BTX leading the charge, $ 3 over Huobi.
Westerners bypassing currency controls,  moving hard currency into China
sry 'bout breaking your cascade
*bFx

It's up. $650. This is ungentlemen.

Those coins didn't disappear, AlexGR. They're still there.
If filthy statists start printing half as much dollar bills out of thin air, the supply of worthless government scrip will not decrease. It will continue to increase, just not as fast.

Sure. In Two Weeks^TM.
No. If anything, it would do the just the opposite, introduce an *inflationary* scenario. It is supposed to stimulate *buying*, and disincentivize "delayed gratification," e.g. keeping money in a bank.
Please take Econ 101 or read a book.

Yes, the classic "GI tract" Bollinger.
Easy to visualize like this: Food enters through the mouth on the left, follows the dashed line, and feces comes out through the sphincter on the right. Colloquially known as "dump." The tighter the right side is, the more massive (and explosive) the resultant "dump."

We don't. He might might be holding a boatload of bitcoin, but wants to go broke by convincing people that it's worthless.

You mean Hegelian dialectic? How so?


I see. Just one of the reasons we bitcoiners are renowned for our lucid, incisive reasoning.

Bitcoin, unsettling as this may sound, is very much unlike a bank. It was designed to be both a currency and a payment processor, i.e. A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
Lightning is not a p2p cash system, but a p2p gift card system. One opens a "channel" and funds it with BTC.  Think credit card that, instead of letting you buy now and pay later, requires you to pre-fund it every month, and then allows you buy up to the pre-funded amount. Why "gift card" instead of credit card, you ask? Because you can only use it to transact with a single entity, just like you can only spend your Starbucks gift card at Starbucks.

I can see LN being useful, but it's not a scaling solution.
Let's take micropayments (assuming that by "arbitrarily small," you mean sub-$2 now, sub $4 when the tx fees double, etc., but that's a different topic).

Why are micropayments useful? Let's say Google is charging me per search: there's absolutely no reason for Google not to tally the number of searches I do on their own database, and then bill me by the month. Is there?
So micropayments aren't needed for sites that I use often, but LN is utterly useless to me if I need to make a micropayment to a site I never visited - I'd need to create a channel first.

In short, give me some compelling use cases for micropayments which couldn't be handled simpler without LN. I'm sure there are many, but just can't think of them offhand.

Let's walk this through. I run across an online game that I want to play. I have to open a payment channel, and prefund it with as much BTC as I think I'm likely to spend playing this game.
What's to prevent me from simply sending this macro-payment straight to the game site? Why involve LN?

I'm not sure I follow. If I want to pay Bob for a hamburger with BitPay, how would LN play into this? I have an open, pre-funded channel with BitPay, and BitPay has open, pre-funded channels with everyone I want to do business with? That's a *huge* sum of BTC to tie up.
If not clear, before using BitPay, I'd have to open a payment channel with BitPay, and fund it with as much BTC as I'm likely to spend with BitPay in, let's say, a month. That's a big chunk of change, but that's not all. BitPay has to keep a huge number of open channels with all of its users, and those channels all have to be funded. That's a huge chunk of change squared.

But LN uses BTC as a settlement layer. So that macro-payment will still be on the blockchain when I fund the channel. If it takes an hour, using LN won't magically make it confirm faster.

You mean, like Starbucks gift card, that I buy from Starbucks with a BTC macro-transaction?
Yeah, that's what I am comparing LN to, because that's what it basically is: a gift card layer.

I don't gamble, but if I understand it correctly, you have a casino wallet, play from that wallet (off-chain, using the casino's internal ledger), and, if you win, you get more money in your casino wallet. Is this correct? Or do BTC casinos actually do everything on chain?
When you want to stop playing and cash out, you pull your BTC out of your casino wallet (macro-transaction), or leave it there for later. Alternately, you've lost all your money, and there's no need for another transaction.
How does LN help here?

Correct. One macro-transaction.


So TheRock has an open channel with BFX, prefunded with a humongous sum of BTC, as much as the biggest swap the two exchanges are likely to make, in, say, a month? How many thousands of BTC is that?

As long as TheRock has a channel with Hamburger Bob, open and funded, sounds like a plan. How much money did TheRock start out with, I mean before it funded all these channels? Are there enough bitcoins in the world for that?

Or they can do it without involving Bitcoin at all, and just send numbers to each other, settle shit with macro-transactions on the first of the month, like every business in the world does.

