This is the great bete noir of our time.

We have known for a long time that the way Bitcoin REALLY gains value is at the cost of social stability.  And we are seeing it play out in real time today.

And it is like a race.  We are becoming paper millionaires, and even higher, but at the same time the unit of account we use today is melting down.

$10,000,000 BTC is a bad thing if a loaf of bread is $100k.

I think there are SOME people whose plan (or hope) is the financial system melts down completely so we can bring forth (pick your story here) socialism, and CDBCs, or freedom and BTC.

And of course WE are all rooting for the latter.  But we will also be affected by the absolutely and dire misery that this road leads to.

But a slow orderly march to a sound monetary system???  Chances of that?  Seeming to get smaller by the day to me.

I just want to take a moment in the last waning hours of 2021 to be publicly thankful for Richard Stallman who has done such a huge amount of work to raise awareness of the sort of dystopia we would be unable to fend off if it weren't for Bitcoin and all other software that respects the freedom of it's users.

It's sad really.  Because he came up with a glorious model.  And even from the beginning of it all he said all models break.

All he needs to do is shrug is shoulders and say "Well damn, the model has broken earlier than I thought it would."  And THEN get about the business of trying to explain why, or adjusting the model somehow to possibly be accurate into the future.  Not move the goalposts, but openly try to improve the model...  And the whole world would listen to him because he earned some serious credibility with S2F.

He could even do less than that, like say "Yeah my 100k by December" stand was a foolish and capricious move that actually ignores the way this model works (because it is and was)"  And then point out that the model has still not been invalidated entirely.

Basically what he is doing now, but with humility rather than the whole "Well here is what I really always meant" line which 7 year olds can see.

And just like that...

I think this is basically what he is doing:



In the past he said two things:

1.  If it's not 100k by 12/21 then the model is broken.
2.  If it does not have an average of 100k for this cycle top, then it's invalidated.

So #1 is done... well, it will be in 1 week.

But #2 is still possible, but becoming more fantastical by the day.

Of course I would LOVE to see #2 come true, and in that case the longer it takes to get there the funner it would be.

In my opinion, he is busted on his December prediction.  I think he should own that bit, and concentrate on figuring out what is either wrong with the model, or his interpretation of it.

You are one ahead of me!  

I have done a few RBF transactions.  But I have never done CPFP.  That's cool that that exists too.

I never stops amazing me how important the game theory part of Bitcoin is, and how important incentives are to helping make it work.

Bitcoin has ABSOLUTELY shown the amazing power of opensource software.  Yes we all know about Firefox, and Chromium.  And a few nerds run linux.  But all but the Linux die-hards see it as the weird "off brand" OS (that happens to run almost the entire internet).

Satoshi rightly gets a lot of praise for releasing such an amazing thing, and then having the wisdom to hand it over to the world.  But, the developers of the software who have continued to shepherd it wisely doing things like adding RBF and CPFP don;t always get the credit they deserve.  While the WHOLE WORLD clamors for features like all the shitcoins have without seeing that a lot of these "features" have cost people millions, and billions of dollars in losses.  And at the same time the shitcoiners yelp about things like RBF, when that new functionality actually strengthens the foundation on which Bitcoin runs.  While certain assholes even threaten and SUE the devs making their work even harder (or at times impossible).

These developers are making the RIGHT decisions, and because of it the crooked financial system of the world will be toppled by a rag tag troop of neckbeards.

It's basically a David and Goliath story.

Yes!  It really is incredible.  Or perhaps so credible it's hard to believe!

Indeed.  It never made sense to me 'till now.  But that is definitely why, lol.

That said, the more I look at this the more I am betting this is a LARGE actor, like an exchange doing some UTXO cleanup during what will likely be some pretty dead days for the mempool.

Well... if you can wait on the 1sat transaction, I imagine it will clear eventually, possibly this weekend.  Looking at recent history there have been a few of these type of events with a big blast of low fee traffic.  Usually with a little more organic spread of fees though... this sort of seems like a single actor with a huge pile of transactions and a lot of tolerance for waiting?

