what you are calling "peoples" is just day traders not everyone. it is those who are trading in short term like daily to make profit from trading not from investment. the investors are not active every day by looking at the price every second. they buy at an appropriate price and after doing proper analysis on the real potentials then they invest what they can afford to lose and go away trusting in their analysis and check things periodically with a bigger interval.

except for very rare cases of small exchanges with no users and no volume at all they do tell you how the API works, where the base URL is and all the rest of the information you need. for instance Bittrex that you mentioned has the URL literary in first paragraph of its documentation last time i checked.
these URLs are usually a "base" URL. for example https://www.exchangeName.com/api/version/ then you append commands to this URL like baseUrl+getMarketSummaries and any additional variables required with ? and & separators: +?marketName=BTC_LTC&time=149005655

now if you want to make a private call such as commands like getBalance you need to sign this with your API keys and include the keys in your header which i don't think is what you want. you ant the public stuff only.

the API docs are more than enough. try looking at the examples that they always include. if there is some API wrappers then that might help you too.

i think you need to know VB.net and i have no idea how that works

API is just the same as you opening the website itself, it is making a call to another computer and giving you some information back. in case of opening the site in your browser you get the answer in HTML, but when you make an API call you get the answer in JSON! then you interpret the HTML as a website and render it that way, but the JSON is just raw data that you work with and render anyway you like it can be in an excel sheet or inside some script running 24/7 with some trading strategy in the background.

if you created your wallet with a bitcoin core version that is smaller than 0.13.0 then it is not HD and upgrading your bitcoin core to a higher version never changed this so far up to 0.16.x that i have seen.

i would say using Electrum is so much more user friendly than core. of course you should already know that an SPV wallet is not providing you with near as much security or privacy that a full node provides even through Tor.

why should i bother showing this to someone who knows it so much better than i do?!
when people call bitcoin dead and are insistent about it so much that every time you see them they are talking about bitcoin and how it is bad, dead,... that just shows they are accumulating more bitcoin at cheaper prices because they already know it. otherwise why would they even talk about something they (apparently) hate so much nonstop?

unfortunately this is pure guesswork and it may even be considered wrong. for starters as someone looking at the whole system for analysis purposes you have to know there is no such thing as "wallets"! all there is that YOU can see are transactions on the blockchain (addresses). you can do some blockchain analysis and come up with some sort of connection between addresses and form wallets in your head but that will always be inaccurate. so statements like "X% of supply is in hands of individuals" is by nature wrong.

as for adoption, usage, rises,... of course it is all rising. it is not something that started in 2017, this has been going on from day 1. there are more users coming in, they buy more and more, and the usage of bitcoin grows and with it bitcoin will be more distributed. but it is not something that we can measure accurately.

another point you are missing is how bitcoin mining really works as in the difficulty and how it changes.
theoretically how much it costs to mine bitcoin should always be as much as its price is. because if it is more profitable then more miners will switch on their ASICs and start mining it (some of them who switched to other altcoins will come back), that increases the difficulty and reduces the profit. if it is less profitable then the reverse of this will happen.
if you look at the hashrate/difficulty charts you can see that the hashing power has been increasing constantly this year showing that there is still a lot of profit to be made in mining bitcoin.

all that has nothing to do with the price though! sometimes speculation may be tangled with mining and guesswork about its profitability but there is no direct connection.

why do you think the way we talk about price of bitcoin should be any different than the way we talk about price of anything else? price is not "determined" if we say it is worth X dollar or if we say it is worth Y Euro or if we say it is worth Z cups of coffee.

and to answer your question about how to do it if USD, etc collapses i ask you how would you determine price of a cup of coffee in that scenario? answer than and you can use the same method to determine price of bitcoin.

ok, i looked at some of the code. i see that you have basically written the elliptic curve calculates on your own. are you sure they are correct? is it tested?

