all the news sites publish crappy not-researched articles. some of them more than others, these two are among those that publish less crappy articles at least.

as for the case with Poloniex, it seems to me that they are just publishing whatever that Poloniex is publicly claiming, and the article i read on Coindesk is clear about it. whether this exchange owners are lying or not is another matter. in other words the article is not saying you will get your money back, it is saying the exchange has claimed to be giving it back.

this looks more like a guesswork to me rather than a solid evidence showing that "investors" are switching to bitcoin. and more importantly the "scale" of such switch is important. for example if there are a very small percentage of people trading bitcoin then a small number of people join in, there surely is going to be a spike but that kind of spike is not something you could call "investors switching to bitcoin" because it is negligible.

i could see that happening but there is one problem with that, bitcoin still has a small market and because of that it is quite volatile and risky. "investors" aren't usually so willing to migrate to something that has higher risks specially during a recession.

it seems like every time another one of these blockchain tracing sites pop up, the first thing they do is publish a ton of nonsense about how bitcoin is being used for illegal stuff.
just the other day another one of these "mushroom-like" businesses released their guesswork about Binance hacked coins and Chipmixer's services used for mixing those coins!

"programmatically" you have to first deserialize this transaction (the bytes) into a transaction object then get whatever fields you want. to do that, you basically start from first byte and read on, how many bytes you read depends on what you are reading or the first byte usually tells you how many more bytes you should read afterwards. for example staring at the beginning we always have 4 bytes that is the tx version (as a contract we already know the length is 4):
"01000000" then we have a variable length integer that will tell us the number of inputs to read (read more about CompactInt from the link below): "01" which is 1, then that number of inputs should be read. each input starts with 32 byte tx_hash (again we know hashes are 32 bytes) of the transaction that is being spent (in actual byte order which is the reverse of TX_ID) "b6bf17c58f3cd20a9b8640f7ad8acbac429e5c6a3b8229454b5b25a91417461b" then the index of it "0000000"
<and so on....>
read the rest of the parts i didn't mention here: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference#raw-transaction-format

after you deserialized it, to get the ScriptPubkey from previous transaction you just have to look at your Tx_In: Tx_in[0].Outpoint.hash and Tx_in[0].Outpoint.index then simply lookup the hash in the database (local blockchain or using an online block explorer, and remember transaction IDs in hex are in reverse compared hashes in byte!) after finding the transaction you look into their Tx_outs: tx_out[Tx_in[0].Outpoint.index].pk_script and tx_out[Tx_in[0].Outpoint.index].value
the square bracket is indicating array index access arr[0] is first item of array, arr[1] second,...

money making!

you have a free and open source (meaning easy to copy) money printing machine that people are also hyped up about and are willing to give their actual money in return for that virtual printed money. that attracts a ton of people.
in other words since bitcoin is open source and it is successful, it has always attracted a lot of others who wanted to make money from that success. so they end up copying the code, change a small amount of things to make it a little different and publish their own version.
then came along platforms such as ethereum that made this whole process easy! people no longer had to write that much code, they just created a small thing with no effort called "smart contract" and get paid millions for what they released no matter how useless it was.
that is why at some point we had nearly 3000 useless garbage in the altcoin market and that is exactly why they keep dying.

well at the very least that is a lot of clerical work for accepting, documenting, reviewing and rejecting each and every proposal they receive.
as for the pressure, you might be right but it doesn't seem to affect US SEC whatsoever. this pressure has been on them for a couple of years now and that is while other countries already have approved some bitcoin ETFs. there seems to be something else in play here which makes SEC reject them. they need to find and fix that issue first.

$10k is still a pretty strong support to be broken even though there still is some panic in the market. we have been in the same situation multiple times before and each time $10k keeps resisting the sells since there is a lot more buys happening against that.


that is not an easy thing to say. with the way things are going, we are again building up for another big breakout and the longer price stays in this sideways channel the bigger that FOMO buy is going to be.

sorry, in my previous post i made the mistake of hashing the wrong thing as public key (forgot to remove the push data OP code). i removed the post right away but it seems i wasn't fast enough.
your public key is indeed correct and the hash is "b4a4ee3ae0d7816333efa3c12c14e345501b0bc5" but your signature is not valid.
broadcasting it with Electrum also gives the same error on OP_CHECKSIG operation step.

in order to sign with bitcoin core, the console method i know of is to use the signrawtransactionwithkey command in your console. you should provide your transaction that needs signing:
your private key
your previous tranasction you are spending in this format:

you can't go to the bank's safety deposit box room, select a random box and try to open that with your key.
it is similar in bitcoin too. think of the blockchain as that room and these transaction outputs as your "box". and the key is your private key. your key can only unlock the transaction that belongs to it not something else.

in fact the output script (aka scriptpub) is also called the "locking script" because what you do when spending that output is that you provide the "unlocking script" which is usually your signature and public key in your scriptsig script. the transaction ID you include in your TX_In is like the pointer to that previous transaction that created that locking script. so you have to provide the correct one.

