doing thins like locking, self moderating,... the topics that involved some sort of business deal (money changing hands) which includes signature campaigns, bounty crap, selling goods, auctions, services,... will only make that topic look shady as if the starter has something to hide and  don't want anybody to speak against them in their topic.

that is misleading.
gambling is the way to have a small chance of doubling your coins. the problem is most of the times you lose all you gamble with which is how the "house" wins and keeps on being profitable otherwise they have to close their business and go bankrupt if people kept on winning.


gambling is pure luck there is no knowledge involved.

as far as "freedom" goes, anybody should be allowed to make any kind of change and make any proposal they want and have the freedom to put it out there and ask others to follow it if they want. but also it is our duty to fight proposals that have a very high possibility of splitting bitcoin into two. in my opinion the damage that such type of split can cause is far more dire than anything else.
BIP148 would have basically created a SegWit chain with minority support (~10% miners which could have gone to 30% if the rest of the SegWit supporting miners switched and about 10% of the nodes) and the rest would have remained in legacy chain rejecting each other!

if you want to buy with fiat and that involves using banks like wire transfer, credit cards,... then there is no way you could ever find a method online that doesn't require KYC and asks you to submit your identification with them. that is the law of fiat world.

if you don't want that then your only option is to deal with cash and for that you have to find a way to find other people who are willing to do it. check out the currency exchange board, you can even start a topic there and offer to meet up with someone and do the trade face to face.
there is also ATMs which don't require identification but their fees are outrageously high.

it is not, BNB is only mentioned in this falsified article on that low quality clickbait website because at the time when they published it that token was at the end of its pump and  the authors probably had some sort of incentive to advertise this token more and try to keep the hype and the pump alive for a little bit longer which they failed by the way.

i think it was made bigger than it really was. of course Chinese exchanges faked volume but i don't think they were doing it more than any other exchange. their volume was so much higher mainly because they didn't have any trading fees and we all know that when fee is zero you can make a lot more trades, even buy and sell to your own orders as a whale to fake things without costing anything so the volume grows ridiculously big without being faked by the exchange.

i am surprised that nobody has yet mentioned the famous bitcoin obituaries list[1]. it is filled with lots of cases like this where some idiot spread some FUD about bitcoin and this has been going on for ages, even when price was in 1 digits not 4 like these days.

https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/

bitcoin as a decentralized and immutable cryptocurrency does not really math with others that are both centralized and mutable so you can't really combine it with something like ethereum. besides if smart contracts is all you want, we already have second layers that can do that in a lot better manner. check out RootStock for instance.

i don't expect any more price drops specially since it has gotten exponentially harder the lower we went, at 85% drop it is at a high enough support that it can not drop anymore. so the only way is to rise even if we see another temporary drop. with the rise starting we can break $6k since and since that was the bottom for so long i would say somewhere above it is appropriate.

to participate i choose $6190

01000000
0001 <--2 extra bytes (seg marker)
01
a683124602722459c3f2f7a6bc1d95f65b8d2ff34a16eb64d7f17192218d26bc
00000000
00 <-- this still exists here so the 1 byte below (0x02) is extra
ffffffff
02
6010030000000000
16 00 14 abbcbaba01e2ece93bbb1c808c87cd4ddee215e1 <--3 less bytes compared to P2PKH
50c3000000000000
17 a9 14 87a5bbd4d212fde72e416e781c47c60a9b17b098 87

02 <--1 extra byte (compact int showing number of witnesses)
47 30 44
02 20 3b6b37f4105a0e51fe0db74d38f6a0e27423c86229da8b974fb2f93b3d662b71
02 20 798fc22bfda5c2d45b4f309e4d8fcf386172129766df38ebbe5c17cdba3645d2
01
21 03 1c27b1d58922b592a26f79494a1c90df2ceba02914054e71d11c0daedb163b33
00000000

the result is the same size in this case not smaller. and that is only because it is creating a new P2WPKH output (paying a bc1 address) otherwise that 3 less bytes wouldn't have existed (like when creating a new P2PKH output) and the tx was 3 byte bigger.

---

now this is where things become so much bigger, P2SH-P2WPKH (link):
01000000
0001 <--2 extra bytes
01
db6b1b20aa0fd7b23880be2ecbd4a98130974cf4748fb66092ac4d3ceb1a5477
01000000
17 <-- this would have existed anyways so we ignore it here
16 00 14 79091972186c449eb1ded22b78e40d009bdf0089 <-- 23 extra bytes
feffffff
02
b8b4eb0b00000000
19 76 a9 14 a457b684d7f0d539a46a45bbc043f35b59d0d963 88 ac
0008af2f00000000
19 76 a9 14 fd270b1ee6abcaea97fea7ad0402e8bd8ad6d77c 88 ac

