LOL, karma laws at its finest

Ok, so my account yefi got hacked 2017-08-19. I'm a little shocked at this as my p/w was a random 9 digit code with a special character. It was also unique to this site. Anyway, please ignore anything my lobotomised impostor now writes, thank you.

It's not a matter of Bitcoin(TM) brand, but who controls the toy. Would you invest in anything hijacked by the 3 stooges?

I entered Bitcoin during the mother of all bear markets. I'm conditioned for doom.
You people merely adopted the doom, I was born into it.

"Real money" that's totally iliquid ?

Is that not a contradiction terms ?

Blockchain technology is revolutionary but BTC is not

make blocks bigger

This seems like the lamest Bitcoin bubble yet.

Are we still on our way to 'return to "normal"' or do we begin the 'fear' stage?

how is that possible after some guy ran off with them all in a panic?

it could be a case of being surrounded by brown eyes.

All you need is love.
-A Beatle

COME ON you big time BTC'ers let us now when and where and why its gonna HAPPEN      

The majority who invest money in a vacuos asset like Bitcoin are certain to lose

During the pump n dump, I went from being an early investor and early proft taker, to FOMO merchant

a cabal of vampire parasites takes its place....

In all honesty, even though I already put in my guess, I predict the next ATH will not be until 2020  

I'm surprised. Normally you are a permabull in just about every situation, and suddenly you had a change of heart. Weird, and unexpected, as I didn't expect you to even think of the option BTC could go the opposite way.
My opinion of you has really changed for the better now.

But why the sudden change of heart?

You can't centralize money if you lack a money printer + taxation/extortion system.

r0ach loves to keep spouting this. Over and over. But he refuses to ever explain how he intends to transact with someone overseas in another country with PMs and avoid middlemen or 3rd party transfer fees. Or even go to Walmart, Target, or Starbucks and buy something, anything with it without avoiding the exchange into fiat via 3rd party (and thus another fee). Or... or... the fkn list can go on forever.

So I guess all a PM coin is good for is... transacting with your neighbor down the street? If Apocalypse cometh?

Well r0ach? We're still waiting. Oh I know, you'll just go scurrying back into your little hole for a while without answer the question. Once again. 

Any other scheme requires trust that is nothing compared to his argument that miners centralize blockchain

Roach why are you doing here if you dislike blockchain?

Zerohedge is where youre belong ore /rbtc.

So bitcoin does indeed "allow you to do something that metals don't" which is to hold a genuine bearer token.

Pretty sure it's the Despair part that happens next. :/

Hey there's no shame in diversifying bitcoin into some PMs. I would encourage anyone to hold both Bitcoin and PMs. I see PMs as more hedge insurance though.

Also without decentralization, blockchain is just a stupid distributed database.

Sure they can control the car for a bit, even try and take us to where they want to go, but ultimately the users will just get another cab. Leaving them on the wrong side of town, alone, and unable to make the payments on their leased E-class.

Dump BCH holdings entirely for a considerable windfall.

What an effed-up fact salad.

If something like SX2 coin succeeds, it will just tell the banks and government around the world that such attack vectors works, and conceivably, before long, we would have something like this,

We will go down slowly to $1500.

This bear market will last for five months.

Hahaha the funniest post in this thread for sure   This is never going to happen, except for maybe in your dreams.

Scamfinex has one single entity controlling price all the way from $200 to $4000.  The same amount of effort spent trying to manipulate metals down is spent on bitfinex trying to manipulate BTC up.  I used to think it was China mining cartel doing it, but then it became obvious Bitfinex staff themselves were involved during the halving.  It's either a complete replica of MtGox, or Finex staff + these Chinese guys made some type of deal to work together and rig the market.  The so called "spoofer" of recent fame is this entity at work.

The cat is out of the bag, with respect to blockchain tech. Bitcoin on the other hand? I wouldn't be so sure yet.

If it's possible in one way, then the opposite is also factible.
My 0.02 BTC

like gold, bitcoin has emerged as an insurance policy to the insanity

You know your shtick is getting real tired r0ach. Maybe if you just cut and paste the same shit from your 1000 other older posts it might save you some time.  

Yes, we all know when gold and silver was used as money in antiquity, there was no problem at all with the governments at the time enslaving people.  
Plus all that gold really helped Montezuma's empire remain sovereign from the conquistadors.  

300. And also citations needed.

Gold and silver is money for people that want this world to be like Dungeons and Dragons.

Oh, and this hoard in question is all profit.

Oh sh***. Thanks for the heads up, Meuh.

It seems legendary accounts are the most heavily targeted. I just changed my password - but I don't get it: is it that some cracker gang got hold of an old passwd database, or are they simply able to get new versions whenever they feel like it?

I would say anyone who supports bitcoin or anything blockchain related falls into that category.  For instance, bitcon transactions are not blinded and the system has built-in middlemen (transaction validators/miners).  If I have a gold or silver coin on my table, I'm not required to ask anyone permission or pay anyone extortion fees in order to be able to spend or trade with it.  Bitcon is the exact opposite.  In order to be able to do anything with a bitcon (since transactions aren't blinded), I'm not only required to ask permission to a centralized transaction validator, but also required to pay extortion fees to them (which they can artificially raise to the moon) to do anything with it.

For the religious nuts who keep posting in this thread (Coincube), Jesus is essentially defining forced taxation by the state as extortion and theft - paying tribute to a false god (Caesar).  So if bitcon is not only a permissioned system (from transactions not being blinded and transaction validators being designed to centralize), but also has a taxation and extortion system built-in, then you should probably not be using it.

Don't you have some altcrash forum to troll in?

You are fighting against the laws of gravity if you believe metals will be displaced by craptocurrency.  I'll take the Joseph Tainter position any day on this subject matter.  When complex systems implode, they don't shift over to an even more complex system, they either go backwards in complexity or enter a full dark ages.  Complexity is not inherently good, it's a liability.  Another crux of the Joseph Tainter argument when extrapolated to it's end point is that overspecialization is essentially a Fermi Paradox-style extinction level event. The invisible hand of nature will force chaos and implosions at random intervals to prevent this.  The world doesn't want "total order" as you always reference the term as being bad/an impossibility.

Metals always survive these random interval re-orgs of nature because they are very basic elements and almost indestructable; craptocurrency does not.  Not to mention craptocurrency being a far inferior settlement system with no reason to even exist due to not removing counter party risk and having built-in rent seeking middlemen (transaction validators - so called "miners".  An incorrect term that should really just be "middlemen").