charts like this are not meant to focus on individual coins, it is meant to show the long term movement of all the coins and for that, it is obvious that even though in short term altcoins may perform well or in some cases better than bitcoin, all of them in the long run are going down and lose value without an exception.
for example during 2017 and the pumps, there were many coins that went up a lot more than bitcoin did but they have all lost all that rise, and not just that they also lost more than just that rise. they went below their starting price.

you can't compare bitcoin with gold. since there is no way to store millions of dollars worth of gold in your home for both security reasons and lack of space. but you can easily store millions or billions of dollars worth of bitcoin at home in the safest manner possible and it will only take a tiny space (a piece of paper or a flash disk for instance)!
people went that route with gold, exactly because of this reason. it can not happen with bitcoin and the fact that some people are "day traders" and keep their coins on exchanges doesn't change that at all.

an special mention to all of those who kept saying bitcoin is following the stock market and some of them still insist on it whereas bitcoin has never follower any other market ever. and these cases are the proof of that which can not be mentioned enough.

as for OP's topic, Google trends means nothing. they only show the interest of people at a particular time in searching about a topic not indicating interest in buying what they search. for instance it might be some debate on TV they saw that led them to search more, it might have been the price rise itself that put bitcoin back on their radar. in the end most of them are just searching.

why does SEC even bother dedicating any time for these proposals anyways. they are going to reject all of them in the end, they have been doing it for a couple of years now without any exceptions. they just waste the time of their staff, these companies submitting ETFs and everyone else's time!

actually the rise from $3100 to $9000 happened in at least 5 steps not 2.
you got the first one right.
the second was another rise from $3400 this time to $4200 and same fall back but like before to a higher low. price then stayed in that range by going up and down (exactly like now)
(this took 4 months so far)
then the third step was from $4200 (the breakout) to $5500 which ended with a $500  fall and price stayed in that range for a whole months.
the forth step was rise to $8.5k and a big fall down to $6k range then a lot of sideways in that range for another months.
then the fifth step was to rise above $10k passing $9k,...

in other words the 168% move that you mentioned here was first of all a recovery not exactly a crazy rise, and also it happened over the course of 6 months.

you can't make that conclusion because the two price areas are different.
prices below $9k were undervalued and we were in a reverse bubble kind of thing. which needed a big ass recovery just like a "bubble" needs a big ass burst. which is why we have that big green dildo on the charts.

the prices above $10k are the actual rally and don't have to follow the "recovery" pattern that we had so far.

lol. not a chance.

what @ETFbitcoin suggested; a side chain would be perfect for this.
as for specialized blockchain, it obviously can not be PoW like bitcoin because the hashrate will never be high enough to secure it. i haven't really done any extensive research on alternatives but those that i have seen weren't good enough.

the point of multisig was having the 1 single address so that others only have to "subscribe" to one address like watching 3BitcoinCoreGit and get the new outgoing transactions from that. it doesn't have to require more than 1 key, it can be a 1 of 5 multi-sig scheme with 5 main developer each having commit access.

what would be the point of that, just a little bit¹ more decentralization?
if it is for privacy concerns then, IP changing techniques should be used (like VPN or TOR). otherwise with or without trackers your IP address will be revealed and anybody who wanted to know who is downloading this file has to only know the hash of it to be able to get a list of all the IP addresses of all the peers.

¹ a little bit, because "Kademlia DHT" isn't really decentralized, you are still connecting to a centralized server (initially)  that is hardcoded inside your torrent client to "connect" to the network and find other DHT nodes. something similar to bitcoin core initial node discovery mechanism connecting to hard coded servers.

your example of altcoins is good, but a better example could have been one of the fork coins that also copied the blockchain and changed the total supply, a fork coin like bitcoin-diamond.
also as far as i know 21 million is NOT hardcoded anywhere in bitcoin's code! there is a lot of other things in place (the block rewards, and halvings) that ensure the cap is not higher than 21 million.

the day mixing services start taking coins (sent to their service for mixing) hostage is the day their business dies. it should not matter where the coins come from, even if it seems against morality. because there would be no stop to that, anyone else could then report any bitcoin they sent to others as being "stolen" and demand they be frozen (assuming the other party is going to use a mixer, like in a case of a face to face purchase where the buyer runs them through a mixer to increase his anonymity).

don't confuse "blockchain" with "cryptocurrency". blockchain is simply a "chain of blocks" and it will continue to look exactly the same. there will be blocks that will be "linked" together, one after another line a chain using some cryptography function which is usually a 256-bit hash function.
that is the cryptocurrencies that are using that chain like a database and keep on changing. it is not possible to predict how they will look like because you are asking us to predict what innovation is going to happen, if we could predict the "innovation" then we would have innovated it ourselves!

having a lower price is not the same as being cheap.
and in this case the altcoin have lower price for good reasons, most of them are useless which means nobody bothers with buying them. and right now that bitcoin is on the rise is the worst time to buy altcoins because we all know whenever bitcoin rises altcoins get dumped.