02 <--1 extra byte
47 30 44
02 20 47ac8e878352d3ebbde1c94ce3a10d057c24175747116f8288e5d794d12d482f
02 20 217f36a485cae903c713331d877c1f64677e3622ad4010726870540656fe9dcb
01
21 03 ad1d8e89212f0b92c74d23bb710c00662ad1470198ac48c43f7d6f93a2a26873
92040000

so the total overhead here is 26 bytes
(i think the parts in these transactions are clear although i didn't name them, if some part is unclear i can explain more)

there is no need for that kind of complication.
as a developer if you needed testnet coins you simply visit any testnet faucet and receive an appropriate amount of TBTC and that is more than enough for 99% of the cases. if some developer wanted more and the faucets weren't enough (whether it is amount or them being dry or any other issue) they can simply run their own testnet with things like testnet in a box (thanks to @BitCryptex)

they don't have to be on two different sides. the freedom is the most important thing but also since we are in a decentralized system everyone should agree about a change or that change must not happen if they can't reach an agreement.

i don't like playing with terms like "soft/hard fork" i believe they mislead the arguments. i say any change in consensus rules must only happen with the majority's support and if that can not be reached then that change must not happen. otherwise we do not have a healthy decentralized system.
so far all the bitcoin "changes" have happened with this kind of majority support (over 95%) and that is why bitcoin is still strong and has not split into more than 1 chain.
and that is why i strongly hate bitcoin-cash which never had any support, clearly visible based on their initial hashrate and lack of usage in the past year.
this is also why i hate things such as BIP148 and all those who were misleading people at that time like LukeJr.

there are two different discussions here:
1. disconnecting from a client that is following different consensus rules
2. disconnecting from a client that is following the same consensus rules but is just different

the first one is a must and it should happen automatically too, like disconnecting from BCH nodes in August when the fork first happened.
but the second one is a dishonest and dirty move. like disconnecting from btc1 nodes that were enforcing the same consensus rules but were being banned months before the deadline of the 2 MB hard fork came.

it is impossible for everyone to go through the code or even compile it themselves. but i believe that people should at least read the change log to be aware of what is being changed. new versions are not just new features, there are bug fixes too that may be influencing you.

no i don't believe that but they certainly have a big influence as they should since they have the experience coming from years of working on bitcoin and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. although i have seen a bad mentality grow in the past couple of years, specially in 2017. for example by that time if you asked those who were passionately against BClassic, BCH, SegWit2x,... and were supporting SegWit or even UASF why they are against the first and for the second they would have answered because core is not/ supporting it. and that is a dangerous thing.

---

i still believe that we need multiple implementations of bitcoin that are preferably written in a different language by different teams so that they don't have the dependency which would also prevent problems like this one, although you can read the discussions against something like that in this topic too but i still believe the benefits are more..

if stability of the price is your goal then you have to realize that bitcoin is currently not stable mainly because it is still growing and since that is going on you should expect big rises like what we had in 2017 which sometimes end with a big bubble and that has to burst and the final result is a roller-coaster while price continues to rise overall.
having no cap will not change this, but what it will change is that when bitcoin reaches mass adoption if it has no cap it will continue to decline. but with cap it can become stable.

these things are always considered a very good sign in my opinion because they are the undeniable proof of how bitcoin has been growing stronger as a currency and that has been scaring the banks and their tyranny of power.


that is simply because these "institutions" want to make more money and they think they can do a better job if they create their own centralized token instead of going with what already exists. and that mentality is  there because of how big some of the useless tokens have gotten in the past.

can you give an example of such few cases because I can't think of any and that link is also saying what I said about the overhead and has no mention of any special case where the size is smaller!

easy compared to what?
compared to altcoins, absolutely not. it is extremely harder to manipulate bitcoin than it is to manipulate altcoins.
compare to gigantic markets like gold, it is very easy to manipulate bitcoin price in comparison.

also it has nothing to do with market capitalization! that's just an arbitrary number when it comes to cryptocurrencies. what makes manipulation possible is the size of the market, more specifically the order books on exchanges and whether they are packed with large number of orders or small number of them.

are you freaking kidding me
each time in the past that we had the altcoin pumping season like this where every single altcoin gets big pumps, when the dumping season starts right afterwards at least 40% of the altcoins die and the remaining 60% go down and give their places to newer altcoins that will do the same thing as they did (pump and dump).

that is false. SegWit transactions have a bigger size in bytes, it is just in weight unit that is smaller. it is easy to confirm this too, take different similar transactions (legacy with 1 input/2 output and native segwit and nested segwit) and compare their raw transaction sizes in hex.
SegWit adds some overhead to each transaction which increases the total size in bytes:
1. the marker (0x0001) which is 2 bytes
2. item count inside each witness which is a compact int can be at least 1 byte per input
3. [only in nested segwit] the leftover script that you place inside ScriptSig (still not sure how big this is but i believe it is about 22 bytes)

^ you are banning different node IP addresses simply because you don't like them! otherwise there is nothing abnormal about any of their behavior as far as i can tell. these are normal bitcoin nodes that have a high download speed and are trying to synchronize with the network and "catch up". which is why they are currently downloading a lot of data.

it is social drama because instead of opening a topic and discussing about a certain subject you started a topic about that subject but only focused on individuals an right now half this topic is about Franky not about the subject!