THE 10 BEST Things to Do Near Downstream Casino Resort, Quapaw

This is my first reddit post, but I think I've finally found the right place to share my experiences. ALSO I know reddit loves to call 'false' on anything long and well written, but this is so long and SO detailed because I've literally been seeing/living these places and events every night for about 2/3 of my life. This is absolutely a true, though incredible, account.
The way I dream is a subject that has baffled me since around the age of 12 when it became what it has been since then. I've asked lots of different people through the years if they have ever known anyone else who has experienced what I have, and nothing. I figured maybe this would be the right place to find someone with a similar experience, and if nothing else, I know y'all will at least appreciate the story.
So when I was somewhere around 12, I started noticing that I was going back to the same large city in my dreams every night. I knew it was the same place because there were a few key structures that were HUGE and featured at least somewhere in the landscape of my dreams. One of these was a crazy, massive tangle of impossibly high/swooping highway over and underpasses and upside-down loops that was TERRIFYING to navigate, but essential to use to get from one area of the map to the other. The second and third key structures were what helped me discover that I was actually on a small series of islands. They were a long swooping bridge that almost touched the water below with bright lights all along it on both sides, and the tall, champagne glass shaped island that was on the other side of the bridge. The top of the smaller island was flush with the cliff edge where the bridge attached to the main island, so the bridge was basically a giant U that went straight down and then straight back up. The little island was entirely crowded with skyscrapers with the tallest being a kind of caricature of the Space Needle.
I dreamt in this extended city stretched between a small island and the coast of a bigger one for some years, I started to get to see areas of farmland and dense forest further inland on the big island. I should say at this point, I'm never in control of where I am going or what I am doing. That is to say, I can't lucid dream. I've tried many times in my life and I just can't quite get it. Just wanted to say that so I don't have to get a bunch of questions about it. I wish I could lucid dream so bad guys, believe me, I've tried lol.
SO... it's hard to really remember exactly when the first big shift happened. I wanna say it was around 18-19. Suddenly my dreams were filled with devastating natural disasters. Floods were common, but not as common as these huge swirling storms of tornadoes. There would be hundreds of CRAZY tall tornadoes touching the ground all around as far as the eye could see all swirling around each other destroying everything in sight. At one point in this time period there was a flood happening and I was helping someone escape from this super tall round tower prison that was just off the coast, but away from the small city island. It had one long walkway to get to the tower and was surrounded by rough water.
It went on like this for awhile, and then I was suddenly dreaming in an area of thick almost rainforest with a wide river running through it. I spent another few years exploring this 'new' area. The river ended up getting narrower and turned into a rapids further downstream. It led to a waterfall and along that edge of the forest (turned out) was also the far edge of the farmland that I recognized from my old dreamscape. There was a long highway that I had never been to the end of in my old dreamscape, but the end of it was here on the opposite coast of the island. It went over the same steep ledge that the waterfall was part of, but there were now these big... air buses?? that carried people over the edge and floated them down into the big city on the beach that was on this side of the island.
Around the time of finding this new city and the road and realizing that I never left the original island, I had a series of dreams where I went back with a group to the 'old city' and the tops of all the highway loops were gone, the bridge was broken on the side that had attached to the smaller island and was in the water so I couldn't even get to the smaller island anymore. There was overgrowth everywhere and everything street level looked like it had been through disaster after disaster. It was surreal.
I now dream mostly in that big beach city and the surrounding poorer areas. The 'big city' is actually made up of like 6 or 7 mind-bendingly big like, SUPER buildings. Each is essentially it's own small enclosed city under the name of a giant casino chain. But they each have their own casino, hotel, mall, golf course, airport, amusement park, amphitheatre, literally like everything, but on a massive scale. The areas just off the beach are more like lots of small rundown houses, warehouses, less noise but also less color.
There have been some floods and fires recently and I have moved a little further inland and uphill and have now been in a kind of grand victorian ish area that I hadn't seen until now. I've been going back to the beach city too, but I haven't really been in the slums in awhile, just this new hoity-toity place where everything feels too expensive for me and my giant casino town.
Also I did have a very short series of dreams (3 maybe 4 nights) where we (I was with a team) launched from the beach city in a ship that I can only describe as a thick soap bubble held in with a very thin metal frame and adventured through space. We visited another planet that had very Dr. Seuss vegetation and coloring, which I feel like was the main mission, and then had some sort of issue that caused us to be way off of where we were supposed to be and almost didn't make it home. I can still see the surface of that planet like I actually walked on it. Oh! And I've also learned how to fly the air buses, which is really fun.
Does ANYONE have a similar, I don't know, second dream life I guess? It's the fact that the things that happen to my dream world when I'm dreaming STAY that way permanently that seems to be the thing that makes my experience unique. At least according to anyone I've talked to about it. Can anyone offer any insight?

We are calling for businesses to voluntarily close if possible, or if not to make as many changes as they safely can to keep their workers home. We understand that this demonstration of community spirit will require significant sacrifice, but we are so moved by the threat facing us that we have made this urgent plea.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation, support and willing to join us in doing whatever you can to keep our community safe.
--Paul Masiowski
(Letter follows):
.....
An open letter to the Saskatchewan business community,
Re: A call to action for Saskatchewan businesses to prevent the transmission of COVID-19
Please, we beg you, join us in battling this disease. The recently declared State of Emergency in Saskatchewan has resulted in the obligatory closure of high-risk businesses (gyms, fitness centres, casinos, and bingo halls) and suggested strategies to mitigate spread at others. While we support these measures, we call on the Saskatchewan business community to go even further and proactively close or transform their businesses in a way that eliminates person-to- person interaction. This will be a painful but necessary way to prevent community transmission of COVID-19. The downstream impact of early action by our business community will save lives and give our healthcare system a fighting chance. We would not ask this of you if we thought there was any other way.
We are so grateful to those of you who have already taken initiatives to protect Saskatchewan from COVID-19. By closing your doors, becoming ‘take-out only’, allowing your employees to work from home, waiving the need for sick notes, and discouraging non-essential movement within our community, you have shown that you understand the threat that we are facing. We see the sacrifices you are making and thank you for this selfless act. We also understand that many of you have not made these changes for any number of reasons, including the very real threat to you and your employees' livelihood. We look to the Government of Saskatchewan and the Federal Government to develop programs to support you and your employees in what may be a long disruption.
Until recently, this virus seemed very far away. However, COVID-19 is here and we cannot wait any longer. The declaration of a state of emergency in Saskatchewan underscores this point. The countries that it has overwhelmed have given us the gifts of time and an approach to slow its spread. However, this disease is unique in that no matter what we do as healthcare providers, we will be overrun without your help. You are leaders in our community and your early and proactive response will help to convey the gravity of the situation while limiting its spread. Lives depend on this.
Regardless of our community's response, we will continue to do everything that we possibly can to keep you and your family safe if and when you fall ill.
Now, more than ever, we are in this together.
Sincerely,
(197 Saskatchewan physicians)
...
Facebook post with full text and images of the letter: https://www.facebook.com/paulmasiowski/posts/10157692432856321

the 7’s in tarot can be quite complex to interpret, and as i was beginning my tarot journey, were some of the most complex for me to understand. all numbers are divine in their own way, and 7 is certainly no exception.
we go the casino to play, and win when three 7’s appear. the 777 sequence is divine fulfillment and movement. it is considered a ‘lucky’ number if one believes in that sort of thing. 7 constitutes the number of days in a week, and 7 is the number of earthly chakras within the human body. this is just scratching the service of the number 7.
in tarot, the 7’s are complex because they signify ‘fortunate instability’, at least in my interpretation. much of what will be written shall be text of a channeled nature, so please take what resonates and allow yourself to be guided by what feels ‘right’ to you.
7 OF SWORDS
let us begin with the suit of swords, shall we.. we here, very much like to ‘debunk’ myths & travesties, and it is a travesty that the suit of swords is commonly purported to be ‘negative’ in tarot.
as swords are mental, the seven of swords is indicative of the ‘fortunate instability’ of the mind. here will be expressed thought processes which are shrewd, perceptive, cunning and calculated. 7 is a harbinger of change; of MOVEMENT of some sort at the very least. 7 is swirling and whirling, and since the number itself is uneven, is subconsciously searching for the stability that the even numbers carry.
7 of swords indicates MENTAL PROWESS of the highest kind. this card emulates premeditation, for the sole purpose of bettering the perceived mental encapsulation of the psyche. the key word here is AWARE. whatsoever is going on within the mind of said individual, held captive within the swords of seven, at least he is AWARE of it, and CONSCIOUS of his abilities.
his mind may be twirling about in some sort of turbulence, but he is attempting to rectify it; through any means. this is why the ‘deceptive’ connotation is favored when most explore this card. the 7 of swords does not wear his thoughts on his sleeve. he does not provide information if he deems it to be invalid in whatever predicament he is in. he may not lie outright; and in most cases, he does NOT ‘lie’, at all. omitting information, is not a lie in and of itself.
the 7 of swords can be likened to the master poker player. he keeps his hand held close and observes those around him, basing his next move on what ‘the other’ is doing. this is not considered a sneaky tactic by any means; it simply is ‘unmovement’ of certain things, until more information can be gathered from his environment.
this shows someone who is a wonderful observer of their environment, who is well versed intellectually, and who takes great care to think prior to making a decision. even if it seems as though a decision is made ‘on the fly’, be assured that the 7 of swords individual has carefully thought it through in his mind. this is someone who may indeed have the sweetest intentions, yet will remain virtually unreadable to ‘the other’, making them APPEAR deceptive.
to touch quickly upon the reversal of the card.. the 7 of swords simply means that their intentions, whatsoever they may be, pure or impure, will be NOTICEABLY VISIBLE to the other. this pertains to what one would consider ‘trying too hard’. the reversed position here simply indicates an individual who has an ‘overactive mind’.. again, we say, 7’s are MOVEMENT. there may be so much mentally that this individual is trying to conceal, that it becomes blatantly obvious that he is hiding something. suspicion is an adequate word to use here. the reversed 7 of swords may appear suspicious to others, because his psyche is so focused on BEING suspicious OF others. so essentially, it shall come to pass that he is viewed suspiciously, even if he is innocent in nature.
7 OF CUPS
the 7 of cups denote the emotional nature of the 7’s. this is the ‘feeling chamber’ of the individual, and often denotes the realm of the subconscious mind. as we continue to proclaim the 7’s as ‘fortunate instability’, we will say this: it is a great blessing to be able to FEEL, as feeling is the catalyst which propels conscious manifestation.
the 7 of cups is certainly FEELING alright. the emotions may sway from one dream to another, not quite settling on any one thing.. because the individual is AWARE of the many choices in which he can feel, he is almost childlike in wonderment of his psyche. the suit of 7 is that of a mental nature, so AWARENESS, be it conscious or subconscious, shall be found throughout, with sheer abundance. when one perceives themself to hold no limit, and the realization that anything can occur, is beholden to him, he now is almost rampant with desire for EVERYTHING.
and hence the 7 of cups. ‘i realize that i am eternally now, and what i desire shall be brought to me’.. is very fitting for the cups of 7. 7 energy, which is prowess, coupled with emotion, awakens the natural instinct to daydream within the psyche. it is like observing a buffet with nothing but your favorite foods laid out in front of you, and being so awestruck that you forget to actually CHOOSE what it is that goes onto your plate. when this card is drawn in tarot expect there to be many options presented to you at once, each of them leading down a different emotional pathway.
YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT THE MOMENT TO CHOOSE, yet you stand there gaping at what lies before you. it is a beautiful place to be; knowing one can have it all, though many times the individual may become overwhelmed at the sensation that they CAN have everything they desire. it is essentially an internal emotional debate about what they want MORE, which leads them to stand on the precipice of dreams fulfilled, without actually taking the plunge to dive in.
sometimes we see this card referenced as being somewhat of a ‘lord of illusions’, though not in fact rightfully so. none of the choices one sees before them is an illusion because it already does exist. we like to use the coined term ‘if you can dream it, you can do it’. the issue becomes making the choice itself. 7 of cups is someone who KNOWS they can have it, feels they can have it, and imagines having it however pleasurable it may be. yet they remain content in just dreaming it, instead of deciding to solidify the image.
this card may occasionally indicate a deep, burning desire for the very things the individual dreams of, yet the physical action to complete the desires into fruition on the material plane may be lacking. again, this is ‘fortunate instability’, as we call it, because one is totally aware of how they feel about what they want, and they are evaluating which of these things ‘feels the best’ to them. it is much more satisfactory to choose the best feeling path after careful consideration, than to choose a more disheartening path ‘on the fly’.
which leads us to the reversed 7 of cups. here is where one has so many emotions that they may misconstrue the way they are feeling for their STATE OF BEING. there is awareness in the sense that many emotions are occurring, however, they may take unwell thought out action now, just to NOT feel overwhelmed. the individual here can appear to be behaving erratically, because they are attempting to mute the emotions which have now seemed to taken over their psyche.
7 OF PENTACLES
in this card, we typically see someone who is depicted ‘observing’ or ‘picking’ something out of their physical environment. the pentacles suit is one of earthly nature, and the 7’s here bring it slight instability. but as mentioned with the previous elements, it is ‘FORTUNATE INSTABILITY’
the 7 of pentacles is the time when one KNOWS, wholeheartedly that they have maintained a positive outlook, done the necessary physical steps, and have intended for their outcome to happen. it just ‘seems’ to not have arrived yet.
i like to think of this card as ‘building momentum for manifestation’. the 7’s are abundant, though still slightly disorganized in motion to the untrained observer. however, there still is energetic motion spiraling down from the ethers into the material plane. when this card is pulled, be certain that SOMETHING is on its way to the seeker in the physical realm. they may even be witness to synchronicities regarding what they are intending, and may come out disappointed because of this, because it isn’t their desired manifestation, only an indicator of its soon-to-be arrival on the earthly plane. they are evaluating their surroundings and looking for clues on how to tweak their technique, whether required or not.
the 7 of pentacles shows ‘gathering’ of earthly matter. it is fortunate to see this card in a reading because it implies that efforts ARE being rewarded, though maybe only on the etheric plane at the time being. when this card is drawn, it is advisable to remain firm in the conviction that what one desires WILL materialize, and that it already has happened energetically. the importance of this card is knowing that now is the time to ‘amp up your vibration’, if one chooses to, in order the accelerate the manifestation’s arrival
the appearance of the 7 of pentacles indicates that what one desires exists NOW, and they must be vigilant in maintaining their positivity regarding the manifestation. since it does not yet appear physically, now is the optimum time to clean up any doubt or fear that may be surrounding the intended outcome.
an individual operating at the 7 of pentacles level may appear cautious and studious, bright and alert, also ever observing and evaluating. this is not someone who leaps without looking. this is someone who has an agenda, though it may not be known at the time to one dealing with him. the 7’s, as mentioned, as shrewd and cunning, adept at keeping their intentions under wraps. so, when dealing with someone operating here, it is important to be aware that they ARE AWARE OF YOU. they are scrutinizing your ways on the physical plane. they may not advertise it, but they are studying you. this is someone who is stealthy in his doings, even if it for positive reason.
if the 7 of pentacles should appear reversed, know that whosoever is doing the observing shall be found out, because they are not as slick as they aim to be. there may be an air of someone who is overworked, or participating in a physical experience that he assumes he has no control over. here is where the 7’s become chaotic in the physical experience. if a plant is given TOO MUCH water, out of fear of it becoming dehydrated, the green thumb becomes the destroyer of the very thing it is trying to grow. when this card is drawn reversed, it is advised to stop, slow down, or take a break from whatever physical work one feels they ‘have to’ do.
7 OF WANDS
the 7of wands is where the fire element runs rampant and dances wildly with the 7’s. though most would consider this card to be one of conflict, we view it as ‘being prepared on the fly’. there is a certain spontaneity here, when we take into consideration the ‘FORTUNATE INSTABILITY’ of the 7 suit.
wands are fire energy, and they too are quite unstable and erratic when left to their own devices. because of this, they actually pair quite nicely with the 7’s because this is someone who is always ‘ready for anything’.
this card indicates someone who may not know what is coming next, but remains nonchalant about it because he knows no opposition. this may be liken to one who is meandering along his journey, a grizzly bear pops up in the road, and the individual instinctively jumps into the river, to be carried swiftly downstream and out of the grizzly bear’s line of vision. we are talking ‘swift action without forethought’.
this individual is instinctual, almost primally prepared for whatever comes his way, so ingrained in his psyche that he worries not of outside circumstances at all. there may be an animalistic quality to the nature of this person, and he may be one who is considered to be ‘sporadically passionate’. his energy flows in waves and he seems to only move when circumstances are moving around him.
when this card appears, it may be indicative of someone who knows not what to expect and kind of likes it that way. this is not one who solely operates revolving around a schedule. they may appear to be random and scatterbrained, ‘all over the place’, but when the time is right to make the leap, rest assured they will. and will will make it look effortless.
if the 7 of wands should appear reversed, there may be a tendency to follow fear instead of intuition. 7’s can have an air of paranoia in the reversal, and the wands take the animal instincts and push them into overdrive. this may indicate an individual who is so riddled with fear, that he stifles his own intuitive nudges and finds himself in undesirable circumstances. ‘daredevil’ qualities are likely to show themselves as well as agile determination

