Thanks, that's a fantastic post. I wish this sort of info was prominently displayed somewhere or easily found. I often feel like bitcoin would benefit from some kind of promotion group or public info resource.  I know the info is all out there, it's just incredibly hard to find what you're after without asking someone for it.

My understand is limited, but from what I've gleamed, the lightning network is the protocol, and for it to be successful, apps and other systems will need to be built on top of it.

So is there a plan of how it will play out?

We're at the live beta testing stage now of the lightning network protocol, however, there is no consumer level software for the network yet.

Is the next step for developers to create lightning network apps for businesses and consumers? If so, who's creating these apps? Is the core team working on an implementation of an app similar to bitcoin-qt?

Great stuff, thanks for these updates on the project

I did about 200 captchas or so a while ago during the distribution period. Is there any chance I would've been distributed any raiblocks or was I shit out of luck? I remember the competition being so stupid that it was pointless for me to continue because I just couldn't keep up with what other people were somehow doing in the captchas.

If you don't believe in the project, that's fine, just sell and forget. I'm still hugely impressed by what the team has done, the accomplishments they've made, and the actions they've taken (particularly burning a huge number of coins - very rare in this sphere).

Price action does not matter. It only matters to you if you're a short term speculator/trader/pump and dump guy.

If you think the project has merit long term, it's a buying opportunity.

From memory there was a very specific data related reason why bitcoin was capped at 21 million.

Something along the lines of  (bad example:) there's 8 bits in a byte, and therefore we have 0 digit figures - increasing the digits requires adding a full extra byte which increases data requirements / processing requirements / bandwidth / etc.

Pretty sure there may be a legit opposition to this, but then again, it may be inconsequential at this point in time. Perhaps it only mattered 8 years ago.

Honestly I think this is a huge part of it. The developers really failed at communicating what the change was to the average user. Now some might argue that it isn't their job, but there certainly should be some responsibility there for some party.

Anyway, yes, I think the reason there's a lot of hate, is because ther'es a lot of ignorance. People just genuinely do not comprehend how complicated bitcoin is, and how changes like segwit work, and what they do.

The implications of changes are also widely underappreciated and undercommunicated.

Too many miners quitting due to loss of profitability = bitcoin security degraded = attacks more likely and bitcoin weaker.

Bad scenario - miner profits drop significantly, miners cannot continue mining, miners sell mining equipment at a discount en masse, a malicious party/government buy up surplus mining equipment, and mine as an attack, not for profit.

That's the danger of the above.

You're right that mining finds an equilibrium, but if that equilibrium is, for example, 50% of previous hash power, that's a HUGE problem.

If you think something has value based on it's exchange price, or whether or not it is listed on an exchange. You really, really shouldn't be investing.

Buy OPUS if you believe in what they are doing. If you don't believe/don't care. Just sell it now and save us the hassle of reading your ignorant posts.

If you believe in OPUS and the price drops, great, you could buy more on sale if you want to.

Making decisions based on the market is so utterly stupid I'm almost lost for words. Make your decisions based on whether you think the OPUS product will be successful/won't be (hint - the success of OPUS has nothing to do with it being on an exchange).

This is a partially concerning part, but it may also be comforting. I'd need to do the math on it first to decide.

After halving, Block reward may as well be at zero. So let's ignore it for the moment. Over the long term, electricity consumption will be dictated by fees paid by users. The total fee (# of txs * average fee) will need to at minimum = the cost of electricity.

A couple things can happen with this:

1. Bitcoins price increases dramatically and covers the ever increasing electricity demands
2. We reach an efficiency bottleneck with ASICs and electricity consumption requirements level off (seems unlikely and also you could just manufacture more asics - so I think this ones out)
3. Average fee price increases to meet the increased demand of electricity
4. # of txs increases to increase the total fees paid
5. Bitcoin doesn't increase in value, fees and txs don't increase, miners hit a bottleneck due to the cost of electricity and profitability. Bitcoin becomes less secure.

Guys still waiting on Lykke to be added. Last statement was 3 months ago that it was being added and still nothing?

It's really tiring hearing people constantly complain about prices. If you don't believe in the product, don't buy it. If you're trying to make a quick buck, you don't get to complain about prices. You're taking a risk by gambling and when you lose, you take it out on the team who are building the product.

News flash - the team behind the product never give a shit about the price. They care about the product. All the people gambling in the time until the product is developed and released are just that - gamblers.

