Hello, the never ending scaling debate and ever rising bitcoin fees are driving me crazy. I know we have UASF, but that's not the most elegant solution. So, I have a bold idea. What about establishing Bitcoin parliament. Instead of traditional political parties, there would be crypto parties (that's a horrible name, indeed). So there would be something like Bitcoin Core Party, BU Party, Bitcoin Classics Party and so on. And around 1/3 of the parliament would consist of independent representatives from industry (exchanges, mining, wallets and so on) and independent developers.

Thanks to a wide variety of people, we could have a really good discussion and mainly, if the parliament gain enough authority, results from debates in parliament could be actually implemented in the bitcoin code itself. This might really help with bitcoin development. All talks will be obviously online, with audio only (transmitting video from dozens of people at once is a bad idea).

The only problem is electing the parties. Which parties will have the privilege to talk at the bitcoin parliament, and how many people from each party. This might be a tough problem to solve. But this is just a crazy idea, isn't it?

Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6fuvez/shower_thought_bitcoin_parliament/?st=j3nc9u9p&sh=5a8f5c9f

Yeah, yeah. But don't forget about the great scaling debate. It seems we are on a good path, but it's still concerning. Knock, knock miners! We want some vertical price moves.

Come on developers! I think the price is just waiting and when SegWit and LN become activated, we will all buy Lambos  . But really, the price then should go ballistic...

I'm more positive about it. It can be a great learning opportunity. You will definitely learn a lot about bitcoin and blockchain technology in general. And obviously, you will learn so much about digital signatures and security in general. You can then use this knowledge in other projects. Not only blockchain-oriented ones. However, it wouldn't be wise to make your wallet publicly available. Even wallets, that have been developed by many programmers for years get hacked. Yours will be hacked at best in a matter of weeks. As long as you don't publish it and operate it at your own risk (therefore store in it only as much as you are willing to loose in case of unexpected behavior of software), it can be a really good learning experience. Good luck .

Thanks for the tutorial, but I want all the blockchain data saved on a different hard drive. Is it possible? For my 500 GB SSD, 100 GB is just too much...
EDIT: I also have all the data now downloaded on that hard drive, and I'm running Bitcoin QT from that hard drive...

What about finding some people close to Nash's son? I think he could answer a lot of questions regarding this stuff. But we have to take action, not discuss Rothschilds and NSA. Unfortunately, I'm from central Europe, so I can't take action in a way as suggested...

Hi, can someone tell me what exactly is user activated soft work without political bullshit? So far I know that it's way, how full nodes can activate SegWit without miners support. But how can one activate it in Bitcoin Core wallet?

Oh no. How can you treat r/bitcoin and r/btc as news sources? They're basically in a civil war with each other and I wouldn't trust these subreddits much. But I like the idea of some kind of list where all cryptocurrency news sites will be. How about setting up a simple website? I, unfortunately, don't currently have time to do this, but others might have enough time...

We definitely need more private and decentralized internet. However, I'm not sure if blockchain is the right way. Blockchains create trust and allow consensus along with a large number of nodes. But they archive this by copying everything everywhere. Can you imagine, that every computer connected to the internet would also store everything on the internet? Even with technologies like sharding, this would be ridiculous. I think you should rather look to solutions based on onion routing (TOR). There's still a lot of work to be done to achieve good decentralization and good speed at the same time. Sybil attacks are also a big problem in these networks.  If someone could solve these problems, it will be a true revolution in terms of privacy. But be aware of NSA/CIA/GHCQ/FSB and other agencies.

OK, slight change of topic. As I said, I'm more interested in the technical side. So the question is more like what's the difference between ring signatures and zero knowledge proofs. And again, especially in terms of privacy (which one is more anonymous).

Well, I'm more interested in the actual technology behind it. I think it's called Zerocoin protocol or something like that. Obviously, closed source is a huge concern for me but I don't want to throw out the interesting idea just because one concrete implementation (ZCash).

Hello,
How do these two coins compare in terms of privacy? Is any of them better than other? And I'm assuming that Monero team will really implement feature (I don't know how it's called), which will hide the amount transacted. So both coins will hide all the metadata. However, I know that ZCash is pretty intense in terms of computer power (and I'm not talking just about Equihash, but mainly about zk-snarks). But are there any other differences in terms of anonymity?

Hello, I got an idea how to mitigate creation of too big blocks. It's actually quite similar to Monero. There's how it should work:
1.) We have to establish some kind of average block size over a period of time (let's say over last 14 days).
2.) Every block mined will be compared to this average. If it is at least 15% bigger, then the block reward will be reduced (the bigger that block is, the bigger reduction in reward). But, if it's within the limit, there will be no reduction. This way, we could prevent the creation of too big blocks and basically protect individual nodes from downloading hundreds of megabytes of data in short period of time. I know, that nodes can already decide how big blocks they will accept, however, this creates another layer of protection for nodes.

Obviously, this will change the money supply, however, not by much. Miners will be incentivized to not mine these blocks with lower reward. 15% bigger blocks should be enough to count in growing number of transactions without hurting miners profit.

Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/61ejer/limiting_max_block_size_through_reduced_rewards/?st=j0p823ar&sh=84438cf7

Hello,
I recently downloaded Bitcoin Core 0.14 and I want to run a pro-SegWit node. How can I do that? I know that with Bitcoin Core 13 you have to download version 13.1, but there's no version 14.1, so how does one vote for SegWit on a full node? I understand that miners vote, not nodes, however, I think it's important to at least help SegWit by running the pro-SegWit node.

PS: Please don't talk here about BU vs SegWit, my question is just about running SegWit node. Period.

Hello,
I have only a little knowledge about these scaling solutions so I want to ask if it's possible to somewhat combine these two solutions. Like, change the transaction protocol according to SegWit to allow off-chain solutions (Lighting Network) while letting the miners choose a size of the block. Is this possible?

Is this troll still active (IAmNotAnonymous)? 

"IamNotAnonymous" - well, you're really weird. Do you at least have some technical understanding of Bitcoin itself?

Does anyone know, if the email on original Bitcoin paper is still active?

Is this crazy price spike real?

So no-one has proof of life since then?