haha, it is a very curious coincidence that 10 years ago when Satoshi created bitcoin the article that he chose was titled "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" now 10 years later the situation is starting to go bad with the banks and the article in here is a similar themed one... and yet bitcoin prevails.

i think it is time that people stopped Only thinking in terms of profit making when it comes to bitcoin. it was never meant to give you profit although it does do that as a product of being scarce and still being adopted. bitcoin is meant to be used as a currency and i believe that these prolonged downtrends are a good time for people to start seeing other aspects of bitcoin which matter most as they stop seeing just the profit.

in some ways i can see that happening very easily.
considering the bear market of other markets has just started and it can take a while before it concludes, in addition to considering the fact that bitcoin is nearly done with dropping and in my opinion it is currently in a reverse bubble aka an undervalued state, you can see how it can start reversing and going back up soon enough.

and when that happens while other assets (stocks for example) are dropping in value, it can attract a lot of attention and a lot of investors which means it can have a much bigger rise because of that.

there is no point in doing that because if you want to be safe you still have to verify the PGP signature of the "hash file" so you still have to have the PGP public key of the developer, know how to verify signatures and have the application for doing that installed.
so why bother with hashes in first place?

not to mention that this model may lead to some lazy people skip the PGP signature verification step and stick to hash verification which is NOT enough for verifying authenticity of a downloaded file. hashes are only used for verifying "integrity" of a downloaded file and there is a big difference between the two concepts.

you can do many things but better keep them in mind for worse case scenario. the simplest way is to right click on your address from your address tab (you may need to enable this tab from View in the menu) and selecting private key option. then import that in any other wallet that allows you to import private keys and have access to your funds.

another, a little more complicated, way is to build an unsigned transaction yourself (like using another tool by only giving the tool your address and nothing more) and then give it to your wallet and force it to sign and then broadcast it using a block explorer's push_tx option.

this means you are over the initial sync barrier!
you should now see the transaction history in your history tab too if you succeed in communicating with a server.

the bold part is a terrible advice because you should try to avoid storing something as sensitive as your seed which is literary the "key" to your "money" digitally in a text file that can be stolen, hacked,... try writing it down on a piece of paper (these are seed "words" for a reason after all).

it will happen in more than 100 years from now so you can not possibly begin to predict what will be happening by then. not to mention that in a hundred years from now, bitcoin is either grown fully (as in being mass adopted) or it is simply dead and replaced by something else along the way. in either case there won't be a new growth by then. price might as well be already worth above $10 million per coin.

first of all don't worry about your money you still own the bitcoins that you have bought and can access them as long as you have backed up your Electrum seed and as long as the address was from this wallet seed (meaning if you haven't copied a wrong one from elsewhere). even if you could never get Electrum to connect, you still can spend them.

with that said, there has been a problem with Electrum when it is first synchronizing. when you first run Electrum it has to download a file called blockchain_headers which is currently at 42.4 MB and depending on your internet speed and connectivity it can take a while to sync. i have also noticed that if the internet is very slow then it won't be able to build the chunks and the file.
if you can monitor your traffic see if Electrum is even receiving anything. you can also go to your application data folder (paste this in your windows explorer %APPDATA%\Electrum) and see the file and its size.

if you have already opened Electrum, created a new wallet and acquired an address which you used to receive bitcoins when you bought them, then you don't have any problems with python or anything. you already have all the dependencies!

but it is not about stupidity and you can not assume that anyone who owns large amounts of bitcoin is not-stupid! they may as well be the biggest ones that just got lucky and got in early and forgot about even owning that much (like forgetting the password of a wallet created in 2009-10).

instead it is about the fact that you can NOT dump that much! what most FUDsters forget is that we are talking about cashing out a ridiculously big amount of money. for instance the 600k bitcoin you mentioned is worth $2.2 billion dollars! you can't even begin to cash out that amount from 20 exchanges let alone the only 4-5 real bitcoin exchanges that exist and are big. and then there is the bank problem. they are fucking with the customers when they cash out a large amount like a couple of thousand, they will not even let you transfer that much money

when you want to use something you have to also accept its rules. in this case when you start bringing in fiat you have to also bring in its rules which would include KYC and a ton of other rules and they start with you verifying your accounts on exchanges that you want to use.

if you don't want to use your banks then you should do the trade elsewhere instead of on exchanges. like using some platform to meet others who want to  buy/sell bitcoin. but that will also have its own risks because there is a lot of ways to perform fraud when fiat is involved.

if you want to sell bitcoin for USD then  sell it for USD and don't complicate things with other trades which will require you to pay a lot of trading fees on each of them. not to mention that you would be trusting more than one exchange and you would also have to hold your new tokens (Tether for example) on their platform even if it is a short time and they can scam you and run away at any moment.

