finally! i've been saying that for a long time but at the time when we were at the bottom and below the bottom nobody wanted to accept it and instead wanted to wait for $1000!!!

Binance is an altcoin exchange not a bitcoin exchange so it shouldn't have affected anything. not to mention that the momentum is there so you can't really expect something like that to put a dent in it.

$6000 was easy because we were in a bubble!

initial steps:
1. go to https://electrum.org/#download but verify that this is the real website and not a fake one!
2. download the appropriate version based on your OS
3. get the developer's PGP public key (learn how to verify PGP keys if needed) and get the respective signature of the file you downloaded
4. verify the signature using these 3: wallet file (.exe or .tar.gz or .dmg....) signature file (.asc) PGP public key.

recommended steps:
5. create a new Electrum wallet by selecting type of wallet you want (standard, multi sig or 2FA) which is one of the first 3 options
6. create a seed, back it up (on paper)
7. get an address from this new wallet and send your coins from your bitcoin core wallet to this address.
8. [optional] in case your bitcoin core doesn't work for any reason and you want to do step 7, after creating your wallet (step 6) from your menu select Wallet > Private keys > Sweep. then in the new window enter your private key(s) and after double checking everything click "seep" button at the bottom right corner.

alternative way (not recommended)
5. create a new Electrum wallet but instead of the first 3 options mentioned in previous step 5, you choose the last or 4th option called "Import bitcoin address or private keys" click next
6. enter your private key here (click the info button on top of this window for more information on how you should enter your key)
7. you have access to your funds and you can spend from the imported keys.

it works based on the assumption that majority of nodes have implemented a rule to reject any double spend transactions. and since majority of the network is running bitcoin-core that implements this by default you can say that it is impossible to do that as long as the nodes have the previous transaction. so in your case that might have been because they didn't have your previous tx with no fee (?).

+these things should not even be called "wallets" because they clearly aren't. they are "banks" that are in full control of your money.

amount should not be a factor in choosing between cold/hot wallets. how often you access those coins is the deciding factor because cold storage is a "storage" not something you cash out from every hour.

it is because traders only switch to altcoins whenever bitcoin price is stable and they can't make profit from that. so when bitcoin starts being volatile again they immediately come back to bitcoin market and that means dumping altcoins hence the market wide altcoin price drops each time bitcoin price rises or falls.
it is also because everyone is here to accumulate and increase their bitcoin holdings and all the rest (altcoin trading) exists to serve that purpose.

remember that we are talking about $40 million dollars not a small amount that a business like Binance can easily recover from. i seriously doubt that they are going to cover all the losses, not any time soon anyways. but i don't think they are going to go away either. it will probably be something like what Bitfinex did. they will first give back some un-withdrawable tokens to their users as compensation of what they lost and force them to come back and continue to trade and slowly over the long term pay back small amounts of it. and to do that they probably are going to manipulate using their centralized token (BNB) with some pumps and other methods to earn that money to pay back.

too much is also a problem, it is not as serious as too little but still is. if the blocks were mostly empty then it becomes easier to spam the network with more junk and cause problems. remember that spam is not just increasing fees, it has different forms. for example one form is to increase the number of UTXOs and make it extremely hard for nodes to run since they would have to load up a much bigger UTXO database in memory and look things up.
you can't compare bitcoin with altcoins either. because there is no incentive to spam attack an altcoin but there are lots of incentives from all sides to spam bitcoin!

i agree with the rest.

actually one of the most important usages of LN is when people want to make lots of transactions like when they move their money between their wallets and exchanges. we only need one exchange to start an LN node and traders to move their transactions there to see a decreased number of on-chain transactions. there are a lot of other cases too, like gambling sites and mixers.

don't waste your time with what Binance is saying these days. they were careless, they got hacked, lost millions of dollars worth of bitcoin and it is over. there is no UNDO button in bitcoin and there never will be because bitcoin is decentralized and immutable with irreversible transactions and nobody will ever accept this type of roll-back they are begging for these days like the drowning man they are clinging to anything they can.

history has proven that "traders" don't care about the fees as it is evident from last time bitcoin was under sever spam attack and fees went ridiculously high. so no it won't get in the way of "bull run" any time soon and price will continue to rise even if fees were to go back up to ridiculous levels again.

but the important thing to keep in mind is that high fees damage and eventually prevent adoption. example is Steam (Valve), Reddit,... stopped accepting bitcoin payments. so although in short term high fees may not prevent bull run (this bull run for instance) but in the long run if things remain this way there will be no more bull runs anymore because bitcoin will be unusable and may even be replaced.


what do you mean "bitcoin's role in it"? there is only one bull run and bitcoin price rise is IT. there is nothing else!

i mentioned 10 minute because it is what it boils down to and is the time between each block on "average". but that is not what sets the difficulty, as i said in the parenthesis, the actual thing that is measured and then is used to adjust the difficulty is the 2 week rule. basically every 2016 blocks we check to see if it took more than 2 weeks or less. if it was more then the difficulty is reduced so that next period we can find 2016 blocks in 2 weeks and if it was less then the difficulty will increase to achieve that.

what is the "Blockchain network"?!!
you mean the "block-chain" as in the chain of blocks? that is not a "network"!

are you running a full node right now or have you ever in the past? if not then you what difference does it make to you who aren't even running a node?

