{"id":2106,"date":"2017-11-12T00:20:26","date_gmt":"2017-11-12T00:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=2106"},"modified":"2017-11-12T00:50:15","modified_gmt":"2017-11-12T00:50:15","slug":"news-lightning-network-new-layer-monero-popularity-ico-securities-tether-analysis-devouring-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2017\/11\/12\/news-lightning-network-new-layer-monero-popularity-ico-securities-tether-analysis-devouring-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"News: Lightning Network new layer, BCH your BTC, popular Monero, ICO securities, Tether analysis, devouring the past"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Now that big blocks are dead again &mdash; remember how the Lightning Network was going to solve Bitcoin&#8217;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&#8217;re putting in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tik.ee.ethz.ch\/file\/a20a865ce40d40c8f942cf206a7cba96\/Scalable_Funding_Of_Blockchain_Micropayment_Networks%20(1).pdf\">a new network with banklike things<\/a> 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&#8217;m pretty familiar with the antipattern &#8220;add another layer of indirection to avoid finally dealing with the actual hard bit,&#8221; and how it signals the project is circling the drain; perhaps the Lightning Network will prove me wrong. I&#8217;m also still after anything resembling an <i>official<\/i> 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&#8217;t third-party and isn&#8217;t obsoleted by this new proposal, please do comment.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Meanwhile, the land of big blocks is using the <a href=\"https:\/\/blockchain.info\/unconfirmed-transactions\">transaction clog<\/a> on the main chain for marketing: BTC.com will mine your stuck BTC transaction if you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.trustnodes.com\/2017\/11\/09\/can-now-accelerate-stuck-bitcoin-transaction-paying-bitcoin-cash\">pay them to using BCH<\/a>. They used to offer this service for Visa, but, well.\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Monero has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.deepdotweb.com\/2013\/10\/28\/updated-llist-of-hidden-marketplaces-tor-i2p\/\">has increasing dark web market adoption<\/a>, and Chris DeRose thinks it&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/derose\/status\/929026257404211201\">approaching first place<\/a> 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 &#8230; Gwern Branwen <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/gwern\/status\/929500432652750848\">notes<\/a>: &#8220;There are some attempts to infer sales volumes from reviews &#8230; 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).&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>SEC chairman Captain Clayton Obvious notes the obvious about the obviously security-like nature of ICOs, <i>i.e.<\/i>, that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/sec-chief-fires-warning-shot-against-coin-offerings-1510247148\">they really obviously are, all of them<\/a>. &#8220;I have yet to see an ICO that doesn\u2019t have a sufficient number of hallmarks of a security.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Tim Swanson puts up a guest post from an attorney friend turned tech entrepreneur, attempting to make sense of the whole <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ofnumbers.com\/2017\/11\/09\/a-note-from-bob-on-the-transparency-of-tether\/\">Tether controversy<\/a>. I should note that I&#8217;ve been contacted by people from the company saying the controversy is all rubbish and I shouldn&#8217;t buy into it uncritically; so I need to get questions together and so forth &#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Ian Walsh on Bitcoin and how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ianwelsh.net\/bitcoin-is-a-bad-way-to-do-something-necessary\/\">the past devouring the future is actually bad<\/a>. &#8220;Deflationary money is reactionary.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><center><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">I&#39;ve said it before and I&#39;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.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Falkvinge (@Falkvinge) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Falkvinge\/status\/929312743219453952?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 11, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\n<\/center><\/p>\n<br><br><div align=\"center\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\"><img src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/become_a_patron_button.svg\" alt=\"Become a Patron!\" title=\"Become a Patron!\" width=217 height=51><\/a><br><p style=\"align:center;\" class=\"patreon-badge\"><i>Your subscriptions keep this site going. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\">Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that big blocks are dead, the Lightning Network (postulated) just had another layer added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[42,95,9,233,6,96,33,39],"class_list":["post-2106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-bitcoin-cash","tag-darknet","tag-ico","tag-lightning-network","tag-links","tag-monero","tag-sec","tag-tether"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2106"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2115,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions\/2115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}