but that is not "mnemonic" or as OP puts it "18 phrases". they are more like 72 random characters that are split into groups of 4 (18x4). it is most probably blockchain.info recovery phrase since they have gone through a range of lengths for their recovery phrase.
if that didn't work, it could be a Coinomi seed as they at some point let users select the number of words they wanted in their seed phrase and 18 was one of the choices.

it is both pointless and harmful to the regular users. a lot of them will end up breaking the thing themselves by entering their passwords with typos! besides if someone is trying to brute force your password through the client, there is a much easier way to prevent them from succeeding: 1. use a stronger password than "123", 2. add a simple fail_counter to add a delay like 30 seconds each 3 times they fail!
otherwise those who actually brute force a password, don't use the  client, they open the file itself and you can't do anything about that.

it is impossible to mine bitcoin without investing a large amount of money and no matter what alogirthm it switches to, in the end that large amount of money will be required because there are A LOT of people mining bitcoin hence the difficulty will always be high and consequently you need to have a higher hashrate => invest more money.

because unlike shitcoins, in bitcoin we don't want to fool people into thinking if they could mine it with a cheap computer (that translates into having a low difficulty and hashrate) then the coin is a good and "decentralized" one!

nobody is stopping you to buy a ton of ASICs and become a "large corporation that mines bitcoin". so i don't see any issues there. it is just that YOU don't want to make that kind of commitment and others do and you blame them for that kind of investment!

PoS is the weakest with lots of issues.

why should anybody be paid money out of thin air for just owning money?

if quantum computers were capable of breaking anything you would have a lot more to worry about than just the mining algorithm that bitcoin uses...

doesn't "so far" in this context means the past 4 hours? since it seems like Bakkt just started running their market. and if that is true, then 7BTC/4 hour is not such a small figure for something that is not even a day old. that is $70k we are talking about not a small amount of money.

also next time try to provide a more reliable link than an instagram post!

since when a currency having a stable price is considered "hard and complicated situation"?


i think you may benefit from familiarizing yourself with the concept of being "decentralized". it is not just a word.

actually it is never hard to understand the "status" of altcoins, they are always getting pumped and dumped. the only thing that is hard is predicting when they get pumped. and most people confuse these pumps with bull runs which imposes a lot of problems for them, otherwise if you see them for what they really are then you won't get confused like the OP here!

it is not just Altcoin Discussion, it is all over the forum. i usually report them as "link advertisement". basically they create a random low quality website with click bait articles which they mostly copy from elsewhere. then come to bitcointalk and spam the links all over the forum to redirect traffic. i don't think restriction on links with ranks is enough though. banning the URL itself might be a better solution, at least in sever cases.

example coinidol:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2626969;sa=showPosts
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=945239;sa=showPosts
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=384833;sa=showPosts

we are not "mapping" keys to addresses to have 1:X ratio. we are hashing the public key which returns a random result so there is no fixed ratio. there is a chance of collision because the hash size (160 bits) is smaller than the number of private keys (a little less than 256 bit) but so far nobody has found any collisions and will not find any for a very long time. anybody who claims otherwise without proof is most probably lying.

well i am not familiar with JavaScript, so let me rephrase it like this. you have to split your code into different components that you can call and test separately. for example if you had a public key and wanted its corresponding address, is there anything you could call in your code to do exactly that?
also do you have any tests written for your code?

you have to be able to write a test like this (pubkey -> bytes for encoding):
input:
output:

by splitting your code and "testing" each "component" you can easily find the problem. now when you test this you get a result from your code called "actual" then compare it with "expected" that you hard coded in your test. then you realize that your returned value has a wrong last 4 bytes. so now you know the problem is with your checksum and you can go back and focus on that part and fix that part.

in this case (again i am not familiar with JavaScript but) this part should change from:
to
since your checksum is 2x SHA256 of 3683f0d40e5cfb112e9055f792204e58614815f4 instead of 003683f0d40e5cfb112e9055f792204e58614815f4

the problem here (apart from getting newbies who want to get rich quick which was mentioned before) is that unlike fiat you first have to educate people about bitcoin, you can't just hand over some coins and wish it helps adoption. most of them would just go to some website like coinbase, dump it and get out.
if you want a MrBitcoin then check out Andreas Antonopoulos content on youtube. he is the "real" MtBitcoin that is educating people with correct information instead of hyping them up and telling them "you'll become rich overnight".

