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BTC market dominance might be at 37%, but if you could measure BTC brand dominance, it would be at 99%. Average person has no idea what Ethereum or Ripple is, but they all know Bitcoin.

It’s the first day of the year. I can think of nothing better than recommending everyone start the year by learning to run a full node and begin using it to send and receive money. https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node 

The best thing about the Bitcoin community is how we all come together and fight whenever someone tries to impose changes on us we don't like or there isn't consensus on. Let's pray all the new people that enter the community in 2018 will be just as engaged.

If mining is too centralized (as it is right now), the economic theory behind a “fee market” rapidly breaks down because a single mining cartel can dictate prices and create artificial scarcity in subtle ways.

If we as a community want lower fees and greater Segwit adoption, we can consider a UASF to enforce that blocks contain >50% Segwit transactions after August 2018, and >75% after January 2019. But only if certain companies continue to delay adoption for political reasons.

In one breath they’ll say that miners are attacking the network and trying to take it over, and in the next they’ll say that high transaction fees are the costs we pay for a secure network. So I’m paying these mining cartels to attack my money and hold hostage tech improvements?

The centralized hashpower has already been used to threaten to alter the network. Why pay high fees as a security cost for mining if mining has been compromised already? Makes no sense!

Typically they will say that this is the cost of securing the network, but this is flawed. A higher difficulty doesn’t mean greater security if the network’s hashpower is already centralized in the hands of a few guys in China.

High fees in the absence of a functioning and widely supported second layer is a disaster. No matter which way you spin it. Anyone telling you that it’s somehow OK to pay these exorbitant fees likely has some sort of agenda.

These scamming premined forks of Bitcoin benefit even if we talk bad about them. There is no such thing as bad publicity. Better to not refer to them or acknowledge them in any way.

Going into 2018, Bitcoin users and Bitcoin Cash users should agree on some sort of truce and peace. No more “Bcash”, no more misrepresenting Bitcoin Cash as Bitcoin, no more attacking each other which only hurts us both. Only friendship and goodwill!

One thing that I’ve always been curious about is why all these “attacks on Bitcoin” and “takeover attempts” have always been hard forks. If you had strong miner support and *some* minority user support, it makes sense to change the network with a soft fork instead.

Merry Christmas! Wish everyone a peaceful and happy Christmas.

If you’re in the Bitcoin community and you’re a cop or in the military, the best thing you can do for Bitcoin is to resign and find another job and do your bit to reduce the power of state violence. Don’t be a goon for your oppressor.

The only ones willing to bear these costs (increasing transaction fees) in Bitcoin will inevitably be financial institutions or large businesses. Larger blocks do make it harder to run a full node, but large fees are worse and make full nodes impotent participants in the network.

It would be like if Bittorrent hypothetically only let you keep being a seeder (relevant in the network) if and only if your internet speed kept increasing with time. Over time most seeders would get pushed away and only the ones willing to bear the heavy costs will be relevant.

It always blows my mind when someone thinks high transaction fees are not an issue and somehow ideal, but then goes on to say that full nodes can be used to secure the network. How can they secure anything if most of them are priced out from even interacting with the network?