UK retail investors tobe offered a bitcoin price tracker directly (through Hargreaves Lansdown)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/investing...in-investment/

No. the fee has nothing to do with Trezor itself.

The fee is chosen by the software that accesses the wallet stored on the Trezor. maybe trezor software (chrome app) isn't great.

I use mycelium on my android and the fee is always reasonable (for the current times).

It's all about inputs (and outputs.)

When you send a TX, generally you have 2 outputs: 1) ouput is the address you send money to and 2) is change so the leftover goes back to your own wallet.

Now for inputs, it depends. A lot of the time, your wallet will just use 1 input so the transaction stays small. But if you send 10 times 0.2 BTC to your wallet and you want to spend 1.5 BTC, your wallet will have to use 8 inputs. Note: it doesn't matter if you send 10 times to same address, inputs are different from address.

So I guess because the TX amount was larger, you probably needed more inputs, resulting into more bytes and fees. But if, in this example, you only had 1 input of 2 BTC, it would still only use 1 input so there is definitely no direct connection between TX amount and fee.

When the alternatives are days or weeks and even more expensive, of course.

Made attempt at figuring out what metrics are important to value bitcoin:
treasureinvesting.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-to-value-bitcoin.html

Where are people storing their bitcoin now a days?

Assuming we get a chain split on the 1st or shortly thereafter is it safe to put them on a paper wallet? Or does it need to be on something like an Electrum? Or a Nano s?

I get that if it does not split after BIP148 any of those is fine, but assuming it does what do people think is best?

If I deposited via debit card to Coinbase and have a GBP wallet - how they hell do I get my money out? Do I have to do the Sepa bank wire thing deposit and then withdraw that way? Why do they make it so complicated and annoying for 'rec' Bitcoin users.

Could someone give somewhat objective explanation of the BIP148 uasf **** that is going on all over the reddit etc. There just seems to be so many opinions and contradicting information out there that I just am not really sure what to think of the whole situation (haven't yet researched it too much).

What actually BIP148 is trying to accomplish?
How can it be activated if we they don't get majority of miners to go for it?
Are majority of miners not going for it?
Who the **** are actually supporting it, if its not miners?
If majority ofminers don't start mining it, the BIP148 chain just becomes basically altcoin?

Is it a good solution?





Yeah, kinda lazy to ask these questions before researching it properly, but there seems to be pretty smart people here, so figured I'd get some good discussion going on in here.

Also, what other places are good to read discussion about this stuff, reddit/bitcoin is basically the only stuff I read, and a lot of people seem to be pretty ******ed out there (applies to most reddit subs from what ive seen).

Get segwit activated without having to compromise on blocksize with the miners.

It will be activated on a chain that is split of the non-UASF chain. This chain will have less hash power.

No, it seems only 1-2 pools are supporting this. I would be very surprised if it gets more than 20% on August 1st.

"The community". Basically a bunch of loud dreamers who do not realize that Bitcoin is now a multi billion dollar business. You will not be able to change the fundamentals of Bitcoin by "protesting" like this just because you have invested a few hundred bucks in running a node. (Neither should you be able to).

Yes.

No. IMO it has been pretty clear for a long time now that the only solution to the scaling situation is some kind of compromise like the 2MB+segwit agreement. It would be a lot more productive if "the community" supported a realistic solution like that instead of continuing insisting on getting their way when it is clear that the miners (who are actually in control of Bitcoin) object.

This is a good observation and it goes for both the r/Bitcoin and r/btc subs. Everyone is so emotionally invested it is mostly a big waste of time. Not really sure if there are any good open places for discussion any more. What has worked well for me is trying to make up my own mind on stuff and discuss it with a few friends on Skype etc.

It would not be a chain split in the conventional way, as it would still be valid for the non-UASF BIP148 miners and nodes, it would just be shorter. That means that if it were ever to catch up, it would reorganize the entire non-UASF BIP148 chain, making all transactions there invalid. That's very different from the consensus rule changing fork that would have happened had Bitcoin Unlimited forked. I don't think this will happen, but it IS a possibility.

It's both wrong and not very objective, to say that the miners control Bitcoin, and that the users shouldn't be able to be in the driver's seat with regards to changes to the protocol. It's pretty uncontested that most users want segwit activated. The only major players opposing it are Bitmain and Roger Ver.

