adjustment of the price or the correction that happens is usually smaller and a lot smoother than this. meaning the drop occurs over a longer period of time instead of being a sharp drop that (on the charts) looks completely vertical. these vertical declines are indicating panic sells and are usually kicked off when price goes below the stop loss that the bots have in place to sell immediately as it goes below that mark which then starts the subsequent sell offs.

not really. i have also never heard the term "virgin bitcoins" be used ever before that one company recently started using it and the news sties started copying the content (with this word in it). so if anything this term is something that was created recently and by one company and nobody even uses it any place else.

that's not how bitcoin works!
it doesn't matter how much hashrate you own, even if you control 100% of it you still can not insert an invalid (fake) transaction in the actual blockchain that everyone else stores because it simply will be rejected right away by the rest of the network and you will be on your own, alone on a chain that you and you only think is valid.

in case you don't know "pools" created before ASICs because they have nothing to do with ASICs. a mining pool is simply a "place" where individual miners go to to share the work and share the reward. it doesn't matter with what you are doing the work, with an ASIC, a super computer or a decrepit Pentium II pc.

now you are just putting words in Satoshi's mouth!
Satoshi designed bitcoin so that everyone could use bitcoin, how they acquire it is on themselves. bitcoin is not some sort of charity money give away to give money to the poor for free or easy!

it is interesting to "visualize" a private key in binary and also if you use the first method (coin flip) to create it but it is not a good idea to use it in any other way such as manual selecting the squares, using random button,... if the key is to be used for funds.

you also should add the warning to your site explaining the insecurity of the random function used, and warn about manual selection since people are never a good entropy source.

additionally i see a zip file link at the bottom. is your project open source? if it is, sharing it on GitHub and linking it there is a better idea.

based on your comments it seems like you have never been affected by any of the "problems" that is why you don't see them and think there is no problem in first place. but there is. the banks screwing people over every day, governments have their hands in people's pockets, restricting them, controlling and censoring them, and a lot more. bitcoin simply solved a ton of such problems by simply being a decentralized currency. now i can send money from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world without needing to jump through hoops or be restricted/blocked because of crazy governmental rules, sanctions,....

how about just a "bump counter"?
(i didn't see anybody suggesting this) it would be interesting to have this field on each topic and the new row added called "bumps" in the list of topics to both show the counter and give the ability to sort them with their total bumps.


i (super) bumped something yesterday for the first time and it has been staying on top for two days, i was very curious to know how many bumps that topic is receiving.

why are you trying to come up with your own unique way? are you an experienced cryptographer? if not then it is always a better idea to use the already tested encryption methods that have been proposed and are in use such as BIP38 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0038.mediawiki) the result would look like this:
and since the encoding is the same Base58 (same characters) you could use crypto-steel to store it. but it will be a lot more secure since it is using strong encryption techniques (AES-256 using a stretched key).

there is nothing natural about a movement that is this sharp whether it is a rise or a drop, that much is obvious. but whether this was manipulation that led to such a sharp drop or a panic sell is something we can never be sure of, and of course there is always a lot of traces of manipulation in this market since it is still small and filled with whales.

as for hashrate drop, i don't think that is the reason for this recent price drop. traders are not known to watch the hashrate for their decision making specially since a lot of other bigger drama is usually going on in the market like the current Bakkt and their Futures drama.

being "young" is not the main reason for the drop. having small market is the main reason and the reason for a small market (meaning exchanges that have order books that are NOT packed with orders) is that the exchanges that we use are not trustworthy so people are always afraid of using them. they prefer to either stay away from trading there or to never leave an open order, instead withdraw their funds right away. that leaves the market open to manipulation and big swings whenever a large amount of buys or sells take place.

how about using Electrum wallet?
it is a lightweight (SPV) client, it is up to date (meaning it supports SegWit) and works with TestNet. you can run it on any OS by adding the "--testnet" command at the end. on Windows open the properties window of the shortcut on your desktop, go to the Shortcut tab and add that command at the end of Target:

now you can create wallets, import keys, sign transactions, get your UTXO history, broadcast them,...

