I agree, Bitcoin was created to help people get rid of third-party control and destroy centralized financial management.
by using bitcoin we still need to download bitcoin wallets and most of them are i think centralized and often called as third party apps . in this context "third party" is referred to someone else that takes control of your money. bitcoin wallets don't do that. and you downloading one doesn't mean you are using a third party nor does it mean they are centralized! all bitcoin wallets are open source and have nothing to do with centralization! not to mention that you will be in full control of your bitcoins. if it is other than what i said, then it can not be called a bitcoin wallet. for example you can't call Coinbase, exchanges, closed source things like Coinomi a bitcoin wallet. |
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I think what is being said is realistic and may be right. Cryptocurrencies have become an acceptable alternative to traditional investments after they have proven their efficiency over the past years and the advantages they offer.
We may differ in that it is a profitable investment, but it has become a reality that countries must deal with it with more wisely by imposing legislative laws to regulate the market.
With regard to Libra, it is different as success will pave the way for big corporations (Amazon, Google,..etc) to set up their coins, which would pose a threat to the global financial system.
We can clearly see that it is much better to invest with crypto, it has a great big future. Crypto was able to give different opportunities and benefits to us and I think it will be the reason why it will stand for a long time. Like no matter what they do, it will continue and do it's specific purpose. well you are talking about bitcoin not "crypto" in general. so you can't really expand it to them. as we have seen majority of altcoins are completely useless so there really isn't any future for them, not to mention that they are not solving anything. as for Libra that was mentioned in OP, that is just another centralized payment system that should not even be mentioned in the same place as decentralized systems such as bitcoin. |
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those seeing Triangles in the current chart and expecting big falls should really check out the recent "Triangles" that we had that led to many expecting the same thing. the part is in between December 20 (2018) to February 7 (2019) when people were expecting $1000 just because some lines on their charts told them so. guess what happens on February 8?
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Thanks now lets focus in the puzzle, 0.024btc are good motivation to find that privatekey, as hint we know the key start with 5,
hold on a minute, the dude in the video explicitly says he is using compressed key for this one so it starts with K or L, since the scrammed thing doesn't have any L so it must start with a K. additionally the char count of it is 52 which is another indication of it being a compressed key  by the way where are you guys getting the "scrambled" key from? i couldn't find it anywhere in the video. How do we validate that the winner is not a friend or family member? Well, it's basically impossible and that is the main problem I have with these puzzles.  if the thing to solve is real then there is still a chance for others to solve and claim it faster even if the creator has the key! you can't verify its solve-ability unless the prize is claimed and OP explains how the puzzle should have been solved. |
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<Comparing Bitcoin to PayPal Makes no Sense but i'll compare them anyways>
who writes these silly articles and why did you think it is worth sharing it here? well it's impossible to know the reason for every Bitcoin payment, whereas PayPal literally do have a recorded reason for every transaction (although some unknown amount of that will be deliberate misreporting)
as a good estimate we could use the stats released by payment processors. since a great percentage of the merchants are actually using them, the stats is closer to reality and can give you a good comparison. for example Bitpay claims to have processes more than $1 billion worth of payments for 2 years in a row (2017 and 2018). Coinbase says they have surpassed $50 million on their merchant app launched in 2018. i couldn't find anything from others. my guess is that the total is somewhere around $3 to $4 billion per year at least. Paypal claims to have process $578 billion in 2018. it is still great though for something so young, volatile and not yet mass adopted to reach these levels. |
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why do you have so many keys to check anyways?
many satoshi's bitcoin are missing out there for someone to take them  i want to take my chances of getting one of this lost wallets  haha, cool. as long as you realize you are wasting your time, it is cool to learn some coding and the underlying cryptography that bitcoin uses. for your purpose you shouldn't be using a library. you have to write your own code for all the parts. for starters the library that was introduced is in python, that is slow to begin with. additionally the functions aren't defined to be fast for huge loops. this part alone will slow it down dramatically: https://github.com/mflaxman/coinkit/blob/8ce28ac4ff56e2320bf452d0559b83baf40b2b51/coinkit/keyspace.py#L25-L37hashlib.Sha256 is also slow even though it is written in C but the way you are going to be using it in that library is going to be slow. although one might wonder why you are even looping through base58 (WIF) keys if you are looping through random keys! |
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nobody has ever lost money when they "invested"[1] in bitcoin. the only people who lose money are those who tried "day trading" while not knowing how trading or bitcoin market works and still wanted to make money doing something they were not familiar with.