On the other hand, I have to admit, I am very fond of RBF.   I had never really thought how that feature renders the spam attacks on the chain fairly moot.

OK.  What is going on?  the mempool is HAMMERED right now according to my little copy of mempool.space.  Is something wrong with my node?




Nope... seems like this is really like that.

Something is going on... what is it?  Someone is spamming the chain, or... or...  Why ALL OF A SUDDEN a huge pile of 2sat/vB transactions?  If you were REALLY trying to spam it you would do 1sat right?

The other weird part is, right now you'd just need to do a fee of 4 sats and you are in the next block...

This is odd!

There are definitely situation of hacking that I feel the hacked does not have anything (or very little) to do with it.  Phillip is one of them.

But that guy?  Doesn't MetaMask allow hardware wallets?  Certainly there are options.  At least a nice strong BIP-39 passphrase.

I am sorry that "Crypto Bitlord" lost money (and I have a feeling it was a LOT), but a DILDO APP?  On the computer where you use MetaMask to trade your idiotic PNGs?

I do not even type any of my cold wallet ADDRESSES into a block explorer other than the one *I RUN* behind Tor.

Etheriem is a f^&*ing throbbing attack surface.

A dildo app... *sigh*.  The hackers most CERTAINLY did a good job sizing up their targets.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!  I have been meaning to search for one of these.  Particularly for this forum... Ahhhh. So much better.

Pretty sure Elvis is gonna be in a walker pretty soon because of all that he did to his ankles and knees.

Who sold at the bottom?!?!

Who got some during LAST TIME you could EVER buy Bitcoin under 50k!?

Can you say "Supercycle?"

We are headed to a new ATH!

100k before MAY!

The next 30 minutes are critical!

How'm I doin?

I like it...  Could be an interesting weekend!

I agree with you entirely here.  But I am still afraid that it will be quite a hard fight in the short term.

And the other thing that scares me... Recently both Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump have said basically the same thing.  Bitcoin threatens the dollar hegemony.

I think this is quite meaningful.  And revelatory. 

What I fear is eventually the powers that be will figure out that possibly their very best chance against Bitcoin is not a CDBC, but rather Ethereum.  And this is one of the reasons the vest asshole, and the idiot xxx.eth people are so annoying.  Because they are too greedy, or stupid respectively to recognize that what they are doing it propping up the best chance the old system has to save themselves.

It is my hope that TPTB waste another 10 years trying to push their CDBC experiment.  I think we will see that fail in a GLORIOUS fashion.  In fact, I think their efforts in this will likely add so much game theoretical gasoline to the Bitcoin fire that, though it might be a rocky decade in some ways, one of the missteps they could make and are likely to.

That is some high quality hopium, LFC!  One in particular resonates with me:


I have outlined the idea of the 4 year cycles either reducing in (particularly downside) magnitude or going away altogether so often and so loudly that nowadays I just come here, read a little, consider posting something about that and then say "Nah.. no need to make everyone sick of me".  Then I also decide (usually) not to post about OTC vs retail and how that has become a very interesting price lever.  Then I merit a couple funny things, and go back into my hole.

But the above is a good brief thing, that I honestly think could be true.

Along with the fact retail are currently mesmerized by the latest big chain narrative being crammed down their throats by all the vest wearing VC assholes.  My, how those narratives have morphed over the years.  A pile of solutions looking for a problem.  World computer. Sound money!  ICOs,  No, Sound money!  WEB3!  No sound money! No WEB3!!!

I want to take a moment to outline why Web3 is massively retarded, then I will go back into my hole.

I am a SQL hack.  Self taught... have used MySQL, Postresql, MSFT Access, MariaDB and others over the years.  Back in the decades when I was running a business I built an accounting server out of a hard drive, and a network appliance called a "Pogo Plug" which was sort of a proto Raspbnerry PI.  It had a simple little ARM processor that could run Arch Linux.  With that, Perl, and Postgresql our business recorded it's money in, and out and printed receipts for the clients that wanted them for years.

I digress.  A lot.  But here's another tangent!

After the business closed, I kept my website and domain name, and built a little WordPress site to house some of my own musical experiments.  I used a VPS where I had to maintain all the underlying software because I am an idiot.

