well, every project starts from somewhere. bitcoin wasn't this trusted or even secure when it first came out. bitcoin-QT (now known as bitcoin-core) had many bugs in it and after years if reviewing got fixed. and at first there weren't really that many even looking at the code!


Just because some open-source exchange doesn't have a sendPrivatekeysToServer() function, it doesn't mean that there is no backdoor.

Do you think you (or one of the 100 others who liked/forked such an open-source exchange) do have an excellent clue about IT security ?
Do you really think they would find a vulnerability which has been placed on purpose ?
[/quote]
we can't put aside open source (decentralized) exchanges just because of a possibility of them not being reviewed by experts at first. the alternative is closed sourced centralized exchanges that are getting hacked every day!

now that is a different discussion. there is a difference between having a bug (which is normal and literary any code that has ever been written has them) and [intentional] backdoors put in the code with malicious intent.

such projects usually work on donations, fund raising,... and remain open. and generally speaking the open source community doesn't work for money and is the contribution of many developers to one project.
i'd personally donate a good amount to a decentralized open source exchange if i can find a good one not to mention i would contribute to the code itself as i have done to many other open source projects.

you are getting 2 things wrong.
we are not yet at 21 million and we won't do that for a hundred year, we have only mined 17.8 million so your percentage should result in 6.4 million lost.
and that percentage (36%) is your pure guess. there is literary no way to measure how much bitcoin is really lost. all we can say is that certain "burnt" coins are actually lost and their total is not bigger than a thousand. the rest is pure guesswork.

bitcoin is not a country, nor a company nor a person that you are comparing it with them!

stats from 3 years ago says it is $80 trillion which makes this percentage 26% if that stat is still correct.
this is the only value that makes sense because bitcoin is a global currency and it needs to be compared on that scale and with its counterparts not other things such as stock market!

people don't buy 1 whole bitcoin and they don't have to. bitcoin is divisible and they don't buy by looking at the total price, they buy either to reach financial freedom and get free of censorship and corruption of the banks or they are buying it to make profit from the potential growth that bitcoin has.
neither of these are affected by the price.

it is not far fetched, it is far away. because we need to reach mass adoption for such price levels to become a possibility. i don't see any reasons mentioned here that suggests otherwise.

just because one implementation of PoS had certain flaws and opened up attack vectors it doesn't mean every implementation of it is also having the same flaw. the fake stake attacks in this case affects certain altcoins not all.
the problem with PoS is not that either. the problem is with the design itself. you are basically giving money (profit) to anybody who has money. the more they have they more profit they earn. this design is economically flawed and in comparison PoW where you have to "work" to earn money is superior.

using open source software is never about "you" personally having the skills to review it. nobody has the time. for example we are using bitcoin-core but most of us might not even have looked at the source code. the point of open source is that the source is open for everyone to see and if the project is popular enough you can be sure that others have reviewed it specially if it is sensitive and deals with lots of money, and then you can trust it doesn't have any backdoors.

isn't highlighted addresses mean that address belongs to your wallet? initially i posted the same answer but removed it because i saw that highlight and thought the 0.001 to the bc1 address ending with ...jsx was his own (change address)!

laundering 101

when you want to launder money, it is not just about swapping it with "clean" money! the "money" is not literary dirty for you to want to clean it literary! and what is being explained here is the literal meaning of cleaning/laundering money. you "swap" dirty with "clean" money and that does NOT really clean the money.

lets use an example. lets say you are earning $1000 per month, have expenses, pay taxes,... so the government knows you earn that much. then you decide to start a meth lab and earn $1 million in a month. you have no way of explaining where you got $1 million from when you are earning $1000 per month! if you now convert it to bitcoin, you would have $1 million (or 100BTC) that you still have no way of explaining how you got but now it also has a timestamp on it which you can not deny like saying you had it all along from 2009. it is now clean when you got it and how much you have. the dollar didn't have the timestamp and the amount wasn't clear!!! so the question is why would anybody want to do this?
you know what this sounds like? it sounds like saying if you convert that $1 million to €1 million it would become clean (magically)!

what launderers do in reality is that they fake a business or something like that, then run the money through that. for example you start a restaurant and instead of saying you had 10 customers you say you have 1000 and run the money through that and pay the taxes on that $1 million, now it is clean because it seems like it is gained through a legitimate way.

with that said, there are people who are buying these newly generated coins but they are doing it because they don't want to go through exchanges and do a KYC and also they want clean coins for whatever reason but it has nothing to do with "illegally procured funds".

i think you may be making bad assumptions after reading the recent articles that have been circulating among the news sites and were spammed all over reddit talking about "institutional investors buying bitcoin". which has nothing to do with "governments" buying bitcoin and we don't have evidence to believe otherwise. there is a lot of incentive for individuals and institutional investors to buy bitcoin but it is the same incentives that have existed forever and they have been buying bitcoin just as long. i don't think that much has changed.
with Bakkt news these days this might have increased but also we are not seeing any kind of change in the market and on the charts so again we have no evidence...

this is the problem!
you created a throwaway account and are posting about "purchased" gift cards that are known to be risky, they might have been stolen or bought with stolen money and a lot of other issues with them. which is why you will never find anybody decent to sell these to.