[1] an investment means you find an asset and find a good entry point which is anywhere but the peak of its bubble. then you buy it and hold it for long term. this for example means buying when price was $2000 in 2017. or between $3k and $6k this year.
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in my experience those who struggle in explaining bitcoin to others, specially the "lay person", themselves suffer from not knowing what bitcoin is exactly which is why they struggle at explaining it to others. the first rule of telling others about something is for you to understand it yourself.
additionally the other challenge these people face is over explaining things that are not necessary. it is like explaining how programming languages like C and C++ work and teaching them to a "lay person" because he asked you how he should turn his computer on and off and windows is written in C and C++!
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Maybe we could setup a new thread, dip alert for the times the price has had a trend of falling but might bounce back. I think now is one of those times, my outlook is not positive but it never pays to be singular minded and I think it can bounce after hitting an old trend.
usually "dip buying" is for the investors not traders. investors that keep on buying bitcoin on intervals like whenever they have some extra money that they want to invest every month. for them, any dip where price comes down a little is good and anything that is bigger than 10% is awesome. there is no need any kind of alert in my opinion because that kind of strategy doesn't need it. |
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~ Yes, finally I have paid 1 sat/byte more for my transaction than required. But it's not known while sending a transaction, when a new block will be found. It's possible that the block will be found 1 minute later or 20 minutes later. And in the meantime, the size of the mempool can increase especially with transactions paying more sat/byte than my transaction so that they will be included in a new block first. So, I tend to set always 1 or 2 sat/byte more when in doubt. That's not much $ (also depending on the size of the transaction) but will increase the possibility to get the transaction into the next block. of course that is also what i would do to stay ahead of the curve. but i was just pointing out how these charts work because i think it is easy to misinterpret them, i used to do it myself. specially since they are satoshi per "byte" not "virutal byte" and it causes some trouble with SegWit transactions you make. |
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This is what I thought. What would be some good ideas to develop a database and rank how much time it is needed to sync given a certain setup? Someone needs to do this. Unless it's done manually and reported case by case, I can't think of any accurate way to gather data without some sort of telemetry involved.
you could do this but you can't ask for it to be built in bitcoin-core client itself. you have to build it on top of it as a separate thing that people could run voluntarily and then report their results if they wished to in a centralized database. start by writing the open source benchmark that you think could measure things you want listed in that database, add things like becnh of different versions of core or different implementations of the full node,.... create the database (website?) then release it to public. something like what these sites do: https://hdd.userbenchmark.com/ |
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you won't find any optimized scripts or tools to do what you want because that is not something that people normally want to do. you just don't suddenly come up with hundreds of thousands of keys wanting to check their balances. even big exchanges that handle millions of addresses add them little by little to their database.
so as @ETFbitcoin said you have to create your own. while doing that you have to know that the bottleneck is not just database lookups, it is also the EC multiplications of 500k times and the two hashes that you have to perform 500k times on each of them.
why do you have so many keys to check anyways?
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i actually don't think ETF is bad, at least it is not as bad as futures and margin trading where they let people short bitcoin specially when they are whales and can manipulate the market and cause unreasonable volatility at times which is more damaging to bitcoin that it may look like.
in the end things like ETF can help introducing bitcoin to more people. which means it can even help those who don't want to "be their own bank" to enter bitcoin. maybe in time they realize what bitcoin offers and switch to directly using bitcoin.