Hello Poker Friends,
I am an avid and regular poker player - live and online. I live in Kansas City and the poker scene here is great! I know a few groups of players who host home games and the casinos have great action too. Harrah's and Hollywood are where it is at for the juicy games. Ameristar isn't too bad but overall not as hot as the other two.
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I try and play poker on every trip or vacation I go on. Sometimes just one session unless I base the whole trip around poker like I do when I went to Las Vegas twice.
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Cities I have played in:
Many rooms on the Las Vegas strip, all the major ones
Daytona Beach Poker Kennel Club
Seattle Fortune Poker
Omaha Horsehoe
Downstream OK
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So overall it has only been a handful of cities but I want to expand that. I went to Vegas twice last year and was so excited to go again in April until it was shutdown. Too bad. But now I am more pumped than ever to go and I cannot wait.
I have a lot of fyler points and can do at least 3 more trips. I want to go to Las Vegas once more of course but I really want to try to do a trip where I visit a city for just two nights and visit 2-3 poker rooms during my time in the city. Can you guys suggest good poker rooms in your cities to play in? Maybe we can have a meet up! Here are the cities I am thinking.
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Chicago
Houston
Tampa Bay / Orlando
Somewhere on the East Coast
Los Angeles
Maybe Seattle again
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What do you guys have in mind?