haha, is it so weird that i had never even heard of this dude before this poll? or maybe i heard him be quoted but wasn't important enough to stick in my memory

anyways checking a bunch of stuff that he has said it seems like he is mostly bullshitting instead of FUD. some of them are so bad that i prefer the bullshit of throw away accounts on this forum more.

it is lack of documentation and is for me my lack of knowledge about python but also i think it is partly due to the fact that a file there does a ton of things that may not be related to each other.
for example the bitcoin.py is dealing with scripts (read/write) converting bases, encode/decodes,  deals with seeds, coverts addresses, and more. although this file is  one of the good ones.
maybe it is just me thinking too much in terms of strongly typed languages and full object oriented language + my newbishness in programming but i prefer a much better categorization of files (classes) that are responsible only for one thing. for example base conversion. another one for scripts (interpret, read, write,...), another one for seeds,...

i think the confusion stems from the fact that linux distributions such as Ubuntu provide a hash (SHA1, MD5, and SHA256 has) of the .iso file but what people miss is that they are also signing the hashes with a PGP key which you have to verify.
i believe they are doing it that way because it may not be possible to sign a 1-2 GB file (the .iso) with a PGP. so they provide hashes the sign them with their key.

both of those numbers are reliable and correct but the difference is that they are showing a different thing and in their own context they are correct.
for example preev is showing the average price between 2 exchanges (Bitstamp and Kraken) so it is a correct "average" price between these two exchanges and it updates every couple of seconds. but for example if you want to know the price at Bitstamp then that value can be wrong because you are looking at it with a different context in mind. same goes with cryptocompare

as far as i can tell, this is true about anything else in the world. you can't decide what the true value of anything is. in fact the concept of "intrinsic value" which you use to determine whether something is over-valued (in a bubble) or under-valued (in a reverse bubble) is a very abstract one which you will never find a concrete way of measuring it.
that is why you can't call something a bubble until it actually bursts. so, similarly you can't call something in a reverse-bubble until it actually bursts.

you can still create a transaction with 0 fee with all the wallets as long as you are not using their user interfaces because that is where the blocking takes place. for example in Electrum the wallet doesn't allow you to set the fee to zero in the interface but you can still make an unsigned transaction with 0 fee using any additional method and then sign it using Electrum. then you again will be stuck in broadcasting it because the "servers" reject your tx.

one way of doing it is to preview your tx before signing it, then copying the hex and editing the amount field to include the fee in it (increase it +fee) and then giving it back to electrum to sign. of course you mustn't do it without knowing what you are doing or you may end up messing things up.

its a matter of who you want to trust.
- your Antivirus program that can report false positives
- the Electrum developers that have released the software for a long time
- or no one.

for most people it is enough to verify the PGP signature of Electrum and be sure that it is released by the real developers and is not fake one. and then they ignore their AV.
if you want to trust no one then you will have to go through the source code which can be found here https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum and then when you trusted the "code" you need to compile it yourself and then trust the compiled .exe and ignore your AV.

it creates 50 "new" addresses which means beyond your gap limit.
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/664b0c234eca5afec9a7de9c7533cbc41227af14/electrum/commands.py#L658
additionally if you check the source code you can see it is getting the length of your address list and then creates the next one
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/664b0c234eca5afec9a7de9c7533cbc41227af14/electrum/wallet.py#L1567-L1580
false is also indicating you are not creating a change address!

run listaddresses() and it will list all your addresses. then you have to copy them manually.

when ancients started using arrow heads as a currency, there were people who said it can not be used as a currency, its value drops if the head is not sharp enough! and it is easy to lose it and what am i gonna hunt with if i spend my arrows! but it became a currency nonetheless.
then when they first created "coins" as a currency there were people who were complaining and saying that is a piece of metal with a freaking head on it, it can not be a currency. we will stick to our salt and tobacco to barter with and use as currency.
when the digital banking started people started saying it is numbers on a computer, it will stick with cash because it doesn't make any sense to me to use a computer, a piece of plastic card, my phone,...
now that we are introducing decentralized crypto-currencies there are people who are saying the same things.

in short it has always been like this with any change. people resist it and keep comparing it with the previous obsolete methods. that is also why in the beginning at the ground floor things look like this with volatility, lack of adoption and all that.

the link that the attacker was pushing to clients to fool them was on github, which was reported and removed the same exact day. i haven't heard of any change or new link popping up yet so basically it was over the same day i think.
as for the update, the new versions still can show you the malicious message if the server sends you one but it won't be formatted anymore. so you won't see a "link", instead it will be a messy text with its markups.