Recently my college age child expressed the desire to have a website to use as a portfolio.  I decided to buy a little $8/yr web host Black Friday special (RackNerds) and set her up a quick skeleton of a site.  I was SO IMPRESSED with how far Shared web hosting had come I decided to move my own useless website over to the same cheapo setup.  Let the pros handle the server software.

Thing is I wanted to keep my website, and WordPress runs on a SQL database.  Like so many sorts of web software it runs on HTML CSS, PHP and SQL.  THIS FORUM is exactly that combo.  In fact this little webhost lets you install "SMF" with the click of a button.

I installed WordPress with a similar button click, and the system spun up the code, and a database in the blink of an eye.  THEN, on the old host I did something like  THEN I came and dropped the tables on the new webhost installation.  Deleting all the mostly empty data, and replaced when by importing my dump from the old sertver.

Voila!  Website up and running on the new server.

There are lots of ways to do this... but one important step, in my humble opinion, was the DELETION of data that I mention above in bolded text.

WEB3 does away with being able to delete.  (*sigh*)

The mesmerized hoardes would point out: "cAPS!  You wouldn't have to delete anything!  You could just leave your data "in the cloud", and hook up to it from the new host!  Don't you see?"  

And yes.  I DO see.  I see one of the dumbest things I have seen in my entire life.

We are making an argument that we would like to keep an immutable record of everything we ever do with computers in an ever growing database with no ability to ever drop ANY of the data.  Every mistake.  Every past action.  Recorded FOREVER on one of the least efficient database structures ever cooked up by humankind.

^^ That sentence gives the Web3 goobers a hard on.  But it makes my soul hurt.  A system designed to be an ever growing panopticon controlled by the elites.

Yes.  There are SOME forms of data where immutability has some significant advantages.  Bitcoin is laser focused on the primary, and most important one.  I can also see how a healthcare database might benefit from blockchain.

But the Web3 idiots do not seem to realize they are effectively tearing the delete key off of their keyboards.  You store it once.  You store it forever.  Don't worry Google, and the Chinese government will be there to keep up with all the data we create.

The vest wearing assholes are getting super excited about this.  It is also a way they can shake the money out of the masses.  They can paint this futurist mirage for them to see and sell them the rights to a particular arrangement of pixels and are filling up the blockchain with pictures of apes.  

Forever, Laura.

And I thought the weather on BSV was bad.

Not only is a database you cannot ever delete from is only a good idea for very few use cases... but it has the potential to be used for great evil.  The biggest attack on privacy in the history of the world.

Anyway...  if I saw Vitalik in person I would probably spit on the ground.

That said... I Do think this "cycle" still has a surprise or two up it's sleeve.  I really do think this whole thing has been a bear trap.

Complete and total utter lack of awareness.

I would LOVE to be wrong.



The thing is this type of thing begins to appear adversarial.  And Monero is lost in the choir of "But XRP", "But Polkadot!'

Yeah that's a cool feature on the cold card.  But you can also concatenate the random numbers into a long string and do the lookups via a table...  For me that's about as complicated as I care to get.

I used to have a PDF somewhere... but I just found this Spanish one:
https://estudiobitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/V00-Semilla-de-moneda.pdf

Maybe I am a goober but there is something about calculating the seed mechanically.  And even if you use a binary item, like a coin flip, it's not too hard to put 32 coins in a cup, and shake them out 8 times and write them down.

Somehow good for the soul.  And it makes the calculated addresses shine just a little brighter.

Yes!  This is what I do.  I's just so important to emphasize the need to stay away from computers to make the seed.  I still read people talking about using air-gapped laptops and Tails etc.

The problem with that is how are you going to arrange those 24 words into a key?  You CAN... using a little math, but it's not easy for most of us.

Most of us would use a computer.  And then we are back to the same issue.

I do something like you say (but with dice, cards, or coinflips) entirely because of the issue with the random number generator, but I use a hardware wallet to make my keys.  *That* is a pretty easy upgrade.

But the moment a computer is involved?  You are back in the hot water...