you can also always only contact the Electrum servers and use their communication protocol to fetch the necessary data you want (basically what Electrum does under the hood). although that would be harder and more time consuming. here is the protocol documentation: https://electrumx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/protocol.html

for that i think you need to work more on the explanation part and start by explaining how to run this tool step by step and on each step you should try explaining what exactly is happening. for example
- what is a transaction (parts that it has, the role of previous transaction, scripts,...)
- what is the signature
- what are public/private key pairs
- what happens when you broadcast the signed tx
- how a block is mined
- how do nodes communicate with each other.

there is also something odd about the keys in your screenshot, from the code it seems like you are using RSA. why use that instead of Elliptic Curve DSA since it is more popular?
also are these keys encoded using DER? you might want to specify the encoding that your code accepts.

also this following part doesn't sound correct:
blockchain is only for "storing" the transaction history and "chain" or link them together using cryptography and in coins such as bitcoin by doing "work" hence the term proof of work. so blockchain only works as the public immutable ledger that only grows. the "authorization" happens by the user when they provide a digital signature.

what i meant was to point out that there is a difference between addresses and scripts. address is the human readable encoding of some of the most popular scripts, in other words we have more scripts than addresses. example is the P2PK scripts that were mentioned, another would be those with OP_CSV or other OP codes in them.

as for second part, no we can not go from address to public key since hash algorithms used in bitcoin are one way functions.

it seems like for these couple of days that Bakkt launch is still fresh there is more panic in the market than anything else possibly it is either because of the fact that weak hands think it is the end of the hype and expected drop so they panic sold before it happened and caused this drop or their panic is because it is Futures and they were scared of its effects on price. whatever the reason we are seeing the panic take its toll on the price but still incapable of pushing it down below the previously tested bottom.

the year that we succeed at optimizing the algorithm for nested hash function {RIPEMD160(SHA256)} and find a collision. nobody can predict when that can happen, estimating it would be at least another 50 years.

an address is the hash of the public key where as those outputs from first year(s) were the public key itself.

P2WPKH scripts are using the same RIPEMD160(SHA256(pubkey)) digests so they are the same 20 bytes (160 bits). P2WSH scripts use SHA256(script) digest so they are 32 bytes (256 bits) and both of them use Bech32 encoding to represent the corresponding "address".

well there is no such thing as "ASIC-proof". this was a term invented by altcoins that wanted to have an excuse to advertise and then pump themselves. they first started exaggerating bitcoin being mined by ASICs situation and then fooled people into thinking their algorithm can not be optimized by using ASICs.

what they call "ASIC-proof" is actually "SHA256-ASIC-proof", in other words it can not be mined by the same ASICs that bitcoin uses but new ASICs can be created to mine that particular algorithm.

haha, yeah but still ignoring all that hype, i'd say it has grown nicely over the past 24 hours and the volume seems to be constantly increasing. i don't think "institutional" investors are waiting to jump in with their head first just because Bakkt started.
on a side note, it is interesting how there is a big sell pressure over the past 24 hours on the actual market pushing the price down though.

OP is talking about "shutting down" bitcoin not causing some short term price drama in the market. but yeah if we are going to speculate about a hypothetical situation then you are right but this topic needs to be in speculation board and the title must change! but i have a feeling that OP is not going to do that

not exactly.
usually when people talk about these "phrases" they are referring to mnemonic that are used according to a standard called BIP39. but the problem is that not all wallets stick to that standard and in early years (like old versions of blockchain.info wallet) this standard wasn't around or was not popular so they used different techniques.
this means as long as you have the "phrase" and have access to the same wallet, you should be able to recover your funds. if you don't have access to the wallet or if the wallet is bad at keeping backward compatibility, then you have to go through the source code of that wallet to figure out how they used to go from the phrase to a private key. i don't think anybody knows this about early versions of blockchain.info wallets!

so your only option is to contact their support and use the links that were posted to try and recover your wallet.

don't be overwhelmed, most of what you have seen are just gadgets and a regular trader doesn't really need any of them to be successful in making consistent profit. most of them are only for special trading strategies and to maximizing the control and profit. otherwise they neither guarantee profit nor even make it possible. the main usage i believe is for those who are hard core traders and also want the communication feature to connect with other brokers. i don't think you find it useful for bitcoin market.