You know that big businesses send each other bills, they sign contracts and, without any physical money changing hands, multi-billion-dollar construction projects are started and ...wait for it ... even finished!. On a signature.
But Bitcoin exchanges, they can't do accounting like every other company on the planet. They need to make trustless micropayments to each other by using LN.

Right. You understand that the benefits of LN are actually negative if you open a channel, make two transactions, and close it?
Why can't they be like other grownup businesses, do the whole thing off-chain, as if it was USD, and bill each other at the end of the month? Or do you think everything* surrounding Bitcoin should be trusttless and as complicated as possible?


As soon as two 50 BTC transactions go in one direction (as is usually almost always the case with arbitrage), say bye bye to that "balance."


Scaling != LN. Two different things. I hope you're not telling me that by pointing out LN's shortcomings, I'm betting on failure.
There's that changing a constant trick. More than one way to skin a cat, but LN ain't one of them.

No, what I'm saying is the utility of that channel is going to be next to nil, because BTC typically flows in one direction, not back-and-forth, due to the nature of arbitrage. So it will be 25 BTC from Rock to BFX, another 25 BTC from Rock to BFX, and another, and another. All small, all going in one direction, because BTC costs less on TheRock. Until things change and it starts going in a different direction, to OKCoin, which is another open channel with 50BTC stuck in it that's only good for 2 tx.

If the majority is wrong, and is sinking all of its efforts into an exercise in mental masturbation, going with the majority is simply wrong. And asking me to support wasted effort, building a scaling solution that's not a scaling solution but is, basically, a solution in need of a problem, that's wrong too. I'm not going to cheer it on just because "we are pushing with everything we got."

By the way, I'm not raging at you, even though it might come off it definitely reads that way. Just general frustration, sorry.

^Yes, you have to open a channel and fund it. Like a gift card. You open it, you pre-fund it, and then you can spend it. You can not "top it off" later.

It's also important to call a spade a spade. LN may solve some problems, but not even a fraction of the problems it claims to solve. No matter what I try to walk through - micropayments, your exchange/exchange thing - it always turns out there's a simpler solution which doesn't involve LN. LN might be many things, but a scaling solution it ain't.

This is not some sort of pure philosophical debate, people stand to gain or lose billions. Why is anything money-related being done? Probably money. Not that I'm above it, with that much at stake who knows what I'd do, but the answer is still money. Egos play into it, but that's about the same thing.

First I hear of this, sounds like bullshit to me. Walk me through? Who is this "LN-PROVIDER"? How does "LN-PROVIDER" transact with "1,000,000 merchants"?
Why is it that "Merchant will be ablle to open 1 channel with LN-PROVIDER to accept payments from ALL customers."

No really. I'm waiting.

I'm not asking who it could be, I'm asking who it will be. As in the one LN-PROVIDER with "1,000,000 merchants." Or will there be competing "LN-PROVIDER[ s ]"with "1,000,000 merchants"? All of them with pre-funded channels to Hamburger Bob?

You mean as in one macro-payment, from my paycheck, so all my BTC goes to PayPal? Or every time I want to make a micro-payment?

You've just explained how pre-funded credit cards work, what does this have to do with Bitcoin?

Please Odalv, I want to learn. This is all so new and exciting, help me understand!


Sucks how people make up ludicrous, untenable bullshit up on the spot, and then just disappear. *puff!* And for what?
Why do it? Do people never call you on your shit, Odalv?

No, Odlav, it's not. 1000 LN-OPERATORS would need to have 1000 channels open and funded, to Hamburger Bob. Assuming Hamburger Bob does $2k worth of business a day, and gets his BTC from PayPal once a month, and further assuming that Hamburger Bob reups 10 times a month (with unidirectional [positive] cash flow window being 3 days, that's ... (3days * $2,000 + $4000_{to make sure the channel doesn't run dry on busy days}) * 1000different LLN-OPERATORS.

So the difference between $10,000 sitting in an open channel and $10,000,000 sitting in 1000 open channels. Just to serve Hamburger Bob, who don't do more than $2k worth of business a day.
allow me to quote:

We do not need LN for this. This is how all credit cards work, now. Today.
Only with ordinary credit cards, I don't have to pay Visa upfront. Visa lets me buy shit and *then* bills me.
So I can already do what you want LN to do today, wit fiat.


I can also go and get one of those BTC Debit Cards, and make as many off-chain transactions as the VISA network could handle. Without LN-Operator. No fuss, no muss.

Please read the bold print above.

Those BTC Debit cards are as much Bitcoin as LN. More so. Without the bother of LN, SegWit, and all these scaling wars.

