@MOUSERThe real question is.. some of you crazy people who were ranting about it, and telling us how bitcoin was going to take off during the early days of it.. are any of you rich enough to retire and bankroll the rest of us yet?
-mouser
Well, I can't bankroll the rest of you, but I can certainly bankroll myself.
I'm not super wealthy, but, I have options open to me and some freedom to choose what I work on.
@DEOZAANWould you mind briefly explaining how you solved the scalability issues? And what you mean by that? Or if it's in the whitepaper just say so and I'll try to get the time to finally read through it.
-Deozaan
The very short answer is "Game Channels". It's a form of trustless off-chain scaling. You can read the academic paper in the journal Leger (a crypto journal) here:
https://www.ledgerjo...r/article/view/15/64It's also in the endnotes in the White Paper. The White Paper explains it briefly.
You can think of it like this... You have the Chimaera blockchain, and then every single game running on the Chimaera platform has its own blockchain where size doesn't matter. (Get your mind out of the gutter!)
That's a bit crude, but should give you an idea.
But the reason I ask is because scalability seems to be a major issue in most of the major cryptos, especially Bitcoin. There are lots of interesting ideas out there on how to resolve or work around the issues, but as far as I know things like sidechains (Lightning, Raiden, Plasma, etc.,) are all still currently being researched and/or developed but nothing is actually released and running on the network(s) yet. If you're talking about scalability in a similar sense as for other blockchains, then solving the scalability issues could be really big news for cryptocurrency in general. 
-Deozaan
What can I say? We're ahead of the curve!
@MOUSERDue to encouragement of the bitcoin evangelists here on DC I did eventually provide a bitcoin address for people who wanted to donate to DC via bitcoin, back in 2015.
There have been a total of 12 payments received in that 2 year period.
Total received from those 12 payments was 287mBTC which apparently is worth about $2,000 USD currently 
-mouser
That's great! Keep it! HODL!
You perked my interest, so I went back through my wallet to have a peek:
https://blockchain.i...548e7e90f02934c1b170https://blockchain.i...115e1a531b2cbf1fc3a6Checking again... Geez... That's more than I've donated in fiat to you. I'm pretty sure I've donated to DC a few times with fiat.
HODL~!
@TOMOS - @DEOZAANThat's about $5 to send a transaction at current prices. And if you have a bunch of small amounts in different addresses, which is the recommended way to do it for privacy, transactions can easily be over 1,000 bytes (or over $20 in fees to send a transaction). And if you try to pay a lower fee, you could be waiting days before your transaction finally goes through, if it ever does.
-Deozaan
it's ironic that it's so user-un-friendly, considering the opposite was the intention.
Was that covered here in this thread -- how that changed (I think it was, but I'm being a lazy beggar here - I mostly work on memory first, then search, but tonight I'm leaving out the search part...)
-tomos
A few screwey things there...
@DEOZAANThat's about $5 to send a transaction at current prices. And if you have a bunch of small amounts in different addresses, which is the recommended way to do it for privacy, transactions can easily be over 1,000 bytes (or over $20 in fees to send a transaction). And if you try to pay a lower fee, you could be waiting days before your transaction finally goes through, if it ever does.
-Deozaan
You can choose your transaction fee rate. You're not forced to spend anything. The only issue is that the transaction may take longer.
I regularly send BTC to people and set a lower fee because I don't care if they get it in 12 seconds or 12 hours. It's all close enough.
@TOMOSit's ironic that it's so user-un-friendly, considering the opposite was the intention.
-tomos
That's soooooo far from the truth.
Have you ever had to send money to people in another country?
It's not easy.
I recently had to send funds to a company to pay for a service.
I did it in 2 parts:
1) BTC
2) Fiat
BTC was easy. I sent it. Done.
Cost me about $1.80 CAD. I could've spent less on that fee.
Fiat? F**king nightmare.
I had to drive almost an hour to another town to get to the bank to wire $$$.
The teller there didn't know how to do it. After 10 minutes.
I waited another 15 minutes.
Then it took 30 minutes to send.
The transaction fee cost me $40 CAD. That's over 22x what I spent sending BTC.
It cost me gas. Probably around $30 or $40 CAD there. Call it $35.
So, about 3 hours of my time, plus around $75 in costs (not including paying for parking), and that's the fiat world.
Sorry. No. BTC is far better. Crypto is better. By leaps and bounds.
Summary:
BTC COSTS:
2 minutes & $1.80 CAD
FIAT COSTS:
180 minutes & $75.00 CAD
Now... for a $2 coffee at a shop... The Lightning Networks are coming. That's next year.
But, even forgetting that, it's still easier to send BTC to a friend than to send fiat.
I don't send my friends BTC. I send fiat. Because it's less valuable. I HODL.
@TOMOSWas that covered here in this thread -- how that changed (I think it was, but I'm being a lazy beggar here - I mostly work on memory first, then search, but tonight I'm leaving out the search part...)
-tomos
We all do it.
@DEOZAANBack when I first got into Bitcoin toward the end of 2015, I sent a test transaction to Renegade after he sent me what was then just a few dollars worth of BTC (now worth almost $200! Wish I had kept it...). I paid 5 sat/byte for that transaction, which at the time was less than 1 cent. But now the recommended fee is 300 sat/byte to get your transaction included quickly.
-Deozaan
Heh! I remember that!
I sent at the time about $10 USD, and Deozaan sent back about $0.40.
Now, for many of my transactions I'm spending in the area of 50k satoshis to 2k satoshis. It depends on how quickly I want it to arrive.
@DEOZAANTo further illustrate the point: Just for fun back in 2015 I gave a friend $1 worth of BTC for Christmas (the low value was an inside joke) to try to get him interested in cryptocurrency. It failed to pique his interest. With the value of BTC going up so much this year (by my calculations that $1 gift is now worth about $22.50), he has finally taken an interest in crypto, and asked me how to access the funds I gave him. But it would cost ~$5 in transaction fees for him to do anything with it so I've told him not to bother.
-Deozaan
You can spend MUCH less. It's not hard.
The expensive fees are all fiat fees.
@DEOZAANIn a nutshell: The Bitcoin "Core" developers refuse to increase the blocksize limit from 1MB to anything larger even though people and developers and businesses have been clamoring for an increase for years. So the blocks are at full capacity. Which means if you want your transaction included in the blockchain, you need to compete with others for the limited space in each block. The only way to incentivize a miner to include your transaction over others is by paying higher fees than others. But everyone else is also trying to pay higher fees than everyone else so they can get their transaction included, so the fees just go higher and higher. Meanwhile more and more transactions are being added to the backlog. So if you intentionally try to get away with paying a low fee, you could be waiting days for your transaction to clear (the backlog tends to catch up over the weekend). And even if you pay what your software deems a decent fee, but for some reason fees skyrocket due to sudden increased demand (making miners consider your fee to be a comparatively "low" fee), then you could be waiting days for your transaction to clear anyway.
-Deozaan
The Core devs rock.
Also, in Chimaera, our Lead Blockchain Developer is a Bitcoin Core contributor.
But, for the block size, that's a bit misleading.
The idea is to off-load transactions into Lightning Networks. That will solve scaling issue massively.
Those will take off next year.
This is just the beginning. There's a long way to go.
Right now Bitcoin is NOTHING in the financial world. It's a blip. A curiosity.
If you're not in already, do your due diligence and think about whether BTC has a place in your portfolio.
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