there are about hundreds of topics with dozens of them active right now talking about this. i don't see the point of a new one unless you have some new discussions yourself that you want to add?

that is to add a difficulty to find the right hash of a block and create the algorithm known as Proof of Work.

result of a hash function is unpredictable and when you change a byte the result chances completely. so lets say you have a message (the 80 byte block header) like A|B|C|D|E|F and want to hash it so that you get a certain result. in this case a result that has n zeros in it, you first hash the message and get some result. if it satisfied your condition, you accept it. if it didn't you change what you are allowed to change (nonce in header) and hash it again. so your message is now A|B|C|D|E|G and you will get an entirely different result. check again, change again,....
you repeat this until you satisfy that condition.

now to find a hash result that has 1 zero is easy, 2 zeros is harder,... and the more zeros it requires the harder finding the hash is going to be. and hard in this context means it requires more "work" by your hardware because now it has to change and check things a lot more.
by this design bitcoin introduces something known as "difficulty" which readjusts based on hashrate and keeps the time between blocks around 10 minute. (more precisely: 2016 blocks every 2 weeks)

that is not something that you could leave to an algorithm to automatically decide what the size should be. what if it was too much? what if it was too little? and not to mention that you can't just be abstract and say "algorithmic way", the implementation of such a thing can open up new ways of exploitation by the miners and we don't want that.
with that said i am all for a block size increase. i always say we need "scaling" not just block size increase but with all the scaling that we have received, it was obviously not enough and with the adoption increase there simply is not enough room in blocks to handle that. and if we want to see LN be used more we need to be able to handle all the extra transactions that LN adoption would bring to bitcoin.

actually the "scale" is the same (more or less) because going from $1 to $2 is the same exact rise as going from $10,000 to $20,000. they are both 2x rise (100% rise).

you don't really need an article. simply open up a bitcoin chart website like bitcoinwisdom(.io) and analyze it yourself.
as for the future, it will be the same as long as bitcoin is still being adopted and has not yet reached mass adoption. which is going to be years from now.

you can not gain any proper privacy as long as you are trading on a centralized platform (aka exchanges) because even if they don't have identity verification you still aren't exactly anonymous there and it is centralized after all. and traders don't seem to mind that either.
the only solution is to use decentralized exchanges for trading if you want a better level of privacy. but then you will have to accept their shortcomings.

we actually have some idea about what their purpose is and will eventually know it for sure too. that idea is that it is just an advertisement, either for some drama regarding the recent drama about CW and Satoshi or this is GotSatoshi trying to first build a nice little email list of bitcoiners and then advertise his stuff to them.

it is not just legacy and SegWit, it is also compressed and uncompressed public keys and also multi signatures both in SegWit outputs (2 types) and in legacy outputs (1 type). which depending on their number of signers the size can be very different. before the year ends we may even see new signatures (Schnorr) and end up with a new transaction size based on them!

it is good to learn but it is best to try and post things as a question.

people don't understand how 90% of the world works starting from the coffee maker they use in the morning to the bed springs they sleep on at night. that  doesn't make any of them "mysterious".

if they had any clues whatsoever they would have revealed it right away instead of advertising it for a couple of weeks and increase the drama. that is just one more nonsense to the millions of cases that existed in the past 10 years.

you should have accumulated when the "wise money" was accumulating bitcoin when price was at the bottom in the $3k range and now is the time to sit back and enjoy the rise. but most people chose to ignore the reality back a couple of months ago and instead believe in the FUD and stay panicked and out of the market and now they are paying the price by being forced to buy bitcoin at a >75% higher level compared to the bottom and this will only get worse as time goes by since bitcoin continues to rise. $6k will soon be history too.

please don't create incomplete guides like this one here with a misleading formula. what you have found on the internet belongs to many years ago where bitcoin only had 1 type of transactions with 2 type of public keys (compressed and uncompressed) nowadays there are more variations and that formula is so complicated that you better leave it to your wallet to automatically calculate it for you.
of if you want to post a guide then do it completely by including all the possible cases with different types of input/output. and keep in mind that fees are no longer measured in satoshi/byte but instead in satoshi/virtualByte

also please don't suggest bitcoinfees.earn.com (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.msg30657510#msg30657510)


it is because the day Satoshi created bitcoin he decided to use a third party library for signature stuff. this library is the OpenSSL library. there the encoding used for signatures is a wasteful and in one word stupid encoding for something like bitcoin.
to keep it simple here is how it works:
when you create an ECDSA signature you basically have 2 n-bits integers (256 bit for bitcoin's curve) in this particular encoding, on top of other wasted bytes you sometimes have to add an additional byte (=0) to the start of these integers to tell everyone reading the encoding that the numbers are positive. so sometimes you end up with
(some other bytes) + 1 + 32 + 1 + 32 or
(some other bytes) + 0 + 32 + 0 + 32 or
(some other bytes) + 1 + 32 + 0 + 32 or
(some other bytes) + 0 + 32 + 1 + 32
hence the +-2

which again brings us back to the first line of this comment! nowadays the second number is changed for some reasons (outside of the scope of this topic) so it will always be smaller than 32 byte. and there is a much newer change which also changes the first number so that it is 32 bytes (in some implementations such as bitcoin-core) so you will always end up with the same 32 byte size hence a fixed signature size.