i didn't understand two things:
1. why are you doing this check? r + s doesn't have to be dividable by 2. and i can't find it anywhere that says this check is needed. do you know any reason i am missing? see 4.1.3 of SEC1
also i believe this mod is completely unnecessary as the numbers you are giving it are 256-bit and mod with that larger number will return the same thing. not to mention that where it is being called the numbers (r and s for instance) must be 32 byte otherwise the implementation would be broken.
2. the other thing i didn't get is why are you using the private key itself for generating a random number for signing. isn't there any better RNG provider to use?

might i also suggest Separation of concerns. some files are too large (as in 1000+ lines) and it seems like they don't all need to be in one place.

nitpicking but DER Format comment should really move to line 252 because that is where you are DER formatting

there isn't any kind of meaningful resistance at $6800 and just because price is hovering there right now it doesn't mean it is a resistance! the real ones are around $8k price and anything until that point is just day traders playing around with each other in the market trying to make short term profit.

as for the "crypto market" i wouldn't start getting excited about altcoins yet because this is yet again another bitcoin price stability phase which has always translated to day traders paying more attention to altcoin pumps than before because there is not much of a profit to make in bitcoin when price is right where it was yesterday!

it has nothing to do with the wallet. in simple terms what happens is that you move your funds to a new address, but while doing so you create a transaction that has a "condition" in it, that "condition" is telling the network that this transaction output (your coins) are only spendable when a certain criteria (time) is met. effectively locking your funds.

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I never thought I'd see pascal again in my life let alone see a project. i'll try checking the code to see how much of it i remember.

thanks for sharing this. the tether drama has been one of the biggest FUDs of last year and it has never made any sense at all, mainly because the whole theory had a lot of exceptions to it that defied the conclusion that it was trying to make.

true. generally speaking new tether is issued whenever there is an increase in trading volume because there are more traders and since all of the altcoin exchanges have USDT pairs since they are avoiding fiat and the KYC that comes with it USDT is needed so that people can run away to it and/or use it to transfer funds between exchanges.

although one question rises here. we all know the market enters excited phases when there is a lot of volume (like end of 2017) but it exits them and enters slow mode with lower volume. what i wonder is how tether price remains up with a large volume in circulation but nowhere near the same demand?

in your blockchain.info account, do you have more than one "account"? i am not sure what they call it but it is basically when you create a new group of addresses. they may call it account or wallet.

if that is so, go to https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ (make a copy of source and run it offline for security), enter your master private key (string starting with "xprv") in "BIP32 Root Key" text box, then scroll down to "Derivation Path", select BIP32 and in "BIP32 Derivation Path" enter this: m/44'/0'/1' i believe that is how they create a new account but haven't checked their code.

(m/44'/0'/0' is the root path that is used for deriving your keys: m/44'/0'/0'/0 then m/44'/0'/0'/1 and so on. m/44'/0'/1' is another account from the same master key with keys that are coming from paths: m/44'/0'/1'/0 then m/44'/0'/1'/1 and so on.)

scroll down and if you see your addresses here then scroll up and copy the "BIP32 Extended Private Key" text box content (string starting with "xpr") and enter that in your Electrum.

(depending on how many of these "accounts" you have created in your blockchain.info wallet you may need to change the 1 into another number like if you have 3 and want your third account you put m/44'/0'/2' there since indexes are 0  based).

imagine for a second that you are a trader. as a trader, your goal is making profit not making an investment. now in order to make profit you need price to NOT be stable.
now on one hand we have bitcoin which is very stable (changes less than 3%, for instance the last 24 hour change is 0.05% which is smaller than trading fees you have to pay). on another hand we have altcoins that are getting pumped and dumped. for example we have big altcoins that got pumped 30% in past couple of days. we also have smaller altcoins (at lea st a dozen) that got pumped more than 100% in the past couple of days. we also have coins that got dumped more than 30-40% which you can short.

now which one of these do you choose as a trader to go into and participate short term?