congratulations they broke a ~4 bit security level key in their attempt

but jokes aside in cryptography the size is not the only thing that matters, the estimated "security level" that the keys provide is the important thing. size is only one factor that determines that level. for instance for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) the security level is half the key size but in Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm the security level is a lot lower than just half (calculated like this).
in short you can refer to the table provided in Standards for Efficient Cryptography (SEC 1):


the achievements that this paper is about, is the Factorization they are using and the optimization that has led to which is reducing the time it takes to break RSA by a lot.

wallets are simply computer programs, they can't read minds
so when you give them a master key, they don't make any assumptions, instead they start deriving a fixed number of keys (usually less than 15) then check them to see if they were ever used. if they weren't then assumption is that the key is brand new. so your 228th key goes unnoticed. if they were used they start deriving more keys (16th+) and check them until they reach unused keys and stop.

so to get your 228th key you have to explicitly tell your wallet to check that. usually this is done by telling the wallet to derive all 228 keys (eg. using gap limit variable in Electrum). but you have to know that you are increasing your wallet file size that way and put a burden on servers which you connect to and keep checking for balance of these addresses for no reason.

ps. try using TestNet for testing these things. that way it won't cost you anything and you also don't spam bitcoin network. Electrum wallet supports TestNet.

since bitcoin is not centralized, there is no centralized entity to release "official" anything. all we have is consensus that the entire network has to agree no matter what client they run. and since things like LockTime are enforced by the protocol to change them we have to create a fork and that is not going to happen and even if it does you will see it if you follow bitcoin (as in checking every couple of months).

haha, a funny comparison but a wrong one. in case of bitcoin it is not the first time to see this kind of "stuck" price and it not out of the ordinary. in fact it happens more than you may think. they usually show either accumulation or the undecidedness of the market participants. and are always the transitioning phase from one state to another. for example the $3k stability which lasted ~4 months was the accumulation phase with everyone being afraid and undecided where market got ready to launch towards $6000 in one month and $13k in 2 months.

your code is pretty bad because you are doing a million different things inside one function. it is near impossible and extremely time consuming for anyone to find out where the problem is!
there is a very single solution for that though. you must simply split your function apart into multiple functions each doing a different job, and then write tests for each function individually and see if they are working as they should.

for example:
- 1 function should be calculating checksum of a given byte array and return 4 bytes. your test would be passing an arbitrary byte to this and seeing if it returns correct 4 bytes after doing double_sha256 on it.
- 1 function should encode a given byte array to base58
- another function should encode a given byte array to base58 with checksum using the previous 2 functions
- 1 function should convert a public key to address
- and so on...

no it doesn't mean that and no blockchain.com doesn't have that kind of access.
the address is behaving like that and i didn't know where the address was coming from. as OP later replied the address is NOT created by his account but comes from somewhere else (it is imported) but he didn't answer my other questions nor did he say how he created this address. so i have to guess at this point.
so for example if the address is created by his exchange account, and then imported that into his blockchain.com wallet, that behavior is easily explained. when he makes a deposit in his exchange account, it remains in that address for a little while then the exchange moves the funds so he sees a "withdrawal" in his blockchain.com account.

things like this proposal don't have to be a full wallet since all they do is creating a scriptPub that is not common. so they can simply be another feature in the already existing wallets. if the wallets didn't add the feature it still can be built on top of them. for example with a very small amount of code it could be built on top of Electrum. that way it doesn't really have to change/maintained over time and it still relies on a wallet that you may trust.

i would never even go near something like this simply because they are obviously lying about a ton of things and exaggerating what their product does. an honest company would simply first acknowledge the previous works and the already existing tools (for example in this case the hardware wallets that already exist) and then explains why their product is any different from others. but they chose the lying route saying their crap is "world's first" whereas it is repetition of what was already created.
maybe they are doing it this way because they are afraid they might get sued soon for ripping off other patents.

can we really consider these as "adoption"? sure they are helping the adoption but to me the term means when people start using bitcoin. for example what happened in Japan where you can actual shops in the cities accepting bitcoin as payment.

these articles are mostly talking about big names wanting to make profit from the volume that already exist from traders. and the second article is not even related to bitcoin, it is another fundraising!

you mean "bear trap" because it is the bears who are being slaughtered these days as they are the ones thinking the price should go down and go against the market. otherwise the bulls are accumulating in this sideways market to get ready for the launch.
as for whales, you have to remember that not all of them go in the same direction. for example the whale bears that are having their heads chopped off these days are going against the whale bulls that are eating them up.