The problem with BIP148 is that it will cause a lot of disruption if it does not have at least 51 % miner support on august 1st. With such a short timeframe, it's way too reckless to be recommended by the developers, which will in turn make it so much less likely to succeed.

A much more likely scenario is that, if no other solution solves the issue before then, that BIP149 gets community and developer support, and activates segwit some time in 2018.

What is the Core's side in all this hassle?

BIP148's objective is to activate SegWit for the 80% of users who have their nodes ready to handle it. It does this by making a new rule - miners must signal readiness for SegWit in every block they mine, and only mine on top of blocks that signal SegWIt, effective Aug 1.

The economic incentives are what will drive the majority of the miners. Imagine you have a bunch of restaurants that only sell rancid food in a city. You have no options. However, you could say "I will only come to your restaurant if you make food that is not rancid". The majority of restaurants say "we don't care, we won't do that! You will eat what we serve!" You gather a bunch of your friends in the town and decide that on Aug 1, you will stop eating at any restaurant that still serves rancid food. If you gather very few, many will ignore you. But if you have sufficient numbers, they will have no choice. The restaurants that serve rancid food will not get many customers. In this case, there is a strong economic incentive for the restaurants to meet customer demand.

In the Bitcoin case, it's more severe due to how the blockchain is handled. If you have *stricter* rules than someone else, your chain is valid for them every time, but their chain is not always valid for you. Since the rules of Bitcoin state that the chain with the most work that is valid is the real chain, this means that the 148 chain is ALWAYS valid (but not always the most work) for the legacy clients, but the opposite is not always true. Because of this, if the mining majority ever gets behind 148, even years into the future, then the entire chain from the split until that day gets erased from history for the legacy chain. Gone. If you had coins on that side without having coins on the 148 chain, you no longer have any Bitcoins. You are done.

So that's a very asymmetric risk.

Now it isn't certain how many people are in favor of 148. Personally, I will be using that chain no matter what happens. I will be selling every coin I have on the legacy side and buying as many 148 coins as I can. I figure I might be able to get 50:1 or 100:1. If 148 is successful, which I think it has a reasonably chance of being, then I just increased my wealth by 50-100x. If it's not, we just have two coins, except one coin now has more features and should be cheaper to transact, and I have roughly the same value as before. Pretty easy situation for me.

Mining right now has a few big players. The biggest chip manufacturers are Bitmain (~70% market share) and BitFury. BitMain operates AntPool and also has very close "relationships" with other pools, such as ViaBTC. These relationships are pretty much to the point where they are the same pool - Bitmain can keep all these pools in line by threatening to stop selling chips if they ever defy the party line. There are strong suspicions that many of these pools aren't even really separate entities other than for show. You'll routinely notice Bitmain controlled hashpower shift between these pools to boost them up.

Bitmain is adamantly against Segwit (it breaks their patent infringing Asicboost chips that give them 20-30% optimizations in power usage), and has been fighting it from the start. They will NOT activate SegWit, and have used numerous stall tactics. BIP148 and BIP149 came as a result of users realizing that there is no way to ever get the supermajority of hashpower on board. Rather than being a user protection, BIP9 (where 95% of miners must signal readiness) became a miner veto. So we must now use other means - BIP8 replaces BIP9 (I doubt 9 will ever be used again). BIP8 allows miners to activate safely ahead of time, but at the expiration period, the rules automatically come into effect, regardless of the miners wishes. This will be useful for miners who feel pressured by state actors to block future privacy enhancing features as well.

Back to the majority of miners- if the economic majority is on the 148 chain, then the price of coins on that chain will be higher. This means that any miner that mines that chain will be making more money than the other. Miners, having expenses to pay, will eventually have no choice than to move to that chain. Once the majority of miners are moved and outworks the other chain, then the other chain gets wiped out. Sorry for your loss.

I would not consider miners the decider of what is an altcoin or not. Miners do not have that power. The economic majority does. If the 148 chain is higher valued than the legacy chain, I would certainly consider it Bitcoin. If it's only used by a few people, then it's probably an alt-coin. I would still use it as an alt-coin - It has the advantages I list above (cannot get wiped out, unlike legacy, has SegWit, bigger blocks, no hostile miners).


I would recommend reading uasf.co for more information (I'm the author of a lot of it). I've had numerous discussions with the author of BIP148 and BIP149, Shaolinfry, so I have given him a great deal of feedback and understand quite a bit of the motivations.