Just go and get a BTC-backed Debit Card, easy peasy, you're done

There's really no need to reinvent gift cards or prepaid credit cards. They're already invented, and work great no matter what currency you denominate them in Numbers are numbers.

But if you want to, we can start a prepaid BTC debit card company called Lightning. You got the looks, I got the ideas. Let's make a whole lot of money!

But nothing could possibly go wrong with "LN-Operator," the one that's PayPal and I send my paychecks to every month? because ... what does the "LN-Operator" do, exactly? I want the nuts and bolts, so I know if we're on the same page.
Who, exactly, will I get my money back from? Walk me through this, I just sent my paycheck to PayPal "LN-Operator," and they went belly up.
What do I do?
Who returns my Bitcoin, the one that's distributed across millions of payment channels because "1,000,000 merchants"?

This is not about BTC vs. USD. This is about Lightning Network, and why it's not a scaling solution for Bitcoin.
Not everything is us vs. them.

I know several folks whose problems would be solved.
We may not need a bigger hammer, but letting a bunch of clever kids glue some wings onto the one we got won't do it either. (so LN is THE WINGS ON OUR HAMMER)
I can come up with silly sounding slogans too. (other than the begging "LN is the solution in need of a problem":p)
But you can't fix stupid? Or is it paper covers rock?

Oh sure. We'll be just fine... Look how nicely we're rebounding.

The miners get their block reward (12.5 BTC) whether they include transactions or not. Transactions are a pretty insignificant percentage on top of that (bouncing between .3 and .5 BTC, here: https://www.smartbit.com.au/charts/transaction-fees-per-block).

If the miners come to an agreement among themselves not to include any transactions, the impact on their bottom line would be pretty small (12.5 BTC per block solved, vs. 12.9 BTC).
But the bargaining power that gives them...

Dunno, better than the ones with Core individuals, that's for sure. The miners have a common goal, so don't see where you see a problem. No different than any labor union, am I right?

No different than labor strikes.
Workers don't strike because they make too much, they strike because they don't make enough

Never. They fight for higher pay and shorter hours. Often get what they want, too.
If unions had the sort of bargaining power that miners have (bring Bitcoin to a grinding halt until they get their way), they'd get whatever they asked for. Always

You can start mining a worthless alt with a new algo. Have fun.

This is no different than a typical business/labor dispute, the sort that happens when bosses make promises they don't keep.
Really.
And the slimmer the miner's (it's, like, 9 pool operators, who are we kidding?) current margin is, the more incentive they have to "Unionize" and "strike."

Only when IRL workers strike, they don't get to draw 96% of their paycheck, as the miners will (because block reward).

Isn't that alt algo just something Luke-dash-jr said once? What, exactly, would that be?
"Bitcoin: World's least secure, lowest hashrate blockchain!"?

How do you think strikes work?
Step1: Grind BTC to a complete stop
Step2: "Your coin isn't worth dick until you let us have what we want. While we're on strike, we're making only 4% less than when we're working for you. Think about it. Take your time."
Step3: Profit  

So many problems with that.
1. The miners don't have to announce their move in advance. Core has to be ready to roll out on a minute's notice. A case where defense is much costlier than offense.
2. The miners can throttle transactions by rapidly escalating tx fees. This is not an attack, legitimate for miners to charge as much as they feel is right. What does Core do when the fees increase by 50-100% a day?
3. BTC will have value, but in the double digits at best.

P.S. Is the code on GitHub? Or is it a secrit?
P.P.S. The whole security through PoW mining thing only works when it is truly decentralized, as in every wallet a mining node, every stakeholder also a miner (like citizen-soldier thing). It starts breaking down as soon as clots develop, and once most users are no longer miners, and most miners are 3 pools, it's a different animal, with things like collective bargaining becoming a thing (no need to say it, once miners are signing agreements with core individuals, we're done).

What I'm saying is that unless Core has both production code and hangars full of GPUs ready to go online, miners could grind the network to a halt. This is how you get ants.

Have tx fee increases  promoted a sense of injustice and tyranny in the past? Do people see the miners as their friends, not businessmen looking to maximize their profits?
The miners may well be everyone's friends, doing it for the community etc., but I'm trying to walk through plausible adversarial scenarios, where each party plays to maximize their rational self-interest win.

The miners don't need to, but they *could* grind the network to a halt. That's bargaining power, what gives a threat credibility. Because bargaining from weakness isn't bargaining, it's begging. It's nowhere near as good as bargaining from strengths.

>what is it the minners want in the hypothetical scenario ?
The miners want to make as much money as they can. If that means cutting Blockstream out, so be it.
But I'm sure they also want some getback. I would, if I got punked by private individuals who are totally not core lulz!
Wouldn't you?

