Quote from: gentlemand on Today at 02:44:48 PM

Quote from: Room101 on Today at 02:34:47 PM

Some kind of layer two solution is needed, but it's taking a lot fucking longer than expected, so maybe a reevaluation is in order?

Then contribute? It doesn't get built on its own.

I've yet to see much that's convinced me that LNs are anything other than an interesting curio but I no doubt would've thought the same of the internet had I been introduced to it in its nascent stages.

Sometimes I feel a bit out of my depth with the technological aspects, but I understand that both open source and attempts at somewhat censorship resistant ways of interacting does not just happen without a lot of snags along the way, including that sometimes regular peeps might not be able to just jump in and start using it... until the interface is like just downloading an app or something like that.

Quote from: Room101 on Today at 02:34:47 PM

Personally I think lightening is not terrible code, which is basically pretty high praise, but putting all eggs in one basket, especially an unbuilt, untested basket is fucking stupid,

Second layer development can be done anywhere that people want, and there are other second layer projects besides lightning network. Sure, none of them seem to be even close to mainstream.

Quote from: Room101 on Today at 02:34:47 PM

and while the most simple solution of a small block increase may very well not be the correct one, it should be open for discussion.

That BIG blocker discussion was batted around intensively, does not seem to have any reason or justification currently.

Quote from: Room101 on Today at 02:34:47 PM

Bitcoin at a high price will make >100 sat/byte unaffordable to anyone who isn't rich, which is not the kind of censorship resistant money I want or got involved for.

There are quite a few bitcoiners who want a fee market to develop... whether that is more than 100 sat/byte on a regular basis or some other amount. Seems to me that having a fee market does not really hurt bitcoin, even though you are personally complaining about it. Having more fees can also inspire more use of segwit, batching, or even second layer developments and improvements.

Quote from: Room101 on Today at 02:34:47 PM

Some kind of layer two solution is needed, but it's taking a lot fucking longer than expected, so maybe a reevaluation is in order?

A re-evaluation by who? By you? You can re-evaluate if there is some other project that you prefer. There is no bitcoin marketing team, so I am fairly sure that all kinds of evaluations are made by various developers to figure out if there is some kind of niche that they can exploit or develop into.

Quote from: Cøbra on May 23, 2020, 06:26:59 PM

Quote from: Pffrt on May 14, 2020, 01:13:04 PM

Quote from: arbiter5 on May 14, 2020, 01:24:35 AM

Though I doubt Cobra will just sell the domain to someone like Roger, holy fuck if Roger actually gets to own two high-authority Bitcoin domains.

I don't think Cobra will just hand over the domain to Roger, as we can see the reply on twitter. He will definitely hand over to someone trusted and of course a supporter of BTC.
It would be better if some trusted from the bitcointalk forum could have the access of it, may be theymos?

theymos controls too many resources, it's better to pick somebody else, even though he's obviously very trustworthy.

This makes sense to me.

Quote from: Cøbra on May 23, 2020, 06:26:59 PM

Quote from: DooMAD on May 23, 2020, 12:38:17 PM

The difference should be obvious in practice. When Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published their ideas in the Lightning whitepaper, people took notice regardless of where their income was sourced. Those who understood it recognised the potential and it sparked enough interest to result in multiple implementations, each with numerous team members, all producing code. There wouldn't be several teams of people working on it if no one thought it was a good idea, no matter how much money someone might be willing to throw at it.

Smart people can waste decades on things that don't turn out to lead to anything. Academia is filled with scientists and mathematicians who spent a good portion of their life creating new systems and concepts that, with respect to them, can be described as a waste of time and a net negative for the world, because that person could have been pursuing better ideas with their time. I personally know a physicist who regrets spending years involved in string theory research. You would be surprised at how common it is for smart and highly technical people to fall into toiling away at flawed projects.

Of course, sometimes we cannot go back in career choices that we made early, and we figure out that we may have wasted opportunities by going down the wrong paths and there ended up being a lot of bad presumptions that we relied upon in making our career choices that end up being wrong. I doubt that this applies to various ways of working on bitcoin or bitcoin second-layer solutions, but it likely does apply to a lot of people fucking around with various shitcoins... but there may be some shitcoins that end up adding value to the space.. perhaps?

Quote from: Cøbra on May 23, 2020, 06:26:59 PM

Lightning has a lot of flaws. How do you train users that to spend money, they need to put it in a channel first? OK. Maybe the wallet can automatically open channels. How do you explain that some of the users money is gone because transaction fees spiked on Bitcoin, and more satoshis had to be reserved for when the channel needs to be closed? OK. I guess you can put a disclaimer, or alert. How do you explain watchtowers? How about backups? The user probably expects to receive arbitrary amounts of value, but you're going to need to tell them to get some inbound capacity if they want to receive anything substantial. At some point, Lightning Labs will choose to abstract all this away, but that's going to pressure them to centralize (a centralized directory of liquidity providers, watchtowers, well connected nodes, etc).