If you believe in OPUS and the team, the price is irrelevant because you're in for the long haul.

That's fantastic. Is there any worries with ERC20 integration? i.e. any pitfalls people need to look out for during regular use?

A sensible advance of userbase is what's required. You don't want an explosion in growth and a bug gets uncovered that kills reputation. Increased users benefit everyone with increased trade volumes and lower spreads, but it also stresses the system and extreme events are more likely so it needs to be robust.

Essentially I'm saying I agree and hope expansion happens, but we need to take it slow and have patience. Do it once and do it right. No need to rush.

You are correct, I just checked it out.

Looks like it's all been thought of and put in place.

I suppose the idea of consolidating coins at single addresses into single tx outputs pro-actively without user input would be denied due to the privacy implications and fees required? I guess there's no way around it and it's kind of a dead end to help with UTXO growth?

Thinking about it the best thing to do would be to manage the creation of txs better to minimise utxo,

e.g.

A single address has:
utxo a = 2btc
utxo b = 5btc

if you're making a new tx, you'd empty "utxo a" first, you wouldn't take 2btc from "utxo b" and leave 3btc remaining in a new "utxo c" controlled by the original address as that would be wasteful.

I believe the above is already being done? - *edit - yes. This is how bitcoin core operates. In fact it operates in a more sophisticated way.

*edit: found an old article discussing this very idea: https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-optimizing-unspent-output-selection-a3e5d05d13ef

Perhaps what would be a useful suggestions is making UTXO transparent to wallet users.

I transfer random amounts generally. There's no rhyme or reason to the values unless they're direct payments. If I'm transfering to an exchange, I transfer whatever number I feel like.

It would make more sense if I could see that I have UTXO of value X, then I can choose a transfer of exactly that amount.

If this was transparent in the wallet and it advised the user "hey, match a UTXO or the sum of some UTXO and you will get lower fees". That could be beneficial in some way.

I want to add some definitions to this discussion as it was difficult for me to understand exactly what's talked about.

This is often the problem where very technical minded folks can't adjust their language to their audience. So here's some extra definitions

Output:
Output in a tx contains two fields: a value field for transferring satoshis, and a pubkey script for indicating conditions for those satoshis to be further spent.

https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference#compactsize-unsigned-integers


So the thing that I found it hard to get my head around, but now I understand, is that it doesn't matter if the coins are all at one address or multiple addresses. Because it's not relevant. Each tx you receive has a script that has certain criteria to spend the coins included in that tx. You need to satisfy the script for each tx to spend each coin. You can't just assume because all the coins are at one address they're the same. They're not.

Although...

That leads me to a thought.

Could you have all your coins sent to a single address, and then make a second transaction of all those coins once again to a single address? Would that reduce the UTXO set?

e.g,:

tx 0 > address 1
tx 1 > address 1
tx 2 > address 1
tx 3 > address 1
tx 4 > address 1
tx 5 > address 1
tx 6 > address 1

In this case UTXO set is 7. If I then did a transfer like this:

address 1 > tx 7 > address 1

Now UTXO set is 1


I believe it would work wouldn't it? It's a two step process but it would consolidate the UTXO set.

Thank you Danny, that's exactly how I had interpreted it. So segwit although a softfork, did introduce trust into legacy nodes. Only new segwit nodes are fully validating transactions.

Interesting idea, one thing to note is that this would result in the loss of historical transaction data prior to the snapshot unless further stratification of the network occurred i.e.:

* Full nodes with historical txs
* Full nodes with snapshots
* SPV nodes
* Web wallets

However, I guess this would allow a new type of fully verifying node to exist, which would be good.

I know that the idea of change addresses were there to give some measure of privacy to the user, but is that really necessary for it to be the default? With the growth of the UTXO causing some of the major hurdles in bitcoin growth, could it be changed to an opt in privacy setting?

I know at the moment coin control is available, but it's hidden behind the advanced settings and is not the default. Privacy is the default, which I sympathise with, but I would ask is it worth it when bitcoin isn't really private anyway? Would it be worthwhile putting it in reverse? Making new change addresses as the opt-in part? And returning change to the original address the default?

Perhaps it won't make a difference because most txs are by exchanges and they wouldn't alter their method of tx creation, perhaps this this isn't a good idea because of some other reason... I'm no genius on this.

I've searched but haven't really seen it floated before, anyone got an input?