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I was able to retrieved case #62 private key 363D541EB611ABEE in 8122.18 sec. (running 4 instances of the script by splitting the interval in 4 pieces at 160000 h/s per core)
It is a pity that this can be done only after an outgoing transaction  So then it's good that Bitcoin clients typically send to a hash of the public key (P2PKH), rather than the public key itself (P2PK). With some of the weaker keys, it would be possible for a selfish miner to: 1. Watch for transactions which redeem puzzle funds, 2. Extract the pubkey from the mempool transaction created by the puzzle solver, 3. Crack the privkey using Pollard or BSGS, 4. Use the privkey to create a new transaction which overrides the first, and include it in the next block they mine. My old Xeon server can crack a 51 bit key (using BSGS) in around 5 minutes, and 52 bits in around 12 minutes, so the chances of a successful attack on a similarly weak key seem good. Such an attack would be of little use now, since the weaker keys were found (presumably by brute force?) long ago. I guess if the person claiming the puzzle prize didn't include a sufficient transaction fee, the time for the attacker to crack the key would be higher. that's not why we are using hash of the public key. the hash is used because if in case some day there was a way to solve ECDLP faster the funds could remain safer. otherwise right now with what we have as algorithms and hardware to find the private key by just having the public key. 256 bit is HUGE. and "bitcoin clients" don't create weak keys. you have to go out of your way to create a key that has so much zeros like this: 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000efae164cb9e3c
even with broken RNG it is still impossible to get something like that! additionally there are lots and addresses that are reused, meaning they have revealed their public key already. if it were possible to break anything they would have been broken already. |
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every government is trying to take control of bitcoin because they don't want anything that is out of their control and decentralized but they can not do that and they have not been able to do that so far either. i still don't get how you made the leap from Binance creating yet another new platform with US government trying to control crypto! that is just Binance trying to separate the US users from the rest of them so that they don't have to impose the same regulations on the rest while forcing US specific regulations on their US users.
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Bringing new investors to buy at high prices will not lead to bitcoin growth
"high" only depends on your perspective. if you think price should be $5k then yes, $10k is high. but if you think price should be $20k then $10k is a discount! so what happens is that investors don't come in based on what the number is for the price but they only come when they speculate about what this number could be in the future. so if they see the potential and realize that price is going to reach at least $100k in the next rally phase they wouldn't hesitate investing no matter what the current price is. the problem however is that they are not yet seeing that potential and most investors wait too long to realize it. that is why we have a lot of entry near the bubble's peak each time! |
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true, that sounds pretty good on paper. but i'm sure the ultimate goal was to convert airdrop recipients into exchange customers, hence the KYC process. i wonder what their conversion rate is since people coming for freebies usually don't intend to become paying customers. they spent a boatload of cash verifying millions of people; that much i know. true but they also not have built a gigantic database of a large number of bitcoin users. and this is a very valuable asset for the company. who knows what they are doing behind the scene and privately. possibly working with governments or different companies like the chain analysis ones. so it could be a good revenue for them to just let them "look up" things in their database. |
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~
There is no way you can remember 12 words for years to come without writing them somewhere. Which also means that they could easily be stolen or lost.
true but as i explained, the alternative is still flawed so in my opinion storing the 12 words that is randomly generated is a lot safer than using a brainwallet even if it is susceptible to physical theft. besides you can mitigate that by using some sort of encryption on it! for instance you could use the "brainwallet" as the password for encrypting the mnemonic phrase and then print the encrypted text instead and remember the password. |
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And when you have a look at the graph you’ll also notice some transactions using a fee way too high… They had sent their transaction with more than 100 satoshi / bytes, although a fee of only 2 satoshi / byte would have been enough to get the transaction into the next block. ^^
the values on this chart are aggregated size not the size at that s/b value. meaning when you see 0.294 MB in front of 2+ it means there are 0.294 MB transaction that pay a fee of 2, 2.1, 2.11,... 2.2, 3, ...,4... and so on fee. so when you see it says 0.556 MB in front of 1 s/b then it means if you had paid 1 satoshi/byte fee or less your transaction would have been confirmed in the next block. and 2 was overpay.the reason why the last number (total) is 2.845 MB is that there are more transactions paying a fee between 0 and 1 and that is mainly because this is satoshi/ byte instead of virtual byte and when you send a SegWit tx and you are paying for example 1 s/vb that is smaller in s/b. |
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