That example can be used to refute your post.
Such high computation power to break strong cryptography (at the time) is not easy to come by and is not available to everyone. It is always owned (in secret) by governments and is used for much important matters like state secrets and espionage not to steal bitcoins from a single address after a year of computation! They can press a button to print more money without spending anything.

By the time such capability becomes known, all systems will start migrating to newer and stronger algorithms and by the time the hardware catches up the old algorithms are a thing of the past. Like today that you can break the WWII era encryption on your PC, nobody uses such algorithms.

That's not to mention for the time being the computing power, known or unknown, is not close to be able to sold ECDLP within reasonable timeframe.

That's a weird paragraph specially the last part. The O in UTXO stands for output so obviously things like witness, script sig, transaction version, locktime, input count don't go into it! This is not a witness specific thing! And what is "fast processing of future transactions"?

As for the slides, again the misleading word "separate" was used and the accompanying image is also misleading (the middle slide in second row). It gives the impression that the signature is removed and placed somewhere else "outside" the transaction whereas the signature is still part of the transaction and is mandatory.
The
[ver][input_count][outpoint][scriptsig][output_count][amount][scriptpub][locktime]
becomes
[ver][flag][input_count][outpoint][][output_count][amount][scriptpub][witness][locktime]

Bitcoin was created to be an alternative payment system that is decentralized and censorship resistant. It is exactly those things.

If people use this forum to spam does that mean bitcointalk is no longer doing what it was meant to do? lol

Bitcoin was supposed to be decentralized and transactions are sent from one peer to another (not directly to people) and it is still doing that.

Name one

Nobody promised to create a stablecoin when bitcoin was introduced.

Wrong. It always comes down to supply and demand with supply being fixed and demand increasing with increasing adoption. What people do in the market is affecting short term fluctuations.

Name one with their real world use cases

Increasing number of people have been using bitcoin for what was meant to from day one to today...

This doesn't sound right specially since BRICS includes China which is almost 20% of the global GDP alone with India being the next big one with about 10%.

The New World Order is already established, it is only becoming more solidified with each major move such as creation of multiple economic, military, etc. blocs such as BRICS. It is simply creating these blocs that are not dominated or ruled by a single power that ends up abusing that power too. Instead it is multiple powers and blocs with the chance of such abuses becoming minimal.

There is still a lot of work to be done like establishment of a new payment system to replace SWIFT and possibly even new currency(ies) replacing the US dollar.
There are lots of good work being done though. Already lot of countries have bilateral agreements to trade using their own local currencies and gold. Many of such agreements are made in similar blocs like BRICS, SCO, ASEAN, etc.

As for the effect this will effectively bring more stability to the global economy so that first of all 2008-like incidents don't repeat where the demise of US economy screws the global economy and affects all countries around the globe one way or the other.
And secondly it allows lots of countries be it big or small, weak or strong to grow a lot since in the New World Order they can manage to get out of the US dictatorship preventing them from growth with sanctions and enforcement of laws that were designed to keep them back. Like Pakistan where in order to get a tiny loan from the US controlled IMF they were forced to increase the fuel prices among other things and ruin their economy first!!! In the New World Order a country like Pakistan takes the loan from the new bloc without them meddling in their internal affairs.

I don't see anything different in the market now compared to when price was at $30k. There was no reason to drop this much back then and there still is no reason for any more drops now. Yet the price dropped and there is still a chance that it can drop.
The problem is that right now the market is unpredictable and the global economy is pretty wild and volatile. Until that changes, we should expect irrational market where price one day drops hard and the other day shoots up hard.

This is also one of those times when you don't want to be trading. If you want to invest just do DCA and HODL.

This is inaccurate. The price of electricity for homes in Iran is about $0.001 per kilowatt hour but that's for the home users and the KWH they'll use. A miner uses more electricity which means the rate will enter an automatic step-by-step price scheme where each time the usage surpasses the next step's threshold the price increases. I believe the ceiling is $0.03 per KWH though.