first of all a tweet from a random person is barely a reliable source to post it here as the link to back up what you said. try using the direct websites that do these kinds of count and post stats such as bitinfocharts.com.

secondly, i am with figment on this one. these stats are very unreliable. specially since the price is rising and those with larger amounts of bitcoin have been spreading them among multiple addresses for many reasons including not wanting to draw attention to themselves.
the only stats that can be reliable to some extent is stats coming from centralized services for example the number of accounts Coinbase has and how much they own on average. or the number of payments that BitPay processes per day,...

you don't necessarily have to use a special tool such as bitaddress or even MEW for that matter. you can do it with literary any wallet of that coin as long as it has the option to "export private keys". for example you could download one of the {insert any altcoin name here} desktop wallets, create a new wallet and then export the key an print that on a piece of paper to have a "paper wallet"!
* obviously you have to take the security steps that were explained in other comments such as being offline and verifying signatures.

nah, i think he lost his credibility back in 2018 when he continued insisting on hitting ATH by the end of the year [2018] and all the while price was going down without any signs of reversal. people have to be real ignorant to still listen to what this dude is saying. i mean making wrong predictions is normal and everyone does it but predicting against the market trend for a whole year and sticking to it is just dumb!

technically there are no "decimals" in cryptocurrencies. what we have under the hood is simple integers, in this case a 64 bit unsigned integer. for example at code level there is no 0.001 bitcoin or 1 bitcoin. there are only 100000 satoshi and 100000000 satoshi, same with ethereum.

another way of looking at this is most people start spending their coins when price goes up. in other words for these people "spending" on merchants is the alternative to "selling" on exchanges.
with that view i don't think we can say it is "bad" for bitcoin ecosystem, it is kind of a good thing actually that they decide to spend their coins to enjoy the profit instead of just dumping them on the market to get their profit out.

any kind of negative news in any kind of market out there always causes a downtrend in that market, there is no exception either. so your question is half answered, obviously bitcoin price could fall if that hypothetical situation happened.
but again like any other market the value doesn't come from random news whether positive or negative. the value always comes from the utilities and bitcoin won't change when a country bans it or when a country adopts it, bitcoin will remain the same resilient decentralized currency as it has always been. so the other half of the answer is that price would rise back up after the "drama" ended.

edit: this is as @LoyceMobile said, i didn't know about the color codes! read @bob123 comment.

first go to your history tab and check if you have any "local" transactions. the second picture showing the insufficient funds error might be because you saved the previous tx after previewing it which means your wallet might be expecting it is spent.
then try clearing what you set in those fields in send tab and set the fee to 1 s/b then click max.

also check if you are paying the 2FA fee. the first picture doesn't show any fees which means you have already paid the fee needed for 10(?) transactions in your very first tx you made in this wallet but clicking max and still having a change still doesn't make sense.

this doesn't have to be a bad thing. for example selling on top of a big bubble like $14 can actually be a very good idea, and they can always buy back when the bubble bursts and price comes back down. that way you get a nice profit and can buy more bitcoin with it.

is it my only two options?!
i'd call this more of bitcoin's growth and adoption rather than "recovery"!

for 10 years we have been using computer generated random entropies in bitcoin so yeah, as long as the wallet is a decent one created by competent developers and is reviewed then it can be trusted to be strong and without issues.
but then again this discussion doesn't math the title you chose for this topic!

you are missing the difference between Asymmetric (elliptic curve) cryptography and Encryption (like Block ciphers). i am not an expert but the algorithms are very different. for example in this topic's case the algorithm (when starting from a certain private key like 2^90) can be simplified to a very simple single point addition but in breaking something like AES you still need to brute force the whole thing.


doesn't seem that bad. my normal point multiplication takes 42 ms using BigIntegers...
that's not the whole thing though, it is all about the LOOP where you have to repeat the same thing, and  you shouldn't work with raw private key and addresses. you start with the bytes and end with hash bytes and skip any unnecessary conversions.

this is not a giveaway. i believe it is more like a test of the security of a 256 bit elliptic curve, and the incentive is the way to keep an eye on it. the conclusion so far is that 256 is very safe since so far after years of work only ~90 bits of it is searched and the "rewards" were claimed. because of that it is not for the "average guy" while that average guy can still start learning more about ECC and gets his hands dirty...

it is not 58 characters, 58 is the base (58 allowed chars used for encoding) the actual length is 51 or 52 char long.
"dummies" don't even see their private key in hexadecimal format, and more importantly you are NOT supposed to come up with it specially if your target is a "dummy", people aren't capable of "coming up" with a truly random entropy.

you are trying to simplify while you are making things worse!

what does "transfer to your balance" mean!

there are no 64 digits in bitcoin. there is private keys that are 32 bytes max and when you encode them, it is usually to base-58 with a checksum which is a lot shorter than "64 alphanumerical characters" used in base-16

what you have in mind is called private key and it is NOT password. describing it as password can be misleading even if it seems like doing a similar thing.

in reality they can seize your bitcoins too. search for the story of user on this forum called BurtW...