Originally posted by Darkstar at Forex Factory.
Disclaimer: I did not write this. I found this post on ForexFactory written by a user called DarkStar, which I believe a lot of redditors will benefit from reading.
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There has been much discussion of late regarding borker spreads and liquidity. Many assumptions are being made about why spreads are widened during news time that are built on an incomplete knowledge of the architecture of the forex market in general. The purpose of this article is to dissect the market and hopefully shed some light on the situation so that a more rational and productive discussion can be undertaken by the Forex Factory members.
We will begin with an explanation of the purpose of the Forex market and how it is utilized by its primary participants, expand into the structure and operation of the market, and conclude with the implications of this information for speculators. With that having been said, let us begin.
Unlike the various bond and equity markets, the Forex market is not generally utilized as an investment medium. While speculation has a critical role in its proper function, the lion’s share of Forex transactions are done as a function of international business.
The guy who buys a shiny new Eclipse more then likely will pay for it with US Dollars. Unfortunately Mitsubishi’s factory workers in Japan need to get their paychecks denominated in Yen, so at some point a conversion needs to be made. When one considers that companies like Exxon, Boeing, Sony, Dell, Honda, and thousands of other international businesses move nearly every dollar, real, yen, rubble, pound, and euro they make in a foreign country through the Forex market, it isn’t hard to understand how insignificant the speculative presence is; even in a $2tril per day market.
By and large, businesses don’t much care about the intricacies of exchange rates, they just want to make and sell their products. As a central repository of a company’s money, it was only natural that the banks would be the facilitators of these transactions. In the old days it was easy enough for a bank to call a foreign bank (or a foreign branch of ones own bank) and swap the stockpiles of currency each had accumulated from their many customers.
Just as any business would, the banks bought the foreign currency at one rate and marked it up before selling it to the customer. With that the foreign exchange spread was born. This was (and still is) a reasonable cost of doing business. Mitsubishi can pay its customers and the banks make a nice little profit for the hassle and risks associated with moving around the currency.
As a byproduct of transacting all this business, bank traders developed the ability to speculate on the future of currency rates. Utilizing a better understanding of the market, a bank could quote a business a spread on the current rate but hold off hedging until a better one came along. This process allowed the banks to expand their net income dramatically. The unfortunate consequence was that liquidity was redistributed in a way that made certain transactions impossible to complete.
It was for this reason and this reason alone that the market was eventually opened up to non-bank participants. The banks wanted more orders in the market so that a) they could profit from the less experienced participants, and b) the less experienced participants could provide a better liquidity distribution for execution of international business hedge orders. Initially only megacap hedge funds (such as Soros’s and others) were permitted, but it has since grown to include the retail brokerages and ECNs.
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Market Structure:
Now that we have established why the market exists, let’s take a look at how the transactions are facilitated:
The top tier of the Forex market is transacted on what is collectively known as the Interbank. Contrary to popular belief the Interbank is not an exchange; it is a collection of communication agreements between the world’s largest money center banks.
To understand the structure of the Interbank market, it may be easier to grasp by way of analogy. Consider that in an office (or maybe even someone’s home) there are multiple computers connected via a network cable. Each computer operates independently of the others until it needs a resource that another computer possesses. At that point it will contact the other computer and request access to the necessary resource. If the computer is working properly and its owner has given the requestor authorization to do so, the resource can be accessed and the initiating computers request can be fulfilled. By substituting computers for banks and resources for currency, you can easily grasp the relationships that exist on the Interbank.
Anyone who has ever tried to find resources on a computer network without a server can appreciate how difficult it can be to keep track of who has what resources. The same issue exists on the Interbank market with regard to prices and currency inventory. A bank in Singapore may only rarely transact business with a company that needs to exchange some Brazilian Real and it can be very difficult to establish what a proper exchange rate should be. It is for this purpose that EBS and Reuters (hereafter EBS) established their services.
Layered on top (in a manner of speaking) of the Interbank communication links, the EBS service enables banks to see how much and at what prices all the Interbank members are willing to transact. Pains should be taken to express that EBS is not a market or a market maker; it is an application used to see bids and offers from the various banks.
The second tier of the market exists essential within each bank. By calling your local Bank of America branch you can exchange any foreign currency you would like. More then likely they will just move some excess currency from one branch to another. Since this is a micro-exchange with a single counterparty, you are basically at their mercy as to what exchange rate they will quote you. Your choice is to accept their offer or shop a different bank. Everyone who trades the forex market should visit their bank at least once to get a few quotes. It would be very enlightening to see how lucrative these transactions really are.
Branching off of this second tier is the third tier retail market. When brokers like Oanda, Forex.com, FXCM, etc. desire to establish a retail operation the first thing they need is a liquidity provider. Nine in ten of these brokers will sign an agreement with just one bank. This bank will agree to provide liquidity if and only if they can hedge it on EBS inclusive of their desired spread. Because the volume will be significantly higher a single bank patron will transact, the spreads will be much more competitive. By no means should it be expected these tier 3 providers will be quoted precisely what exists on the Interbank. Remember the bank is in the business of collecting spreads and no agreement is going to suspend that priority.
Retail forex is almost akin to running a casino. The majority of its participants have zero understanding how to trade effectively and as a result are consistent losers. The spread system combined with a standard probability distribution of returns gives the broker a built in house advantage of a few percentage points. As a result, they have all built internal order matching systems that play one loser off against a winner and collect the spread. On the occasions when disequilibrium exists within the internal order book, the broker hedges any exposure with their tier 2 liquidity provider.
As bad as this may sound, there are some significant advantages for speculators that deal with them. Because it is an internal order book, many features can be provided which are otherwise unavailable through other means. Non-standard contract sizes, high leverage on tiny account balances, and the ability to transact in a commission free environment are just a few of them…
An ECN operates similar to a Tier 2 bank, but still exists on the third tier. An ECN will generally establish agreements with several tier 2 banks for liquidity. However instead of matching orders internally, it will just pass through the quotes from the banks, as is, to be traded on. It’s sort of an EBS for little guys. There are many advantages to the model, but it is still not the Interbank. The banks are going to make their spread or their not go to waste their time. Depending on the bank this will take the form of price shading or widened spreads depending on market conditions. The ECN, for its trouble, collects a commission on each transaction.
Aside from the commission factor, there are some other disadvantages a speculator should consider before making the leap to an ECN. Most offer much lower leverage and only allow full lot transactions. During certain market conditions, the banks may also pull their liquidity leaving traders without an opportunity to enter or exit positions at their desired price.
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Trade Mechanics:
It is convenient to believe that in a $2tril per day market there is always enough liquidity to do what needs to be done. Unfortunately belief does not negate the reality that for every buyer there MUST be a seller or no transaction can occur. When an order is too large to transact at the current price, the price moves to the point where open interest is abundant enough to cover it. Every time you see price move a single pip, it means that an order was executed that consumed (or otherwise removed) the open interest at the current price. There is no other way that prices can move.
As we covered earlier, each bank lists on EBS how much and at what price they are willing to transact a currency. It is important to note that no Interbank participant is under any obligation to make a transaction if they do not feel it is in their best interest. There are no “market makers” on the Interbank; only speculators and hedgers.
Looking at an ECN platform or Level II data on the stock market, one can get a feel for what the orders on EBS look like. The following is a sample representation:
You’ll notice that there is open interest (Level II Vol figures) of various sizes at different price points. Each one of those units represents existing limit orders and in this example, each unit is $1mil in currency.
Using this information, if a market sell order was placed for 38.4mil, the spread would instantly widen from 2.5 pips to 4.5 pips because there would no longer be any orders between 1.56300 and 1.56345. No broker, market maker, bank, or thief in the night widened the spread; it was the natural byproduct of the order that was placed. If no additional orders entered the market, the spread would remain this large forever. Fortunately, someone somewhere will deem a price point between those 2 figures an appropriate opportunity to do something and place an order. That order will either consume more interest or add to it, depending whether it is a market or limit order respectively.
What would have happened if someone placed a market sell order for 2mil just 1 millisecond after that 38.4 mil order hit? They would have been filled at 1.5630 Why were they “slipped”? Because there was no one to take the other side of the transaction at 1.56320 any longer. Again, nobody was out screwing the trader; it was the natural byproduct of the order flow.
A more interesting question is, what would happen if all the listed orders where suddenly canceled? The spread would widen to a point at which there were existing bids and offers. That may be 5,7,9, or even 100 pips; it is going to widen to whatever the difference between a bid and an offer are. Notice that nobody came in and “set” the spread, they just refused to transact at anything between it.
Nothing can be done to force orders into existence that don’t exist. Regardless what market is being examined or what broker is facilitating transactions, it is impossible to avoid spreads and slippage. They are a fact of life in the realm of trading.
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Implications for speculators:
Trading has been characterized as a zero sum game, and rightly so. If trader A sells a security to trader B and the price goes up, trader A lost money that they otherwise could have made. If it goes down, Trader A made money from trader B’s mistake. Even in a huge market like the Forex, each transaction must have a buyer and a seller to make a trade and one of them is going to lose. In the general realm of trading, this is materially irrelevant to each participant. But there are certain situations where it becomes of significant importance. One of those situations is a news event.
Much has been made of late about how it is immoral, illegal, or downright evil for a broker, bank, or other liquidity provider to withdraw their order (increasing the spread) and slip orders (as though it was a conscious decision on their part to do so) more then normal during these events. These things occur for very specific reasons which have nothing to do with screwing anyone. Let us examine why:
Leading up to an economic report for example, certain traders will enter into positions expecting the news to go a certain way. As the event becomes immanent, the banks on the Interbank will remove their speculative orders for fear of taking unnecessary losses. Technical traders will pull their orders as well since it is common practice for them to avoid the news. Hedge funds and other macro traders are either already positioned or waiting until after the news hits to make decisions dependent on the result.
Knowing what we now know, where is the liquidity necessary to maintain a tight spread coming from?
Moving down the food chain to Tier 2; a bank will only provide liquidity to an ECN or retail broker if they can instantly hedge (plus their requisite spread) the positions on Interbank. If the Interbank spreads are widening due to lower liquidity, the bank is going to have to widen the spreads on the downstream players as well.
At tier 3 the ECN’s are simply passing the banks offers on, so spreads widen up to their customers. The retailers that guarantee spreads of 2 to 5 pips have just opened a gaping hole in their risk profile since they can no longer hedge their net exposure (ever wonder why they always seem to shut down or requote until its over?). The variable spread retailers in turn open up their spreads to match what is happening at the bank or they run into the same problems fixed spreads broker are dealing with.
Now think about this situation for a second. What is going to happen when a number misses expectations? How many traders going into the event with positions chose wrong and need to get out ASAP? How many hedge funds are going to instantly drop their macro orders? How many retail traders’ straddle orders just executed? How many of them were waiting to hear a miss and executed market orders?
With the technical traders on the sidelines, who is going to be stupid enough to take the other side of all these orders?
The answer is no one. Between 1 and 5 seconds after the news hits it is a purely a 1 way market. That big long pin bar that occurs is a grand total of 2 prices; the one before the news hit and the one after. The 10, 20, or 30 pips between them is called a gap.
Is it any wonder that slippage is in evidence at this time?
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Conclusions:
Each tier of the Forex market has its own inherent advantages and disadvantages. Depending on your priorities you have to make a choice between what restrictions you can live with and those you cant. Unfortunately, you can’t always get what you want.
By focusing on slippage and spreads, which are the natural byproduct of order flow, one is not only pursuing a futile ideal, they are passing up an enormous opportunity to capitalize on true inefficiencies. News events are one of the few times where a large number of players are positioned inappropriately and it is fairly easy to profit from their foolishness. If a trader truly wants to make the leap to the next level of profitability they should be spending their time figuring out how identify these positions and trading with the goal of capturing the price movement they inevitably will cause.
Nobody is going to make the argument that a broker is a trader’s best friend, but they still provide a valuable service and should be compensated for their efforts. By accepting a broker for what it is and learning how to work within the limitations of the relationship, traders have access to a world of opportunity that they otherwise could never dream of capturing. Let us all remember that simple truth.

TL;DR: We have a storyteller and two players in Northern Virginia, but would love to link up with more in the area. We'll be meeting in the inner suburbs; likely Arlington/Rosslyn or possibly Tysons Corner. Tentative start date is early September.
A brief campaign intro is as follows. This is our first time playing VtM v5--any advice will be greatly appreciated.
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2019: The Blood Wager
The coterie assembles at Coronado’s Palace, an exclusive and historic “desert chateau”-styled resort overlooking the Colorado River downstream of Hoover Dam. The Coronado is quiet and unassuming—demure, even, catering to those Humans and Kindred who seek an escape from the ostentatious hedonism of the Las Vegas Strip, while still retaining an air of refined Old World opulence.
Here: a brutalist lodge set low into the western bluffs of the Colorado, its sprawl concealed by yellowed ivory sandstone and thickets of sage. The weather is warm and dry, wind out from the city carrying redshifted sounds of heartbreak, pleasure, traffic. The detritus of short lives; the despondence of longer ones. What reaches the palace is winnowed off by an hour’s drive through suburbs, golf clubs and finally desert absolute.
You have come for your own reasons, either individually or in pairs. A night’s retreat from a busy half-life. A week on the cliffs or the river. A month’s sabbatical, a year’s penance. The Coronado welcomes all and asks of you nothing but wealth in return.
The ceaseless silent grace of the old palace has never been broken before tonight.
​
Factions at Play:

• Camarilla: The Kindred faction officially dominant in the region. Even Vegas compares little to the world of Los Angeles, and the City of Sin is thus reduced to second fiddle in the Southwest. Most Kindred here, and the Camarilla administration especially, are the spiritual second sons of their comrades in LA—prodigious pleasureseekers, hucksters, disgraced politicos, the half-mad. They remain, for one reason or another, within the establishment that broke their dignity. With the Second Inquisition in full swing, what official Camarilla presence remains in Vegas is more a thinblooded rump state than a healthy and hale province of the Council.
• Independents: The conspicuous venality of Las Vegas affords the neutral clans a city to conduct commerce and hunts in relative peace, distant from the watchful eyes of Camarilla yet still affording all the amenities of the Modern Nights. Money is king on the Strip, and the authorities, Human and Kindred alike, rarely look askance at activities that might elsewhere be questionable.
• Sabbat: The Gehenna Crusade has drawn hundreds of the Sabbat Kindred across the seas to the Old World, and those that remain in North America have mostly gone to ground. Vegas is a partial exception—the city’s unique character gives cover to those fanatics willing to brave the crowded neon streets.
• Anarchs: Vegas presents a special case for the most temporally-relevant Kindred rival to the Camarilla in North America. On the one hand, this is a city of a million little vices. It is a libertine’s playground. On the other, the sum of those vices is the enrichment of the Camarilla and Clan Giovani establishments. Those seeking to restore freedom and balance to the Kindred have their work cut out for them.
• The Inquisition: A collection of government security services, domestic and foreign, united under the direction of the Vatican to purge humanity of darkness. With Las Vegas being proximate to a number of military and intelligence facilities, the city has for some years been an open hunting ground for agents of the Inquisition. The Kindred that remain—and they do remain, in the dozens at least—are generally wise to local Inquisitional activities, only truly threatened by strike teams targeting the most infamous or imprudent vampires.
• The Saints’ Crusade: The Latter Day Saints’ encouragement of church elders to join US government service has led to some unintended consequences in recent years. LDS recruitment into the CIA and FBI brought horrifying revelations to the attention of the Quorum of Apostles, and the Saints have since begun taking action against Kindred on their own initiative. The Crusade focuses its work on the heavily Mormon regions of the interior West, and coordinates its operations through the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the church rather than an independent militant body. The cross-pollination of Saints and state security service members has led to severe jurisdictional issues between LDS and Inquisition operatives.

Casinos:

• The Kingfisher: Of new construction but old design, the Kingfisher is modelled after the plantation homes of North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound coast—only, to a scale more in tune with middle America’s gargantuan appetite for an imagined Southern grandeur and their own financial ruin. Not frequented by local kindred, more out of distaste for its Human clientele than anything.

o The Drink: A Mint Julip, or a Long Island Iced Tea

• Heaven’s Gate: Lustrous white marble—apparently real! Heaven’s Gate is ever-clean, ever-lit, and never ceases to cater to affluent Left Coasters seeking an “alt” casino experience while retaining its industry’s necessary blend of luxury and fiscal impropriety. Though some corridors and rooms feature sunlamps for the many native flora deposited in recycled water-fed planters, the casino—“Heaven”, to its fans—is relatively popular among some Kindred. Total incongruity between one’s space and one’s nature has a draw for certain Cainites.

o The Drink: A non-alcoholic fruit cocktail. :/

• The Solstice: An inversion of Heaven’s Gate, the Solstice draws on those who seek a darker, more subversive experience on the Las Vegas Strip. Curtained tables, ambient neofolk, and symbols of the European occult and Kabbalah characterize the establishment. Also characterizing the establishment was the recent back-page story in the Review-Journal regarding rumors of pagan blood rituals. Strange, huh? Funny, too, given that both the Solstice and Heaven’s Gate are majority-owned by something called Red Moon Properties in Nicosia, Cyprus. The Giovanni have something of a saying: you play both sides to win.

o The Drink: A Sazerac—brandy, of course. Rye is for heathens.

• Sodom & Gomorrah: The close friendship between gambling and masochism has never been more apparent than at an S&G baccarat table in 2019. Black hair, black hats, black gloves. BSDM fetishists, less introspective Goths, and the morally adventurous all congregate here. It has its fans and its haters among the Kindred, but all appreciate S&M’s friendliness towards extravagant dress and unorthodox appearance.

o The Drink: Something dark and far too sweet.

• Apotheosis: High rollers only--$10,000 buy-in for Texas Hold’em, and it only goes up from there. More fortunes are lost than won here, contrary to the name, but that’s the way Clan Ventrue likes it. Professional gamblers, sharks, and East Coast scions flock here each year to try their hand at all the classics. Beating the house in a normal casino is something to post to Facebook; winning in Apotheosis is something to put on your gravestone. Kindred don’t come here to gamble or relax—this is a clearinghouse for Ventrue business.

o The Drink: This isn’t the sort of place to be inebriated. Not at all.