If you do have any more questions, I'd be happy to answer.

If you are unsure about BIP148, I would recommend strongly to make sure you control your coins with your own private keys (use a wallet like Bitcoin Core, Electrum, etc...), rather than a trusted third party like Coinbase. If Coinbase is unprepared, which from all signs it appears that they are, they could have a massive loss and be unable to ever pay back what they lose. Even if it's a small risk, you are better off keeping your own coins, sitting tight, and seeing what happens before you act.

Another thing to mention - most transactions you send after August 1 will be valid on BOTH chains. This means that if you send legacy coins, you also will be sending BIP148 coins to the same place. There are protections to split them, but it will take about a day to be able to use them, and you will have to actively seek them out. I would recommend being extremely cautious in the week up to and after Aug 1. I would also anticipate a huge rush of getting coins out of 3rd party sites leading up to Aug 1, so be sure you do it well in advance or expect to pay a large fee.

Sorry for being dense...... but how do you sell legacy coins and buy 148 coins?
Will they be listed as such on the exchages?

thx in advance

Core is not very monolithic in this. There are a lot of different opinions.

Luke-jr is strongly in favor of 148 and is championing a lot of its revival.

Eric Lombrazo is also strongly in favor of it.

Wladimir van der Laan (the lead maintainer) runs a 148 node and has spoke positively of it.

Peter Todd thinks its a bit risky but would love to see it work.

Others are more resistant:

Greg Maxwell does not like it and thinks its too risk and wants to do 149 instead.

Matt Collaro is even more conservative and isn't even a fan of 149 (would rather just have status quo).

Core likely will not merge 148 without strong support in the community. Much of the community won't touch it until Core merges it... so chicken and egg issue.

Thanks for the post, and thanks for the info from uasf.com. Very helpful.

I know electrum has said publicly that they will support both chains, so you feel storting coins on there is reasonable even post split assuming it happens?

This is is not a dumb question by any means. If you own Bitcoin today, you'll one 1 Bitcoin today, you'll own 1 Legacy Chain coin and 1 BIP148 coin after the split (assuming that there is a split).

Splitting them means doing one of two things:

1) You spend them in a transaction that is not valid on one side. Since new coins are minted on each block after the split, you would mix your coins with the coins minted (spend in the same transaction), the result outputted is not valid on the other chain.

2) The other way is to make two transactions that spend the two coins but go to different addresses. You send one on one network and the other on the other network. This can work well if one chain is more clogged and requires higher fees. In this case, one transaction may confirm on one chain, but might not on the other due to a backlog. Then you spend with higher fees on the higher fee chain (after the other has been confirmed), and your coins are now split.

Some exchanges will likely support this.

First the probability of this happening is low according the prediction markets, so don't get your hopes up. Second what we saw from the hardfork of ETH exchanges are pretty fast at listing both coins. Most exchanges will split them for you, so you deposit on both chains and get your account credited on both chains. Or you just make sure you have a client that supports sending on only one chain and do it yourself.

Electrum is a good wallet because they never have your coins. You have all the information needed to protect yourself. With that comes great responsibility - if you lose your password or keys, you are out of the money! If someone else gets this information they can steal your coins! So be careful.

Electrum connects to trusted servers, so you aren't as certain the coins are yours as if you were using a full node. But it's a reasonable way to do things for small amounts, and certainly reasonable if you already have confirmed the money is yours, or come from someone you trust. In that case, you would use them to spend.

So if you have btc on trezor or nano, then say you send that coin in September to an exchange, the exchange should recognize that u now have 2 coins? Bip148 and legacy?

Figured I'd ask this one, where do you store your bitcoin?

Regarding softforking SW:

TomCollins,

Thank you for your BIP148 explanation. It certainly lacks elegance (the proposal, not your explanation of it.)

My question is: if a soft fork occurs where one chain becomes at risk for being orphaned and the other does not- why wouldn't everyone choose the risk-free chain? I understand why miners might not mine on the new chain for economic reasons, but why would a transactioner ever use the legacy chain?

This sounds like it could be a huge disaster for bitcoin.

Ya that is kind of my take as well, it seems insanely confusing

Agree.

It's taken me like 2 weeks of real study about it just to be able to kinda know wtf is gonna happen. Tho that is coming from a position of zero knowledge about bitcoin forks.