It was your finest work, you totally should.
Nice chatting with you, loser?

Sure they will reset the difficulty, but GPU miners aren't the Salvation Army, they're mercenary. If forking the shit out of BTC is what pays, that's what they'll do. And it sure will take more than a few hours to deploy a meaningful number of GPU farms to prevent this from happening, GPUs aren't sitting around waiting for the goahead from Core.
That's why countries have standing armies, who do nothing but eat and shit 99% of the time. For times like this.


Is there something more than Miss Manners that stands in the way of (2)?
I keep hearing stuff like "it's not nice, be nice" in one ear, and blood-curdling screams of the robbed/buttraped in the other. So having a hard time figuring out if this is a family/friends or a business/let's make some money type of a setup.

How can my "customers" (assuming you mean BTC holders and not exchanges) make an iota of difference here? Why would I care if you have a million BTC in a paper wallet buried under a bird bath?
This is all hypothetical, of course, because I'm really passionate about supporting the Bitcoin community and you just can't put a price on something like that. Because it's priceless.

Let's try to be civil. I'm not gonna call you a faggot and you're not going to call me delusional or a troll. Shall we give that a try and see how it goes?

What makes you think that most miners are hodlers? Do you think the guy who works at the gas station is also a gasoline aficionado, and spends his paychecks on 55-gal drums of Premium?
Remember what I said about acting civil?

A blazz from da pazz.
Don't misunderstand me though, I'm not some Miner's Union organizer. Just trying to figure out how things can play out: what's probable, what's possible, and what's not. Like playing chess if you ain't got the book learnin', "if I go here, then he can, but then I." that sort of thing.

P.S. think we're due for a matching uptick to maybe 70, before going below 60?

No, it isn't. Both are meaningless, empty verbiage meant to insult and belittle the person you're talking to. Both carry no information, both are childish and rude.

Do you think oil drilling companies own oil? Do they store it in their wine Oil Cellars too? In 55-gal drums, and the best in Mason jars, labeled "Sweet Crude"?
We live in different worlds.
Again: Stop trying to provoke me and start reading. I'm not a Miner's advocate. I'm not a big blocker, I'm simply trying to play things through. Now what's the point of turning neutral bystanders into enemies? Why do it?

But back on topic: tell me how a mining equivalent of a walkout would hurt them?
Or do you think workers who strike never get what they want?

Run this Bitcoin video https://youtu.be/AUP8t-5pFZg?t=235 in one tab,
and this not-bitcoin video https://youtu.be/5PuDWxgIxdc?t=100 in another.
Backstory: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4tun94/ok_coin_just_scammed_me_and_my_wife_out_of_25_btc/?st=iqvp5u1a&sh=ce0d2f57
Disturbingly funny.

I need to sleep now.

Here... I have a pilot’s thumb... Got it  ...  right here.

Or is he?
(It's not the price, it's the volume...)

^Worst Statue of Liberty cosplay ever.

and this is the slowest, weakest drop ever.

"Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and [very slowly -ed] swirled and bubbled about the wreckage ... Here and there [very slowly -ed] struggled a form‍—‌whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a [very slowly -ed] thrashing about in the [very slow -ed] sticky mass, showed where any life was ... Horses [very slowly -ed] died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled [very slowly -ed], the deeper in the mess they were [very slowly -ed] ensnared. Human beings‍—‌men and women‍—‌suffered likewise [very slowly -ed]."--wikipedia

It should be used by everyone, at least once a year. 21 people died needlessly [and very slowly -ed]. Swept [very slowly -ed] beneath a [very slow -ed] 40-foot wave of molasses.

The Great Molasses Disaster Memorial Day used to be a US national holiday, until the government renamed it Martin Luther King day as a part of a backroom deal with Equal Rights Agitators back in the 60s. That's a shame, because like Future President Trump once said, those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Team A only needs to be better than Team B.

>In the end we had to arrange the transport on their behalf.


Sounds French. You're not French, are you?

---

Does it feel like there's only one guy trading? He buys 500 coins, price goes up, he sells 500 coins (in several parcels), price goes back down (which is what it's doing now).

So you're the one spamming the network with dust transactions? *AND* you work for the government? Everything is so much clearer now.

Yeah, everything went to shit over where you're at after you stopped rationing food, and your government stopped planning your economy, after WW2.
You guys used to be something, now you don't even have an Empire worth talking about.

You need somebody like Future President Mr. Donald Trump to make Britain Great Again.