• The Union: You’re not sure if you’re in the Caledonian, the Ritz, or a stateroom aboard the Britannia. Chances are if you chose to come here, though, you like that about the Union. Though its clientele is utterly ordinary, the sheer throughput (and losses) of upper middle-class Boomers seeking a taste of stately Commonwealth majesty is such that the façade of old-school solidity is more than skin-deep. For this reason, most any among the Kindred can find easy hunting in the crowds of insurance salesmen, dealership owners, retired civil service members, and the like.

o The Drink: Single malts only. Straight. Man up.

• The Tiger’s Cage: The Tiger’s Cage is utterly unlike any other establishment on the Strip. Run by a consortium of Chinese, Indian, and Chinese Malay financiers, the Cage leans into every orientalist trope about the Indo-Pacific, and makes a few original contributions of its own. Frequented by a range of clientele—most notably thrillseekers from Los Angeles and the Bay area—the Tiger’s Cage offers in-house escort services, guest suites purpose-built as drug dens, private cagefights, and animatronic elephant rides, among other features. The Cage is the newest establishment to grace Las Vegas, having opened its doors in late 2018.

o The Drink: An Ex-Girlfriend, Hibiscus Sour, or possibly something more exotic.

The grocery bags plopped down and he collapsed backward onto his couch, breathing heavily. He shook his head and rested. Wow, he was out of shape. His friends were right; he did have to lose weight after all. “Dammit,” he said, recovering. He’d always been a bit chubby, but since getting full-time at the warehouse, he’d gotten so much fatter. The long hours kept murdering his feet and knees, but after being in poverty for practically all his youth, the money more than made up for it, and his waistline expanded accordingly. Pulling the mail from his hoodie pocket, he glanced at each one. The credit card offers he pitched into his burn pile, and his paycheck he opened and checked carefully. They’d finally gotten his name—Manfred Voren—completely correct.
Taking a deep breath, he huffed, and hoisted the six plastic bags into his kitchen and began unloading. Some of the items he chose carefully, as per a recipe he wanted to try. He read the list and arranged each ingredient. Since the recipe estimated a thirty-minute time of completion, he opened his medicine drawer and popped his medication. For the next half hour, he toiled away at the chicken and pasta dish until it very nearly resembled the picture. Scooping it onto his plate, he chowed down while reading comics on his laptop. The latest issue of Breaker featured the main heroine, a tall, muscular power house of a woman, ripping into the powered armor of a bad guy. He knew the lore quite well.
First Breaker was a favorite of his. He’d been reading it since the mid-nineties, having picked it up at age twelve. What attracted him to it, as he had typed into a conversation defending it against arguments of it being outdated, was how unique it was as a comic. “First Breaker,” he had written, plumbing the depths of his childhood memories for the right words, “isn’t just a ‘hey, ‘let’s beat up bad guys and smile for the camera’ superhero story. The main character is Cyroya, a goddess from the fictional ‘Bakeru’ religion. She’s not actually a savior, or a good guy; she’s the main enemy, the Satan of her people’s beliefs. As the Goddess of Strength, she basically shows up in ancient Rome and nearly ends the world, cutting apart entire armies all by herself. Kareth, the God of Mercy and Creation, defeats her, at great cost and casts her into Pareion, basically their religion’s hell.”
He remembered that exchange and how heated he became, even though he realized he was only staring at a computer screen. He’d also introduced several of his friends to it. “Cyroya is cast into the bad place for her many murders, and here’s where it really gets good,” he’d defended. “Where most comics from the late eighties to early nineties—the so-called Dark Age—were just blood and gore for no end, we see her get tortured in Pareion and repent her crimes. That’s when Kareth sends her to the modern world and she must use her powers for good to save humanity, or else spend the rest of eternity in Pareion.”
“So,” his friend Shawn asked, “if this Kareth guy is so powerful, why doesn’t he intervene?”
Manfred took that as his cue. “Because eventually, they encounter threats even beyond the Gods. There’s literally a moment where a guy tells her she can help him take over the universe, and she has a perfectly good chance to kill Kareth and be free of his threat forever. Instead, she helps him defeat the bad guy. It’s great because she’s clearly a recovering villain. You see her have to struggle with the fact that, no, these humans aren’t insects merely there to satisfy your violent urges. You see her literally become a better person.”
He remembered the friend basically answering with, “that’s great, Manny,” and leaving it at that. It was his favorite comic. Shoveling pasta and chicken into his mouth, he pressed the space bar to move forward. Doctor Richard Felaru, the bad guy in the power armor, Manny read, clearly had thought his machine could duplicate the Godess’s power. He’d had her against the ropes, but with the strength of will, she ripped his armor apart. Manny felt like a little kid again. This storyline had been going for the better part of a year, and he was glad to see it end.
“Wow,” he mouthed, reading the last page. The story had ended exactly as he wanted. After finishing his sizeable meal, he washed his plate and silverware, setting it in the drying rack and picking up his laptop. Sitting for too long made his legs hurt, so he walked around carrying it. He shopped for comics online before reading some other issues he had on his computer. Furious Thunder Comic issue 682 appeared full-screen, him clicking on it. He enjoyed it, even though the writing hadn’t always been great. Unlike First Breaker, Furious Thunder was a very traditional super hero story, although not the same as many others. Unlike most of the traditional stories that started in the early Silver Age of Comics, Furious Thunder had started with a female lead. A female lead character, in 1952, was unheard of. Somehow it had managed to avoid being absorbed by the bigger studios, but had suffered in the sixties thus.
The new timeline, he saw, wasn’t quite as good as the one before, but he still kept reading. One of the things that annoyed him was that when the character was first drawn, she was a decently curved woman for sixties standards. Now, she was almost anorexic. It wasn’t unique; many of the big studios had the female supers being model thin, but she was supposed to be a major hero. At least she wasn’t drawn with comically exaggerated breasts—even being a guy, it became annoying and distracting after awhile. Once more, he noticed her pulling her cousin’s pod out of the river. Before it had been a mountain landslide, and the original reboot had it be a river. He knew the story by heart: Michelle Delanter, having been examining archaeological ruins in South America, touched an artifact and was magically transported to another world, where she was forced to fight for her survival for a hundred years, somehow not aging. When she finally succeeded, it was revealed the whole ordeal was an illusory test to see if she was worthy of the power contained within the artifact. She then became Capacitor, a hero that utilized otherworldly energy to possess great strength, speed, and energy abilities.
He read on, seeing that the origin deviated just slightly, with her finding the artifact and the whole training ordeal montaged in a series of six panels. She apparently explained to her cousin that he had been put in stasis because of his disease, and the pod had cured him, right before the earthquake diverted the river through the area where the building was. She grabbed his hand, and shared some of her power with him. “We’ll talk later,” she told him. “Right now, help me save the people downstream.” The next few pages were of the two of them using their powers to save people from the flooding and earthquake. It was nice to see they’d updated her age. In the original 50’s and 60’s comics, she’d been a teenager and her cousin the same age. Now, she was five years older than him.
His cellphone rang and he set down the laptop. The caller ID read a familiar name. “Yeah, Joey? What’s up?” he asked.
“You still hanging out on Saturday?” Joey said.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Manny explained. “Shit, as much as I work these days, it’s the only time I can.”
Joey let out a breath of a laugh. “Ain’t that the damn truth.” He coughed. “Well, if you’re busy right now, I’ll let you go.”
“Eh, I think I’m just staying home,” he replied. “Nothing much to do ‘round here anyway.” He smiled. “See you then.” Both knew too well what he spoke of. Southern Illinois was well-known for a few major things: abandoned buildings where industry once was, being twenty miles from the nearest civilized anything. If he was going to a movie, it would be fifteen miles to Edwardsville, or eight miles to East Alton. There was one book store the Illinois side of the Mississippi river.
He watched some shows on the internet. After that, closed his laptop. Normally, later in the week, he found himself not wanting to be bothered. Now, though, the thought of being around friends made him feel lonely. Still, the nearest mall worth going to would be almost thirty miles away in the Chesterfield, Missouri area. Popping his knuckles, he made up his mind. He didn’t want to be home alone. At least the mall, far away as it was, presented the possibility of running into friends.
His gas gauge reading full, he started it up and headed towards the Missouri line. Miles of forested areas passed by as he left his house, which was just short of Jerseyville, and passed through Alton. The riverside showed block after block of abandoned buildings where jobs used to be, some fifty years prior. The riverboat casinos with their flashing lights stood in stark contrast to the rows upon rows of taverns and bars that segmented sections of former places of business. The economy had been rough and he was lucky to have gotten a job that paid well.
After crossing the Clark Bridge, the economy seemed to get much better, with the businesses of the Florissant area passing by. After more than twenty minutes of driving, he made it to Chesterfield and one of the few remaining malls performing well in the downtrodden economy. The mall looked uncrowded as Thursday evenings weren’t major business. The first store he hit was the bookstore, checking out their manga collection. There seemed to be only twelve people walking around the store, and none of them he knew. He read a few volumes before he left the store.
Walking around the mall, looking around, he felt a bit dumb. There weren’t that many things he wanted to buy, and none of his friends seemed to have thought to come out here. He popped into a dollar store and bought a generic cola. The man behind the counter looked at his shirt and smiled. “Hey, nice shirt,” he said. “Haven’t read a comic since I was a kid, but those movies are great.”
The man looked to be nearly fifty. Manny regarded the man’s gray hair and lined face. “What’d you read growing up?”
“Well, I read a bit of everything,” the man admitted. “I can’t say I remember much of it. Nice to see Hollywood finally giving a thought to it, though.”
Manny let out a humph. “You can say that again,” he responded. “I think when I was a kid, there was the 1989 movie and other than that, a bunch of crap. Now it seems like everyone likes ‘em.” He shrugged. “It’s annoying. Where were these movies when I was in high school about two-thousand-one?”
They shared a laugh and he left the dollar store. It raised his spirit to feel reassured he wasn’t alone. Entering the video and game store, he looked through the Blu-ray section. He came across a copy of the nineteen eighty-one Capacitor movie. They’d made a crappy sequel in two-thousand-five, and hinted at a Furious Thunder reboot, but he always enjoyed the original. He hadn’t seen it in years or had this updated disc, so he bought it to give himself a reason to have come.
He started the car and set his bag in the passenger seat. Flipping the radio on, a news story talking about lights in the sky over various parts of the world, and what the experts had to say about such things. Even though it might have been interesting, he set his radio to Bluetooth and played music from his smartphone. Pressing the emergency brake off, he shifted into drive and left the parking lot. The highway back to southern Illinois signaled his experiment had failed and he had to return home. Miles of highway passed once again. Nothing much out of the ordinary appeared until he got about halfway home.
Pulling the car over to the shoulder, he stared at the sky, both awed and weirded out. Streaks of color, vaguely reminiscent of aurora borealis made streaks across the evening blue. However, these were off-colored. Various pinks, oranges, and silvers streaked in with the green and red. It undulated in the sky like some cosmic worm wriggling. Eager, he checked his mirrors and got out. He clicked his phone’s camera app and pointed it at the sky. The image quality wasn’t fantastic, but he wanted to keep a record of this. Some ten minutes later, it faded, and he got back in his car. Since others were stopping and staring, he took his opportunity and left.
Returning home, he uploaded the photo to his laptop and watched videos on the internet. He opened his bought movies and made sure they worked. After ten minutes, he checked the clock. Work the next morning would be a pain in the ass, so he decided to check in for the night. He set his phone’s alarm clock and changed into his pajamas. The usual evening routine came next: brush teeth, change into pajamas, swallow some pain medication since his feet hurt. Once the ibuprofen kicked in, his mind slipped away into dreams.
The alarm interrupted his dream of driving through a vague pseudo-city consisting of several places he had been to, while fleeing some nondescript sense of dread. Waking up was an exercise in lifting himself to a sitting position and waiting for his sense of balance to kick in. Shaking his head to clear it, he stood up and stumbled a few steps before righting himself and walking to the bathroom. The routine became second nature: brush teeth, do business, shower. He had a half hour or so before he had to be there, so he made himself a few sandwiches for breakfast along with some coffee. He took a hit of his inhaler and dressed himself before heading out the door.
The drive to the warehouse reminded him how much he hated it. His work was a decent paying job; it didn’t, however, mean he enjoyed it. The man at the door scanned his ID badge and he walked over to the counter to be assigned. The woman, a middle-aged smoking victim, regarded him with the same deadpan expression everyone got. The number he got was thirty-three with a ‘C,’ and that meant he would be on shampoo duty. If there existed a better demonstration of how to reduce a man to a robot than the next five hours, he would have loved to see it. His task consisted of taking finished shampoo two-packs, placing them in a cardboard box in their slot, sealing the box in plastic when full, and placing it on a palate for a forklift to retrieve when the palate filled. Other than a single fifteen-minute break, he did nothing else. When the lunch break came, he got in his car and drove to the truck stop across the road and bought a sandwich from the refrigerator along with a generic diet soda. After that, he went back to work and another five hours passed by.
His knees and back ached, and his hands hurt, so when finished he popped two naproxen sodium and finished the last of his green diet soda. It was painful, but at least he was lucky. Some of the other warehouse companies that hired paid only minimum wage. Then again, he rationalized, most of them were staffed by stoners and ex-convicts. On the way home, he stopped by the video rental kiosk and chose some arthouse film one of his friends had recommended. It wasn’t normally the kind of film he watched, but it would be a welcome waste of time. The sun was still up and yet, he wanted nothing more than to plop into his chair and leave the day behind. It bothered him some of his friends worked as much as possible. Other than keeping the house clean—which was the responsibility of everyone with a home—these people exercised for three, sometimes four hours a day, and this is after an eight to ten-hour work shift, and then chores. Maybe by the time they were done, they’d have two, maybe two and a half hours to just relax and do nothing before going to bed at eight-thirty, nine at the absolute latest. His shift started at five-thirty, and he finished at three-thirty. He worked forty hours a week, his default four-day schedule. His arms and back often ached, but damn it, every weekend was three days, he made enough money to pay the bills on a house his parents left him, and that mattered most. Furthermore, if he skipped a few meals here and there, he could save enough money to buy something big. Five years ago, he’d skipped enough meals to buy a two-thousand, five-hundred-dollar gaming laptop. It kicked as much ass as he could hope for. Maybe next year, he would start saving for a new one.
The movie was ok, not exceptional, but he was glad anyway, because it being Thursday, he wouldn’t have to be back at the warehouse until Monday. He pulled out his PC controller and plugged it into his laptop. He decided to play Inindo: Way of the Ninja, a role-playing game from nineteen ninety-three. A relatively obscure game, he’d rented it once as a kid from Blockbuster Video and enjoyed it so much he played it completely at least once a year. It wasn’t particularly breathtaking, but it was a fun way to pass the time. Noticing the clock on the wall was nine P.M., he saved, put his laptop into hibernation, and stretched his limbs. The night was calling and he didn’t want to stay up too late. Just not having to awake at four the next morning felt great. When he turned in the direction of his bookshelf, he saw the book occupying the top slot—volume one of the 2004 run of Capacitor in Furious Thunder Comics. Opening the graphic novel, he remembered the familiar opening. The heroine, Michelle Delanter, with her trademark red hair, reminiscent of the setting sun, flapping in the wind, stood poised to save lives. Her figure, not quite as anorexic as the new run, had the super-skinny frame of a waif model, which, absolutely did not mesh with her powerful expression. He’d been entering college during the original run of these issues, and they were always a fun time. Hard to believe, it had been more than ten long years since then.
