The 62,940,389 Posts in 1,366,119 Topics by 3,567,459 Members probably blew up the servers. Who made the last post? It was the last straw

Stats are found here by the way: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats

Saying bitcoin's utility is as a payment system and NOT a cloud storage is neither my definition nor is it an arbitrary one. It is the definition of Bitcoin that has always been accepted by all bitcoiners and it is the definition the inventor of Bitcoin has used to define it and it is also the definition used in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Not to mention that "using bitcoin blockchain as a cloud storage" has been the attack that we have always strived to prevent. From the day OP_RETURN was introduced and using outputs to inject arbitrary size data was "softly" banned by standard rules and then the limits placed on OP_RETURN.

We can analyze this from different perspectives.
-From the Western (mostly American) perspective:
In the post World War 2 era when the winners were "dividing the loot", one place with all the resources was West Asia. To exert power and control they needed a "guard dog" there hence Israel was created. The policy was to give all the help they can to create a strong military force there that stays stronger than everyone else so that they can always have that as a "dog" that attacks them and keeps them weak while also destabilizes the region that would then warrant foreign intervention and presence.
To create this rabid dog, they used the worst of the worst. Despite Israel sometimes being referred to as a "Jewish state" it is actually a "Zionist state". Zionists are the extremists of the Jews with extremely radical ideology.

-From the Zionist perspective:
It's all about Armageddon, end of the world and world domination with these extremists. They had a 3 stage plan throughout history (2000+ years). They've tried this a couple of times and they've always failed, interestingly before they reach their 80'th year. Israel is now 75 years old!
Stage 1: Build Israel, the promised land (anywhere) and gather strength.
Stage 2: Expand. The "between two waters" thing (Nile and Euphrates). Although the coins they made decades ago, maps they released and other intelligence talked about a much bigger plan of expansion that started by occupying Palestine and continued by annexing Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, parts of Turkey, Iraq, parts of Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, ...
Stage 3: "Cleansing the earth". You see the Zionists believe something along the lines of having a pure bloodline (from Jacob, grandson of Abraham) and IIRC they trace it back to Adam and Eve and say that everyone else (that's the entire world that is not a born Zionist) is a demon spawn and needs to either be put down or used as you would use an animal in the farm.
This plan was going well into stage two as they kept defeating the lauded Arab armies quickly and easily.

So this war was never with Palestine. It was between the Zionists and most of West Asia. However, at some point in about 40 years ago the Zionists stopped being able to advance in their neighbors soil and their defeats started piling on. That limited their atrocities to Palestine. For example they had once occupied a couple of their neighbors, like half of Lebanon and the capital was about to fall but as the tables turned (thanks to Iran creating a copy of itself which today the West likes to call it "Iran's proxy" aka Hezbollah) the Zionists were defeated and kicked out.

The recent conflict is only one in a serious of 7.5 decade long genocide against Palestinians and when any people are presented with the choice between elimination or resistance they will chose the later.

Now if we want to look at the most recent history we can see that in the past 4 years the Israeli structure is falling apart as they are getting more radical. For example the cabinet that keeps changing as the prime minister fails and keeps swapping between the worst extremists that not only have been threatening the region's super power, Iran, but also have been increasing their attacks on Palestinians. For example the number of raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque which is a very important Islamic holy place has significantly increased. Their bombings of Gaza and other Palestinian houses in the West Bank has also significantly increased. So was the Palestinian casualties.
This type of "explosion of anger" was expected. All of the members of Hamas that you see have had their family members brutally murdered by Israel, either in their air raids where they bomb their homes or by the hands of their armed soldiers or just by the settlers around Gaza that like shooting them from afar for fun!

Palestinians have tried everything over the years. They tried resisting, then they tried accepting to live side by side and even normalize relations to reach peace. That is the part where some of them sell their lands but it is estimated to be less than 2% of the lands that Israel is now illegally occupying.
As I said the Zionist plan was never to live side by side, their plan was genocide, expansion and world domination. So Palestinians, realizing that went back reality and resisting. Specially after they saw that despite them not fighting anymore, they were still getting killed every day.

As for Jews, they've always lived in the region. After all West Asia is the birthplace of all religions. For example Iran has all religions and each group (eg. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, etc.) each have a seat in Iran's parliament. All these problems in the post-WW2 era started the day the "foreign Jews" were kicked out of Europe when the war ended and were shipped to West Asia creating the extremist regime of Israel.

