matter?

Huh? That makes no sense at all. I have no idea why Satoshi chose a 1MB limit. Probably for the same reason he chose a 21M BTC limit on the total number of bitcoins that can be mined: both are arbitrary numbers that he pulled out of a hat. But the next time I see him I'll be sure to ask.

probably more to it than a hat. She's more clever than that

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it false? I didn't say "mining is profitable". I just said anybody can do it, and that's the key. Just like anybody can seed torrents without any incentive, or just like Tor nodes exist without any incentive.

I think they mean it is true in the same sense that "anyone can be president of the US" is true, e.g. true in theory, but in practice, it requires significant wealth which most do not have. I would have worded it differently than calling it a "lie" though (since it technically isn't).

But since "everyone being a miner" doesn't solve anything (even if everybody decides to donate their electricity without getting profits), since the ASIC manufacturers would still control the majority of the network, then any argument based on that analysis is moot already. (Yeah sorry I should not have said "lie" but just "infeasible" and "useless".)

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#369
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blog author and you need to learn about lighting network and graph theory. Edit: responses to the specific "proof" you linked https://medium.com/@murchandamus/i-have-just-read-jonald-fyo... https://medium.com/@murchandamus/some-subsidiary-points-on-l...

That's just a lot of hand-waving, if the author is so confident about his rebuttal he should be able to provide a model for it. This person did at least attempt to simulate something along the lines of an ideal LN, which showed that micropayments do not do very well at all due to the combination of fees accrued at each hop: https://hackernoon.com/simulating-a-decentralized-lightning-... This thread on the same story…

> The trouble of course is that LN is just a bunch of proposals right now,

There are multiple implementations of the spec.

Re: Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it costs $5 to send $5 worth of bitcoin Not that this is a whole lot better, but the cost is $1.48 for fastest confirmation time, and $0.42 if a delay of 15-300 minutes is acceptable to you. Source: https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

How is this supposed to be competitive with the real world? Paypal transactions, Swish (Sweden), etc. etc. are instant and often with zero fees.

There are many situations where it is a significant improvement:

* Fee is not dependent on amount of money you're sending. You can send $200M worth of Bitcoin to a company in China and it will only cost you $1.50, try doing that with a wire transfer.

* Transactions are "final": after 3-6 confirmations you can have a great degree of confidence it won't get reversed

* Compared to Western Union or MoneyGram, it's still faster and cheaper

But in its current state, bitcoin is definitely not a replacement for your Visa card when buying groceries at the store. Maybe Lightning will change that though.

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