Replacing the book, he felt a mild static shock. It annoyed him, and he started towards the bathroom when he felt a mild burning sensation wash over him. He pulled his shirt off, having stripped down to his underwear. Furiously he slapped his hands on his torso, trying to locate if something was injured or in some way damaged. A few seconds passed with the feeling increasing before fading entirely. His head felt slightly dizzy and then became normal again. “What…” he uttered. Before he had a chance to finish the thought, he felt a yanking, a pulling. It came from his abdomen. In a scene of utter impossibility, he looked down to the source of the feeling, and saw—as he continued to feel—his large bulbous fat gut drawing in. His entire torso shrank before his very eyes. “No, oonooo!” Trapped in a panicked thought, that he was shriveling up into a corpse somehow, he grabbed and pinched at skin, pulling and yanking, trying desperately to fight it. After a few moments, there wasn’t enough fat left to grab handfuls of. He gasped and panted, wide-eyed at how small his torso had become. Now the pulling came over his limbs. From his waist to feet, and shoulder to fingertip, his flesh tightened and retreated. Coarse hair disappeared, scant, fair body hair appeared in its place. His mallet-like hand with stubby sausage fingers turned into a dainty palm with slender pianist digits extending from them. Legs became thin, smooth, with only faint hair that wasn’t too noticeable. Giant fat feet shrank several shoe sizes. Finally, a twinge travelled up his chest and to the top of his head. His saggy man-breasts became recognizable ‘B-cup’ women’s breasts. Hair grazed his shoulders. “Yeep!” he shouted, tugging at the intrusion, only to see the reddish hair attached to his own head. The voice registered clearly in an adult woman’s range. He stumbled to the bathroom mirror and stared.
Twenty-year-old, redheaded, superhero, fictional character, Michelle Delanter, or, an incredible facsimile, stared back at him. He shook his head, slamming his eyes shut. No. This is impossible. He had spent years of his life thinking skeptically. It was the reason he’d left religion behind. No, what happened was, he’d gone insane. This was a hell of a hallucination; he hadn’t even had a history of mental illness. Sure, when he was ten, he had a phase where he wanted everyone to call him Batman, but even then, he knew he wasn’t turned into an imaginary character. He ran his hands over his face. The red-headed woman—who, now that he thought about it, had no reason to be a fictional character—rubbed her face the same way. He felt up and down the body, and sure enough, the hands in the mirror moved as well. He took a deep breath and let it go; this was an amazing degree of insanity. He’d really flipped. Not only had he somehow developed a separate personality, but the hallucination was so good, he couldn’t think his way out of it.
A thought occurred to him. Had he been this red-haired woman all along? He fumbled through his wallet. His driver’s license was the same as it was that morning. Manfred Voren, Illinois Driver’s License, five foot nine, two hundred eighty pounds. He took a selfie, making sure to only photograph from the neck up, and sent it to a friend of his. “What do you see here?” he included with the text.
Ten seconds later, his friend Jake responded. “Cute girl,” he said. “Nice hair. She your new girlfriend?”
“She’s a friend,” he replied. He set the phone aside. He sat down on the toilet lid. Either he hallucinated the text, he figured, or else Jake had really seen the girl. That wasn’t evidence enough, he knew, but it was a good start. He honestly expected, had he simply gone crazy, for Jake to say something about why Manny would send a photo of himself. Still, he couldn’t trust his own mind. This wasn’t possible. He had a mountain of evidence to suggest he had spent thirty-one years as Manfred Voren. Thinking about it, he’d never so much as seen a single redhead, anywhere in his life that looked like her.
He sent the photo to his perverted friend John. “Would you do her?”
“Sure, I would,” he replied moments later. “Who’s she?”
“Someone I had a pleasant conversation with earlier,” Manny texted. “Has anyone like her ever been around us before?”
“No, dude, I wish,” John replied. “Don’t miss the opportunity on this one.”
He set the phone down. Now he had more evidence. Still not enough to positively rule out his insanity, but two separate friends acknowledged that the photo he remembered taking a minute before was both not him, and not someone they’d seen before. Either he was insane enough to have hallucinated: transforming, taking a photo of the result, as well as his friends reactions, or something absolutely not possible was actually happening. He still didn’t want to accept what had never happened before in human history. He slapped himself to see if he was dreaming; he wasn’t.
He stood in front of the mirror. In his mind, he could see an image of himself as this woman. He focused hard on the image. He imagined it turning back into him. Nothing happened. After a few minutes, he closed his eyes and saw the image even clearer. He did it again, and still nothing. He imagined both images side by side—himself, as he was before, and her. Nothing happened, except this time, he felt a presence in the back of his head. Not like a person or spirit, but as if a switch or lever had magically appeared in his brain. Obviously, it didn’t have a literal appearance of such a device, or any appearance at all, but he noticed it only when he summoned both images side by side. With thoughts, he manipulated it, imagined it changing. Once more, nothing happened. Almost a half hour passed with nothing changing.
Opening his eyes, he stared once more at the red-haired woman he’d become. If this didn’t change, if he couldn’t change back, he’d have a lot of hell to deal with. Sooner or later, he figured he’d wake up in a nuthouse or a courthouse, having done something like beating a guy to death because he hallucinated the devil in him or some crap like that. Or, if the absurd turned out to be true, he would have no identifying papers as this woman, and no history whatsoever. He’d have no solutions. If he somehow overcame these problems, he’d be spending the rest of his life as this woman. Could he really commit to that? Could he really pull the trigger?
Oh my god, he thought.
It was a trigger!
He coughed to calm himself. Okay, he rationalized. Let’s assume what, again, I know to be impossible, is really happening. Let’s say I’m somehow turning into a woman and back again, his mind fired. Wouldn’t it be damn inconvenient should, say, a random thought morph you in the middle of a crowded room? He was the kind of guy to imagine spiders crawling on the walls at random. He’d hate to have the kind of power to do that. So, he guessed, should there be a fail-safe, to guarantee that no random imagining of himself would cause the change to occur? He focused on the twinge in his head, the feeling the…whatever the hell it was. He imagined her morphing straight back into him. This time, he didn’t imagine himself manipulating the…well, hell, he just decided to call it the Trigger. He committed. He decided, firmly and completely, yes, he wanted to be fat, almost thirty, underpaid and overworked, Illinois native Manfred Voren. He felt the Trigger change to a different state.
Like a bad CGI film, his body morphed back into Manfred Voren. The entire process took eleven seconds. His fingers were fat again, his gut stuck out again, and his penis and testicles had returned, along with his ungainly body hair. He could have cheered when he became normal again. He had never been so glad to be overweight.
And then, his curiosity got the better of him. Oh hell, he realized. He couldn’t let it go. He stepped on the scale, and it read two seventy-nine. Hey, he realized, he’d lost two pounds from the month before. In his mind, he imagined the woman again. He pulled the Trigger by committing to the transformation. Hey, as far as insane ideas went, it was convenient, the equivalent of an “are you sure” before deleting the file from the hard drive. It snapped into its previous state, and the change happened again. This time, the burning was replaced by a tingling, almost like the cold mixed with electric prickling around fur rugs. He stared in bewilderment as the scale plummeted to one hundred and thirty-seven pounds. Wow, not just impossible, he thought, but ultra super-duper impossible, violating the Law of Conservation of Mass impossible. He reversed the transformation and the scale climbed again.
He decided to go to bed. This insanity could wait until the morning. With thoughts raging on his mind, it took quite a while, but he managed to slip off to dream.
The sun’s light peering in through the window and shining in his face woke him up. He rubbed his belly and face. He was still Manny and still fat. How much of what happened the night before had been real? He yawned and stretched. Stumbling to the bathroom, he splashed water on his face. Mental images of himself turning into the woman from the night before returned, and with it, a familiar presence. He pulled the Trigger once again. Eleven seconds later, the red-haired woman stared back at him in the mirror, blinking when he blinked. The possibility that this was a hallucination hadn’t diminished much. Much of what he saw continued to be impossible per all the scientific evidence he knew. He had two pieces of evidence he couldn’t necessarily trust because he could have hallucinated them as well. A decision entered his mind. Since what was going on didn’t appear to be harmful or destructive yet, one of the easiest ways to prove it real would be to do things that it would be utterly impossible for a hallucination to deliver. To get there, he had to know if he had been turned into Capacitor, or just a red-haired woman.
Based on his current supermodel-thin build, it would be utterly impossible for an ordinary woman with red hair to lift a refrigerator. He knelt in front of it, and wrapped his arms around the large metal rectangular prism. He bent his womanly legs and expected his back to scream at him. Instead, he felt weight resistance on par with lifting a beach ball. At fully standing height, he yelped and immediately had to avoid three problems at once: hitting it on the ceiling, dropping it, or banging it into the wall. It felt like carrying a bag of groceries. So, not just an ordinary red-haired woman, he thought, but actually The Capacitor. Gingerly, he set down the fridge. Got it.
He walked around the house a bit, curious as to how many of her powers he had in this form. If this were really happening, he took mental note, he’d already demonstrated strength. She had several more. He stared all around, trying to activate her see-through vision. What the writers had made sure to do, he remembered from the comics, was not to give her x-ray vision. Her vision was a form of psychic remote viewing, since they didn’t want to imply her eyes gave off harmful ionizing radiation. After long minutes of trying, he found wanting to see further caused layers to become transparent, allowing him to see behind and beyond them. With effort, he gained another small, possibly unreliable, piece of evidence that this wasn’t a hallucination. One layer at a time, he saw past the wall of his house, past the walls of the neighbor across the street’s house, and into the books on a shelf perpendicular to his vision in one of their rooms. One book, he had never once read, The Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway, he saw the cover, then the first page. The next page was backwards, obviously, when the first page became invisible as he saw past it. Exercising his will, his vision returned to himself, having remembered the text of the page as best he could.
He downloaded a digital version of the book and read the first page. The text matched what he saw. Alright, I couldn’t have made that up, he realized. Unless somehow, he had read the book somehow and forgot that he read it while still remembering the text, which struck him as unlikely. He still couldn’t rule it out, but now, more evidence mounted. The best evidence, he figured, would be to act as though it were real and see how far it went. Certainly, real life broke down all barriers and the truth eventually came out. If he ventured out into the world, and this was a hallucination, it would come crashing down, wouldn’t it? Sure, it could be disastrous, but if he had the insanity to hallucinate to this degree, what could he trust? It also meant, the farthest and most unlikely scenario could be true. Something impossible could truly be happening, and the implications, he scarcely wanted to contemplate, for the whole universe was involved.
Turning back into himself, he decided to push it. He transformed parts of his body into hers. Individual feet at first, then hands. He could even transfer much of his body fat to her form. This seemed practical, as it meant his clothes would fit her, but at the same time, it bothered him. He thought about it. Ultimately, he shook it off in favor of more pressing matters. Her being fat allowed him to put his clothes on and head outside to do some work. Grabbing the car keys, he headed for the park near Wood River, Illinois. There, he could find a quiet corner of the large open park and practice.
The wooded areas had quite a few places off the beaten path where people hardly went. In a cluster of trees, he stood, focusing on what he knew. Alright, he thought, one of the most basic abilities she had was flight. She could, in the comics, fly incredibly fast. He focused on his presence and imagined himself moving. At first, just as he expected, nothing happened. Practice made perfect. It was just like riding a bike.
After twenty boring minutes of trying different mental techniques, he focused on deciding to levitate upwards. Leaves blew away from him in a circle, as if he had a propeller blowing. His feet left the ground by an inch. I’m getting it! He thought. Then he fell backwards onto his butt. He stood, brushed himself off. Fly, already, he mentally commanded. Upwards! Fly!
As though fired from a cannon he shot up. Uncontrolled at first, he slammed into a tree face first, having surprisingly tested his durability and upon issuing a mental yell of “stop!” he came crashing down with a thump. The thought occurred to him that direction and speed may not be the same mental process. He indicated the direction of up, and decided. Simultaneously, he indicated a speed of slightly above gravity and committed. Like a balloon, he levitated to the height of the tree. At the top, he changed his speed to exactly the speed of gravity. He came to a dead stop and floated alongside the treetop. Left, he focused and thought. Slow. He hovered in the direction of the next tree. What surprised him was that he continued facing the original direction as he moved sideways. He had to turn his body midair to face the direction he moved; it wasn’t automatic. Touching the tree, he stopped and lowered himself. Finesse and fine control would have to wait. He had other powers to practice. What surprised him was that flight worked much like the “trigger” that activated his power: he had to mentally force it so a random thought couldn’t interrupt it.
Sensory powers were her next major task. Sure, he knew, he’d tested her sight, but now, he had hearing to test. This was easy to activate. Unfortunately, it was hard to focus. A thunderstorm erupted in his head. He heard everything from nearby cars starting all the way down to the footfall of a squirrel. Drowning out everything except people’s conversations proved hard. It wasn’t like the comics at all. Sure, with effort, he could hear what they were saying separately by paying attention to it, but just like regular hearing, everything else mixed in.
Ironically, the easiest powers to learn were what he expected to be the hardest. Energy projection, which in the comics, manifested as her being able to emit laser-like beams from her hands and directly in front of her eyes, wasn’t hard at all. He thought of the type of energy to be fired. In this case, a powerful beam of laser light. He pointed at a log. Making the decision, the tip of his finger glowed red and a dot appeared on the log, slowly burning. He decided to increase power. The light turned from red to blue, and it ate through the log in seconds. Once stopped focusing, it vanished. The other, super speed, almost felt like turning a knob. He found the world frozen around him as he focused on it. The only disorienting part was movement. He found he could see and process all the information around him, even though he felt the tremendous speed at which he ran. The logical problem was that his clothes didn’t rip off. The only answer he could come up with was that the invulnerability extended somewhat during running.
He shifted back into his normal male form. Within twenty minutes of testing individual body parts, he found he needed to transform his brain into hers to have any abilities at all. Furthermore, he found he needed at least half his internal organs to be changed to have strength or flight, but sensory powers only required his eyes and ears to change. After a few minutes of testing his sensory powers in his normal form, he realized, it bothered him somehow. It didn’t feel right to him to use powers in his male form. He pondered it a few moments, but shook his head. He had other work to do. Namely, the thing he wanted to do was, in fiction, usually the first thing the hero learned not to do. He’d read enough comics and manga to learn that one of the very first lessons a protagonist learned was not to use their powers for self-interest. It was wrong. To an extent, he knew why it was wrong. But as someone who worked ten-hour days, for less than fifteen dollars an hour, he didn’t care.