The difference in cost of production and face value of a monetary instrument is called seigniorage fee. If the cost of a dollar bill is something like four cents to create but you pay the government 96 extra cents for it, that's called you being ripped off by orders of magnitude and the government using the ripoff profits to fund it's mafia. In the big picture, you're always going to be getting hit with some type of seigniorage fee no matter what you use, but the key is to minimize it.

Now that we've established you need to be a moron to buy paper, fiat currency, let's examine how this relates to craptocurrency. Humans live in a generally closed ecosystem, and since the peak of the industrial age, cost of production generally only goes up for the noble metals as the free market takes all the low hanging fruit first. This means seigniorage fee is mostly always going to be on your side holding those instruments. Bitcoin on the other hand, has a floating cost of production function where production cost is recursive based on it's own demand.

Metals are a non-recursive system since cost of production is always a derivative of the external energy market. This is an important point to make since anyone from a programming background knows recursive systems are a flimsy house of cards with a single problem variable. The problem variable is that the cost of production for bitcoin can go down just as easily as it goes up. This makes it a very unsound monetary instrument in terms of seigniorage fee compared to virtually every other "asset" on the planet since the other assets are generally not recursive.

In case you lack any common sense whatsoever and haven't figured out bitcoin doesn't actually exist in the real world and is mostly imaginary, I would say any system built on recursion disqualifies itself from being an "asset" in the first place.

There are virtually no fundamentals whatsoever in terms of seigniorage fee in bitcoin and contrary to current day opinion, fundamentals actually do matter. It's basically designed to be nothing more than a pump and dump in other words. (i.e. You can never say "oh, I got a good deal buying bitcoin at $100 or $10,000. Everything over $0 is a seigniorage fee in bitcoin so you are generally always being ripped off no matter what you pay, unlike physical assets even as lowly as toilet paper).

 So it's your ad?

But a wildcard that I'm expecting is the implosion of Finex.

tonnes of scope for Ver to scam people for the wrong bitcoin

I remember a time when Roach was posting meme's about his trading profits. I saw a happy Roach in that time.

Roach is not so happy these days, he loves shitting on Bitcoin...i know why!

Roach sold at the bottom

But, I see a f'-ing huge bear trap now in BTCiTcoin!

Bitcoin down to $8135. Is Bitcoin dying?

In other news some tether coverage https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/technology/bitcoin-bitfinex-tether.html?_r=0

http://i.imgur.com/EiAkazx.png

the smart money

http://i.imgur.com/EiAkazx.png

I saw the image above linked online and someone referred to it as "the smart money".

This is where they're wrong.  True, bitcoin has lots of smart people in the space, but all programmers have a god complex and pretend that any problem can just be worked around with some rickity hack.  They don't believe in unsolvable problems.  A truely smart person would be able to go through all possible branch prediction beforehand and realize that it's not possible to create a decentralized digital currency at all.  

If any cryptocurrency you create will either be completely centralized from day one, or designed to become that way over time, this means none of them have any fundamentals whatsoever.  If something has zero fundamentals, it's price is inevitably going back to mirror those fundamentals - zero.  

All the people you see in bitcoin right now are just programmers (problem solvers) who are trying to make a name for themselves by...solving problems.  The fact that the problem is not solvable is the perfect rat trap for any programmer since most cannot identify the issue due to their inherent god complex as mentioned above, and they will continue to shovel out dysfunctional Rube Goldberg machine one after another promising "the real cool working thing is just around the corner!", but it will never come since it's not even possible.  I expect Ethereum will be the epitome of this example.

It's not like all programmers are just delusional fool problem solving monkeys, though.  Off the top of my head, Gmaxwell said before bitcoin was created that it wasn't possible to create a decentralized digital currency, but then saw bitcoin and flip flopped and became a dev for it.  I assume he will eventually flip flop back again after exhausting all options or go insane in the process ala fate of most mathematicians.  Mind-boggingly, many other people who work on bitcoin are some of it's biggest skeptics, such as Peter Todd flash dumping much of his stash when he saw it becoming completely centralized under corporate-like entities such as Ghash.io in the past.

Ironically, some of the much less popular and more notorious people in the bitcoin space identified cryptocurrency for what it is far ahead of the mainstream ones who still don't seem to get it (if you take Gmaxwell's flip flop into account that is).  People such as Realsolid of MCXNOW identified all cryptocurrency as mostly useless "Rube Goldberg" machines in private conversation long ago in the past.  At the time, I was leaning towards 90-99% chance these are all unsolvable problems myself.  Shortly thereafter, (notorious?) user Anonymint in typical Anonymint wall of text fashion also identified decentralization in cryptocurrency as an unsolvable problem on the bitcoin forums.

Many of these people in the bitcoin space constantly flip flop back and forth due to the inherent god complex in programmers, so it's hard to keep track of who is on what side.  The one constant trait in bitcoin is that the people who know the absolute least about it have the most confidence, or at least 'portrayed' confidence about it.  In the context of this article, these people shall be known as traders and pumpers.

The traders and pumpers manipulating price tend to provide a feedback loop to the programmers who then feel if the price is going up instead of down, their work or technical belief system is somehow valid; or in the case of cryptocurrency decentralization being an unsolvable problem, the Rube Goldberg machine currently fooling enough people that matter.

That's cool. I'm glad you are a Bitcoin supporter.

This is a bunch of interesting Bitcoin charts I hadn't seen before.


http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-nvt-ratio/

I've sold about half my Bitcoin Gold so far. Traded it into Bitcoin Segwit. About half of the resultant Bitcoin Segwit, I have exchanged for Bitcoin Cash. The remainder is sitting on open Bitcoin Cash buy orders, waiting for the price to be hit. Though it looks like my bids are too low. May have to cancel and reset.

If Bitcoin Diamond has more proof of work than Bcash, then Bitcoin Diamond will become the real Bcash.

154Mill Tether (margin market) on Bitfinex...prepare  

I wonder what will happen in the next 24hs

Hilarious article from The Telegraph.

The Bitcoin bubble will burst. It's time for a 'Bitpound'

Look what the cat drug in!!!!    

I hope you all are feeling right good and honoured to have such legendary posters in your presence. Such wisdom to impart, so many nuanced thinkings.

It does. basically the nodes become miners and vice versa, kind of like the way the bitcoin client worked when I first got started, only with much beefier hardware.

https://medium.com/@eduffield222/how-to-enabling-on-chain-scaling-2ffab5997f8b

I know, I can't believe it. I really should be stoned right now...

But there is a centralization effect happening with Bitcoin in the sense that big miners are forcing their smaller competitors out of the marketplace by constantly reinvesting in better infrastructure (mining gear) - which the average Joe can't keep up with and therefore his mining power keeps decreasing. So in the end there will be a few top dogs and a few "hobby miners" I guess.