I don't have much info on the history but I believe those wars were with the radicals who are not particularly Muslims, they just bear the name. The same radicals that Iran fought for centuries too. The same radicals that Iran is still fighting today such as of ISIS aka Da'esh that share their ideology with the al-Saud family ruling over Arabia.

Things would be unpredictable but I believe that if US were to declare war on Iran, the Iran's initial response would targeting the biggest and most significant US bases in a 2000 km radius which are all in the South of Iran (eg. Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia). The response would also be so massive and harsh that people and governments of any other country in that radius would rush to kick US out of their country themselves.

We witnessed a tiny version of it after January 8, 2020 when Iran dropped a little over a dozen hypersonic ballistic missiles with heavy warheads on two US bases in Iraq and how angry Arab regimes of other countries started contacting US demanding their evacuation in case US wanted to respond, which they couldn't.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfjxHjs0hKo
https://imadl.ir/Satellite%20imagery/2022/01%20-%20January/Jenuary%208,%202021%20--%20Satellite%20imagery%20and%20Geo-Location%20of%20ballistic%20missiles%20strike%20on%20Ain-al-assad%20base%20EN.jpg

I totally forgot about coal.

This is one of the smaller reasons I start discussions like this. You see it helps a lot to know what is going on in the world in a much bigger picture. It specifically helps make better financial decisions too. For example someone who trades stocks benefits from knowing these things. Imagine if you were bagholding energy company stocks (like the German energy giant Uniper that got dumped 95%). On the other hand there were some other stocks that skyrocketed in the same period (usually defense related stock).

Even in the current ongoing conflict in Palestine there are a lot of economic tips. For example take the highly lauded Merkava tanks that are advertised as super strong and super invulnerable, with each unit is worth $3.5 million. Palestinians are blowing them up easily, some with $50 drones and have captured at least 4 so far
The value of the company manufacturing them is now shit... because they're proven to be useless.

It seems like we agree on more than I imagined except this part.
Georgia is far from Iran and doesn't even have any border with it to be able to start any wars, and Georgia  is already struggling with Russian intervention and the internal multipolarity that exists among the people and domestic power houses.
I'm also not aware of any major issues between the two countries that could lead to any sort of serious conflict.

The proxy wars the West wished to start with Iran was from all 4 sides: with Taliban in the east, Baku+Turkey(NATO) in the North, ISIS in the West, Arabs in the South.

• After Taliban took control they had to actually govern a country, people needed food, infrastructure was destroyed, they needed electricity, etc. So these cavemen realized they could no longer be "crazy" people like before so they betrayed United States and instead of destabilizing the region started an inhouse cleansing to remove the most extreme and are slowly becoming "normal". They've even been fighting with ISIS!
• Baku is too tiny and too insignificant on its own (30 to 50 precision strikes would end its entire military; one base alone in North Western Iranian border with Baku stores 150k loitering munitions) and since NATO is busy with Russia they can't do anything but be a nuisance. Turkey is also still struggling with hyper inflation, a massive budget and foreign reserve deficit and an energy crisis to be able to be a geopolitical player let alone a proxy
• ISIS was dismantled by Iran in Syria and Iraq as it was created so that plan is already failed. Other subsequent revivals and smaller groups were nipped in the bud.
• Arab dictatorships were whipped into submission after Iran started supporting the country they'd invaded 9 years ago and have been committing genocide there (I'm talking about Yemen) so now there is an extremely strong army right at their doorstep from the south east with an unlimited reach that has an unbreakable bond with Iran.

BTW this would all tie together with Israel as this terrorist organization was supposed to attack Iranian infrastructure as all these proxy wars were going on.

Energy Crisis 1.0 last year is behind us but at the cost of deindustrialization of EU, mass lay offs (increased unemployment rate), decreasing quality of life (increased employment rate as people try to get additional jobs to fill their bellies), losing in competing international markets as other countries replaced European products, inflation + recession, collapse of banks, and a lot more while other economies grew specially in the Eastern Bloc.

Energy prices are still higher than what's needed to stop the inflation+recession and the scarcity has not been fully resolved in Europe to go back to the pre-2022 times where industries could start up again and start trying to compete. This means deindustrialization will continue.

As we get close to colder seasons we have had some significant developments that has worsened the energy situation and some that has the potential to turn things critical. I will iterate them here, feel free to add any that I missed:

1. Russia has been disrupting different markets in the past year (food/grain, fertilizer, gas and oil). Recently as a big diesel fuel exporter, Russia started disrupting that market and playing with international supply and price. They cut the export completely then lifted the ban slightly.
Diesel fuel is important in heavy machinery and is directly affecting the supply chain ergo the price of everything like price of food.