 
WARNING THIS IS GOING TO BE A REALLY REALLY LONG POST BUT PLEASE READ IT ALL. SCALING BITCOIN IS A COMPLEX ISSUE! HOPEFULLY HAVING ALL THE INFO IN ONE PLACE SHOULD BE USEFUL
 
Like many people in the community I've spent the past month or so looking deeply into the bitcoin scaling debate. I feel there has never been a fully comprehensive thread on how bitcoin could scale. The closest I have seen is gavinandresen's medium posts back in the summer describing the problem and a solution, and pre-emptively answering supposed problems with the solution. While these posts got to the core of the issue and spawned the debate we have been having, they were quite general and could have used more data in support. This is my research and proposal to scale bitcoin and bring the community back together.
 
 
The Problem
 
There seems to me to be five main fundamental forces at play in finding a balanced solution;

• 'node distribution',
• 'mining decentralisation',
• 'network utility',
• 'time',
• 'adoption'.

 
 
Node Distribution
Bandwidth has a relationship to node count and therefore 'node distribution'. This is because if bandwidth becomes too high then fewer people will be able to run a node. To a lesser extent bandwidth also effects 'mining decentralisation' as miners/pool owners also need to be able to run a node. I would argue that the centralisation pressures in relation to bandwidth are negligible though in comparison to the centralisation pressure caused by the usefulness of larger pools in reducing variance. The cost of a faster internet connection is negligible in comparison to the turnover of the pools. It is important to note the distinction between bandwidth required to propagate blocks quickly and the bandwidth required to propagate transactions. The bandwidth required to simply propagate transactions is still low today.
New node time (i.e. the time it takes to start up a new node) also has a relationship with node distribution. i.e. If it takes too long to start a new node then fewer people will be willing to take the time and resources to start a new node.
Storage Space also has a relationship with node distribution. If the blockchain takes up too much space on a computer then less people will be willing to store the whole blockchain.
Any suitable solution should look to not decrease node distribution significantly.
 
Mining Decentralisation
Broadcast time (the time it takes to upload a block to a peer) has a relationship with mining centralisation pressures. This is because increasing broadcast time increases the propagation time, which increases the orphan rate. If the orphan rate it too high then individual miners will tend towards larger pools.
Validation time (the time it to validate a block) has a relationship with mining centralisation pressures. This is because increasing validation time increases the propagation time, which increases the orphan rate. If the orphan rate it too high then individual miners will tend towards larger pools.
Any suitable solution should look to not increase mining centralisation significantly.
 
Network Utility
Network Utility is one that I find is often overlooked, is not well understood but is equally as important. The network utility force acts as a kind of disclaimer to the other two forces. It has a balancing effect. Increasing the network utility will likely increase user adoption (The more useful something is, the more people will want to use it) and therefore decreasing network utility will likely decrease user adoption. User adoption has a relationship with node count. i.e. the more people, companies and organisations know about and use bitcoin, the more people, companies and organisations that will run nodes. For example we could reduce block size down to 10KB, which would reduce broadcast time and validation time significantly. This would also therefore reduce mining centralisation pressures significantly. What is very important to realise though is that network utility would also be significantly be reduced (fewer people able to use bitcoin) and therefore so would node distribution. Conversely, if we increased the block size (not the limit) right now to 10GB, the network utility would be very high as bitcoin would be able to process a large number of transactions but node distribution would be low and mining centralisation pressures would be high due to the larger resource requirements.
Any suitable solution should look to increase network utility as time increases.
 
Time
Time is an important force because of how technology improves over time. Technology improves over time in a semi-predicable fashion (often exponential). As we move through time, the cost of resources required to run the bitcoin network (if the resource requirements remained static) will decrease. This means that we are able to increase resource requirements proportional to technological improvements/cost reductions without any increase in costs to the network. Technological improvements are not perfectly predictable though so it could be advantageous to allow some buffer room for when technological improvements do not keep up with predictions. This buffer should not be applied at the expense of the balance between the other forces though (i.e. make the buffer too big and network utility will be significantly decreased).
 
 
Adoption
Increasing adoption means more people using the bitcoin/blockchain network. The more people use bitcoin the more utility it has, and the more utility Bitcoin has the more people will want to use it (network effect). The more people use bitcoin, the more people there that have an incentive to protect bitcoin.
Any suitable solution should look to increase adoption as time increases.
 
 
The Solution Proposed by some of the bitcoin developers - The Lightning Network
 
The Lightning Network (LN) is an attempt at scaling the number of transactions that can happen between parties by not publishing any transaction onto the blockchain unless it is absolutely necessary. This is achieved by having people pool bitcoin together in a "Channel" and then these people can transact instantly within that channel. If any shenanigans happen between any of the parties, the channel can be closed and the transactions will be settled on the blockchain. The second part of their plan is limit the block size to turn bitcoin into a settlement network. The original block size limit of 1MB was originally put in place by Satoshi as an anti-DOS measure. It was to make sure a bad actor could not propagate a very large block that would crash nodes and increase the size of the blockchain unnecessarily. Certain developers now want to use this 1MB limit in a different way to make sure that resource requirements will stay low, block space always remains full, fees increase significantly and people use the lightning network as their main way of transacting rather than the blockchain. They also say that keeping the resource requirements very low will make sure that bitcoin remains decentralised.
 
Problems with The Lightning Network
The LN works relatively well (in theory) when the cost and time to publish a set of transactions to the network are kept low. Unfortunately, when the cost and time to publish a set of transactions on the blockchain become high, the LN's utility is diminished. The trust you get from a transaction on the LN comes only from the trustless nature of having transactions published to the bitcoin network. What this means is that if a transaction cannot be published on the bitcoin network then the LN transaction is not secured at all. As transactions fees rise on the bitcoin blockchain the LN utility is diminished. Lets take an example:

• Cost of publishing a transaction to the bitcoin network = $20
• LN transaction between Bob and Alice = $20.
• Transaction between Bob and Alice has problem therefore we want to publish it to the blockchain.
• Amount of funds left after transaction is published to the blockchain = $20 - $20 = $0.

This is also not a binary situation. If for example in this scenario, the cost to publish the transaction to blockchain was $10 then still only 50% of the transaction would be secure. It is unlikely anyone really call this a secure transaction.
Will a user make a non-secured/poorly secured transaction on the LN when they could make the same transaction via an altcoin or non-cryptocurrency transaction and have it well secured? It's unlikely. What is much more likely to happen is that transaction that are not secured by bitcoin because of the cost to publish to the blockchain will simply overflow into altcoins or will simply not happen on any cryptocurrency network. The reality is though, that we don't know exactly what will happen because there is no precedent for it.
Another problem outside of security is convenience. With a highly oversaturated block space (very large backlog of transactions) it could take months to have a transaction published to the blockchain. During this time your funds will simply be stuck. If you want to buy a coffee with a shop you don't have a channel open with, instead of simply paying with bitcoin directly, you would have to wait months to open a channel by publishing a transaction to the bitcoin blockchain. I think your coffee might be a little cold by then (and mouldy).
I suggest reading this excellent post HERE for other rather significant problems with the LN when people are forced to use it.
The LN is currently not complete and due to its high complexity it will take some time to have industry wide implementation. If it is implemented on top of a bitcoin-as-a-settlement-network economy it will likely have very little utility.
 
