The network would very rapidly notice whenever a witness stops posting units. Since witnesses are publicly known, they can be contacted, and if no satisfactory explanation is given (or the problem is not solved) the community at large will decide to replace that particular witness address for someone else's.

So no matter what the state power does, or a hacker, or just a witness turned malicious by himself, Byteball is not vulnerable.

So in that sense I'd argue we don't even have to "trust" these witnesses.

Hi Piotr, I saw your presentation at The Future of Bitcoin in Arnhem last week (I'm one of the Arnhem Bitcoincity organisers ) and that was awesome! Very interesting, you're doing great work!

I'd love to set up a new Bitcoin node using Gocoin. Would a Raspberry Pi 3 with Ubuntu be sufficient? I assume it would need to have 16 GB of ram? (is that even possible?) And perhaps a 256 or 512 GB SDcard? Or do you recommend something more powerful, e.g. a barebone miniPC?

I have a valid 24 word mnemonic string for a GreenAddress wallet, but I can't log in. I enter the mnemonics, it decodes up to 100%, then it offers me to add a 4-digit PIN, I enter 4 digits and hit Confirm, but then it just stays there.

The words seem valid (if I deliberately omit or mistype one, just to test, it says "Invalid mnemonic: Checksum does not match").

Tried Chrome as well as Firefox, on both Mac OS X and Windows, using fresh clean browser or private window (to get rid of any earlier cookies) but no go.

What should I do?

Two feature suggestions:

1. Some audible indication if you receive bitcoins. Andreas Schilbach's wallet has a very neat 'tinkling coins' sound. Just something subtle. Would be a great addition in the user experience, I think (sounds crazy, but often I've heard "damn I love that sound of incoming coins!")

2. If you install Mycelium on a phone with European regional settings, use EUR as the default currency, instead of USD (as source, Kraken or BitcoinAverage are fine). There's always a lot of confusion getting newbies to switch from USD to EUR, especially since not only do you have to find and check EUR, but also uncheck USD.

Thanks for your consideration.

Sorry, but Snowden is talking bollocks. See this great response by Andreas Antonopoulos.

Will this make it into Bitcoin Core as well, or is there still a discrepancy between Core and XT ?

If so, exactly who or what still prevents the above patch to make it into Bitcoin Core? (i.e. so we can all stick with just ONE Bitcoin version)

New York BitLicense is 2015's version of the Red Flag Law

Why doubled? (seems like a large step)
And why per 2 years (seems like a long period to adjust) instead of doing so adaptively, according to current block size usage?

"640 KB should be enough for everyone"


Not too long ago, 1 TB harddisks were unimaginable. A bit longer ago, but still quite recently, 1 GB was already *huge*. Storage space availability grows exponentially, as does bandwidth.

8GB blocks sounds ridiculously huge today, but 1 MB blocks would have sounds ridiculously huge 15-20 years ago.
There's no saying how futile a measly 8GB will be (in terms of either storage or data traffic) in 20-30 years from now.

Don't get too stuck up on the numbers. I hope the core devs can agree on a sustainable growth model, at least for the time being, rather than forcing Bitcoin to be split in Core and XT.

Currently, Arnhem in The Netherlands is the Bitcoin Capital in the world.

See also this reddit thread, and two earlier posts on this:

Are you kidding us? In the current fiat system, most of the money in the world IS in possession of a small group of criminals.

In what country do you live?

I think you've been using old or uncommon clients or wallets apps then.

There's absolutely nothing theoretical about this. Both Mycelium and Breadwallet, the two most popular (and best, imho) wallets on Android and iOS, allow you to spend unconfirmed input immediately. I know some other clients do require a confirmation before letting you spend it, but that's purely an arbitrary limitation within that client, and has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself. Again, there's nothing theoretical about this, I do it all the time. It works fine. I receive coins, and send some of them to another address immediately, without waiting for any confirmations, and without requiring any fancy strange specialized apps or tweaking the settings or whatever.

Forcing you to even wait for multiple confirmations is totally ridiculous. Any app that does that should be ditched immediately. Why the heck would you want to use an app that imposes all sorts of unnecessary restrictions on you.

