Lightning Network

This terms explains everything in a clever way, so I’ll simply reiterate for the laziest who don’t feel like clicking a link:

You and I sign a contract.

As long as we both respect it, no one else needs to know we have this contract. But if I try to screw you, you want to be sure there’s someone who can force me to desist.

That’s Lightning Network: the contract is a smart contract, the enforcer is the blockchain. As long as no one breaks the law, millions of smart contracts can be stipulated simultaneously off chain, thus reducing greatly the amount of congestion on chain, but as soon as there’s a contentious, the smart contract can be broadcasted on the network (classic BTC transaction) and the power of blockchain will fix the issue. As simple as that. It’s just the translation of common practices into crypto-space.

If you don't mind spend a few minutes and investigate my record. I trust I can went through your strict standards, if not I will attempt progressively and return later.

A debt of gratitude is in order for your opportunity Sir.

Good day. Thanks for creating thread like this.  Please review also my merited quality post.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3332970.msg35209623#msg35209623
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3290430.msg34799486#msg34799486
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3282028.msg35305895#msg35305895
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3375677.msg35384164#msg35384164
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3294367.msg35556217#msg35556217

Thank you so much. More merits to come !

Great thread for us . Hoping to get more merits. Please check my quality post.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3332970.msg35209623#msg35209623
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3290430.msg34799486#msg34799486
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3282028.msg35305895#msg35305895

Thank you so much sir.

Absolute yes for me , why?

The problem that governments created by monopolising the issuance of currency and thrusting fiat systems of finance and currency upon the world.

✦ 100% voluntary and non-coerced or forced upon people

✦ Users/owners are free to do with it what they will and use it in whatever way they like

✦ Fraud/counterfeiting (which are standard practice in banking/government finance systems) are completely impossible

✦ No central entity means no single point of failure and a distributed mining/accounting system means an incredibly resilient and powerful network (The Bitcoin network outperforms the top 500 supercomputers combined | ExtremeTech)

✦ Inflation (creation of money) happens at a stable rate and halves every four years, creating a limited supply of 21 Million Units - this solves a problem that central banks and governments have created

✦ Free transfer and free to hold - this solves the problem that banks created

#Proof of ownership
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This is a difficult one, as I am not invested in bitcoin and heavily invested in real estate. Real Estate has some significant advantages. One, it is tangible. You can touch it, paint it, plant trees in it, this makes one less nervous on valuation volitility. Two, people will always need a place to live, Amazon, Google, Apple will not make an alternative to a roof over your head and a place to keep your stuff. Three, you can borrow most of the acquisition. Four, you can depreciate it and chew up some of the earnings. Four, you can cash out refi without cap gains or dilluting your ownership percentage. Five, you can make improvements and raise the rent to force cap appreciation. Six, you can live in it in a pinch.

Downside, and this is why it is a difficult case, you are tied to a local that can have economic trouble, natural disasters, or massive regulatory shifts that can blow you up. Bitcoin seems protected from that.

This question deserves a detailed explanation so stay with me. The canadian dollar and the US Dollar are both affected by oil prices but DIFFERENTLY!

Oil Prices and Oil Exchange

In 2014 when OPEC (Organization of Petrol Exporters) decided that they would maintain the supply of oil despite it’s plummeting prices this had detrimental impact on the Canadian economy, because Canada is one of the largest exporters of oil to the US this meant that it became more difficult for their oil prices to remain competitive. It became more difficult for Canada to sell oil at profitable prices, this sent the Canadian economy down the drain. However the US Economy flourished because of how easy it was and still is to get oil.

Crypto market continues with its positive show with Bitcoin Cash being the show-stopper. Analysts remain bullish on the future. Crypto markets continue its positive momentum as the Bitcoin prices are now just short of $9,000 levels with the total cryptocurrency market cap approaching the $400 billion mark. Last week proved to very good for crypto enthusiasts as the bulls were seen taking charge of the markets. The crypto surge added $80 billion to the overall market valuations as per the global charts on CoinMarketCap, and this price-rally has been majorly contributed by Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple besides other altcoins.