2. Ukraine's energy ministry publicly revealed something top classified regarding the gas storage in Ukraine overflowing and the capability to export to EU; consequently Russia has been using this classified information to target Ukraine's energy sector heavily ever since. Although I don't have reliable information about the degree of damage, this has definitely harmed a good source of energy for Europe thanks to idiots in Ukraine government who don't know what "classified" means at times of war.

3. Gas and oil that Europe bought from the separatist/terrorists in Northern Iraq (the so called autonomous Kurdistan) with the help of Turkey is now completely halted as these groups were disarmed and dismantled as Iraqi military took back control of their soil and its resources.

4. The plan to eliminate the country called Armenia and then NATOise the Caspian sea (a massive source of gas) for Europe to steal its resources is a big failure for now so that hope is gone for at least this year. After case #7 I don't think it will start ever again.

5. US strategic oil reserves is at its lowest so they can no longer release the reserves freely like before to desperately try to bring the price down. We can already see a small rise over the past couple of weeks that has the potential of growing faster now. That market manipulation by increasing supply can no longer work as effectively as before. So there is a good chance that oil starts rising in winter and next year (so does gold and of course bitcoin).

6. Africa remains the main source of energy for Europe but due to the coups and how some nations have started kicking out the colonizers it is not the most reliable source. Additionally there aren't enough LNG terminals to be able to meet the supply needs of EU.

7. Last but not least is Palestine. The recent rise up by the Palestinians against genocide and occupation of their country by a terrorist organization known as Israel changed the geopolitics of West Asia (falsely referred to as Middle East). Although this is not YET significantly affecting the energy markets but considering that United States is a supporter of this apartheid regime and there is a very small chance that US military could get involved, we can expect a massive energy price surge if US makes that mistake.
That's because the international community has warned United States that in the case of a direct military intervention, all US positions become legitimate targets. Majority of these positions are located in key oil rich regions such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, etc. any small tension in any of these regions would shoot the oil and gas prices up let alone an all out war that would not only increase energy prices to new record high but also would cut the global supply by at least 60%.

!

sigh... it's really sad to see how some malicious actors have successfully turned Bitcoin into a cloud storage and people have not done anything about it so far. There was only some discussions here and there but that too was forgotten as nobody really lifted a finger to fix what they Ordinals Attack is exploiting...

In a full UTXO based setup, there technically should no longer be a "pruned blockchain". Also as a service that receives payments, they usually have an automatic setup where every received coin is spent rather quickly so if after a while they wanted to check if a payment is received only from UTXOs they would not find it there because the automation has already spent it.

If by Muslim nations you mean their regimes, then no. Almost all of them have been on the side of the terrorist organization (Israel) instead of Palestine. If you mean their people, then yes. We saw what people think of Zionists in Qatar FIFA World Cup 2022.
Even their regimes' statements in the past couple of days is in a way that they are still standing in the middle instead of showing any support for Palestine even in empty words.

Russia has always been a supporter of Israel, there are large number of Zionist immigrants occupying Palestine that came from Russia. There has been large number of cooperations between Israel and Russia in technology, weapons manufacturing, economy, etc. and Israel has many lobbies and infiltration inside Russia.
The fact that Russian statements are different now is only because Israel has sent help to Ukraine over the past year. Otherwise there is no actual support.

I didn't mean to belittle what's been happening in Ukraine but you have to admit that there is a big leap from war crimes committed by some Russian soldiers and 75 years of systematic genocide by Israel itself.

I can tell that we disagree on some matters like who started the war in Ukraine and why but let me tell you that I am well aware of the brutality of Russians. As a nation we bear that wound too. In WW2 despite being neutral and thousands of kilometers away from their fight, Soviets+Brits+Americans killed more people in my country than Germany lost (~9 million versus 4.8 ) just because we were weak at the time and we had a lot of resources they needed to steal.
Regime change hasn't changed their secular military tactics either. In our fight against ISIS inside Syria when United States was giving air support to ISIS, we needed to tip the balance so we brought Russian air force in, during that time we had countless "frictions" with Russia over their brutal ways as they wanted to simply raise entire villages and cities to the ground just because there may have been a single target to eliminate there.