Uses of The LN
The LN is actually an extremely useful layer-2 technology when it is used with it's strengths. When the bitcoin blockchain is fast and cheap to transact on, the LN is also extremely useful. One of the major uses for the LN is for trust-based transactions. If you are transacting often between a set of parties you can truly trust then using LN makes absolute sense since the trustless model of bitcoin is not necessary. Then once you require your funds to be unlocked again it will only take a short time and small cost to open them up to the full bitcoin network again. Another excellent use of LN would be for layer-3 apps. For example a casino app: Anyone can by into the casino channel and play using real bitcoins instantly in the knowledge that is anything nefarious happens you can instantly settle and unlock your funds. Another example would be a computer game where you can use real bitcoin in game, the only difference is that you connect to the game's LN channel and can transact instantly and cheaply. Then whenever you want to unlock your funds you can settle on the blockchain and use your bitcoins normally again.
LN is hugely more powerful, the more powerful bitcoin is. The people making the LN need to stick with its strengths rather than sell it as an all-in-one solution to bitcoin's scaling problem. It is just one piece of the puzzle.
 
 
Improving Network Efficiency
 
The more efficient the network, the more we can do with what we already have. There are a number of possible efficiency improvements to the network and each of them has a slightly different effect.
 
Pruning
Pruning allows the stored blockchain size to be reduced significantly by not storing old data. This has the effect of lowering the resource requirements of running a node. a 40GB unpruned blockchain would be reduced in size to 550MB. (It is important to note that a pruned node has lower utility to the network)
 
Thin Blocks
Thin blocks uses the fact that most of the nodes in the network already have a list of almost all the same transactions ready to be put into the blockchain before a block is found. If all nodes use the same/similar policy for which transactions to include in a block then you only need to broadcast a small amount of information across the network for all nodes to know which transactions have been included (as opposed to broadcasting a list of all transactions included in the block). Thin Blocks have the advantage of reducing propagation which lowers the mining centralisation pressure due to orphaned blocks.
 
libsecp256k1 libsecp256k1 allows a more efficient way of validating transactions. This means that propagation time is reduced which lowers the mining centralisation pressure due to orphaned blocks. It also means reduced time to bootstrap the blockchain for a new node.
 
Serialised Broadcast
Currently block transmission to peers happens in parallel to all connected peers. Obviously for block propagation this is a poor choice in comparison to serial transmission to each peer one by one. Using parallel transmission means that the more peers you have, the slower the propagation, whereas serial transmission does not suffer this problem. The problem that serial transmission does suffer from though is variance. If the order that you send blocks to peers in is random, then it means sometimes you will send blocks to a peer who has a slow/fast connection and/or is able to validate slowly/quickly. This would mean the average propagation time would increase with serialised transmission but depending on your luck you would sometimes have faster propagation and sometimes have slower propagation. As this will lower propagation time it will also lower the mining centralisation pressure due to orphaned blocks. (This is just a concept at the moment but I don't see why it couldn't be implemented).
 
Serialised Broadcast Sorting
This is a fix for the variance that would occur due to serialised broadcast. This sorts the order that you broadcast a block to each peer into; fastest upload + validation speed first and slowest upload speed and validation speed last. This not only decreases the variance to zero but also allows blocks to propagation to happen much faster. This also has the effect of lowering the mining centralisation pressure due to orphaned blocks. (This is just a concept at the moment but I don't see why it couldn't be implemented).
 
Here is a table below that shows roughly what the effects these solutions should have.

Name	Bandwidth	Broadcast Time	Validation Time	New Node Time	Storage Space
Pruning	1	1	1	1	0.014
Thin Blocks	0.42	0.1	0.1	1	1
libsecp256k1	1	1	0.2	0.6	1
Serialised Broadcast	1	0.5	1	1	1
KYN	1	0.75	1	1	1
Segregated Witness	1	1	1	0.4	1
TOTAL	0.42	0.0375	0.02	0.24	0.014
Multiplier	2.38	26.7	50	-	70

(The "multiplier" shows how many times higher the block size could be relative to the specific function.)
 
 
The Factors in Finding a Balanced Solution
 
At the beginning of this post I detailed a relatively simple framework for finding a solution by describing what the problem is. There seems to me to be five main fundamental forces at play in finding a balanced solution; 'node distribution', 'mining decentralisation', 'network utility', 'time' and 'adoption'. The optimal solution needs to find a balance between all of these forces taking into account a buffer to offset our inability to predict the future with absolute accuracy.
To find a suitable buffer we need to assign a set of red line values which certain values should not pass if we want to make sure bitcoin continues to function as well as today (at a minimum). For example, percentage of orphans should stay below a certain value. These values can only be a best estimate due to the complexity of bitcoin economics, although I have tried to provide as sound reasoning as possible.
 
Propagation time
It seems a fair limit for this would be roughly what we have now. Bitcoin is still functioning now. Could mining be more decentralised? Yes, of course, but it seems bitcoin is working fine right now and therefore our currently propagation time for blocks is a fairly conservative limit to set. Currently 1MB blocks take around 15 seconds to propagate more than 50% of the network. 15 second propagation time is what I will be using as a limit in the solution to create a buffer.
 
Orphan Rate
This is obviously a value that is a function of propagation time so the same reasoning should be used. I will use a 3% limit on orphan rate in the solution to create a buffer.
 
Non-Pruned Node Storage Cost
For this I am choosing a limit of $200 in the near-term and $600 in the long-term. I have chosen these values based on what I think is a reasonable (maximum) for a business or enthusiast to pay to run a full node. As the number of transactions increases as more people use bitcoin the number of people willing to pay a higher price to run a node will also increase although the percentage of people will decrease. These are of course best guess values as there is no way of knowing exactly what percentage of users are willing to pay what.
 
Pruned Node Storage Cost
For this I am choosing a limit of $3 in the near-term (next 5 years) and $9 in the long-term (Next 25 years). I have chosen these values based on what I think is a reasonable (maximum) for normal bitcoin user to pay. In fact this cost will more likely be zero as almost all users have an amount of storage free on their computers.
 
Percentage of Downstream Bandwidth Used
This is a best guess at what I think people who run nodes would be willing to use to be connected to the bitcoin network directly. I believe using 10% (maximum) of a users downstream bandwidth is the limit of what is reasonable for a full node (pruned and non-pruned). Most users would continue to access the blockchain via SPV wallets though. Downstream is generally a much more valuable resource to a user than upstream due to the nature of the internet usage.
 
Percentage of Upstream Bandwidth Used
This is a best guess at what I think people who run nodes would be willing to use to be connected to the bitcoin network directly. I believe using 25% (maximum) of a users downstream bandwidth is the limit of what is reasonable for a full node (pruned and non-pruned). Most users would continue to access the blockchain via SPV wallets though. Upstream is generally a much less valuable resource to a user than downstream due to the nature of the internet usage.
 
Time to Bootstrap a New Node
My limit for this value is at 5 days using 50% of downstream bandwidth in the near-term and 30 days in the long-term. This seems like a reasonable number to me for someone who wants to start running a full node. Currently opening a new bank account takes at least week until everything is set up and you have received your cards, so it seems to me people would be willing to wait this long to become connected. Again, this is a best guess on what people would be willing to do to access the blockchain in the future. Most users requiring less security will be able to use an SPV wallet.
It is important to note that we only need enough nodes to make sure the blockchain is distributed across many places with many backups of the full blockchain. It is likely that a few thousand is a minimum for this. Increasing this amount to hundreds of thousands or millions of full nodes is not necessarily that much of an advantage to node distribution but could be a significant disadvantage to mining centralisation. This is because the more nodes you have in the network, the longer it takes to propagate >50% of it.
 
Storage Cost Price Reduction Over Time
Storage cost follows a linear logarithmic trend. Costs of HDD reducing by 10 times every 5 years, although this has slowed over the past few years. This can be attributed to the flooding in South East Asia and the transition to SSD technology. SSD technology also follows the linear logarithmic trend of costs reducing 10 times every 5 years, or roughly decreasing 37% per year.
 
Average Upload and Download Bandwidth Increases Over Time
Average upload and download bandwidth increases in a linear logarithmic trend. Both upload and download bandwidth follow the same trend of doubling roughly every two years, or increasing 40% per year.
 
Price
I was hesitant to include this one here but I feel it is unavoidable. Contrary to what people say (often when the price is trending downwards) bitcoin price is an extremely important metric in the long-term. Depending on bitcoin's price, bitcoin's is useful to; enthusiasts->some users->small companies->large companies->nations->the world, in roughly that order. The higher bitcoin's price is the more liquid the market will be and the more difficult it will be to move the price, therefore increasing bitcoin's utility. Bitcoin's price in the long-term is linked to adoption, which seems to happen in waves, as can be seen in the price bubbles over the years. If we are planning/aiming for bitcoin to at least become a currency with equal value to one of the worlds major currencies then we need to plan for a market cap and price that reflect that. I personally think there are two useful targets we should use to reflect our aims. The first, lower target is for bitcoin to have a market cap the size of a major national currency. This would put the market cap at around 2.1 trillion dollars or $100,000 per bitcoin. The second higher target is for bitcoin to become the world's major reserve currency. This would give bitcoin a market cap of around 21 trillion dollars and a value of $1,000,000 per bitcoin. A final, and much more difficult target is likely to be bitcoin as the only currency across the world, but I am not sure exactly how this could work so for now I don't think this is worth considering.
 
As price increases, so does the subsidy reward given out to miners who find blocks. This reward is semi-dynamic in that it remains static (in btc terms) until 210,000 blocks are found and then the subsidy is then cut in half. This continues to happen until all 21,000,000 bitcoins have been mined. If the value of each bitcoin increases faster than the btc denominated subsidy decreases then the USD denominated reward will be averagely increasing. Historically the bitcoin price has increased significantly faster than subsidy decreases. The btc denominated subsidy halves roughly every 4 years but the price of bitcoin has historically increased roughly 50 fold in the same time.
 
Bitcoin adoption should happen in a roughly s-curve dynamic like every other technology adoption. This means exponential adoption until the market saturation starts and adoption slows, then the finally is the market becomes fully saturated and adoption slowly stops (i.e. bitcoin is fully adopted). If we assume the top of this adoption s-curve has one of the market caps above (i.e. bitcoin is successful) then we can use this assumption to see how we can transition from a subsidy paid network to a transaction fee paid network.
 
Adoption
Adoption is the most difficult metric to determine. In fact it is impossible to determine accurately now, let alone in the future. It is also the one of the most important factors. There is no point in building software that no one is going to use after all. Equally, there is no point in achieving a large amount of adoption if bitcoin offers none of the original value propositions. Clearly there is a balance to be had. Some amount of bitcoin's original value proposition is worth losing in favour of adoption, and some amount of adoption is worth losing to keep bitcoin's original value proposition. A suitable solution should find a good balance between the two. It is clear though that any solution must have increased adoption as a basic requirement, otherwise it is not a solution at all.
 
One major factor related to adoption that I rarely see mentioned, is stability and predictability. This is relevant to both end users and businesses. End users rely on stability and predictability so that they do not have to constantly check if something has changed. When a person goes to get money from a cash machine or spend money in a shop, their experience is almost identical every single time. It is highly dependable. They don't need to keep up-to-date on how cash machines or shops work to make sure they are not defrauded. They know exactly what is going to happen without having to expend any effort. The more deviation from the standard experience a user experiences and the more often a user experiences a deviation, the less likely a user is going to want to continue to use that service. Users require predictability extending into the past. Businesses who's bottom line is often dependent on reliable services also require stability and predictability. Businesses require predictability that extends into the future so that they can plan. A business is less likely to use a service for which they do not know they can depend on in the future (or they know they cannot depend on).
For bitcoin to achieve mass adoption it needs a long-term predictable and stable plan for people to rely on.
 
 
The Proposal
 
This proposal is one based on determining a best fit balance of every factor and a large enough buffer to allows for our inability to perfectly predict the future. No one can predict the future with absolutely certainty but it does not mean we cannot make educated guesses and plan for it.
 
