My dad has been curious why I'm always hooked on to the computer reading about something called Bitcoin.
I'm from India. In our country Bitcoin is banned. So to him Bitcoin is a dark technology. He's concerned I might be moving to the dark side.

So I decided I should probably tell him things I've learnt in complete layman terms.
He doesn't understand any computer science. He doesn't know what a hash is.

I wish I had something I could share with him to help him understand.

In the end I decided to make one myself.

After much deliberation, I've gathered courage to share it with you guys too - if there's someone in your circles who'd want to learn Bitcoin from scratch without the jargon.

Here's the link : https://madhavan.nity.app/bitcoin-course-2dc/bitcoin-course---season-1-f6a

It's paid, but costs only $3. Just to cover my costs. I hope you don't mind.

I'd love to hear your feedback on this.

Also, i'll be grateful if you could spread the word too

Lots of love!

TRANSPARENCY: I'm the creator of the following course

I have a really low cost course (just $3) on getting started - without the technical jargon.
Feel free to check it out

https://madhavan.nity.app/bitcoin-course-2dc/bitcoin-course---season-1-f6a

It's for absolute beginners who know nothing about crypto or computer science.

Hi,
I have been working on a project in which i needed my users to login with an Ethereum address so that i am able to map the users with their corresponding Ethereum Address. I needed to do this in a way that there are no transaction fees involved and such that they don't have to be tied to a certain device with MetaMask.

So i built Dauth (https://dauth.co) which is similar to OAuth, but i tried to keep the architecture as opely decentralizable as i could.

I'd love to hear feedback on this.

A blog post i wrote on the same topic : https://medium.com/madhavanmalolan/login-with-ethereum-e6dbd408d46c

And, no this isn't an ICO. 

What are the economic incentives for the participants who run a Lightning node?

I am aware that there are over a 1000 nodes at this point, will this hold even after the novelty dies down?

What is in it for the people who maintain such huge (?) nodes, and locking up their own funds?

Bitcoin, Ethereum and the like have their own way to add coins in circulation through mining rewards. This keeps the economics (inflation vs liquidity) in balance.
How do altcoins/ERC-20s introduce coins in circulation?
The ones that i have seen either have a fixed supply or are minted by a central authority.

What are the best practises for introducing more coins? What are the market/economic dynamics one should be aware of before making this decision?
Are you aware of some coins that have an innovative approach on this?

It is not impossible for a crypto currency to fall to zero, bitcoin/ethereum included.
It is certainly possible on paper (51% attacks) - but Proof of Work has so far shown to be pretty stable against this threat.

From a life-savings point of view crypto currencies (majority of them) might be a bad investment. But blockchains as an invention is here to stay, and hence crypto currencies. It is hard to estimate which ones will make it through, which ones will sustain, which ones will receive mass adoption. But my bet is the concept of crypto currencies is here to stay irrespective of ups and downs.

Also, can someone point me to the right resources to learn about a Bounty program?
How is it structured?
How is it executed?

I am sorry for the ambiguity.
I am looking for ways that i can find people to invest in my ICO (if i do one).

Its been a while since we've been seeing ICOs happening.

Are there some guidelines one can come up with to reach out to the community and get them to participate in the ICO?

The most solid compilation that i have got to date is this :
https://medium.com/@mccannatron/guide-to-launching-an-initial-coin-offering-ico-94587af2c8d5

But this doesn't talk about how to make sure you are able to reach out to the potential investors for your ICO.

I know this is a very vague quesetion, but, any leads on this?

I am aware that you have to look for technical completeness/soundness and also look for a good team.

I am curious how do you evaluate a white paper on those guidelines?
How do you check if the project is sound from a technical standpoint, what are the elements you look for?
How do you validate a good team?