I'm just quoting this for the future (after "matter of weeks") to laugh another time at this keyboard warrior who has no understanding of the world

The apartheid regime of Israel is well known in the world as Child Murderers. For years they have been trying to shake this well deserved brand but have been failing because they keep murdering Palestinian children. The vague statement @light_warrior reposted here is a propaganda released by the Child Murderers to try and distract the public from their violations against Children. Interestingly enough there is absolutely no picture of this supposedly 40 children anywhere including the DailyMail which is the source!!!
Meanwhile with a simple google search you will find the pictures of the Children the Israeli terrorists murdered a couple of hours ago. That is despite the reporters that the Israelis have killed in the past couple of days, the internet and electricity they have cut off, etc. to prevent the news from coming out of Gaza.

I just live in West Asia so I follow everything that goes on around my country in a 2000km radius with extra attention. This is by far the most complex region in the world with the most complex events that are impossible to speculate on without seeing a much bigger picture as opposed to a limited view on a small battlefield for example.

---

Let me expand a little with some thoughts on how the Palestinian struggle falls into the World Order changing from the trade routs perspective.
The Old Word Order is where the West dominates the world, specially United States in the past 30-ish years. The Western trade routs and main dominance has been in the sea. For example we have major routes such as the Suez canal that majority of the trades go through. Majority of shipping companies, shipping insurance, etc. are also located and controlled by the West.
They also exert control over other countries using their dominance over the trade routes (both direct and through proxies). For example they seize shipment of a country they want to sanction for no good reason, just like pirates stealing loot!

In the New World Order, the East is gaining strength. Eastern hegemonies have existed long before the Western ones and have been trading through land for centuries. The best example is the famous Silk Road.
During this shift in the World Order, these land based trade routes are being revived in the modern sense of it. The best example of it is the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

Now when we look at these routes and the countries they pass through we see an interesting pattern of very suspicious series of destabilization. Open Google Maps and look at the countries (land) between Europe and China. You'll see what I mean and why there are wars breaking out in these countries and how every single one of those conflicts are either started by the Western hegemonies directly or indirectly through their proxies.

On the westmost part coming in from Mediterranean Sea we have:
Palestine: already occupied and a genocide is ongoing, so completely unstable and unsafe. The war is started by the West (when they created the fake country of Israel after WW2 and started the genocide of Palestinians) and is still fueled by the West. Palestine is one piece of this puzzle, and there is more...
Lebanon: has had problems with the Zionist regime and has some parts in its south occupied by them, struggles with security and is under severe sanctions, has economic issues
Syria: invaded by United States coalition and partially occupied, a war torn country with weak security struggling with terrorism and destabilizing invaders that are stealing its resources while the country itself is facing many economic problems

Deeper to the East we have:
Iraq: war torn from 20 years of United State invasion, struggles with security, terrorism and separatism
Azerbaijan and Armenia: small countries but have been at war destabilizing one of the routes. A war that is supported by the West and most recently by the Zionist regime too.
Iran: The most secure country in the region that US could never invade like others but instead is under the most number of sanctions that has prevented a big chunk of these trade routes from being connected to each other

On the final layer before China:
Afghanistan: Another war torn and insecure country that United States invaded and destroyed all its infrastructure making it difficult to provide security for such a trade route. Even more so when they handed over the country to a terrorist extremist group called the Taliban!
Pakistan: Not invaded or destroyed like others but it is struggling with its economy and governance with coups and foreign interventions.

If we go a little south across the Persian Gulf we have:
Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Yemen: Another US fueled war for the past 9 years (invasion of Yemen) that has destabilized the Arabian Peninsula

P.S. I didn't mention Turkey because as long as it is a NATO member it is counted as Western bloc even if they don't want it. There are other countries I skipped because my information is lacking but somewhat similar situation is happening there too like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Mongolia, etc.

From what I explained above, it is obvious why US has been fueling all these conflicts over the years.
By having in mind that the World Order is changing and how Russia is now on the opposite side as US we can know why all of a sudden (after 75 years of genocide) they decided to take side and support Palestine (even if only in talk).

That's the classic Western double standard. On one hand they are supporting Ukraine against the invaders, on the other hand they are supporting Zionist extremists that have invaded Palestine!
They also have to refer to any Palestinian who resists against genocide and invasion as terrorists because if they don't they can no longer silence their people who would ask "why is the side West supports dropping phosphorous bombs on schools and hospitals and is regularly killing children?".

Nice propaganda. Funny that this morning the Zionist terrorists' own Television published footage of Israeli women who clearly stated that freedom fighters of Hamas had treated them with respect and were only arresting the Zionist terrorists from IDF and the militia in the settlements as prisoners.
That's despite the fact that the Israeli terrorists had just used the internationally banned phosphorus bombs on a school murdering dozens of kids that very day.

