as i always say, you can always create a better coin than bitcoin since bitcoin isn't perfect. but to do so you will have to spend a lot of time and innovate and that is something that none of the current developers in this space are interested in which is why we have not seen anything better than bitcoin.
otherwise anybody can create and have created coins that can be used worldwide but "can be used" does not mean "will be used".

we have already entered that trend a while ago and despite the fact that we can clearly see it on the charts and the history is showing us these parabolic rises that occur within cycles some people still resist accepting the fact that the trend has changed and we are in the bull mode.
in any case i believe we are going to see a slower rise to the previous ATH and with the halving and all its hypes and effects we will see a speed up to the whole process. with all the media coverage that bitcoin is getting which is only increasing i can see this "cycle" to be a lot shorter and bigger than the previous ones.

being "high" is a comparative characteristic, so when you say high you should argue high compared to what?
for example you can't say $1000 is high! high for what? high for a cup of coffee? yes. high for a house? no.
it is the same for bitcoin. the amount of energy it is consuming is going into sustaining a global, decentralized, censorship resistance payment system that is processing (on average) $2 billion worth of transaction per day!

you are missing the news exactly right after JPMorgan CEO called bitcoin fraud where there is a big dip (~30%) where they buy a ton of bitcoin!


money laundering has turned into an excuse for anybody who runs out of reasons why they are against bitcoin. it is not just banks, it is governments too. the funny thing is that bitcoin is literary the worst thing to use for laundering money because of its transparency! basically you would be putting ALL your monetary transfers up on the internet for the whole world to see. why would anybody choose that when there is much easier ways to do it through fiat?

actually the main problem is that most people are going overboard with their exaggeration of manipulation in this market. the fact is that manipulation exists in bitcoin market like it exists in every other market like the big ones such as gold market,... and the worst part is that whenever price falls you see everyone talking about the manipulation and when there is a rise everyone is silent because they are happy!

what does UN and the government agencies have anything to do with bitcoin and whether you trust "them" about bitcoin or not?! that doesn't make any sense! they are not producing bitcoin or selling you bitcoin or even buying your bitcoin. it is all done by yourself and there is no trust involved in this world, the only trust is in the transparent and open source cryptography that is the backbone of bitcoin and nothing else.

without seeing the raw block bytes of the block that was rejected it is impossible to say what the reason was. all you can say is that there was a block and it was rejected. it could have had any reason as simple as being orphaned.

also as we can see now the block in question (#584802) is already mined by Bitmain (Antpool)!!!
https://www.blockchain.com/en/btc/block/000000000000000000036f762072726964af3199d3c1dd0c3301c1d68a9ecec8
and the reward is 13.14968988 BTC which is not far from the number that the article reports as lost (13.26 BTC) so again there is no way of telling why it was rejected.

yes, the "industry" is filled with manipulation and scams. for example the company they are quoting here that is talking about manipulation (TIE) is scamming itself. they rehash something that was discussed a lot of times, come up with a bunch of random numbers out of thin air and throw it at people as if it is real and gained after proper research! and then they start selling their crap services to gullible people and take their money while throwing more random fake numbers at them.
scam is also these random news sites that keep popping up every day that are quoting these scam random companies that also are popping up like mushrooms.

as for exchanges, them reporting fake trading volume is not manipulation of the market! market manipulation exists, to some extent in bitcoin and on a much larger scale in altcoin market but this is not it.

you are two completely different discussions here.
the price volatility is an entirely different discussion that has nothing to do with wallets and security. if you find it unacceptable then invest smaller amounts or stay away altogether.
as for the first part, the solution is simply keeping multiple backups and storing them encrypted with a strong password and encryption technique. for example you simply encrypt your Trezor's seed phrase with a password that has 10+ length consisting of random upper/lower characters and symbols and numbers. now you just have to remember that password and print the encrypted string and stored it in multiple places so that if your home caught on fire you still have a place to go to and recover your bitcoins.