Again, I think you have been using old or uncommon wallets. If they force you to await multiple confirmations (for no apparent reason even), then yeah sure it might take longer. But that's completely unnecessary.

I did the maths for you, the probability of having to wait an hour for a confirmation is extremely small, having to wait two hours is astronomically small.

Semantics. You get my point. With credit cards and paypal, there is no such thing as a confirmation. There is a notification of receiving a payment, which is the equivalent of receiving a Bitcoin transaction (nothing confirmed yet). This is a matter of seconds. Then there is a certain period of uncertainty, where you will probably end up receiving the money, but it might also be cancelled or nullified or reversed (no matter what you call it, you end up without the money). You don't know until it's, well, 'set in stone' so to speak. With Bitcoin, this is 10 minutes on average. With paypal and credit card, this is 3-6 months on average.

Works the other way round as well: are you connected to blockchain.info? I call 'attempt to maintain previous market share'.

It has nothing to do with competitors, I've been a happy user of blockchain.info for quite a while, but they messed up too much lately.

There are several great sites for various purposes (blockchain explorers, APIs, wallets, etc), I like blocktrail.com best.

Complete and utter nonsense.

It's perfectly fine within the Bitcoin protocol to create, sign and broadcast a new transaction, using output from an earlier transaction that was just pushed before, and has not been confirmed yet.

Here's an example: first this transaction was done, and then before the first transaction was confirmed, this second transaction (which spends an output from the first) was sent as well. At the moment I'm writing this, neither is confirmed, and I expect them to be both confirmed in the same block (either the first next block from now, or later, doesn't matter).
*edit* → right after posting this, I noticed they were both confirmed in block 368710. You tell me how that's possible, if the 2nd transaction (which spends output from the 1st) would have required the 1st to be confirmed first.

It gets even more confusing when you say "normally multiple confirmations needed" - what do you mean "normally", as if some transactions require more confirmations than others before they can be spent, or what? It's nonsense. Any transaction's output can be spent immediately, with zero confirmations.

10 mins "absolute minimum" to wait for a confirmation? (which isn't even necessary to wait for in the first place, but for argument's sake)

Bollocks, sometimes it's 10 minutes, sometimes 3, sometimes 28, it's all probability. It's 10 minutes on average, but the "absolute minimum" waiting time for a confirmation is ZERO minutes.

And "commonly an hour or two" is even more bollocks. It's all statistics you know. The probability you have to wait an hour or more for a confirmation is 0.24% for Bitcoin, and 0.0000000037% for Litecoin. Likelyhood of having to wait for two hours is 0.00061% for Bitcoin, and infeasibly small for Litecoin. So, no, it's sure as hell not "commonly".

This completely contradicts what you're writing below.
As soon as you see a transaction, and no funny business is going on (like an existing conflicting transaction in the memory pool, or tons of dust output with zero tx fee), then you're already very, very sure it will be confirmed. Maybe in the next block, maybe in 10 blocks from now, but it will be confirmed.

Exactly, so why the hell would any merchant ever make a customer await even a single confirmation. This is what I mean with "Bitcoin payments are instant": nobody will have to wait 10 minutes (or whatever the amount time it takes until the next confirmation). With Bitcoin, you send your payment, and you're done. In a second. Nobody waiting, nobody at risk.

And yes, obviously, there is no such thing as chargebacks with cryptocoins. I mean the concept of a transaction becoming irreversible, or permanent, or set in stone. With Bitcoin, theoretically, a transaction is not 'guaranteed' (although *extremely* unlikely to be nullified) until it's confirmed. With paypal or credit card it can be reversed (and happens quite often) until the chargeback/dispute period expires, and that's typically 3-6 months.

Does that same judge hereby also dictate that Japanese Yens are not subject to ownership, for the exact same reasons? (even more so, as far as 3rd party dependency is concerned)

You seem to be confusing transaction time with confirmation time. Maybe this clarifies things:

Transaction time (the time it takes to process a payment)
Bitcoin: 1-2 sec
Litecoin: 1-2 sec
Credit card: 5-10 sec
Paypal: 3-5 sec

Money arrival time (the time at which the merchant actually receives the money and can spend it)
Bitcoin: 1-2 sec
Litecoin: 1-2 sec
Credit card: several business days
Paypal: several minutes to several weeks (depending on payment method of customer)

Confirmation time (the time at which the merchant can be sure the payment won't be reversed)
Bitcoin: 10 minutes
Litecoin 2½ minutes
Credit card: 6+ months
Paypal: 3+ months

So.. exactly what was the problem with cryptocoins, again?

