what do you call "basics"? like how to choose a wallet, buy and send/receive bitcoin? these things have been available on bitcoin.org and most other places and are easy to understand. you don't need months.
but if by "basics" you mean something like how Elliptic Curve Cryptography works then yeah that should take that long!

yeah and 90% of them are crap. in fact the large number of available information, most of which is bad, is a bad thing for newcomers. they are being misled by these people, specially those on places such as Youtube which make it like a revenue for them. so they just create low quality and sometimes wrong content just to get views and make money.

Andreas Antonopoulos contents are always good. but it again comes down to what the "newbie" wants to learn. for basics i believe reading bitcoin.org start here page is more than enough. then they just have to start using the wallet they chose with the help of that site to learn more.
anything more than that, you can't call them "newbies" anymore.

something that is centralized and is fully in control of the bank is never going to provide any kind of freedom to its users. it in fact gives more control to that bank that has created such a token, and takes the freedom from the users. with fiat, at the end of the day you can withdraw it and have full control over your cash. with a token you can never withdraw that and use it on your own, because you still need that bank and their network to be able to use it.

to answer that we first have to figure out which set of curves he had access to (in order to choose from) back in 2008. i couldn't find any list sorting the curves chronologically but the safecurve website has the date of their paper in its table here: https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/

assuming Satoshi was looking at most popular/used curve and also a curve that has a standard defined by NIST (similar to the hash algorithm that was the most popular and had standard by NIST) the choices weren't really that big.
- Curve25519 released in 2005 but it wasn't popular until 2013
- brainpool curves' standards seem to be from 2010
- the rest of the dates are from years after 2008

that leaves NIST curves. so now the choice is limited to a much smaller number of curves.
if we consider size of them (192, 224, 256, 384, 521) and the recommendation by SEC about the fact that 256 bit curve offers a good security for many years and the fact that it matches the hash function (SHA256) makes that group a good choice.

now the list has 2 curves in it: secp256k1 and secp256r1
between these two since the first one is a Koblitz curve and it can be optimized more than the random curve, the choice is obvious.

well the two lines provided by OP doesn't really explain much about why he needs this data and what he is going to do with it, so i can't really tell what is best for his purpose.
as for APIs, they are not "non-public"! the market data is always public, that is how all these sites like CMC are gathering the data. and even shittiest exchanges have such features. and you can get the order books directly to see the "live" price:
example from a shitty exchange: https://yobit.net/api/3/depth/btc_usd?limit=10

the problem is that even though many of you are not "newcomers" anymore but you still are acting like a brand new member in this market! what was the article says "was happening in the past couple of days" has been happening all through past 2 years!
the thing is only because it wasn't the shitcoins that are on top, nobody saw it. otherwise the same pumps of 10%-50% have been very common and each day of past 2 years we have been having at least 5 shitcoins that see such pumps and from time to time we see a couple that have a 1000%+ pumps.

what happened in the past couple of days was that coins with bigger market cap were chosen for pumps instead of those small cap coins! if anybody celebrated this, they were newbies thinking their bags are recovering.

you mean the dude who mostly gained popularity during 2017 because he said he will eat his own dick. and then used that popularity to advertise and help pump a lot of shitcoins during that year? the same dude who also got paid about $100k for each tweet he made for scam ICOs?
no, i am not interested in what he says...

actually it is more like "don't-fork or die" for those who you named here. we are discussing a switch to a different algorithm to "outrun quantum computers", that includes hash algorithm and consequently the mining algorithm that will effectively brick SHA256-ASICs and make the producing companies obsolete even if for a short period of time until they create NEW-ASICs. they would have more cause to delay it.

the altcoin "holders" are currently in at least 85% loss and at most 98% loss. seeing some small pumps here and there is not considered good news for them!
as for this supposed decline, it is the natural thing to happen when bitcoin price becomes stable and as it was completely stable with less than 1% fluctuations, the altcoin pumps began and some of the shitcoins with biggest supplies such as XRP got pumped recently leading to their market cap to bloat hence decreasing the "market cap ratio" by around 2%.

as you can see as the stability stopped (bitcoin price dropped ~4% today) the same pumped altcoins got dumped hard. for instance XRP lost 7%, XLM 10%,...

usually mobile wallets (which Trust wallet is one) are not recommended for storage specially long term.
checking the wallet, it seems like it is newer and less popular than the alternatives.
looking for the source code was a little disappointing. all i could find were two dead repositories that are archived:
Andriod https://github.com/trustwallet/trust-wallet-android-source
IOS: https://github.com/trustwallet/trust-wallet-ios
both of them are from 2018, so for nearly a year they either didn't release any new version or the new ones are considered closed source.

how about directly going to the source of the "market" itself instead of looking for third party history keepers. this means visiting the exchanges and their API documentation to see if you could get the price history, which most of exchanges that i have seen are already offering such API calls. that way it will be more accurate and you don't have to trust some crappy site to not-have tampered with the data!