Maybe you can see more than me in terms of the technicals? Does not seem to be a waste of time to me, and maybe some of what is learned in various second layer explorations, including lightning network, can be incorporated into some other areas in the even that lightning fails or has too many uncorrectable flaws? perhaps?

Quote from: Cøbra on May 23, 2020, 06:26:59 PM

Blockstream is a hostile actor in the space. They don't want Bitcoin to succeed. There are some good people working there, but those few good apples mostly collect their salary and focus their time on Bitcoin Core and cryptographic research, they tend to distance themselves from Blockstream's damaging products. Have you ever seen Pieter Wuille shilling Liquid? Nope. It's unclear to me how they ever plan on making money, but they will no doubt abuse their position of influence in the community for their own business interests at some point. They already attempted to market Liquid as "trustless", which lead to founder Matt Corallo publicly shaming them on Twitter.

Maybe you have insider information about purported Blockstream bad intentions? I just don't come to the same conclusions of you that blockstream is purportedly striving for bitcoin not to succeed.. just seems a bit contrary to both facts and logic, in spite your attempted justification, here.

Those who were shilling liquid were bad guys because they wanted to convert it into a kind of trustlessness?

Quote from: Cøbra on May 23, 2020, 06:26:59 PM

The worst thing Blockstream has done: they made a block size increase on Bitcoin absolutely impossible. They whipped up a mob to such an extent that, for the foreseeable decade, we're not going to get any increase because a mass of uneducated morons will oppose it. I don't ever see a hard fork in general as a possibility, which sucks because some nice things could have been fixed with a hard fork, and the "no hard fork" mentality hurts Bitcoin as more and more technical debt will accumulate because of ever messier soft forks. I suspect this is what they want: an ugly system, that is slow and congested, so they can market their sidechains as better alternatives.

I doubt that preferences for no blocksize limit increase nor hardfork is the achieve of blockstream. Seems to me that there still has been no justification for either an increase in the blocksize limits nor reason to hardfork, and it is not because of blockstream's purported propaganda.

Seems to me that if there were some legitimate reasons to either increase the blocksize limit or to hardfork, then likely there would be work in that direction and maybe even increased consensus regarding the necessity of either one of those.

Quote from: Cøbra on May 23, 2020, 06:26:59 PM

Before Blockstream, the general consensus was that hard forks could be done in the future, carefully and far ahead in advance. They ripped that consensus out of the community. Any Bitcoiner who doesn't view Blockstream with some level of suspicion has no intellect; you don't need to call them a fucking conspiracy, but you better raise a bloody eyebrow when there exists a company that benefits from Bitcoin not working.

Bitcoin seems to be working quite well in a lot of ways. Of course, it might not be perfect, but there is a lot of good paradigm shifting aspects of bitcoin still changing the world in a variety of ways, and no one needs to be any blockstream cheerleader to recognize that bitcoin has already been a success and continues to be a success in a lot of ways of both where it has been including some of the softfork changes in 2017 (segwit related) and where it seem to be going which is a preference for both onchain and second-layer solutions (and, yeah, lots of work still being done and attempted and maybe some slower than preferred progress, too).

Seems to me that we have seen those projects related to bcash not really justifying any kind of benefits of BIG blocks, but hey maybe they might inspire with some of the ongoing experiments.. And sure there are thousands of other coins experimenting, but frequently, if they do not have enough traffic, then it becomes more difficult to recognize whether or how their traffic or fee dynamics would play out if such onchain changes were made to bitcoin.

Maybe part of the problem that you personally are having cøbra has to do with some personal battles that you are having with blockstream conspiracies..? and sure I can see that you are inclined towards wanting everything done on layer 1 and you seem to be skeptical of segwit, even though it was passed though consensus nearly 3 years ago. So I am having trouble understanding seemingly bitter pills in that direction.

I cannot really know why you seem to be so negative about current bitcoin direction and seeming to not accept some of the segwit related matters and to attribute so much bitcoin's current direction to blockstream, but you are coming to some pretty strong conclusions that seems to want to require more blockstream suspicions, but you are linking these matters in weird ways, too to assert that the incentives of blockstream is for bitcoin not to work so that they make more money or they benefit from more obscure products and putting themselves in kind of monopolizing places or something like that blah blah blah.. just seems weird to be arguing such seeming conspiratorial angle.. but I suppose.. maybe I have been just brainwashed because I have not yet seen enough of the subtle effects that some of the blockstream folks are having upon my thinking and my being o.k. with the various ongoing second layer solution efforts that are done by blockstream and there are other second layer solution developers too besides just blockstream, right?

I am having troubles seeing the blockstream monopolies or undue influences, but maybe my intellect is not strong enough? perhaps?