Spending Bitcoins is good. You can compensate the company's dumping of their bitcoins, by buying back the same amount of bitcoins you spent yourself.
 
 
This line of thinking is a mistake. Please let me copy an answer I've mentioned in some other similar topics as well:

-------------------------------------------------------------

Even if you consider your bitcoins as long term investment, rather than spending money - what do you think will help raising the value of your precious bitcoins more:

• 1. Hodling your bitcoins and spending USD, thus only stimulating the USD economy
  
  or
  
  

• 2. Spending your bitcoins, thus stimulating the BTC economy, and immediately buying back new bitcoins (on exchange or circle or whatever), thus increasing demand for Bitcoin on the market.

Notice that the end result is the same: you essentially purchased some stuff, lost some USD, and kept your BTC. But with option nr. 2, you're actively helping to raise the Bitcoin price level on two ends: Bitcoin economy AND market demand. I really don't understand why even the most fanatic Bitcoin owners don't seem to get this

Especially if you're a Bitcoin fan, believer, enthusiast, investor, or hodler, SPEND THEM! (And immediately refill your stash of bitcoins by buying new ones with fiat)

By just sitting on your coins, instead of using them, Bitcoin won't grow! Spend them, and buy back at the same time.

If you are concerned about the 0.2% exchange fee that this will cost you: think how utterly significant this is when Bitcoin rises a few hundred % in value.

Two questions / feature requests for my absolute #1 favorite wallet app

1. I noticed in 2.4.4 you updated the transaction fee calculation. Even on low-prio, it currently applies over 0.08 m฿ fee. Until the previous version, the 'economic' mode used to do 0.01 m฿ fee. I have done hundreds or even thousands of transactions like that, and never had a single problem with any of them. Obviously, during the spam / stress test periods, it could take several hours before it gets confirmed, but in most cases that is not a problem (otherwise I would have used a higher fee).

I understand why the new algorithm is better, and adaptive, based on the current mempool size and everything. But still, could you please consider to also keep the old fee structure at least an option? I.e. something like "smart fees" (the default) which uses your new algo, and "fixed fees" (like it used to be) with fixed 0.01 m฿ or 0.1 m฿ for economic and normal. Or just one extra option in addition to the current fee settings, called "low fixed" or "very low prio" or something, which does 0.01 m฿.

2. When viewing transaction details, you can visit the transaction on a block explorer. This seems to always visit blockchain.info. Especially with all the bugs and security issues they are struggling with, but also to avoid too much of a monopoly or single biggest player, is it possible to add more block explorers there, and let me choose (through a setting) which it uses by default? Some block explorers that I'd like to use instead of blockchain.info are: blocktrail.com, blockr.io, smartbit.com.au, bchain.info, blockchains.io

Thanks for your consideration. ♥

Of course there is. I spend $10 with my credit card in McDonalds. Then I chargeback, thus the payment gets reversed. Or in a way you could say it gets 'unverified' (in fact, a CC payment doesn't even get verified until 6-12 months). Then I spend the same $10 on a pizza. See, I just double spent my $10.


1. It will make the seller losing money just as much as with credit cards or paypal. In fact, with credit cards or paypal it's even worse, because the seller not only loses his money, but also has to pay chargeback or refund fees (enforced by visa/mastercard/paypal, nothing you can do about it).

2. "Imagine if the transaction doesn't get verified", do you have any idea how extremely, immensely, extraordinarily unlikely this is? It just doesn't happen. Especially not without using ridiculous trickery that is very easy to detect (like zero fee, or duplicate conflicting transactions, or tons of dust outputs, etc).

Seriously, try it. You simply won't be able to send a normal transaction and prevent it from being verified.

No, you're not. You're comparing apples and pears.