otherwise you could use bad sites like coinmarketcap.com!
there is also a new site which was announced here recently that has most of what you want: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5183531.0

isn't it the same with most of other countries too? not to mention with most of the people around here!
people see bitcoin as investment since it continue going up and giving them profit.
governments see it as investment because it is easier to tax it that way and their revenue could be higher.
i don't think it is specific to Chinese.

i don't think it has anything to do with what their government thinks!
mining requires a couple of things to be more profitable in a competing market. first is the electricity cost, which is quite low in many parts of China specially when these farms struck special deals with their electricity provider. the next is the cheap and easy access to equipment. again they can acquire it easily from Bitmain and fast, maybe even cheaper. another factor is climate, i have seen farms that go in places with lower temperatures which would reduce their cost for cooling and increase their revenue. and finally the cost of labor can be much smaller which is another reduced cost. all of this leads to higher profitability.

if you buy a game worth $10 and price goes down from $10500 to $9500 the seller loses $0.95. but when you are making a gigantic trade like selling oil per barrel per day worth $50 million for example, the same price drop means the seller loses $4.76 million. same goes with case when price goes up. and that what volatility does to large transactions.

similarly you can "convert" $10 to and from bitcoin, even $100k or $1 million one time but you can't do the same with something like $50 million every day. the market isn't even that big to absorb that much. (just now it took only ~800BTC=$8mil to push the price below $10k again)


How many people own Bitcoin, and how much do they own? How can the government prove, and will the people declare it?

Better to tax people in fiat, and use that to subsidize Bitcoin buying/mining.
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all they need to do is to regulate exchanges and force them to give a list of all transactions every user made. now it is not up to the "people" to want to pay their taxes or not, if they don't they are evading and that is illegal and can have jail time.

in that case, it would be a special scenario, not the normal thing that we currently have. and i see a big difference there which could have the potential to even affect bitcoin.
by the way i don't think there will be any military conflict, at least not anytime soon. so far US is trying to build a fire and push others in to watch from a safe distance while the world burns. and others have been reluctant to play along.

mining cryptocurrencies is going to always be profitable unless that cryptocurrency has a gigantic drop (like losing 90% in one day) or drops to zero. that is how they continue living.
a better question would be "is it profitable for me?" and to answer that you first have to calculate your own costs. the biggest one is going to be your electricity cost. and that depends on where you live. other costs include maintenance, cooling, and the initial equipment cost. good news is that there are a lot of mining calculators online that you could use.
https://whattomine.com/
https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency


that depends! are you capable of trading? do you have any experience in trading and experience in trading cryptocurrencies?
if yes, then the answer to your question is also yes, trading is a lot simpler than mining but if you don't have that experience then trading is worse and you can even end up losing a lot of money.

FWIW this has nothing to do with DDoS attack. this is an intentional change that almost all legit Electrum servers have implemented in order to "crash" your client's network instance and prevent it from connecting to any other server too. that way they will protect all the old versions from suddenly connecting to a malicious server which could exploit a message-bug that existed in older versions that could show them a fake message deceiving them into downloading a malicious version.

you are wrong, bitcoin has never had any relationship with any other markets, specially stock market. at least not any connection that could be big enough to cause any measurable changes in its price.
this recent drama is only going to have its major effects on oil (and consequently the related products) prices. bitcoin will remain on its own path, ...like always.

i wouldn't be so sure about that!
we are talking about a major change with a hard fork and it is not like there is only one solution that everyone could jump on board. there is a ton of different things that will cause a ton of drama. for starters which algorithm to choose? and worst of all what to do with coins that won't move such as outputs that were made in early years such as 2009 (naively referred to as Satoshi's coins). should we burn them? you see there is a lot of room for debates.

Roger never left bitcoin to want to come back to it. he has always been "in" bitcoin! things like BCash are only additional revenues for people like him to make themselves richer.

you are right about the "political value" of this domain though and i don't think he will ever sell it even if BCash died and someone offered a very good deal for the domain. it is not like he needs the money. at some point having the "power" is more important than the money.

it really depends on what you call security and what cryptocurrency you are talking about when you say "blockchain industry"!

for example if you use cold storage to store your coins "your security" is much higher compared to if you were storing them in some website (web wallets, exchanges,...).
as for security of the cryptocurrency itself it depends on a lot of factors. if you are only concerned about bitcoin, it is the safest thing around. it is bug free, reviewed by lots of experts and have been working fine for 10 years. most altcoins don't have that. they are in fact insecure either because they have bugs in their protocol (even the big top 10 altcoins) or because they have lower hashrate that opens up many new attack vectors.

security isn't really a small subject to be covered in one comment in my opinion.

lol, and Binance of all places! it is not as if it were hacked recently. tell them to at least choose an exchange that doesn't have such a gigantic hack in their recent history.
i had a friend that was doing the same, holding his bitcoins on exchanges believing it is the safest way possible. i showed him so many cases of exchanges getting hacked, people getting their accounts hacked, people being scammed by their exchanges,... that he made a withdrawal the next day to his Electrum wallet which i helped set up.