hot wallet is different from exchange wallet.
a hot wallet is a wallet that contains small (spending) amount of bitcoin in it and you hold it in a wallet that is connected to the internet. for example a desktop wallet like bitcoin core or electrum that you have on your PC that you use daily, or a mobile wallet on your smart phone.
an exchange wallet is not even a wallet and is not for storing anything. it is an "account" that lets you trade and should not be used for anything else.

then why not everyone else is not being scammed?
existence of scams is as old as human history, it is not just on the internet! and for thousands of years there have been people who have been scamming others and there have been gullible people who fell for their schemes. none of it has anything to do with bitcoin though!

since i initially view bitcoin as a currency not a store of value, so i always want to see bitcoin at a stable price instead of being volatile and shooting to the moon every year giving huge amounts of profit which then attracts the wrong crowd (the speculators).
but realistically speaking as the adoption of bitcoin increases we will continue seeing price rising and not remain stable. and that increase is going to be big and because of that it will attract more investors which then cause the volatility in this small market. and finally we are left with the same pattern, shoot to $100k and enter bubble and drop down to $50k for a year and then rise back up again and so on.

as long as you can not even figure out the root of the problem, you will not be able to solve your problem and move on with your life and have better days. you are in a way trying to find someone or something to blame instead of looking where the problem was.
all your issues stem from gambling addiction of your brother and as long as you are not admitting it, you will have problems. you have to accept it and seek professional help. it is not the end of the world!

wasn't this mainly FUD? a tweet talking about ifs and buts is barely evidence of someone wanting and pushing for more supply.
bottom line is that all the arguments about supply belongs to year 2100+ and we are talking about something that is not going to be an issue for at least 80 years and that is IF it becomes an issue!

i guess you and all those who started talking about Tether after a year of silence were either asleep or intentionally ignoring Tether all this time. when price was falling all through 2018 tether was being printed just the same way it was being printed in 2017 if not more!

leaders? as in plural? it was one tweet by Trump!

why? maybe because US dollar has been losing its place in the world despite what he is saying in that tweet, US dollar is no longer as strong as it once was. the sanctions, the war with China, the other viable options such as Euro, the corrupted banking system,... are the reasons why.

also this in some ways reminds of the Gandhi Quote:
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"

sometimes i think some people see the market in black and white. it either has to be rising constantly and reach the "moon" or it has to drop constantly and "die"! it appears they can't see any middle ground where price is slowly rising with corrections on the way, or with moderately stable phase where we mostly have sideways action between a fixed max and min price, which in this case is between $10k and $13k.

in any case, excellent charts. thanks for posting an important part of history.

that would require the "official site" or electrum.org to be compromised, and just because so far it has never happened it doesn't mean it never will. in other words you should never trust anything, always try to verify. all you have to do is spend enough time figuring out if the PGP public key that you have acquired is the right one or not. then from that day onward you only have to verify if the downloaded file is signed with the same key or not and whether you want to trust the owner of that key (Thomas V.)

usually when you write down a public key it is in hexadecimal format not UTF8 (unless you have explicitly converted them to UTF8!), so you have to convert the string from hex to bytes (or binary?) then pass it to your hashlib to perform SHA256 on it.
then your "h" is the 32 byte SHA256 digest (hash result) you then want to perform RIPEMD160 hash function on this result as HCP said to get the "HASH160" that you are looking for.

nobody wants unlimited bitcoin supply and i have not seen any core developers saying they want it either! you might want to speak with reference and facts here.
but even if they were, to prevent them you can easily start a node or buying mining equipment and don't follow the chain that is enforcing a rule that you don't want. that is how the decentralized network is supposed to work, devs are just workers not the owners or decision makers specially when it comes to consensus critical matters that are related to basic principles of what makes bitcoin, bitcoin.

you are not "extracting" cash, you are claiming free giveaways that happened a long time ago. some of them are timed out since they are too old and some still work. if there was a fork that copied the whole blockchain of a cryptocurrency and created a new one and you had a balance prior to that copy/fork then you have the same coins in the forked chain.
you should beware of the risks of claiming these coins though, not just replay attacks but also infecting your computer by having to install shady wallets.
also take a look at this site: http://www.findmycoins.ninja/