The first part of the proposal is to spend 2016 implementing all available efficiency improvements (i.e the ones detailed above) and making sure the move to a scaled bitcoin happens as smoothly as possible. It seems we should set a target of implementing all of the above improvements within the first 6 months of 2016. These improvements should be implemented in the first hardfork of its kind, with full community wide consensus. A hardfork with this much consensus is the perfect time to test and learn from the hardforking mechanism. Thanks to Seg Wit, this would give us an effective 2 fold capacity increase and set us on our path to scalability.
 
The second part of the proposal is to target the release of a second hardfork to happen at the end of 2016. Inline with all the above factors this would start with a real block size limit increase to 2MB (effectively increasing the throughput to 4x compared to today thanks to Seg Wit) and a doubling of the block size limit every two years thereafter (with linear scaling in between). The scaling would end with an 8GB block size limit in the year 2039.
 
 
How does the Proposal fit inside the Limits
 
 
Propagation time
If trends for average upload and bandwidth continue then propagation time for a block to reach >50% of the nodes in the network should never go above 1s. This is significantly quickly than propagation times we currently see.
In a worst case scenario we can we wrong in the negative direction (i.e. bandwidth does not increase as quickly as predicted) by 15% absolute and 37.5% relative (i.e. bandwidth improves at a rate of 25% per year rather than the predicted 40%) and we would still only ever see propagation times similar to today and it would take 20 years before this would happen.
 
Orphan Rate
Using our best guess predictions the orphan rate would never go over 0.2%.
In a worst case scenario where we are wrong in our bandwidth prediction in the negative direction by 37.5% relative, orphan rate would never go above 2.3% and it would take over 20 years to happen.
 
Non-Pruned Node Storage Cost
Using our best guess predictions the cost of storage for a non-pruned full node would never exceed $40 with blocks consistently 50% full and would in fact decrease significantly after reaching the peak cost. If blocks were consistently 100% full (which is highly unlikely) then the maximum cost of an un-pruned full node would never exceed $90.
In a worst case scenario where we are wrong in our bandwidth prediction in the negative direction by 37.5% relative and we are wrong in our storage cost prediction by 20% relative (storage cost decreases in cost by 25% per year instead of the predicted 37% per year), we would see a max cost to run a node with 50% full blocks of $100 by 2022 and $300 by 2039. If blocks are always 100% full then this max cost rises to $230 by 2022 and $650 in 2039. It is important to note that for storage costs to be as high as this, bitcoin will have to be enormously successful, meaning many many more people will be incentivised to run a full node (businesses etc.)
 
Pruned Node Storage Cost
Using our best guess predictions the cost of storage for a pruned full node would never exceed $0.60 with blocks consistently 50% full. If blocks were consistently 100% full (which is highly unlikely) then the max cost of an un-pruned full node would never exceed $1.30.
In a worst case scenario where we are wrong in our bandwidth prediction in the negative direction by 37.5% relative and we are wrong in our storage cost prediction by 20% relative (storage cost decreases in cost by 25% per year instead of the predicted 37% per year), we would see a max cost to run a node with 50% full blocks of $1.40 by 2022 and $5 by 2039. If blocks are always 100% full then this max cost rises to $3.20 by 2022 and $10 in 2039. It is important to note that at this amount of storage the cost would be effectively zero since users almost always have a large amount of free storage space on computers they already own.
 
Percentage of Downstream Bandwidth Used
Using our best guess predictions running a full node will never use more than 0.3% of a users download bandwidth (on average).
In a worst case scenario we can we wrong in the negative direction by 37.5% relative in our bandwidth predictions and we would still only ever see a max download bandwidth use of 4% (average).
 
Percentage of Upstream Bandwidth Used
Using our best guess predictions running a full node will never use more than 1.6% of a users download bandwidth (on average).
In a worst case scenario we can we wrong in the negative direction by 37.5% relative in our bandwidth predictions and we would only ever see a max download bandwidth use of 24% (average) and this would take over 20 years to occur.
 
Time to Bootstrap a New Node
Using our best guess predictions bootstrapping a new node onto the network should never take more than just over a day using 50% bandwidth.
In a worst case scenario we can we wrong in the negative direction by 37.5% relative in our bandwidth predictions and it would take one and 1/4 days to bootstrap the blockchain using 50% of the download bandwidth. By 2039 it would take 16 days to bootstrap the entire blockchain when using 50% bandwidth. I think it is important to note that by this point it is very possible the bootstrapping the blockchain could very well be done by simply buying an SSD with blockchain already bootstrapped. 16 days would be a lot of time to download software but it does not necessarily mean a decrease in centralisation. As you will see in the next section, if bitcoin has reached this level of adoption, there may well be many parties will to spend 16 days downloading the blockchain.
 
What if Things Turn Out Worse than the Worse Case?
While it is likely that future trends in the technology required to scale bitcoin will continue relatively similar to the past, it is possible that the predictions are completely and utterly wrong. This plan takes this into account though by making sure the buffer is large enough to give us time to adjust our course. Even if no technological/cost improvements (near zero likelihood) are made to bandwidth and storage in the future this proposal still gives us years to adjust course.
 
 
What Does This Mean for Bitcoin?
 
Significantly Increased Adoption
For comparison, Paypal handles around 285 transactions per second (tps), VISA handles around 2000tps and the total global non-cash transactions are around 12,400tps.
Currently bitcoin is capable of handling a maximum of around 3.5 transactions every second which are published to the blockchain roughly every 10 minutes. With Seg Wit implemented via a hardfork, bitcoin will be capable or around 7tps. With this proposal bitcoin will be capable of handling more transactions than Paypal (assuming Paypal experiences growth of around 7% per year) in the year 2027. Bitcoin will overtake VISA's transaction capability by the year 2035 and at the end of the growth cycle in 2039 it will be able to handle close to 50% of the total global non-cash transactions.
When you add on top second layer protocols( like the LN), sidechains, altcoins and off-chain transactions, there should be more than enough capacity for the whole world and every possible conceivable use for digital value transfer.
 
Transitioning from a Subsidy to a Transaction Fee Model
Currently mining is mostly incentivised by the subsidy that is given by the network (currently 25btc per block). If bitcoin is to widely successful it is likely that price increases will continue to outweigh btc denominated subsidy decreases for some time. This means that currently it is likely to be impossible to try to force the network into matching a significant portion of the subsidy with fees. The amount of fees being paid to miners has averagely increased over time and look like they will continue to do so. It is likely that the optimal time for fees to start seriously replacing the subsidy is when bitcoin adoption starts to slow. Unless you take a pessimistic view of bitcoin (thinking bitcoin is as big as it ever will be), it is reasonable to assume this will not happen for some time.
With this proposal, using an average fee of just $0.05, total transaction fees per day would be:

• Year 2020 = $90,720
• Year 2025 = $483,840.00
• Year 2030 = $2,903,040.00
• Year 2035 = $15,482,880.00
• Year 2041 = $123,863,040.00 (full 8GB Blocks)

Miners currently earn a total of around $2 million dollars per day in revenue, significantly less than the $124 million dollars in transaction fee revenue possible using this proposal. That also doesn't include the subsidy which would still play some role until the year 2140. This transaction fee revenue would be a yearly revenue of $45 billion for miners when transaction fees are only $0.05 on average.
 
 
Proposal Data
You can use these two spreadsheets (1 - 2 ) to see the various metrics at play over time. The first spreadsheet shows the data using the predicted trends and the second spreadsheet shows the data with the worst case trends.
 
 
Summary
 
It's very clear we are on the edge/midst of a community (and possibly a network) split. This is a very dangerous situation for bitcoin. A huge divide has appeared in the community and opinions are becoming more and more entrenched on both sides. If we cannot come together and find a way forward it will be bad for everyone except bitcoin's competition and enemies. While this proposal is born from an attempt at finding a balance based on as many relevant factors as possible, it also fortunately happens to fall in between the two sides of the debate. Hopefully the community can see this proposal as a way of making a compromise, releasing the entrenchment and finding a way forward to scale bitcoin. I have no doubt that if we can do this, bitcoin will have enormous success in the years to come.
 
Lets bring bitcoin out of beta together!!

I like the discussions taking place here, and frequently read through them when I'm procrastinating. In one thread, I read a brief exchange about corporate taxes that went roughly like the following:

Shill: corporate taxes should be lowered
Commie: wouldn't that be trickle-down, which failed when Bush tried to do it? moreover wouldn't that be taking money from the gov't [thus from potential social benefits, and thus from the poor, I assume - I'm editorializing]?
Shill: we could adjust personal income/wage taxes, so that we tax the CEO/rich more and the workers less, in a way that makes up for the difference [something about being revenue neutral, which I'm assuming means what it sounds like, as in no net change to gov't tax revenue?]
Commie: but if there's no overall change what difference does it make?
Shill: corporate taxes are upstream of wages, so by cutting them we ensure that the company has more capital, and by moving the tax burden downstream of wages we have more control over which income brackets feel more of the effective tax burden, since before with a higher corporate tax then employers are incentivized to slash employment, employee benefits, etc as cost-cutting measures. This newly freed up capital (on the company's part) can be invested in the workers, thereby improving their situation, etc.

I'm not sure if I've represented the above argument accurately, but I've tried to do it justice. Assuming it's a mostly correct paraphrasing, I think I'm missing something though, because I don't find this argument entirely convincing. If the change really was revenue neutral, what's stopping the company from using its modified amount of capital to just adjust wages (e.g. raising the wages for upper management) to return to the previous situation? Presumably most/all of the socioeconomic forces keeping workers' wages low and CEO wages high are still there, e.g. you hear all this talk (whether justified or not) about why CEOs need to be given absurd salaries just so they'd stay.
It seems to me the whole shift-corporate-taxes-to-wages argument is a red herring (at least in the context of improving quality of life for middle-to-lower class) distracting from two issues:
(1) I'm not overall fond of Bernie, but it does kind of seem unreasonable that the upper-to-(upper-upper) class possess and continue to earn (not just through wages, but through things like stocks, i.e. the whole financial system) amounts of money that are so high as to just be abstract, more-convenient-to-count-by-powers-of-ten numbers. That is, while I certainly acknowledge and appreciate that they play a valuable role in a functioning capitalist society, the rewards of their particular stations seem to be wholly disproportionate, especially considering that these immediate rewards (in the form of money) also inevitably afford them similarly disproportionate influence in the governance of what is supposed to be a mostly democratic society. I should say that I'm not anti-establishment and I'm not against the idea of a sophisticated financial system - just that the results of our current implementation of it seem way lopsided, and that the whole corporate taxes idea seems to do little to nothing in the way of trying to remedy this.
(2) Related to (1) but more in the way of armchair philosophizing, it seems to me that there's a discrepancy of scale between what is valued in certain parts of economic theory and what is relevant to people: perhaps some overall wealth is worth sacrificing, perhaps some inefficiency is worth being suffered, if it means we could have a more equitable (less miserable, at least) society as a result. I guess the example my economically illiterate self has in mind is the question of buying a lottery ticket, or playing slots at a casino - it's obviously a losing proposition in that it has a negative expected value, but if it's a loss that can be covered by your disposable income and you deem it worth whatever happiness you gain, then it's probably not entirely unreasonable. (I imagine this example is simple enough that it actually has been treated by real economists, but I guess you get my point if you replace "negative expected value" with "inefficiency/less overall wealth", "disposable income" with "disproportionate and hoarded wealth".)
That last statement probably makes me sound like a dirty commie but I don't think I am one - it's just that I'm having trouble justifying a society in which someone might have to skimp on going to the dentist for serious tooth pain because their hourly wage is less than goddamn log-base-10 of someone else's yearly earnings.
(If you take issue with (2) then please ignore it, I'm much more interested in discussing (1) anyways.)
All of this is not to say I claim to know the solutions. I certainly don't think full-blown socialism is the answer - I just fail to see how the neoliberal positions on tax policy will move us toward that direction. I'm of course open to being educated on this matter (but like don't 'muh Ayn Rand' me, ain't nobody got time for that).
And I have done some cursory reading of the economics faq, so I guess this isn't a total shitpost?
EDIT: It occurs to me that perhaps "effort post" is a designation specifically reserved for higher quality posts (like some of those that I thoroughly enjoyed reading on here), so my apologies in advance if the title is presumptuous.