The CME group are going to sell nothing. They wont matter.

About theymos advice: I still don't get it. Why does he care? and what does he know about the fact that

Hiya Roach, missing a few beats? Long time without a reference to rent-seeking usury schemes.

You can scrape some more gains out of this rally but only if you can manage sell before the drop to $3K.

Just looked into ZeroHedge. It's trash.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-01/signs-market-top-pole-dancing-instructor-now-bitcoin-guru

It's called arbitrage.

and right now is best used as a digital store of value

Okay, everything you said is correct (except for that image) but you're moving the goalposts here by re-defining what "money" means. It is true that gold and silver have intrinsic value but it's also true that collective delusion creates "money". In your opinion it would be more accurately called an IOU but most people call it money because money is usually defined as the most efficient way to trade things without bartering. You certainly can't pay for a hamburger with silver but you might be able to buy lunch with Bitcoin or another crypto-currency soon. I already pay for my servers using Bitcoin.

Maybe you're right and it would be better in a hypothetical universe if we used silver or gold as a transactional unit. How would online purchases work in that case? Bitcoin is the only way to trade value using a decentralized network.

the unskilled/uneducated people will lose their jobs first. they can not become designers, programmers and builders.

NASA logo barf bag ready

evidence or fuck off

...roach, i've been on this forum since 2011 just after the crash from 30 bucks. iam not familiar with this information. therefore, could you please provide informational links so i may educate myself?

CNBC is hyper pumping it on TV !! :-D weeee

Adam's mantra was always '32K guaranteed' it doesn't seem that crazy now....

Ive seen forex brokers with 1 second candles

idonotthinkthatwordmeanswhatyouthinkitmeans.png

Its called distribution.

And only angels fly, because they take themselves lightly

your antisemitism and misogyny

Can you explain how "just adoption" justifies a price increase of 2000% within a few months? Adoption does not just suddenly jump from horizontal to straight lines and and happen all at once in a 2000% spike. It is more like a smooth logarithmic curve of a few percent per day. So if it jumps too much that means it is overbought by traders.

Are all these fast block fast adjusting coins any better?

Just pointing out you can be a misogynist even if all what you have said were true. It can be true of a whole society as well, perhaps those brainwashed SJW cuckolds do have a point after all when complaining about the patriarchy? Too bad many of them do it in such a retarded way that it almost makes people like you seem legitimate.

Also I still think it's kind of cute that you have decided to think I am a woman  

As you seem to be very well versed in both in Bitcoin and PM's... Any prediction on when the price of one Bitcoin will be equal to 1KG gold bar?

OTH, they can do some interesting OTC trades between BIG holders of different assets. And that's exactly what they do when they do want to diversify.

the entire situation is so far beyond "insane" at this point that I really just don't have words

Someone who commits suicide probably has a longstanding depression or chronic pain condition and isn't just committing suicide due to whatever appeared to happen most recently.

Trading litecoin just isnt the same without a trollbox and fontas.

This is the "Gotta-scare-those-average-joes-away" and "See-I-told-ya-so-its-a-bubble-ponzi-scam" portion of the show.

But how do the Jews fit into all of this?

I love the Jewish conspiracy stuff too. But I try not to fixate too much on it.

But I still think its a good idea to diversify into crypto though PMs are awesome too. Gotta make money to survive at least in the short run.

I put Adolf Hitler on my ignore list. Or is it Angela Merkel? There isn't much difference these days it seems.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-08/bulgaria-government-shocked-discover-it-owns-3-billion-bitcoin

Ain't seen any mention of this.

And @roach is nonsensical with his tinfoil hat precious metals fetish.

Who decided that Bitcoin would be denominated in Y and Y weren't we consulted? 

Of course the universe is not deterministic. It's called quantum mechanics. Unless you want to consider things falling within certain probabilities deterministic.

After launch of bitcoin at CBOE futures

If "the house" consists of the "hodlers" and the money comes from the banks. I'm fine with that.

Also just noticed the global Alexa rating of Steemit.com is.....#2,085...is this rigged?  That's fucking yuge.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com

Looks like we underestimated how big Steemit could get while having a dysfunctional economic model.  But how does this factor into the price of native tokens?  I mean, Steemit.com could become the #1 Alexa site on earth but since you're not required to buy coins to read it or post on it, it would have 0 effect on the coin's market cap heh.  They could put up advertising and require advertisers to buy and pay in Steem tokens, but that's obviously not decentralized (not that anyone running Steemit.com cares).

Nuts. I let it ride too much

This market is fucked.

it is futile trying to read these markets

the splashes of the whales have frozen me in my tracks

these markets are just not to be traded

I can't reasonably expect to be able to play these markets

it is fucking galling having to witness this again.

During the pump n dump, I went from being an early investor and early proft taker, to FOMO merchant

Fucking rat cocksuckers. 6 fucking BTC trade with Stop Order

The majority who invest money in a vacuos asset like Bitcoin are certain to lose

So my plan is to look for long setups

a cabal of vampire parasites takes its place....

Spoke with a financial advisor yesterday who has over 100 high net worth clients.  Number of his clients that hold any cryptocurrencies:  0.

From the r/K angle, most of the worlds population are rabbits. It would be surprising if most people didn't think bitcoin is a scam or bubble or any of the other synonyms.

We are the few, the intelligent, the brave. We are those who See. We are visionaries, in the most literal sense. And in the decades to come, we will have the means to reshape the world. Never forget that.

realr0ach

lol, what happened with the r0ach account?

You keep repeating the same wrong arguments all the time.

Bitcoin is on its way to reduce the fees with LN.

https://img15.hostingpics.net/pics/992976Sanstitre.jpg

just posting this here to reserve my "i told you so" spot  

18-19k top imo

it was a fucking scary night. virtual wealth imploded. all we had left was to laugh. and boys, we had no clue about the following multiyear drought.

Now I started to believe more and more than next year will indeed be a good year for crypto currency cause the coin capital market table was full green.

Also this from James A. Donald, the first person who communicated with Satoshi on the mailing list where Bitcoin was announced:

It’s not a shitty precious metal either that you can shovel out of the ground as soon as the price rises.

But of course Mr Roach.

This is truly awesome. Very well written!

and we have already disseminate 79,7% of the bitcoins.

Goyim of the world unite!

Decentralization and creator anonymity is basically what makes bitcoin valuable. But trying to get peoples minds around that...

The birth of coins such as LTC are similar in their lack of disgustingness but that absolute purity can't happen again.