You should go to BVI, aren't they you ... what is it? Protectorate? Paradise. Or almost, they don't sell their kids to tourists...

Our Empire is doing just fine, never had one, never will. Why buy a cow when you can get the milk for free?
Got a steady supply of migrant workers to do our dirty work (South Mexico on one side, North Mexico on the other), we got it made

Did they get all the officers? Was it like a mini gun, one of those motor driven things with a bunch of barrels that spits a solid stream of death at a rate of over 9000 rounds per second? Or newfangled missiles?

American here, have no idea what or where everything is, so Googled it. Misread "Pitcairn Islands Tourism | Come Explore.." as "Come Exploit."

No need to assume. It has.
Le Wall Invisible at 660 on BFX.

What's going on?

Is this good enough, or still too rich for your blood?



*But at least we're seeing some volume...

Waiting a bit, step back in @ 75% profit opportunity.
BTW, to take advantage of opportunities like this, you gotta have worthless fiat waiting. Got any?
Or are you, you know, all in?

If you squint a little bit, 655 looks like 666, so we're pretty much where we were yesterday.

Depends on where in US. There are places where you can get a house for 50k, maybe less. Remember seeing some dilapidated mansion-looking place in Detroit for something ridiculous, like 5k.

---

Pirate gets off with a year and a half, makes BBC news http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36865208
"A Texan man has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for running a fraudulent Ponzi-style scheme based around the Bitcoin virtual currency."

Is it coiling like a cobra now, getting ready to strike? Because I calculated the marginal supply reduction delta_{[n1, ... n++]} ratio, backtraced it into fractal regression with a harmonic form-fitting Bollinger Bend, and all the numbers seem super bullish.

Told you to wait, but nooo... You knew better.

I was looking up some fish in Wikipedia, ran across this picture, and thought it was fitting:

Diner; 50-something waitress. Doesn't like you, you look like a college kid.
Order, get coffee while you wait. Get sugar/cream squared/finally cool enough to drink. "Freshen your coffee?" (pours without waiting).
She knows, just fucking with you.
Clink! from the kitchen window (that's your food).
Clank! plate on the table, some orange stuff spills. This is choreography, setup for the rancid bar rag ... with which she returns after about 3 minutes, just when you thought it's safe.

Picks up plate (you started eating)., "Here, let me get that for you!" smears spilled orange crap around the table, drops plate back.
You start eating, feel owned.
~3 minutes pass~
She reaches around you from behind, presses old lady boob into your shoulder, pours more orange crap onto your plate from stainless steel gravy boat. "Everything good?"  (you nod)



"Bon appetit!"

A year from now, you'll see 1,800 * 365 = 657,000 BTC *MORE*

Apollo One, how're you guys doing in there?

+1




Movin' to Montana soon
Gonna be a Dental Floss tycoon
(yes, I am)

Will 650 hodl?
Just a week left. Don't forget to vote!

I'm an American, I never vote. The only reason I know that Coventry even exists is because

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that there may be correlation, and no in the sense that this doesn't imply causation.
Bitcoin is a speculative commodity, in the widest possible sense: it exists to be speculated, that's its raison d'etre. News of failing governments, failing economies, failing banks -- pretty much any and all societal failings -- could be, and typically are, used to bootstrap pumps.
Hence correlation.
This does not mean that the price is driven by world events (as in Greeks buying BTC because Grexit, Brits buying BTC because Brexit,...or Pakistani buying BTC because Prexit.

Timing is hilarious, was just going to bring this up. Did you sell already, or waiting for 665.99? (because I'm pretty sure many peole are )

No, you're right, the price rise was due to the halvening pump. Now price is coming back down, as always.

Estimated Next Difficulty:   201,904,118,316 (-5.43%)
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Prophesies gettin' fulfilled

Right. And $680 a few minutes before the halvening, but why quibble? Dropping hashrate is dropping, as the fees escalate. As prophesied

https://foundersgrid.com/bitcoin-price/

Looks like your tomfoolery is coming to an end, Elwar...

http://bitlegal.io/2016/07/24/eu-commission-to-propose-central-database-of-virtual-currency-users/
EU Commission to propose Central Database of Virtual Currency Users
July 24, 2016
520

The EU Commission in its latest proposal to regulate virtual currency exchanges and custodian wallets (Proposal) suggests a further amendment to the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (4AMLD) which may result in the creation of a central database of virtual currency users (Central VC User Database).

Yes, your mischief and foolishness. Monkey business, if you will.
EU authorities had just about enough of your crypto shenanigans, Elwar