The truth is that there's nothing dangerous in the XT fork, and the "smallblockers" are fully aware of this.

Either there will be a clear voting majority behind the push to bigger blocks, or there won't even be a fork. No fork will begin until 75% of the hashing power will start supporting it. In that case it will be crystal clear which fork can claim itself being Bitcoin, and which instead will end up as an altcoin.

Maybe I'm missing something, please correct me if I'm wrong.

In the event of an empty mempool (and with a 0 btc subsidy), for a miner to obtain a profit would be necesary to wait until enough new fee paying transactions enter into the mempool, otherwise keep mining at a loss.

Isn't this the same as saying

"In order for a transaction to be added to the blockchain, a sufficient fee must be provided"

Just finished reading it. Well done.

WRT my choice of word, guess what ? English is not my native language. Are you going to pick on me for this ?

But you know what ? I think that I like the image you are referring to. It conveys exactly the idea of what you are doing with that quote: you squash and grind its content, keeping only what you are interested in and discarding what you can't use.

WRT the "Bitcoin Civil War", keep on dreaming. If you think that "you" will be able to stop people from running the code they think will suit their needs, be my guest

You should keep in mind this while posting.

Maybe then you would take a full quote of a post, instead of just extracting a part out of its context in order to prove your point.


But I guess that intellectual honesty has never been your goal here

Yes, they're not expensive, especially the spam ones. And guess why is that so ? Because there's no room for those transactions in a 1MB block, and  whoever is sending them can just resend them over and over again without actually spending a dime on them.

The problem is that currently Bitcoin (the protocol) is conflated with Bitcoin Core (the software). Until this state of things changes we are de facto running a centralized system, with veto power in the hands of a few selected ones. And this is what bothers me the most.

Whoah, that's a bit harsh. I wouldn't agree on saying minix is Tanenbaun only contribution, there's so much more from him, despite being proven "wrong" on the specific monolithic/microkernel debate.

Apart from that, I agree with you on SC and LN (currently mostly vaporware) being an essential part of a 1MB chain in order to make it valuable.

I received one of these at the beginning of this week, I put it at work and this is what it's giving me atm:


I had a spare cpu cooling fan, I decided to give it a try putting it above the stick heatsink. Without the fan the stick was mining at an average of 3.7Gh/s, with a WU of about 23.0/m - it really gets hot

Just to share it, I'm having fun with it - it's my first miner after all 

On the other hand:
Spammer spends 0 (no fees) while whole network spends K for bandwidth

Edit: I agree in full with Peter R and what his table reports.

We don't.
But why should a single node owner pay for the storage used by every other node in the network, instead of bearing just its share ?
Because that's what it looks you're implying...

Well, strictly speaking, actually no, in order to obtain a bitcoin it doesn't require a BT, it's just the exchange part that requires it. Since you asked specifically for it I thought it could be useful to recap some of the available methods. Still, there are other ways to obtain bitcoins that don't involve a BT.

Just to name a few: localbitcoin (peer to peer exchange), ATM (Robocoin/Lamassu), mining (as unfeasible or expensive it may seem, it's still a valid method), donations (remember the "Hi mom, send bitcoin here" sign a few months ago?), or even salary (yes, there are employers who offer this opportunity to their employees).

As per your question, I'm not aware of exchanges accepting credit cards. Too much fraud risk, generally speaking (Oh, the irony).


Questionable assertion. Anyone could benefit from a discount offered in BTC prices at the present time, even while currently possessing 0 BTC.
 
If the company A ("Dell") offers the possibility to either

1) Purchase an item at full USD price or
2) Purchase an item with a x % discount if priced through BTC

I'd say that if the discount is greater than the expenses for the BTC conversion you end up paying a lower price, whether you have "cheap" BTC or not.

How about this:

I send the USD to the exchange in any way it's available to me, preferably with the cheapest one.

It could one of these:
ACH for Coinbase
Plain wire transfer (most of the exchanges)

Or even these:
Astropay (Bitstamp).
SEPA (Bitstamp, Kraken, and so on)
...

The point is, even if there are middle-man fees with all these methods, you will end up with BTC, which in turn gives you more purchasing power (due to discount, offers, etc) than you would have if you used USD directly.

I second this. Can you at least maintain the total accumulated swap cost visible in the same place it is now, just for reference ?

Agreed.

I think that overall this will be a positive development for bfx. It will help reduce the risk of the platform and address some of the concerns regarding the current amount of swaps.

That's not entirely true.

This is what will happen starting from July 21st.


The leverage will vary depending on the type of collateral.

I have a question too.

Assume I hold a LONG BTC position with the swap set to TERM.


How will this work, in case the position is full leveraged but still above the margin call level,
i.e. the Tradable Balance is equal or less than 0  and the Margin Balance is above the Required Margin ?

Thank you

Just a quick reply, I'm a long time lurker of this forum. In my opinion many people fails on estimating the swap rates on finex. It's true that the amount of open longs is really high, and the swap cost has been driven up to extortionary rates, but most of the swap has been taken at a much lower rate.

This is an actual example:

Swaps currently provided
Currency    N. of Swap Contracts (of 1 unit each)    Rate (% per day)    Opened at    Expire in    Actions
USD    2000.0    0.09%    21 May 10:44    2 days    Notify

As you can see this is a long term swap provided (granted, not my most successful swap contract...).
This has not even been placed as an autorenew. At that specific moment this was the highest request available, the FRR was even lower (about 0.07%, if I remember correctly).

My point is that in the 24M USD amount are included really low interest rates, and many of that longs have been opened at about 490/500. Again, I don't claim these are the most successful trades, but they're still there.

I don't think this is a stupid question, I am definitely interested in a reply from the Bitfinex staff.
I also have a question for the staff. This is an excerpt from a translation of the PBOC statement, please bear with me for possible errors:


Will this affect your current policy on verification ? I don't mind being verified if need be, but it's a hassle I would rather avoid if I am not strictly required to in order to use your platform.

I'd bet you have already looked into this, but have you considered a bank from the same group of Bitstamp ?
I'm not sure about it, but I believe that you could obtain bank deposits/withdrawals in the same day even between banks in different countries, if they belong to the same group. This has been reported somewhere in this forum some time ago, so it must be taken with a grain of salt.

If this is indeed confirmed, you could try and find a country with a lower systemic risk than Slovenia.

I'm considering myself opening an UniCredit Group account in my country, should what I said above be confirmed and my needs require it.