I'm pretty sure Jeff's OD'ed on the red pills. He's been shilling for gold the last few weeks encouraging us to use BTC profits and now this. https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@dollarvigilante/the-globalist-plan-to-blame-bitcoin-for-biblical-level-collapse-in-2018
And I like contemplating conspiracy but this might be over the top even for me (and torque?)  

Not really the outcome they were expecting, hey r0ach?

The good news is non-Bitcoins undeliverable in January are still above $17k

Why oh why did I not listen to (that racist, paranoid, fucktard) r0ach

Zionists! !! !1!!!!111111111

I am yet to see an Elliott wave prediction come true

I've been informed that were not the new wealthy elite and the jig is up.

Question of the day. Is Jstolfi paid by Ver, ?

Sideways for days - means we will go south soon... Watching this pattern for years now. Only one guy needs to start a dump and well be at 4 digits....

Alot of the price is counting in future expectations of integrity, reliability

We need more throughput. Stop being a fucking tribalist and focus on what matters.

Business, actually. I trade in person at a premium and buy and sell on kraken. It more than pays the rent.

Just no one can send via SW to a broker like Coinbase, arguably the largest and most successful by far. And they have given zero reasons why they haven't implemented it yet, just lame excuses.

Fucking truth, brother. I dumped my GLD holdings out of boredom, and put em into QQQ and SPYG. Already up.

and here:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609408/quantum-computers-pose-imminent-threat-to-bitcoin-security/

 

BTCBTC#quantumattack

let's buy iota then

I'm a Trump-voting, libertarian-leaning conservative, and I'm fucking pissed.

There's a good debate here though: http://www.wnyc.org/story/net-neutrality-repeal-done-deal-open-question/

What are you smoking? Net neutrality is the idea that you pay a flat fee to a broadband provider and they aren't allowed to manipulate your content. If they are allowed to manipulate your content, you aren't using an "internet", you're using an "intranet" because they will firewall off competitors or ideas they don't want people to have access too.

The end result is that there is no internet and there's only serfs who have the ability to choose which corporate walled garden (like the apple store) to subscribe to. So yea, you are sort of correct stating net neutrality is "socialism", if by that you mean all large, complex, public works projects are incapable of being done by the private sector because they don't have the land usage rights or millions of other rights to lay down pipes everywhere on other people's property to facilitate that business.

So I guess the argument boils down to the fact that socialism is anti-freedom, but can temporarily leverage resources to create larger, more complex structures than the private sector, before socialism inevitably collapses from immediately turning into crony capitalism. This makes "freedom" kind of a pro-Amish movement, but a free society will be less able to leverage resources to tackle big problems or create technological spectacles. This makes the Amish kind of right that technology is a deal with the devil. If you want the internet, then you want socialism, otherwise you're getting an intranet.

https://twitter.com/bitpay/status/941769498742394880

Bitpay goes Bcash.

No effort for Segwit. Them Bitmain shekels are powerful.

looks like bcash will overtake btc soon enough

So the pareto distribution is fucking hax, you know?

Back in the bad old days before bitcoin, I had no money and made no money.

Now I have money and I use that money to make more money. Just made about $300 shuffling money around. That's like two days worth of hard work for low end jobs. Actual effort expended today, about an hour. And a bit of chatting people up which I frankly don't include under the banner of "work" since it's an excuse for me to ramble.

Today was a slow day.

And this is just a side income compared to, uh, sitting back and watching the price go up. I don't strictly speaking need to do it.

Apparently, once you start winning you just keep winning.

Also being poor is expensive.

but ... it really is a failure.

They can be very good engineers, but they are pretty bad at economics.
Was not Peter Todd the one who argued that bitcoin should have an inflation system integrated?

If bitcoin is worth $100k each then I think $100 fees are reasonable. No crisis.

Relax guys, Satoshi's vision is alive and well, it's just called bitcoin cash now.

Well, I'm a right-of-center-leaning, Conservative nigger.

How do recommend we resolve this ?

An expert on scamming and manipulation sees bitcoin as a manipulated scam.

You could move it to Bitmex instead and try to short the top at some gawdawful leverage. All you need to do is VPN in the site and state that you are from Canada. They will let you participate.

Since there was a discussion of conservative vs liberals above as well at the trotting out by others of all the usual scapegoats

All that exists in reality is natural selection and evolution, which gives no shits about your political opinion. The goal of evolution is to cull the dysfunctional and prevent them from spreading and causing the whole system to collapse. Natural selection and evolution have given us systems like patriarchy because things like matriarchy...don't work for one reason or another. The one thing evolution does well is create lots of endless variables and throw them at a dartboard to see what works. This means lots of things that don't work will be created in the process.

Any organism that is incapable of reproducing (like lesbians or asexuals) are technically errors because they are defacto evolutionary dead ends. The evolutionary dead ends as well as functional products of natural selection are both equally selfish and form various interest groups. This is how you get the so-called "left". It's mostly a coalition of things like lesbians, feminists, neurotic jews, etc. What do all these groups have in common? They don't see themselves fitting into the mainstream evolutionary product. A world where they don't fit in is deemed useless to them, and thus they want to destroy it while attempting to spread their dysfunctional group in which they fit in, but usually has either no or decreased evolutionary viability.

Various factions move back and forth between the so-called right and left for whatever reason, but at it's heart, the left is a dysfunctional, antithesis of human, evolutionary dead end based on inferiority complex.

I actually with exponential theory being proposed. Could easily see moving from 30k to 60k within a matter of days.

I need something like a stop loss based on BTC/USD prices but instead of purchasing fiat it purchases an altcoin.

Roach:  shouldn’t you be off 100:1 shorting on Bitmex?

People like the Winklevoss have 200,000 coins they bought for next to nothing they can send to Coinbase and use as margin collateral to 10-50x the price overnight (the same thing that was done to create the artificially high Ethereum price on Poloniex).  

Do you really think it's a good idea for people to be able to rig markets by putting up collateral that not only has no real value due to not being a real commodity, but it's a completely imaginary asset that doesn't exist in the first place?  That's an even bigger scam than the fraudulent Wall Street markets that existed before it.  And it's not just bitcoin, they can create an infinite amount of coins and do this over and over.  How is that not a scam? lol.  These markets are all just fraud bubbles.

If what you are saying is true Roach then you may as well accept it and ride it.  

