Ha Ha, you’re not fooling me anymore, I know you are secretly excited about the prospect of people having the ability to hold their own currency, and I know “the bank of Aedaxus” appeals to you somewhat. this is real, and this is now my friend!
Go ahead and create a wallet, put £1 worth of BTC on it and have some fun with monitoring it.
DISCLAIMER : THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVISE! I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR. I WILL GET OUT BEFORE YOU AND YOU END UP WITH WORTHLESS VIRTUAL TOKENS.
I do think many young people are trying it in small amounts as we speak and certainly until the end of August. I will let the young and learning have the brunt of the profit (if MtGox people don’t get their BTC back and sell out of frustration or some other thing collapses or the financial crisis expands further and people need their money to bet on things like energy/food/rent). Those people although a lot don’t really change the value of BTC a lot (unless some rare whales) but they can experiance in ultra-speed-version with no holds barred, how stocks and stock market works (except for the brake systems in regular finance).
DISCLAIMER : THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVISE! I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR. I WILL GET OUT BEFORE YOU AND YOU END UP WITH WORTHLESS VIRTUAL TOKENS.
It’s interesting to see if the supply of BTC will lower a little and the actual transactions are of greater volumes and also, if things can be bought online for BTC at reasonable prices. The latter being important even if just microtransactions to make use of the ‘no international boundaries’ aspect of BTC. Ok, friends can actually send wallet to wallet so their parents have no overview of it… I’m sure these months there is some market for it. In two months we’ll see if BTC expanded in actual use or not.
DISCLAIMER : THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVISE! I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR. I WILL GET OUT BEFORE YOU AND YOU END UP WITH WORTHLESS VIRTUAL TOKENS.
That aside, I am not sure if it’s safe for me to get back into crypto. It’s like squid game, a lot of innocent people are volunteering to play a game, then some people end up wounded or dead. Then they vote to leave. At this point, in a court case, the players would have a reasonable chance of not being convicted. However, if they with that knowledge would still participate to the game, they could be sentenced to conspiracy to murder.
Obviously BTC and the squid games are different in some ways but do have similarities in other ways. So for my safety (and that of others), I’ll stay out of it. I’ll just be like soem old man warning the younger ones about the dangers of the dark abyss of real life.
DISCLAIMER : THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVISE! I AM NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR. I WILL GET OUT BEFORE YOU (which I did) WITH DANK USD (or ISK) AND YOU END UP WITH WORTHLESS VIRTUAL TOKENS. 
PS: ‘YOU’ is meant in a general sense of anyone reading the disclaimer, not to you specifically as you are probably making dank profits generated purely on the fact others buy (main price setting) and transact (the main reason it could still work after whatever date will be the moment it changes from winning BTC to getting transactional fees) BTC (or other crypto) all around the world.
Saylor bought BTC for millions to slow the drop of BTC, yes, no one controls BTC.
Meanwhile Elon uh… Musk uh… answers he uh…never told anyone to buy Dogecoin, he said he supports dogecoin, only because his poor employees told him to buy dogecoin, so they could becom crypto gorillionaires.
Good that BTC has no money printer, it has a social media printer that makes it’s real value go up and down. See, no matter what middleman you remove (Binance’s CEO is still alive) there is always a way for a select small group of people to control BTC. And they are not letting go.
Ah but then Trump used social media in a way which resulted in people being fed falsehoods, they believed it and rallied up which then resulted in loss off life. The actual issue is certain people in our society have a strong desire to spread falsehood and manipulate on a massive scale. This is in fact what needs to be addressed.
I think it was good twitter caught on to what trump was doing and started flagging his posts with clear visual notices to get the statements being made fact checked.
tweets about Bitcoin or Economy/finance might need a notice that the content includes financial speculation and for us to carefully fact check or verify the content contained in the tweet/video.
I’ve noticed every time I do payment transfer on my normal banking app I am always met with a full page of text asking me to double check if the transaction is a scam, they ask if I know the person I’m sending money to and they have lots of links to advice about avoiding scams, I must agree that I have read the page before being allowed to complete my payment. Other industries could learn from this which would help people understand more about what they are using and doing.
If theres one point I will fully agree with you on it’s definitely the need for these social media platforms to tighten up their game.