Just to add to the discussion ...
Transaction fees is collected by the miner. This becomes much more important once the mining rewards caps out (in year 2134). From that point on the only source of income for the Miners will be this transaction fees

What makes you say that the opening/closing will be that frequent?
If all payments move to LN, we might as well see these channels to be open for much longer (years?). People would close channels regularly today, but once LN is proven to be robust, i think the channels TTLs will increase in magnitudes.

I think the best programming language for an open source project especially at the scale of BitCoin is how strong the community is in that programming language. You don't want to scare people off by making some wierd language choices.

There are situations when a functional language might be better, but the opportunity costs associated with them for bitcoin was simply magnitudes higher.

No lightning?

I don't think Blockchain 3.0 is even a thing.
You can do a small exercise to replace Blockchain 3.0 with BS each time you see it.

Well, for blockchain 3.0 to happen, we first need to see blockchain 2.0

I don't think there has been any fundamental improvement over the bitcoin/blockchain technology that is definitively better than the one in use right now.
There are a bunch of other consensus mechanisms coming up, especially PoS and DPoS. But we are not yet at a point where we are better than the current systems.

We have only gotten to the stage where 1.0 works. We are a long while from 2.0. 3.0 ... ?

I don't think there was any disagreement in the fact that 2MB block sizes are good for scaling immediately.

It does introduce some amount of centralization in the sense that it will require more compute/storage to process and maintain the blockchain. But, i feel the tradeoffs at this point were not as significant as it has been shown in media.

However, the block size is best at which the network agrees. If everyone agrees on 2 MB or 4MB, is really just a small battle.
That said, the people who were against the 2MB upgrade had the following argument.

If we do a 2MB upgrade right now, we will point to this upgrade to say 'hey, the last upgrade worked fine, we can double the block size again'.
And if we keep increasing the block size, then the centralization becomes a real issue.

The reason why the 2MB upgrade was not done was to fix this problem in a future proof way - the layer 2 solution.

You need a ZK-SNARK to make this happen.

That means, you need some sequence of bytes that gets generated (because i assume you'd want to store it on a blockchain) which would need some information that a human has that a computer doesn't.

Consider this.
Assume a human does generate some byte sequence that a computer cannot produce. The human also needs to prove that he/she has provided the correct sequence.
This proof will be an algorithm that a computer can run on the byte sequence.

We have been able to device SNARKs in math because we understand the fundamentals of modulo operations (In case of public private key encryption), because we invented both math and computers.

I am not sure if we have an understanding at that level for any property associated with humans.
What is the underlying logic that creates a fingerprint/DNA? Can that logic be exploited to produce ZK-SNARKs?


PS : I add "ZK" because i'd assume you want to maintain privacy of the human

If bitcoin stays true to its ideal of being "trustless", it wouldn't move to PoS.
Because Proof of stake needs atleast some level of trust about who the validators are.  An entity can easily (relative to a 51% attack) fool others to believe in the malicious set of validators.

We are still far away from a full fleged implementation of PoS. Casper on Ethereum seems to be the best bet in the space. That too does budge from some ideals.
Given that, i think Bitcoin Maximalists won't make the move to PoS.

The energy consumption remains a valid concern. I don't think PoS is ready to be adopted to trade the security that comes with the energy burnt.

Best ways are
1. Find a job that pays in bitcoin (Full time/freelance)
2. Buy tokens over an exchange (like http://coinbase.com)
3. Mine - This is probably the hardest of the methods. You need to have a really good ASIC miner to make sure that you mine profitably. Joining a pool increases rewards.

    https://www.amazon.com/AntMiner-T9-10-5TH-0-136W-Bitcoin/dp/B079G8LH46/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1518700070&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=antminer&psc=1

    https://99bitcoins.com/beginners-guide-to-mining/

Happy mining!

The closest i can think of is "Mastering Bitcoin" book

https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Programming-Open-Blockchain/dp/1491954388/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1518699813&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=mastering+bitcoin&psc=1

Dives much deeper, but might be able to answer some of your basic questions