Shorting in craptocurrency is mostly pointless because the following.  This is why all shorters in the history of bitcoin are squeezed.  You have a bunch of rich con artists that were already rich before bitcoin was created who bought up 200,000 coins for next to nothing. These coins are toxic assets that they can't actually sell at market rate without crashing the market.  Anyone who shorts just adds liquidity to the market and allows them to cash out by effortlessly squeezing the short using their horde of toxic asset coins as margin collateral, manipulating the shorts into margin calls with no real risk to themselves besides losing a few toxic assets that they could do nothing with anyway:

Don't get left holding the bag.

This is called distribution and its precisely the reason it will work.

The real crux of the situation is that money is an imaginary or social construct humans use to try and gain leverage over one another, and so the further you abstract human trade away from barter, the bigger an immoral scam you have created.  THIS is why only physical commodity currencies can be money, whether it's gold, silver, oil, wheat, or what have you.  Anything that does not have some type of roots in the real world is a flat out scam because you're inherently trying to con other humans into accepting something of no value for a real world good of value.

bcash

You're taking on societies entire value constructs with your argument which is ironically one of the largest utilities of bitcoin today.   Borderless, trustless, deflationary, voluntary participation, secure, indiscriminate, and unrevocable. All the things central banking can't be. It offers peaceful participation of choice in the monetary revolution we're seeing today and that sir is a massive utility towards positive change.  I participate because I believe this.

If you look at all naysayer or troll posts, no matter what the argument they are presenting, they all boil down to one and only thing.

To try to get you to not buy Bitcoin and hold it.

Why would they care about you so much?

The centralization goes by the name ASIC, bitpay, coinbase, bitfinex/bitstamp, and winklevoss&futures&friends

http://sentienttrader.com/hurst-trading-room/blog/bitcoin-hurst-cycles-15-december-2017/
 

If you want to talk to a bear go to talk to roach

You may have missed my other post (or maybe you ignored it, I dunno) so here:

1. You say that Andreas Antonopoulos is wrong.

2. Bitcoin is not a store of value.

3. Bitcoin is not a unit of account.

4. Bitcoin is not a medium of exchange.

5. Bitcoin is not decentralized. (thousands of full nodes, thousands of miners, dozens of pools, bunch of devs who all joined voluntarily.)

6. Bitcoin is a scam. And a lie.

7. Bitcoin is worthless.

Help get me out now...

For this to ‘end’ it requires central banks worldwide to address their issues.

They’ve avoided doing so until now via suppression of gold etc  but the day of reckoning may have come.

Anyway, thank you for all the links to your posts, I think I will read them. You are an interesting person.

If they did control more than 50% of the hashing power, they would do a 50% attack, like undoing blocks and whatnot. Most mining machines being sold by bitmain, doesn't mean that they control them as well.

You find me a way to teleport gold or silver and then come back talking. Meanwhile, welcome to my ignore list.

They want to drive everyone to Bcash. It's not going to work but they'll give it a whirl. If that fails they still have a stranglehold over BTC. If it works then they own BCH lock stock and barrel.

Fees are too expensive already.

who the hell is Smoothie?
you didn't quote so no idea what you are on about...

Here we go ..

Also, we need more cold storage 4Life Hodlers!

Nah. I'd rather treat it as the multi-year, continuous, pump-and-pump that I haven't lost a dime on, thanks.

CME dragging down futures out of the gate.

Bleh.

http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin.html

Random thought. Do you think if we had a more sophisticated name less people would have thought it was a scam and took it seriously?

Mining has eventual low, uniform profit per unit of (hardware $  + energy $). Both hardware and energy markets are seriously skewed, that's what allows monopolies.

Fun fact - all of these same conversations have happened at 4 digit price levels, and before that they happened at 3 digit price levels, and before that they happened at 2 digit price levels, and 1 digit levels. The same comments, the same debates, and even many of the same people.

Roger, what a jerk.

https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7kf43b/bitcoincom_wallet_2_out_of_5_stars_531_ratings_we/drei7jx/

"In any State in which there is a bad organization of authority, an impersonality of laws and of the rulers who have lost their personality amid the flood of rights ever multiplying out of liberalism, I find a new right - to attack by the right of the strong, and to scatter to the winds all existing forces of order and regulation, to reconstruct all institutions and to become the sovereign lord of those who have left to us the rights of their power by laying them down voluntarily in their liberalism."

Political freedom is an idea but not a fact. This idea one must know how to apply whenever it appears necessary with this bait of an idea to attract the masses of the people to one's party for the purpose of crushing another who is in authority. This task is rendered easier if the opponent has himself been infected with the idea of freedom, SO-CALLED LIBERALISM, and, for the sake of an idea, is willing to yield some of his power. It is precisely here that the triumph of our theory appears; the slackened reins of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might of the nation cannot for one single day exist without guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place of the old already weakened by liberalism."

I think it may be time for some retaliation attacks against Wu and Antpool who have demonstrably become malicious miners, attacking the bitcoin network.

They are withholding blocks, spamming the network to drive up fees and being a general nuisance to the point that if they were excluded from the mining network it would do more good than harm to bitcoin. They are doing everything in their power to subvert the network, without performing the 51% attack which they may actually be capable of.

At it's heart, bitcoin is nothing more than a variable number multisig. With current mining centralization, it's probably a 2 of 3 or 3 of 5 multisig. So the only question is how big of a multisig is needed for it to be considered "decentralized"?

The fact that bitcoin is nothing more than a multisig in practice also makes it kind of bogus because a multisig is obviously not an open entropy system. For it to be an open entropy system, instead of using 6 confs, you would probably need to use literally infinite confs. That's kind of how bitcoin is a con in practice, because given an infinite timeline, you can attempt to make the claim bitcoin is a decentralized, open entropy system, but if you actually try to use it on a finite timeline, it morphs into nothing more than a centralized multisig. People claim that's "probabilistic", but no, it's just a centralized multisig when a finite timeline is applied.

So there you go folks, the only way for bitcoin to properly function is by not using it because the act of a human using it applies a fixed timeline and makes it's mechanics fall apart.

(and anonymint is going to argue the confs can be rolled back at any time during the middle of this process making whatever number of confs pointless in the first place)

Don't listen to the fools thinking that any coin comes close to Bitcoin. There is no coin that is even close to solving the scalability problem.

Except that metals can be mined indefinitely. And if the price of them increased beyond a certain point people would just research ways to create them in a lab. Meanwhile Bitcoins will never go beyond a given amount.

Metals not hoarded will be taken by attrition or force. Metals hoarded will be taken by attrition or force. How exactly do you defend against this unless you can command more force or generate more attrition than them? Both are achieved by issuing fiat and you don't issue it, they do. Neither of you issue metals but their fiat takes it from you. No defense possible over a long enough period. It is their game. They won and your free will is just the totality of possible moves you can make in their game because you had lost before birth.

