going UP:

I'm a bit shocked that no one is talking about this idea.

It would greatly increase the security (and hence the value) of SPV clients and allow far greater scaling with almost no sacrifice in security.

I guess I'm just expressing the opinion that the current header based proof if work mechanism is working fine so far and is difficult to exploit. I'll take a look when I have time (but you're a smart guy so I'm sure the solution is strong). Its just that in this instance I'm not sure we have a problem yet, and I'm starting to take a if its not broke why fix it view largely out of fear that an unneeded change might have adverse unknown consequences (but maybe we will someday and so its very useful to have solutions ready)

2 1/2 yrs later after my newsletter post on this:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/silicon-valley-going-wall-street-171001127.html

And if this is true Blockstream is making a HUGE mistake.  I don't think many people are doing multiple txns per day, every day right now.  I don't even think many people do 1 txn per week.  I doubt that people will be willing to sequester coins into the LN for significant periods (no I have no facts to back up this intuition).  

So I don't think that the lightning network solves the problem we have today which is getting people to do their FIRST txn (expand the network) and then getting them to use it periodically (use encourages merchants to accept it).

Once people are using BTC a couple times per day, LN is becomes very valuable.  Its actually WORSE if you do just one txn in a payment channel (it takes 2 blockchain txns instead of 1).

So LN won't actually solve the typical use pattern today.  And if that pattern is forced to pay high fees people will choose other payment options stagnating Bitcoin growth (or best case transforms into low velocity digital gold) to the point where we'll never need the volumes LN can offer.

So much for thermos being the "epitome of authoritarianism" and ready to start "book burnings."   

If you and the toxic Redditards (eg Frap.doc) could learn the diff between moderation and censorship, that would be great.

XTnodes = 3%

Wow, very disruption.  Such revolutionary!

Attacking what you imagine to be people's motivations is easy.

Refuting the actual computer science and game theory is hard:

note the non-technical assumption that idiot makes in his post upon which he bases all his technical mis-steps.  he's wrong.  where Bitcoin XT is headed, there's a big enough pie to bring every miner currently involved in the space along for the ride.  and the miners know this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or65M4Ht4Kk

This is actually a great argument! I think you are completely 100% correct here, but to have another strong case for the blocksize increase, what we would need to have here is some data on actual usage patterns of Bitcoin to support this argument.

Did someone already extract 'typical spending patterns' vs. 'typical investment patterns' from the Blockchain?

what is really going on here is that Blockstream wants to shift the long term miner tx fees away from the mainchain into SC & LN tx fees paid to their federated nodes, LN gateways, & consulting fees for SC's.