So Elon Musk owns twitter which should never have been allowed to happen. A more suitable owner is one that is simply interested in connecting people, not a business man who has multiple other businesses and won’t have the time to tend to twitter. It’s a conflict of interest in my opinion.
Ah!! here we go news just in.
Thanks god for that, it seems the powers that be had the same thoughts as me. I don’t think he knew what he was doing and realised it’s too much to take on for such a high price. Leave it alone and let someone who is interested in connecting people buy it.
BTC has 2 major technical issues:
Of these, the lack of scalability is the bigger obstacle for widespread adoption. The power needed to run BTC is undesirable, but well within our capabilities. Unfortunately, BTC’s scalability issue simply cannot be overcome without drastic changes (proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake, etc).
The “Lightning Network” (LN) has been pointed to as a solution to BTC’s scalability issue throughout this thread:
I’d like to point out some issues and limitations with LN that I have not seen discussed here.
LN doesn’t actually do anything to address BTC’s scalability issue - at least not directly. It reduces load on the BTC network by not doing all transactions on the network (
). It groups a series of transactions between pairs of individuals into “channels”. The net result of a channel is settled on the BTC ledger only when the channel is created/closed. So LN only has a positive impact on BTC scalability in the cases where large series of transactions between two parties can be conducted off ledger and before the channel expires or actual transfer is required.
Literally… LN speeds up use of BTC by not using the BTC network until it must…
LN “channels” require trust and/or risk. Since the series of transactions in a channel is done off chain, a system of penalties is used to discourage fraudulent behavior. Each party in a channel commits BTC to the channel on its creation. Attempts to double-spend, etc. are penalized by rewarding the entire value of the channel to the victim. A decent system, but I don’t think I need to explain on an EVE forum that there is room for abuse here (remember there is no record on the BTC ledger of individual transactions within a channel…). Also, (I think) this means that BTC committed to the channel can’t be used elsewhere until the channel is closed.
Something like LN could be built on top of any crypto currency. It’s speedup occurs completely off the BTC blockchain, so why not use a coin with less scalability/efficiency issues to bottleneck the speedup?
LN can (probably… I think…) only solve BTC scalability issue through centralized system of money brokers. Strike (from the link quoted above) is a good example of what can be achieved with LN. It’s a very clever use of it, actually. However, given the limitations of LN, we can safely presume it relies on a system of partners (banks/exchanges/etc.). So I can use Strike to cheaply and instantly transfer USD to a friend in Europe in the form of euros, but I can’t do the same using only LN, without established partner channels.
Hence the centralization pressure… A bit ironic given the intent of BTC…
I liked this:
“The whole story of LN is reactionary in nature. It is reactionary to the fact that BTC does not scale. It also projects from a prefixed position that BTC is the only choice and must be made to work, and that an alternative is not allowed to be considered. It is an ad-lib patching device, not a principled invention.”
https://medium.com/bitcoin-blockchain/lightning-network-on-btc-is-a-dead-end-even-if-it-works-as-claimed-d550d17053b1
I’m curious about why you think PoS has any impact on scalability. I have seen this line from some shitcoin marketing, but it makes no sense. PoW and PoS is a consensus algorithm, it has no effect on how many transactions can be processed.
No, this is a complete misunderstanding of how LN works. Payments can be routed between nodes.
For example, I opened most of my channels 2.5 years ago with some random other plebs. I can send money to every single other participant on the LN. I can do millions of transactions on those channels. As long as my channel partners have a good uptime and behave there is no need to ever close them.
The only fraudulent behavior the other node can attempt, is if it tries to settle an older channel state. A channel is nothing other than a Bitcoin transaction that is not broadcasted to the Bitcoin network. When you open a channel, one or both parties deposit coins into a multisig address, this is an address only both parties can spent together, because it requires signatures from both. A channel state is such a signed transaction that will send the coins in the multisig address that belong to me back to me and the coins that belong to the other person back to them.
Now as we transact over that channel we simply cooperatively agree tho create new versions of that transaction (channel state) and in doing so revile a key that if the other party should use the previous transaction to settle I get all their coins. Because there is no other way to invalidate that transaction.