Lofty dreams based on a story that is a distortion of reality. You are a lot more alone than you realize and you may never realize it but that did not happen the way you wish it did and it will not happen as you wish it would. What will happen is the idea of that as the means to you and yours living and dying for their goals; again.
You are a cell in a body in which they are the brain. We would all be worse off if you didn't perform your function, as whatever cell you are, out of delusion so why do you keep wasting time chasing a dream that can never bring you any upside in reality? Is it a fetish?

To be useful the protocol is going to have to be developed further, its not static.  

idonothinkthatwordmeanswhatyouthinkitmeans.png

Fungibility is simply the property that any unit of some substance is functionally equivalent to all other units of that substance.

GDAX's fiasco with BCH launch today

Perhaps you will thank me later for this suggestion?  

You are one of the lucky ones to have an existing bitfinex account. New registrations are now only allowed with a referral code, and it's impossible to get a referral code yet.

It's an actual word.

Maybe I'll stick half my cold stash in an offline laptop wallet after all until I trust these things a little more.

Are we in for another wild ride? BTC is pumped, alts down, then alts being pumped atm. What's next? June 2017 we saw a good pump and dump and slump. Are we being setup again for the same?  

Roger actually had a lot of good points but he turned into a babbling idiot at the end by promoting bcash as one of two versions of bitcoin which he admitted was an altcoin earlier in the conversation.

Indeed, it is no longer exciting technologically as it is just the peer-to-peer electronic cash system described in the Satoshi white paper.  

One day you will realise that we are all on the same side and our enemies are the Jewish run banking cartels.

If you call a top everyday eventually one of those calls will be right. /brokenclocktwiceadayorsomething

breakout confirmed

I don't think many traders/investors/HODLERS actually know what a like kind exchange is so I don't think this is the reason for the route.

I didn't think bitcoin could be this volatile with the size of market cap it has now. I was wrong.

Look, when the whales begin to believe that the bull market has ended, it's going to go below $5k. Their going to want to take profit.

Agreed. However, I'm suspecting you're not married or have many close family relations in the US? The moment I brought up renouncing to my wife, and that she would need to apply for visas to visit family, friends, etc., well... you can imagine the response.

I assume you are joking.

To crush souls and steal their money? Yeah, most of us seem to have forgotten.

Do you really think the minnows that hang out here can possibly make even a dent in the PM supply?   Maybe you ought to hit up the Winklevoss twins. However, I don't think even they could muster enough to make a dent. Maybe you can get Barry to suddenly change the investment strategy of DCG.  

Come on man.  Peru alone has 120,000 MT of silver reserve.  That's 3.85 billion troy ounces.  I think your numbers are way off.

Silver can be produced through the s-process in larger stars and can also be produced in normal supernova through the r-process. The two neutron stars colliding is just an extreme way to get the r-process going.

I think the fact that years ago, everyone knows that solar energy requires massive amount of silver and yet silver failed to stage even a meaningful rally is quite bearish.

Even China, which is on Silver Standard for a millennium and was one of the largest silver producer in the world (still is), doesn't care about silver.

Silver as well as all precious metals have a long future of suppression at least until full blockchain adoption is in place. By then only the inner party will be able to use their blockchain money for pm purchases so everyone will be happy by default.
You will learn not to even want it eventually, particularly when there is absolutely no way to use your tokens to get it and everyone you know was born in the same system.

Nope I spoke with Bitcoin and it definitely wants to be lower. It doesn't like this cherade of 'wall street' and winklevoss twins and feds and fiat - being another cog in the wheel. Government approval and stock markets were not in the whitepaper. It wants to go back to the underground and then come back up as honey badger.

Hating another group the actual owners want you to hate isn't very enlightened and it is a little disappointing.

Are the odds not very high that the Jews are just another one of the groups they hide behind? It would be too obvious otherwise.
The owners have been generating hatred for groups they can hide behind for all of history, what would be different now?

Having you hate whatever group that is too broad to isolate them is very productive for them so why have you fallen in this trap so deeply despite seeing so much? It would be much easier to realize the reality that is the owners are too small of a group to every be correctly identified when the scale is that of a major religion or race. It would then be very obvious too that you are being played and there is no meaningful power to you or yours, only occasional appearance of power when someone wins the lottery or does well in the casino. All by design to keep reality going.

If you were part of the owners you would do to others exactly what they do to you, just with a different label, so why not just admit jealousy and live without hatred and always improving yourself, enjoying every tiny amount of real power anonymity allows you to enjoy as long as you keep your thoughts to yourself?

No one left any positive comments for bitcoin judas.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaN3jYQxmQU

How many geniuses will continue trying to defend the bitcoin narrative as digital gold or layer of decentralized settlement for large financial institutions?

Because Bitcoin is digital gold

You're right, gold isn't even gold anymore, because the thing it used to be has been completely destroyed by Central Bank manipulation.

Bitcoin is a "digital commodity." Gold is just a shiny rock dug up from the ground.

There, fixed.

Yeah, they give you a piece of paper and say yes we are holding your gold, and then you feel safe....WHY!!!!!

I buy a bitcoin, I can track it monitor it, etc etc etc on a trusted ledger

this is beautiful

Alright. Let me go off and do some research. I want to keep the irritation up.

Finally something interesting. May I know the name of that free app I can use with my phone? Have you used it and can vouch for its accuracy?
I would be willing to do some tests RIGHT NOW. What is the name of the app again?

Just turn off “Listen for Hey Siri”

LN is the real scaling solution.

Well said.

LN is an unworkable train wreck without putting all channel closings in the same common permissioned queue (meaning completely centralized).  The fact these systems are built around a finite block size means humans can easily attack that bottleneck by flooding it with channel closings.  Since it can be flooded, you're required to buffer them and either discard low payers or put them at the back of the line just like regular bitcoin mempool.

From that point, you either have to design as a hub and spoke model just like what Mike Hearn claimed, where the Lightning node is a bitcoin bank and everyone who uses it is their peon slaves to extract usury upon, or every lightning node broadcasts a shared queue with each other.  But due to the fact that people can try to flood the queue as mentioned earlier, each lightning node will have their own criteria for what is or isn't spam that they will broadcast to other nodes (meaningly INSANELY PERMISSIONED, cartel coordinated, and usury based).  