Nah, the terrorist organization called Israel is too weak to need any involvement from elsewhere. The plan is to weed out this cancerous cell from the region slowly this is why others like Lebanon with its 150k precision missiles haven't even bothered entering the conflict.

The only case anybody else would feel the need to enter it and expand the conflict is if United States makes the stupid mistake of attempting to help the terrorist organization.

As for Ukraine that you mentioned, since United States is in dire need of proxies in Syria they have been trying to evacuate their ISIS terrorists leaving the armed forces of Ukraine shorthanded. This will make Ukraine suffer specially in the gorilla warfare these terrorists were helping Ukraine with.

They use a combination of a couple of tactics to overwhelm the enemy, apart from the launching of large number of projectiles, drones are also used to hunt down the defense batteries and radars directly and at the same time a large scale cyber attack is perform against the entire cyber infrastructure of the Zionist regime that includes the air defense (radars, Iron Dome, David's sling, etc) to disable or disrupt them.

Gone are the days that all Palestinians had against the heavily armored enemies were stones.

^^^
FWIW this is the Zionist ideology, and they don't think this way only about Palestinians. They believe that their bloodline is pure and everyone else is an animal that needs to be put down to "cleanse the earth". This is why unlike other religions or even cults and ideologies you can not become a Zionist, you must be born one and only from your mother side!!!

That is easily debunkable.

* There is population concentration but if you look up Gaza on google maps you'll see that there is also large unpopulated areas. Many of which are covered with trees (inaccurate use of the word "jungle" by me) like this screenshot from North Eastern Gaza without any tall apartments in sight for the terrorists to bomb:


* You can compare google maps with some of the videos I mentioned above from all these years where there is a face off and see that every time there is a rocket launch, it clearly is from an open area without any tall buildings in sight. You can also see the cover of trees used to hide the positions in some videos. Examples:
Rocket barrage system Rojum in the middle of "jungle":

Palestinian "air defense" brigade shooting down an Israeli helicopter from the middle of "jungle":


* The past 4 days has been mainly a land attack not a rocket attack like previous battles; this means majority of Palestinian forces are already on the front line and inside the occupied land, not in Gaza itself to be hit by any air raids when the terrorists bomb apartments!

* Israeli terrorists are mainly using precision strikes so even claiming or inferring it is a "mistake" is outright false.

* The targets which these terrorist are hitting with their fighter jets are civilian, many of which are too obvious to be civilian like the schools built and controlled by United Nations (UNRWA), hospitals as I mentioned earlier too, the press building, even ambulances in middle of the roads!

I have never encountered any significant problem whilst uploading images to TalkImg.com through Tor. Only small annoyances like not uploading fully, which was easily fixed by doing a simple Tor Circuit change that is only two clicks.

I am more curious as to where you came across such a strange FUD about Bitcoin which doesn't take any effort to debunk?

Start running a full node and you'll see your UTXO database (a database containing any spendable coins) is empty. As you sync and download the first block (block #1) it remains empty because reward of Genesis block (block #0) is not spendable and the reward for first block needs to mature 100 blocks. As you continue downloading blocks you can clearly see how the UTXO database grows as new coins are created, all of which is timestamped and is unchangeable so you can literally see how each and every single satoshi was created by miners one block at a time.

That is a weird comparison in your title.

Gold is by nature physical and if you turn it into digital, it stops being gold and becomes IOUs which can not even be compared with bitcoin.
Similarly Bitcoin is designed to be digital and if you convert that to physical (some have tried in the past), it also stops being Bitcoin and becomes IOUs which again can not even be compared with gold.

So if you want to compare, the comparison should be between Bitcoin and Gold (not digital gold). And in that comparison both of them are good for different purposes and each have its own advantages and disadvantages.
For example unlike gold, bitcoin is used as a currency but at the same time bitcoin price is still volatile whereas gold is more stable in comparison.

Fear always stems from lack of knowledge and understanding, specially in the context of Bitcoin and the related FUDs. For example we see people panic sell because they never educated themselves about Bitcoin and its market, so at the first sight of some lies on the internet about an upcoming dump, they jump at selling themselves. Same with panic buyers, they act irrationally too. Like when they wait until price has recovered from a dip and has already gone up then start panic buying at a higher price and at a loss.

Obviously when this characteristic exists amongst market participants, there will be some others who would love to exploit it for their own gain. This is where FUD comes in, that includes lies created to intensify the irrational behavior in the market and cause higher volatility so that the FUDsters can make a better profit from the swings.