There is a risk that if your node is offline for weeks that the other node might try to broadcast an older state in the hope that you don’t get back. But you can also use watchtower services that will punish on your behalf if you are offline.
This is actually only an issue if you ever receive funds. If you have a channel you use like a debit card, that you charge by opening one and close when it’s depleted, there is never a channel state that is more beneficial to the other side in the first place.
Not every crypto currency, but probably a lot of them. But it’s not enough to have the software, you also need the liquidity network.
Other blockchains or DAG buy this better on-chain scalability by compromising either on decentralization or security. You can only optimize for two of this properties. The whole reason Bitcoin built the lightning network is because they chose to optimize the base layer for the things a blockchain is good at, security and decentralization.
Even if you optimize for scalability it just doesn’t get you anywhere really. A decentralized systems that requires global consensus has very real physical restrictions how it can actually scale.
I know the shitcoin marketing department may tell something different. But they are not addressing a technical audience that might understand the tradeoffs they are making, they just stay quiet about them and hope you buy their shitcoin anyway.
LN has no limit on scalability. There can be any number of payments in parallel. On a fundamental level, all it does is to make payments not require global consensus which removes that physical bottleneck.
Ok, so first, LN has a completely different threat model. Payments don’t need global consensus, so there is no risk of something centralizing that can then take over consensus.
It’s more like an infrastructure risk, where you have big routing nodes with a lot of liquidity that make payments more reliable and ensure good connectivity. This incentivizes more nodes to connect to them, so they become even bigger.
Now they either behave and continue growing or they suddenly start to misbehave and will figure out that their position of “power” as a centralized routing hub was very temporary as nodes close their channels and route around them.
In my opinion, this isn’t an issue, but we will need some more time to see how this all unfolds.
Strike partners with exchanges in the respective countries to enable them to receive USD or other currencies. Obviously if you have your own node you can’t send or receive fiat yourself, but you can still send Bitcoin to a Strike user over LN and they can receive it in USD.
There are protocols like TARO or RGB that will enable stablecoins on LN, routed over Bitcoin liquidity, so you will no longer need a company like Strike if you want that feature as well.
An article that cites Craig Wright. Ok… I skimmed some of the first lines. It seems to target an audience that has no clue about anything, as the arguments are completely ridiculous, so I’m not gona waste my time reading this.
That’s probably the number one issue with social media. I’m surprised that at least the U.S. didn’t change law to switch the responsibility of the posts from poster to the “publisher” and the “poster”. If social media does select what can be posted and what not, they can be held responsible for what they allow to be posted.
He’s trying out politics, “he’s not good at it” would be a very nice way to put it. 
Someone with his responsibilities should not be tweeting/posting/… like a 12 year old.
Fair enough. I’d argue that in practice there is an impact (given other considerations), but at least in theory you are correct.
…
I described the effect of channels on BTC scalability, you described the channel process. I believe these descriptions are not contradictory.
The speedup occurs by using LN channels to process many transactions off ledger. But this speedup is not the same for all channels since every channel requires 2-4 settlements on the BTC ledger (1-2 on channel creation, and 1-2 on channel close). For example:
Channel with 1 transaction
Let’s say I want to buy something for a cost of a BTC from Amazon (and that they have started using LN to accept BTC). We establish a channel with myself depositing (at least) a BTC on creation. Then we agree to a transaction that gives them a BTC from my deposit, and we close the channel. On channel close we each get the net result of the channel back in our starting address. For this single purchase there have been at least 2 BTC ledger updates required (deposit and withdraw). This case is slower and more expensive than just using BTC directly, without LN.
Channel with 1 million transactions
I shop a lot with Amazon, so I decide to deposit a large amount of BTC into a LN channel with Amazon. Then, over some period of time I make 1 million separate purchases using this channel. Then we agree to close the channel and BTC are dispersed reflecting the net change of the channel and its transactions. In this case, we have conducted 1 million transactions with only 2-4 BTC ledger updates (on chain). So our cost per LN transaction is small, and we only have to wait on the slow BTC network during creation/closure of the channel.
Put more broadly: LN’s ability to address the scalability issue of BTC depends entirely on the distribution of transactions-per-channel. It is misleading to say LN has “solved” BTC’s scalability issues.