If a Lightning node constantly broadcasts flood bullshit to everyone, they will likely be blacklisted by other Lightning nodes (lightning banks, whatever you want to call them), so the entire system is based around things like trusted and untrusted members, subjective anti-spam filters, etc.  In other words, for Lightning to work at all, it would probably be the most permissioned centralized piece of garbage ever to exist.  No real difference from having an account at Bank of America, and ironcially, the govt will likely legislate who is and isn't allowed to run these Lightning nodes, meaning Bank of America or Goldman Sachs will run them.

At least this is my understanding of the problems one has to overcome to create such system.  The fact bitcoin is not decentralized and it's impossible to create a decentralized digital currency in the first place, also means anyone claiming Lightning is going to be "decentralized" is a complete idiot when it's built on top of bitcoin.

Last time I saw you post that, I responded asking for a link to -- or at least the name of -- that app. Unless I missed it, you did not reply.

Explain how I can securely send gold or silver across the world for payment without any friction/transaction fee or middleman, or GTFOOH you idiot.

Lol. Not only did you NOT answer my question, you redirected it toward complete garbage. Classic straw man fallacy response.

You need to go back to Troll school. They don't even teach this stupid tactic anymore because people see right through it.

When I first showed back up you gently, but firmly, advised me not to feed the troll.

I'm done. By confronting the troll directly and him not directly answering my question, I think anyone else reading this thread will understand that he's just wasting people's time.

But I ask you this then in return, why has he not been perma-banned from the WO thread? Or at least his posts deleted, if we ALL can agree that he's just a troll? Why should we all suffer this idiot whilst he constantly spams the WO thread with his drivel?

You cannot securely or insecurely transfer any quantity of information across the world for payment or any other purpose without friction, transaction fees, middlemen, gravity, thermodynamics and other things alike which are part of how reality works. The same reality that has been developing for billions of years in which you and I are just one infinitesimal part.

Bitcoin is not a perpetual machine. You are buying into the illusion sold to you by the ones who want to enslave, at best, you and your descendants.

You are not your own bank when your mining cannot in any way influence a proof of work system.

You are not your own bank when your storage of bitcoin depends always upon third parties to continue on doing immense amounts of proof of work to keep it safe. Do you think they will always be happy with just fees and block rewards?

You could never securely send bitcoin across the world without any friction/transaction fee or middlemen. Friction was always there, transaction fees were always there and miners, ISPs, Operating Systems, computer hardware architectures, were all there as middlemen all along.

lol... yea, i just bought at 15100 a couple hours ago at the start of this down swing. bigger down than i expected, clearly. yikes.

In the next few days the people who took in loans to buy BTC at 18-20 k will start to sell  

Microsoft exec, head of decentralized identity weighs in. Oh yeah!

https://twitter.com/csuwildcat/status/944524657348055041

this is because with rising BTC price the value of your collateral for your leverages increases too - atleast this is my view; i usually dont use leverage.

PM shilling

So anyone buying their other half or family members some BTC for Christmas?

Thinking of getting my girlfriend some BTC as another gift as I've been left a bit "meh" with what to buy her this year.

Timid sideliners are just starting to pull the trigger, precisely because of MSM news coverage

with 50% of posts pushing PMs, 25% about how crypto currency is not decentralized, and 20% about killing jews, i really don't feel like sifting through all that crap searching for that remaining 5%

Well, SOMETHING is happening.

Maybe I don't understand the lightning network well, but wouldn't the channels used by the exchanges be the major benefit?

LN is an unworkable train wreck without putting all channel closings in the same common permissioned queue (meaning completely centralized).  The fact these systems are built around a finite block size means humans can easily attack that bottleneck by flooding it with channel closings.  Since it can be flooded, you're required to buffer them and either discard low payers or put them at the back of the line just like regular bitcoin mempool.

From that point, you either have to design as a hub and spoke model just like what Mike Hearn claimed, where the Lightning node is a bitcoin bank and everyone who uses it is their peon slaves to extract usury upon, or every lightning node broadcasts a shared queue with each other.  But due to the fact that people can try to flood the queue as mentioned earlier, each lightning node will have their own criteria for what is or isn't spam that they will broadcast to other nodes (meaningly INSANELY PERMISSIONED, cartel coordinated, and usury based).  The nodes might also be incentivized NOT to broadcast and force a hub and spoke model for their own gain.

If a Lightning node constantly broadcasts flood bullshit to everyone, they will likely be blacklisted by other Lightning nodes (lightning banks, whatever you want to call them), so the entire system is based around things like trusted and untrusted members, subjective anti-spam filters, etc.  In other words, for Lightning to work at all, it would probably be the most permissioned centralized piece of garbage ever to exist.  No real difference from having an account at Bank of America, and ironcially, the govt will likely legislate who is and isn't allowed to run these Lightning nodes, meaning Bank of America or Goldman Sachs will run them.

At least this is my understanding of the problems one has to overcome to create such system.  The fact bitcoin is not decentralized and it's impossible to create a decentralized digital currency in the first place, also means anyone claiming Lightning is going to be "decentralized" is a complete idiot when it's built on top of bitcoin.

This is inevitable.  It cost time and money to run a node which serves headers and Merke-branch proofs to SPV clients.  Eventually, businesses will charge for this service, perhaps using payment channels.  I'd suspect the cost would be well under $1 per month, as it would be a high-competition / low-margin type business.

An income stream for non-mining nodes would be a positive development, as it means we're not relying on altruism.  Do you disagree?

Is there still a chance bitcoin breaks ath before the new year?

You know the Spartans died and Persians won, right?

I sure hope the BCH FUD stops soon, getting really tired of it.

Thats where you're wrong kiddo. Look at the github and filter those developers which did more than 1 commit and did not just changed a type...you're left with basically 5-10 persons

I don’t know how you sleep at night knowing the Chinese government can whisk away your coins any time it pleases.  

I have to admit my calls about altcoins are much better than my calls about usd. You could made tremendous profits listening to every one of my altcoins calls including emc, bch at 0.07, and doge when it was still at 20 sat.

I didn't make any Tether calls. I might have joked "tether to the moon" but I'm scared to death having to hold tethers instead of fiat.

JJG, are you on drugs during the holidays? Or just drunk?

I'm confused. Everyone on this thread is supposedly so bullish that they are always 100% btc and never sell a single coin, and also that they dont trust any exchanges to hold their coins or fiat. However, then whenever the dip occurs they say they 'bought the dip' and profited tremendously - meaning they would have had to have sold for fiat and been on an exchange first. So which is it?

That just dropped like a rock!

The problem with the UK is that the HMRC have basically published a few paragraphs a few years ago and now leave it to everyone else to interpret them.

Fucking Bitcoin going down

But everything shows 2018 will be a good year for crypto.