At the press time, Bitcoin is trading at $8,927.27 while the overall crypto market valuations are at $399 billion, according to the data on CoinMarketCap.

As the U.S tax deadline passed away last week, analysts believe that the Bitcoin price rally to the $20000 mark is just to kick-in. Fundstart analyst and Bitcoin proponent, Tom Lee said: “We believe the ‘winter’ is ending for Bitcoin, as the crypto to fiat pressures from tax day subside, and as headline risks seem to be fading.”

Considering the CoinsharesCrypto ETF, which is a major indicator of BTC price movements, he said: “We believe large institutional investors globally use this ETF as a way to quickly gain exposure to Bitcoin. Hence when shares rise, big money is buying bitcoin.”

Bitcoin Cash is seen once again leading the pack today posting a nearly 20% gain while trading just short of $1400 levels. It looks like as the Bitcoin Cash hard fork is approaching closer, more and more traders are lining up to grab this Bitcoin derivative at the earliest. The new Bitcoin Cash hard fork scheduled next month in May is expected to bring new features to the network along with simplified smart contracts that is driving the craze further.

Moreover, there has been a renewed positive in the market towards Bitcoin as the SegWit usage continues to grow since the beginning of the year. As per the latest data, Segwit transactions now amount to 32% of the total transactions while occupying 27% of the total block space in the Bitcoin network. Most of the crypto exchanges and wallets have now adopted the change and the use of SegWit is now giving a further push to the most awaited Lightning Network development.

Last month, Lightning Labs released the first Bitcoin mainnet-ready Lightning Network after reaching 1000 active nodes. The Lightning Network is basically a second layer protocol developed atop the Bitcoin’s blockchain network, which takes transactions off the chain, thereby reducing congestion on the main network while expanding the blockchain’s operational abilities by manifold times. Later, it will add the record of all these transactions to the BTC’s blockchain network.

Former JPMorgan banker, Daniel Masters is quite bullish on the future of digital currencies saying that they are fuelling a financial revolution. Masters currently heads the digital investment bank Coinshares and is the chief investment officer at Global Advisors.

Masters remains bullish on the crypto growth story and says that the future looks to be promising with the crypto markets being much bigger than they are today.


WHATS YOUR OPINION ABOUT THIS?

Read more at: https://beat.10ztalk.com/2018/04/23/bitcoin-price-is-heading-to-9000-while-total-crypto-market-climbs-to-nearly-400-billion-coinspeaker/

Bitcoin is King Kong

Do not mistake this. Bitcoin (BTC) is still standard of measurement against ALL other altcoins in the crypto world. And when BTC runs or when BTC dips, alts bleed. This is because BTC still rules them all.

And while I have answered questions regarding other coins in the past, I have only focused on altcoins with solid dev teams behind the coin and have the markings of a solid project. However, I never mistake those coins as better than BTC or long term holds.

For example, Ripple (XRP) has a solid run. Many people began buying into it as it started to run and at the all time high (ATH). Those who bought ATH, for example, learned a hard lesson. It took a hard dip and correction and many people were hurt (or in the crypto world, the term is they got “wrecked). However, if you were like me, I sold my XRP when it hit the ATH and put it into USDT, then jumped in on a BTC dip three days ago when BTC went from $15,000 to $17,400 (it jumped $2,400) and I pulled back to USDT.

While others who bought into Ripple, currently at $2.73 as of writing this, are waiting for the next price jump (to $3.00?), I made 20x as much buying into BTC while they wait for their profits

…because BTC is still the king.

Comodo provides free Anti-Malware software automatically detects and destroys the many different types of malware.

Even if you're the most careful PC user out there, malware can find a way to download itself onto the computer. A seemingly innocent email from a friend could in fact be a stealth method of exploiting security features. What appears to be a favorite website could in fact be an imposter, foisting its own malware on unsuspecting visitors. There are literally hundreds of ways in which personal information and entire operating system can be hijacked.