that is exactly why there is a volume increase in altcoins. it has nothing to do with investors but the day traders.

i seriously doubt that that is the reason. as others already pointed out the usage is a lot more than what you think but even if it wasn't that shouldn't be the reason for not supporting Bech32 addresses. their platform already recognizes the addresses and decodes the output script into a correct format. heck it even has a bech32_encoder that it can encode the <OP_0> hash160 into a bech32 address, otherwise it would have shown it as a red text saying "unable to decode" just like how they  are showing OP_Return outputs.

these two are completely different arguments though.
implementations such as XT, classic,... were planning on enforcing (eventually) different consensus rules and they were created because certain people didn't want SegWit and wanted bigger blocks. if there were no SegWit or bigger blocks then these implementations wouldn't have existed at all. that is one thing. not to mention that they were forks (copies) of bitcoin core so that is not even related to this discussion because technically since they copied the code they would have had the same bugs.

another thing which is what @ETFbitcoin is talking about is having other clients that do enforce and continue to enforce the same consensus rules. there currently are other implementations. it is not like they don't exist at all but not many use them.

in simple terms there was a "bug" in bitcoin core full nodes. this bug can be exploited by a miner to mine an invalid block. if other miners start building on top of this invalid block we can end up with a chain of blocks that will all be invalid essentially making every transactions in those blocks not-final. depending on how fast we can detect this initial invalid block the size of that invalid chain can differ. so what you would see in that situation is a transaction that is confirmed but confirmed in a block that was invalid and needs to be orphaned. doing that means the transaction  becomes spendable again.

to avoid this risk you wait for a much bigger number of confirmation so that if such an incident happened there is enough time for it to be found and you to be informed about it.

but the sheep panic buying has never happened out of nowhere as far as i can tell. the rises have always been either slow with solid buy support hence building up a strong support without falls. and that takes time. or we have had big jumps that as far as i can tell have always followed these solid slow rises and were practically their final step after a long rise. and they usually want some sort of hype like the Futures hype of last year. that is why i believe he said ETF since it could have been the fake hype.

unfortunately there are a lot of features missing from bitcoin core although it has the capability of supporting all of them. maybe someone with more insight can tell "why" they are missing?

bitcoin core is already a Hierarchical Deterministic wallet which means you have a master private key that all your key pairs are being derived from. you can use "dumpwallet a file path" to get that master private key in a plain text. having this means you should technically be able to derive all the private/public keys that are currently in use or will be in the future.

but now the problem is in your watch only wallet you want to import a master public key but bitcoin core doesn't have this feature. you can however use another tool to get the addresses from your master public key then use "importmulti" command to import your addresses in your watch only wallet. but then you will have to do it every time you create a new key pair outside of the range that you just imported.

the question you are avoiding to answer is that how are you so sure you are providing 1 signature?

the fact that on top of your screen it says 2of2 doesn't mean you are providing 1 signature. for instance (i just tested this) when you create a 2of2 wallet the first step creates your key, then in second step it asks  you for the second cosigner key. you can provide it with a master public key (xpub....) and NOT be unable to fully sign on this wallet or you can provide it with a master private key (xprv....) and be able to fully sign the transactions since you are holding both keys and providing 2 signatures.

try creating a new wallet but this time in step 2 make sure that you are giving it a string that starts with the word "xpub". if you still could sign transactions then we can start digging more to see what the problem is.

in a way you are correct because this has happened as some people forgot that bitcoin was meant to be a currency not other things including a get rich quick scheme, store of value,... but you should not forget that usually what you read on forums is not representing the whole community specially this forum that is filled with newbies and spammers. basically what happens is that those who are in bitcoin for real reasons aren't so vocal so you don't see or hear them around here but the newcomers, specifically those looking to get rich quick, are the ones who are so vocal so what you see most is them and their confusion about why they haven't become a millionaire yet!