Bitfinex down

Will you have some patience? It looks like LN is coming soon enough.

I for one dont give a fuck. why you here?

I wouldn't have any problem in additional layers more or less de/centralised. You shouldn't too, as they are all optional... just additional layers!

Suck my dick.
Ok ?

Blockchain is not the future. Blocktree is.

I would invite you to look into research on homosexuality in simian populations - the non-reproducing members contribute to the group in other ways, such as helping raise the young within the tribe, and resource gathering.


No argument with you there. Fuck everything about SJW-ism and liberalism.

LOL. You would actually be surprised to know that a good protion of gay men have actually had sex with a women without having to go to such an extreme. Think there is absolutely no chance that your wife/gf could be unfaithful to you if she is hanging out with a gay man? Think again.  

Don't try to reason with that awful shithead.  Many of us have him on ignore.

When is this blizzard on the chart going to let up? It's been going on for a month and is giving me lag.

ATM in Hong Kong:

https://s19.postimg.org/4nvg7ft5f/960x0.jpg

What most forget is Bitcoin is programmable.  There's no reason it can't adopt any new great discovery with enough consensus of the people that use it.  That's one of the things that makes Bitcoin great.  A bar of gold isn't going to change into something more usable ever.

War is the only thing that could keep Trump in office. Worked for Bush...

There's only one bitcoin

But i don't think he cares.

The combination of Trump tax plan (deficit spending into no bid bond market) + 1 trillion dollar infrastructure plan is either going to completely reverse the collapse in money velocity and ignite 1970's inflation to the moon, or the entire league of ivory tower, fraudulent economists will be completely bewildered that money velocity continues to collapse and do something like QE4 on top of that. Either way, they're going to force inflation somehow in the end no matter what and it's going to be yuge.

The metals market is already responding with people front running this right now.  The last time they did something like this, gold and silver both went up 10x in inflation adjusted dollars in the span of 8 years. I think this time the inflation might hit harder over a shorter time span (once they ever manage to get it started that is). If stocks collapse, all retirement funds collapse and the establishment gets overthrown by the boomercucks. Betting on stocks collapsing is probably not a good idea when they're clearly trying to engineer 1970's inflation to debase the unservicable debt + prop up the stock market.

In terms of metals price, gold should already be $2400-2600 or so right now when looking at gold to debt ratio charts. Silver would spike to around $75-85 when gold corrects there in current dollar purchasing power. Howerever, if they actually do ignite 70's inflation, the metals prices are going to go off the charts.

Gold that thing with lots of mothball mine's waiting to come out of retirement when gold is worth x. with modern extraction techniques that make the old days and numbers comparison totally obsolete.

watch and learn kids

extreme prejudice, this is how it is done

Wake up man..you missed the future..its here.

16 Psyche is located in the large asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is a 130 mile (200km) wide chunk of metal, made up of iron, nickel and a number of other rare metals, including gold, platinum and copper. If the asteroid could be transported back to Earth, the iron alone would be worth $10,000 quadrillion (Ł8,072 quadrillion).

The article I got this from goes on to explain how NASA is setting up a probe and scientific experiments to explore this very rock. There are literally millions of similiar and much closer NEO's that will be mined for raw materials in this century. A few of the companies on the forefront of this are Deep Space Industries, Kepler Energy and Space Engineering, Planetary Resources and Moon Express.

Gold and other so called "precious" metals are not so rare and precious. The future is encryption.

Da red wunz go fasta!

ignored.

I barely tolerate Youtube now because they'e started sticking commercials in at the start of videos. I consider them to be stealing my bandwidth.

Just make sure to teach him how the wallet works and have patience with him; last thing you want is for him to lose the coins.

Roach...fuck off...what ever..

Roach has some valid points

Also as per recent comments a few pages back. Lightning Network, I have also concluded is a banking layer plonked on top of bitcoin.

Ignoring this is akin to putting your head in the sand like an ostrich.

Do you actually know what LN is?  I'll tell you what it is.  LN is nothing more than establishing bitcoin banks on top of the blockchain.  All of the exact same regulation traditional banks have will be applied to them and bitcoin will be virtually identical to your current banking system.  The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because it's too difficult for them to play whack-a-mole with regulating miners, but the LN "nodes" aka banks are less ambiguous in nature and will be regulated to infinity just like any normal financial services provider or bank.  

The costs, compliance, and amount of lawyers needed will be so high only entities like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs will run them.  This is how crony capitalism works.  You introduce regulation with compliance requirements and fees so high that only your existing monopoly can participate while all small competitors are eliminated.

Nevermind the fact LN doesn't function in a decentralized manner in the first place.  There is also ZERO incentive for LN nodes aka banks to broadcast transactions to external peers.  There is actually incentive for these bitcoin banks to FORCE a hub and spoke model or cartel collective in order to hold their users hostage for usury fees (just like regular banks do). There's also nothing that stops them from changing usage of bitcoin as settlement to ripple, US dollars, or anything else.

LN is an unworkable train wreck without putting all channel closings in the same common permissioned queue (meaning completely centralized).  The fact these systems are built around a finite block size means humans can easily attack that bottleneck by flooding it with channel closings.  Since it can be flooded, you're required to buffer them and either discard low payers or put them at the back of the line just like regular bitcoin mempool.

From that point, you either have to design as a hub and spoke model just like what Mike Hearn claimed, where the Lightning node is a bitcoin bank and everyone who uses it is their peon slaves to extract usury upon, or every lightning node broadcasts a shared queue with each other.  But due to the fact that people can try to flood the queue as mentioned earlier, each lightning node will have their own criteria for what is or isn't spam, or who is and isn't a terrorist that they will broadcast to other nodes (meaningly INSANELY PERMISSIONED, cartel coordinated, and usury based).  The nodes might also be incentivized NOT to broadcast and force a hub and spoke model for their own gain.

If a Lightning node constantly broadcasts flood bullshit to everyone, they will likely be blacklisted by other Lightning nodes (lightning banks, whatever you want to call them), so the entire system is based around things like trusted and untrusted members, subjective anti-spam filters, etc.  In other words, for Lightning to work at all, it would probably be the most permissioned centralized piece of garbage ever to exist.  No real difference from having an account at Bank of America, and ironcially, the govt will likely legislate who is and isn't allowed to run these Lightning nodes, meaning Bank of America or Goldman Sachs will run them.

At least this is my understanding of the problems one has to overcome to create such system.  The fact bitcoin is not decentralized and it's impossible to create a decentralized digital currency in the first place, also means anyone claiming Lightning is going to be "decentralized" is a complete idiot when it's built on top of bitcoin.