No, it will need to change or regulators will make it illegal to mine / transact Bitcoin, here are a few problems with Bitcoin…



The BIG Problem With Bitcoin

Many people believe that Bitcoin is the future currency of our world, others argue that it is a store of value. Whilst both could be true, there are fundamental issues with Bitcoin that need to be changed in order for it to scale to mass adoption.

In this article I will be listing the top 3 issues that Bitcoin faces in terms of scalability.

1. Energy consumption

A study from Digiconomist found that each transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain uses 236 KWh worth of electricity, this amount is enough to power 8 U.S households for an entire day.

Now to put things into perspective, there are over 300,000 transactions per day. At this rate, Bitcoin uses more electricity per year than the whole of Nigeria and this is only increasing.

Read more here: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist

Proof of work is vastly uneconomic and damages the environment at an alarming rate.

2. Scalability issues

Energy consumption will hinder the scalability issues of Bitcoin, however the other issue that arises with POW mining is that with the increase in cost associated with mining BTC it is less economical to mine Bitcoin. This would limit the distributed nodes (miners) globally and allow a larger percentage of control to the dominant mining pools / farms.

This would lead to a more centralised blockchain, where they can change the rules of BTC as they please.

The supply of Bitcoin is finite, capped at 21 million. Eventually (currently predicted for 2140) Bitcoin's supply will run out. Once this happens, miners will no longer receive rewards for completing blocks but instead will be given fees. The fees will be drastically high in relative terms, and people will stop using the blockchain.

Also, if miners decide that this is uneconomical for them to process the transactions and use their computing power elsewhere the speed of transactions for Bitcoin will drastically slow down, rendering one of the fundamental values of a Bitcoin (speed) useless.

3. The unknown future

Bitcoin is not a superior blockchain, there are hundreds of projects that are faster, cheaper and more valuable than Bitcoin. Bitcoin has market dominance because it is one of the first and most topical cryptocurrency (did you know that the price of BTC has a direct correlation to the amount of google searches). Here are a few things that could really end Bitcoin’s dominant era:

I) Blue chip company coming into the markets

This is more so for all cryptocurrencies, but Bitcoin in particular. It’s not a matter of if but a matter of when a blue-chip company such as Facebook, Amazon or Google decides to implement their own cryptocurrency, they will dominate the market.

The consumer's trust is already with these big companies, and they have the power and capital to influence the entire market.

Another possibility is a potential ‘world coin’ which global governments will all agree on using, this may seem unrealistic but it is definitely not impossible and many benefits would arise from having such a currency.

II) Quantum computing

Bitcoin is said to be Quantum resistant, on the whitepaper it mentions that:

‘To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases.’

This may seem quantum resistant but it is important to understand that the difficulty is changed every 10 minutes and this is more than enough time for QC to mine all of Bitcoin’s remaining coins.

The other issued that QC represents is that there is a possibility of QC calculating people’s private keys for their BTC wallet. I do not know the technical details of how this is done, but from what I have read this is possible.

III) Bitcoin bubble

My last point for this section is that Bitcoin is not being bought as a store of value or a currency by most people, for most people Bitcoin is a speculative investment hoping to make a fortune on something they really don’t know much about.

Once the bubble reaches its peak, and people start panic selling, Bitcoin will inevitably crash with that. After all, Bitcoin’s price is determined by demand vs supply.

In the light of a fair argument, I would like to point out that Bitcoin can change to tackle these issues and substantially increase its long-term survival. Bitcoin has a massive passionate community behind it and this reason why Bitcoin has grown to where it is today.

Thanks for reading,

What are ephemeral things in life?
Life is a complex mixture of ephemeral and interminable things, and one needs to identify them clearly in order to have a happy life.

People : Very rare people exist in one’s life for long time, others are just temporary. For example, colleagues, travel buddies etc.

Orgasm : Indeed, this has the shortest life span. Though a human has more than enough chances.

Trust : One wrong move and it gets shattered forever!.
Crushes : Most crushes a person gets in his/her lifetime, are short lived. If it exceeds more than 4 months, it is love already.

Happiness : It is also an ephemeral entity, it can completely vanish with one wrong incident.