So (I think) we agree there is centralization pressure for LN to effectively bypass BTC’s scalability issues. It would be impractical for an individual to establish long running channels with every entity they wish to send BTC to. If I wanted to open a 3 year channel with Amazon, I would need to commit all of the funds I will spend with them over that period up front. And I would need to do the same (separately) for every other entity I want to send/receive BTC.
This centralization pressure will create “big routing nodes”. At that point it’s really not much different than what we see in free market between powerful financial institutions now. Technically, I can start my own credit card company - but the resources and connections required to make it a success create an enormous barrier for entry. Similarly, (I think) it will be almost impossible for a routing node to become big/successful/powerful without access to a large web of exclusive channels. It will actually strengthen the position of powerful financial institutions and further entrench them. BTC will still be deflationary, but practical use as a currency becomes centralized around powerful financial institutions.
I’m glad you don’t apply the same standard of worthwhileness to posts here. Thanks for your consideration and reply.
He literally needs to “Stay in his lane” lol
He’s amazing at making cars, 100%. Stick with that.
Feel free to elaborate
Yeah I worded that poorly, because:
You don’t need a channel to amazon. You can open a channel to any node and the payment will find it’s way to Amazon or any other shop for that matter.
There is also no reason to ever close the channel, other than the node connecting not being reliable.
LN is kinda of a paradigm shift for Bitcoin. From the LN the base layer is more like a registry to construct the network among which payments flow. Transactions on L1 become topology changes for the transaction network on top.
Well yes, in it’s current form it totally can’t. Even if you would want to open a channel for every person on the planet it would take decades. But there are many technologies worked on that will improve on that. Bitcoin moves slow on the base layer for good reason, and for right now there is more than enough capacity to grow.
It may, but again, LN has a different threat model. There are other forms of centralization here and they are not necessarily as concerning as they would be on the base layer. The crypto community is always really quick at crying “centralization” without actually understanding where it is important and where it doesn’t really matter.
Well yes, because the established payment networks and integrations into payment terminals etc is completely proprietary and controlled by corporations who will only give you access to this technology on their strict conditions.
But LN is an open source standard. You can take the software (or code your own) and instantly integrate into the existing payment network and start innovating on it.
Obviously LN payments aren’t really accepted yet in a lot of places, but companies like Strike are pushing hard, El Salvador too. And if they succeed it will not only support Strikes App, it will support every other App that uses LN invoices including the one you may code together in your basement.
I don’t see why for example Amazon would want exclusive channels. They want as much inbound liquidity as possible so people can actually buy stuff. Routing nodes (which is just a regular node, just has a lot of channels, is always online and maintained well) want to find opportunity to earn routing fees, so they want to connect shops to customers.
The moment such a routing node becomes malicious it will lose it’s place on the network, as people can just route around it.
In fact modern routing algos split up payments and send it over different routes to increase reliability and the probability of finding valid routes with enough liquidity. So it’s not even clear if big fat nodes with lots of liquidity and connections will be optimal, maybe it will turn out to be a mesh of medium sized nodes.
But this is all theory. The network is in its infancy and it’s hard to say how it will all turn out.
As far as I can tell you just want to have a honest discussion about the technology. Nothing wrong with that.
The people or person who wrote that article on the other hand are purposefully malicious and spreading misinformation to push their alternative coins they either created or have a influence or stakes in.
This guy Peter Schiff is a famous sceptic of BTC, I’m pretty sure he will be reconsidering his stance on BTC after this.
I was thinking who the hell is he? Then I looked it up :
Some guy who makes a living organizing tax evasion, yes, very strange he wasn’t a Bitcoiner. His father died in prison convicted of tax evasion. I’m not even sure if these Wikipedia pages are just a joke or something, even in a parody movie this would be unbelievable. But… here we are. rofl.
Yes, I’m just not sure why people believe Bitcoin is the Evil Devil, when it does seem to have some benefits that can be used to avoid complicated laws. He said he wasn’t aware he even had to have a minimum amount of fiat money in his bank in order to be compliant.
We must all be careful not to commit to a belief without understanding. Aim to understand it fully and then let the belief develop based on fact. I am interested to see his opinion of BTC now.
