- Now that big blocks are dead again — remember how the Lightning Network was going to solve Bitcoin’s scaling problems by being a layer 2 network with Bitcoin being layer 1? With an almost-certain hub and spoke architecture producing things that would work like banks, and never mind the unsolved routing problems? Instead, they’re putting in a new network with banklike things to grab funds from the blockchain and disburse them for micropayment channels as layer 2, and LN can become layer three. As a sysadmin for developers, I’m pretty familiar with the antipattern “add another layer of indirection to avoid finally dealing with the actual hard bit,” and how it signals the project is circling the drain; perhaps the Lightning Network will prove me wrong. I’m also still after anything resembling an official document of how they expect the economics of the Lightning Network to work from a user and merchant perspective; if anyone knows of anything that isn’t third-party and isn’t obsoleted by this new proposal, please do comment.
- Meanwhile, the land of big blocks is using the transaction clog on the main chain for marketing: BTC.com will mine your stuck BTC transaction if you pay them to using BCH. They used to offer this service for Visa, but, well.
- Monero has has increasing dark web market adoption, and Chris DeRose thinks it’s approaching first place on the markets! Has anyone gathered numbers, even vague ones? Although the markets are unlikely to have convenient APIs for that sort of thing, at least some data could be scrapable … Gwern Branwen notes: “There are some attempts to infer sales volumes from reviews … But, crawling has been getting steadily harder and more unreliable so not sure anyone is still crawling for that particular purpose anymore (obvs LE is still crawling a ton for investigations etc).”
- SEC chairman Captain Clayton Obvious notes the obvious about the obviously security-like nature of ICOs, i.e., that they really obviously are, all of them. “I have yet to see an ICO that doesn’t have a sufficient number of hallmarks of a security.”
- Tim Swanson puts up a guest post from an attorney friend turned tech entrepreneur, attempting to make sense of the whole Tether controversy. I should note that I’ve been contacted by people from the company saying the controversy is all rubbish and I shouldn’t buy into it uncritically; so I need to get questions together and so forth …
- Ian Walsh on Bitcoin and how the past devouring the future is actually bad. “Deflationary money is reactionary.”
I've said it before and I'm saying it again and again: in order to beat old-world banking, crypto must be at least an order of magnitude better. Old-world banking offers free instant tx between private accts, and 15-cent txs to merchant accounts. Beat that or be obsoleted.
— Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) November 11, 2017
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What is Tx and txs?
common abbreviation for “transaction”. Tweets may expand to fit the 280 characters now available, but Twitter users will still think in abbrev txt spk …