Sorrow/ Sadness : Similar to happiness, it is also short-lived. Be happy.

What is ephemeral and what’s not, just depends on our attitude towards life. If we are optimist, they the happiness will not end so soon and vice-versa.

Thank you.

I think legalization and regulation of all drugs is going to be inevitable in a few decades.

A lot of drugs are already legal, just go to your nearest pharmacy. You can buy a lot of drugs here, many of them quite deadly (swallowing 20 pills of tylenol is a very bad idea).

If you want something stronger, even larger amount of drugs are illegal to buy only until you happen to have a prescription from a doctor (and a lot of doctors are sponsored by drug manufacturers to give you that prescription). Such drugs include opiates, benzodiazepines or amphetamines, and are responsible for more direct deaths than any illegal drug.

Most countries don’t see bitcoin as a competitor or a threat but take some security measures regarding how secure could be; for example, United States consider bitcoin not a coin but a commodity according to the IRS but in a report in recent years showed that only a small amount of people declare they have bitcoins and they treated as criminals.

The problem with these countries is that most of them have a monetary policy that guide them and they’re the only authority established by the State to create money.; that’s why the United States in a Congress Report suggested to consider them as a commodity (due the price fluctuation) and not a currency.

Lots of people are using bitcoin in order to find some financial help to save their assets. For example, in Venezuela bitcoin’s demand is big because their currency is dead, it’s useless to save something with the Venezuelan bolivar and too difficult to find dollars (USD) so they use bitcoin in order to save the money and hope to gain some value. It’s affecting in a small scale to the economy and the State is prosecuting those who use bitcoin. No joke. They detained two engineers for mining.

Technically speaking, financial freedom is when you have enough money to do whatever you want.

Depending on your "wants" this is easily possible.

The place to start is to calculate how much it costs (or would cost) to live your desired lifestyle.

Then you need to calculate how much of a lump sum you would need to produce this amount each year. The go-to school of throught is that through a properly diversified portfolio you can safely withdraw 4% of your initial sum each year and never run out of money.

So you just divide your cost of living by 4% and you get how much of a lump sum you need.

This provides you financial freedom.




Tips to get there fast:

1. Start investing early
2. Create a strict budget that allows you to save a lot of dough
3. Save (and invest) all you can

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It’s as safe as providing your Kyc details to any private sector Banks. Digital Wallets are now regulated by the RBI. At the end it’s the consumer trust what matters. Until a data breach happens all public and private sector banks and companies are good so having faith , trust and confidence is all what you can do.

My opinion is Mixed.

I recognize that the state has the authority to administer the death penalty. I have no problem with this, “in principal”. However, it is poorly administered and does not perform it’s function well if at all.

It is also vastly expensive as presently conducted.

I recognize that there are seriously bad people who will remain a danger to society for all their lives. Incarcerating them in inhuman conditions (like the “Supermax” prison) for life seems far more inhumane than execution.

At the same time, I recognize that many of these really bad people are insane, and that this mitigates to some degree their level of responsibility. Unfortunately, we have no reliable way to treat such people at this time.

The death penalty is inequitably administered. Everyone knows this. If you are poor and/or a minority, you are vastly more likely to be given “death” than if you are wealthy/white.

That’s unacceptable.

Additionally, programs like “the innocence project” have proved that many people presently on death row were in fact innocent and had been improperly convicted, either by incompetent representation, faulty evidence, jury bias, or prosecutorial malfeasance. (withholding exculpatory evidence, not putting contrary witnesses on the stand…)

That’s horrifying.

Our state just executed a fellow who had been on death row for 30 years. 30 years… Waiting to be executed.

Finally, the stated purpose of the death penalty is deterrence. That the prospect of being exeted will deter people from committing serious crimes. It doesn’t. Death-penalty crimes are committed either in a state of rage, or under the influence of psychosis, or due to long-standing pschological or psychiatric conditions.

There has not been any evidence shown (to my knowledge) that the death penalty provides any such deterrance. Instead, what it provides is vengeance. “Closure” as we so euphemistically say these days.