“any node” is a bit of a stretch (must be a node that is connected through network of channels/nodes to your desired recipient, with sufficient liquidity in the direction of travel). That said, I had surmised that routing networks would be required to make LN at all useful - but I was not aware this routing can actually be handled by LN directly and without an additional trust requirement for any nodes along the path. Pretty cool!
Probably true for many channels, but I think not all. For example: what about “leaf channels” (channels with a routing node on one end, but just an address on the other end) that are primarily used to transfer funds towards the routing node? Once the entire deposit is transferred to the routing node, the channel basically becomes stuck liquidity for the routing node and is no longer useful for the address on the other end. At that point it would benefit both parties to close that channel and make a new one.
Well said. BTC scalability bottleneck is definitely still a factor, but less so with LN.
Also, I see BTC value volatility as an issue since it increases risk involved in holding liquidity in channels. BTC becoming more stable would definitely help here. Either way, these routing nodes/networks are going to need to be paid commensurately for their risk and service. Time will tell if current fees are sustainable.
It will definitely be interesting to see how LN evolves and scales over time.
Yes, that is definitely one way. It’s also possible to loop coins out or in without closing the channel. This is causes an on-chain transaction, but it’s a batched transaction, so multiple nodes can participate, share the transaction costs and lower the on-chain footprint ( https://lightning.engineering/loop/ ).
Yes, that is totally an issue. But I fear that will still take a lot of time. Until then the use as a bearer asset for international money transfer fiat to fiat is still an interesting use case that already works despite volatility. And the more the countries start to weaponize their financial system against each other lately, the more attractive a neutral alternative will become in my opinion.
What is the Lightning Network in Bitcoin, and how does it work?:
What is the Lightning Network in Bitcoin and how does it work?.
I had a question regarding BTC payments.
Would it be logical for a type of Bitcoin retail/finance company to approve payments?
So lets say I had £10 Billion in Fiat and I was an investor, lets also say I invested in a BTC payment app that users can use like a debit/visa card on their phone.
So, under the hood, a user pays for something with their phone because I have already made agreements with retailers and card payment companies to pay them fiat when one of my users taps their phone on a payment machine.
From the users perspective, they will have already sent Bitcoin to a wallet on the payment app and whenever they make a payment the correct amount is deducted from their BTC balance and deposited into a wallet owned by me.
Does this go against the idea of decentralization? Are there any flaws in doing things this way?
I am struggling to understand the Lightning network a little, how does the retailer get fiat money from a transaction on the lightning network? will the retailer have to exchange bitcoin for fiat or is this done by the lightning network?
Sorry if this question has been asked before.
The Bitcoin city is a good idea, I don’t think it will/should be at the base of a volcano. If done correctly it could become one of the world’s best tourist attractions, features could include, Luxury/Low cost hotel rooms, a state of the art amusement park, restaurants, activities, the sky is the limit if the finance there. It would provide lots of jobs.
This is currently only possible with custodial services like Strike or Chivo (El Salvador), because they automatically exchange this for you.
The general idea of Strike or El Salvador, is to simply establish Lightning as global payment rails to send money around the world, and use Lightning invoices, the QR code you scan, as open payment standard. So you can always use your own wallet and node, but then you obviously can only use the native asset Bitcoin.
Everyone can then build services like the ones they build to for example exchange fiat on top of it.
In the future, fiat exchange may be possible in a “trust-less” fashion with Taro (https://lightning.engineering/posts/2022-4-5-taro-launch/). In quotes, because a stable coin is usually issued by a central party which isn’t trust-less. You will also need to find a node that supports this kind of channels and trust that they give you a good exchange rate.
To some extent, yes. Karak and I discussed this a bit. LN is only useful with a well connected network of routing nodes that have sufficient liquidity. And applications like Strike that allow fiat on either (or both) ends of transactions currently require systems outside of LN.
LN at least has the potential to be decentralized in practice - it is an open network that anyone can use. In this way it is inherently more decentralized than (exclusive) proprietary networks used by financial institutions now. But there is the potential the meta of these routing nodes and related systems outside LN will evolve in a way such that practical use of LN effectively requires playing with powerful financial institutions.
It’s similar to free market in general. A free market may spawn lots of little companies that compete with each other, or it may spawn a small number of monopolies that stifle all competition.