mempool

Anybody else read this? blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9b

It's so nice to see people hanging out here regularly again. :)

It's just so... orange

BTW if you ever need site search, there is always Corzoogle. PSA

I can neither confirm nor deny that I went on an editing spree. :p

I'm personally a big fan of staying alive

@MaxVernon this is kinda paranoid, but one thing that stopped me from order one is the idea that the cryptosteel's customer list is a goldmine. Probably a large portion of their customers will have hardware wallets stored at home. I suppose its not too different from any other hardware wallet manufacturer though

@MaxVernon Very true! I think that is a danger most people don't consider. Knowledge of a key makes you at least somewhat socially liable for those coins

I can't help but think 'bitcoin banks' will be a necessity for some users, though certainly the ecosystem should be built in a way that always allows a user to 'be their own bank', should they so desire

The stupider you make something, the more stupid people will use it.

Nevermind, found it. ;)

@Willtech No, Reddit is great at allowing everyone to engage, but terrible to filter signal from noise.

@vzn I thought he already had one

I just posted a cipher. It contains $50 worth of Bitcoin. puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/62588/…

though yes, I often want to strangle people who show up, don't understand SE, then get pissy with the people who try to wrangle them into proper form

I kinda feel bad for mark karpeles but this is all shrouded in incompetence

reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yjzdg/… @Murch

@Murch the chat room is gaining people

But I digress.. it still seems to me that the ability to pay for larger blocks is a larger existential threat to the network than the ability to pay for limited space. Or at least, given the advent layer 2+ solutions it is. Our proposals seem like a lot of meddling for marginal capacity gains XD

@GabrielR. Bitcoin is a payment system that is unprecedented in speed at low-cost. It's units are valuable because they are useful for transmitting money around the globe.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Let's summon Trogdor the burninator:

@NicolasBarbulesco Take a look at BIP 39, it allows you to back up a wallet file using a mnemonic seed phrase. The BIP 39 standard provides a fairly straightforward way of backing up and re-instantiating a wallet as need be, though it is safest to never have your private keys on an internet-connected device. afaik most hardware wallets use BIP39 to create an HD wallet

@PieterWuille lol, that's why they make windows ;-)

There's a balance between risk of loss and risk of theft, but having only one copy of your private keys seems like a very extreme and dumb idea.

@MaxVernon Having a single door also means that if it's on fire, you die.

@murch You can absolutely transfer ownership of BTC without a transaction. I suspect you mean "on chain" - but ownership is very different from control of private keys.

@NicolasBarbulesco If I met you in person, perhaps.

@Murch In theory, if it's your block, you could include your own zero fee transactions, right? But that's a limited use case.

@NicolasBarbulesco Not in the same way. Dedicated mining hardware is providing a valuable function to the network, and their operators are paid for by - exactly as the system was designed.

@fredsbend I expect that with a half decent laptop you can get 20 MH/s. The total network hashrate is 15 EH/s. That means you'll find one block in 750000000000. In other words, one block every 14 million years.

@MaxVernon There are good reasons why miners may occasionally produce an empty block, namely because they know about the previous block already (and want to build on top of it) but haven't validated it yet (so they can't decide what new transactions would be valid in a successor block).

@MaxVernon No shortlinks. Heretic! j/k

This might also interest you mining folks: poolprofit.io/en

@Murch, I can't wait. It's been almost 3 years since I woke up one morning and read the Lightning Network white paper. Feels like a long time, but in reality, this is very fast

newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/…

heh when is anything about bitcoin ever "normal"

Heh who likes my hat

@PHDLAB, publish the code snippet?

This is what leads to signature aggregation: we don't actually care to see signatures for each public key. We just want a proof of knowledge, and the signature is one way to accomplish that. Aggregated signatures accomplish that in a more compact and computationally cheap way.

Why would every full node in the world need to recompute it? The one signing the transaction already knows the outcome of that square root. He can just tell everyone, and let them verify it instead.

@MaxVernon Yes, it's in the 0.15 release notes: bitcoincore.org/en/2017/09/01/release-0.15.0

I agree with the advantages of having a sufficiently flexible script language so that it supports the efficient validation of most or all conditions you want for spending, but I disagree that implies a Turing-complete language.

There have been a few "succesful" ICOs in that they actually resulted in interesting technology that was developed - Ethereum in particular.

I must admit, it's more fun on the site with more people looking what's happening! :D

Winter is setting in, and I need a space heater.

However, the system is designed so that that should be against their own financial interests.