Additionally big miners have to follow the regulations which have changed a couple of times over the past couple of years. Basically in these contracts they receive special rates for their farms which depends on a bunch of factors. For example it depends on the month, during the peak usages in summer their rate is equal to the export rate which I think is less than 5 cents; and in the rest of the year the rate is half that.
Another factor is their source of electricity. If it is the national grid the rates are as I said before, otherwise they could use renewable energies, start their own power plant in which case they'd receive super cheap gas which can be as low as $0.0008, or participate in the building of new power plants using the gas flares to produce electricity and get it practically for free. Although this last one was just a news I once read, I don't know if the project was started or not.

How do you know with certainty that this address belongs to a "person" and not a company like an exchange or some big service?
It's the same problem with the opposite type news saying "a whale dumped bitcoin". We can not say who the coins being moved belong to or their purpose. This claim about someone buying bitcoin is as as false as those other claims about some whale dumping bitcoin.

Two birds with one stone!

Putin just took revenge on Wagner bosses by eliminating them in the same distance from Moscow they used to be when they were trying to have their coup. This seems like the last step to remove all the domestic "enemies of Russia". #firstbird

With the situation in Africa and Wagner being present there going face to face with the colonizers (namely European "powers" like France) and the elimination of the Wagner bosses, it is possible that this would open Africa for France and others to invade easier. Specially since France is already getting ready to do so.
But that also means NATO will have to shift its focus from fighting Russia to fighting in newly opened battlefield thousands of kilometers in the opposite direction, which is obviously in favor of Russia and it is possible that they would start advancing in Ukraine at the same time. #secondstone

---

The way I see it these days the colonizers are facing two main options, one worse than the other.
1. They accept Niger putting a boot up their asses and accept Niger independence.
This means more nations would rise up against the colonizers kicking them out of the rest of Africa which means the end of Western Hegemony. Which means more economic crisis in the West. Which means more energy crisis in Europe. Which means the gas bills that reached 11k euro last year could reach 50k euros this winter. Which means more deindustrialization. Which means more people being fired from their jobs compared to last year....

2. They go in with full military force
This means weaker NATO in the Eastern front facing Russia which means Russia advancing more taking the last remaining cities to cut the connection to the sea.
This also means NATO forces being massacred in Africa since Africa today is not the same as 200-300 years ago where they could go in and enslave people. They're armed and ready and most importantly have strong "friends" ... Lets just say the sound of lawnmowers will be heard in the sky.

They already did do that, the inflation in United States sky rocketed over a year ago which was made worse by all countries dumping the US debt bonds they held; so the FED started increasing the interest rate incrementally to battle the inflation and they could not decrease it as much as they wanted while causing recession.
Now that high interest rate means they also had to pay a ton of interest to those who were bag holding bonds thingies! This is why the US government had a battle to increase the debt ceiling. Because they needed to print a ton of money to pay those interests! They did do that in a month or two by printing nearly a trillion dollar. Guess what that newly printed money does to inflation

Besides, do you know what this game with interest rates does to the economy? It kills it and the society. People won't be able to pay their debts, whether it is a loan they took to buy a house or send their kids to college or a loan to start a business. Production is slowly dying because of how much it costs inside US soil. Where do they migrate to? LOL.... to China.
This is why US currently has a war with two of its biggest investment companies called BlackRock and MSCI because they are slowly pulling about $15 trillion out of US. Guess their destination?

The more I learn about economy the more I realize that it is the most complicated topic and there is no rule that fits them all. There are just too many variables that we can't make claims such as these. Your example was an excellent one proving that, specially when we look at other opposite cases like China.

It is aptly named "national debt", they say the money the governments print out of thin air is a tax on every single citizen. Good thing we have bitcoin with a capped supply...

To be fair US is an exception and it is not US economy that backs the ridiculously huge amounts of printed money, it is the fact that US doesn't print dollar for its own citizens, they print dollar for the entire world. Basically they print it out of thin air then go abroad to purchase goods and resources with that worthless piece of paper hence exporting their inflation to other countries.
This is exactly why the world has been trying so hard to get rid of the dollar in the past couple of decades, pretty much after Bretton Woods fell apart.

I have to say it is odd to talk about inflation and percentages like 10% inflation while bitcoin in the long run goes up thousands of percentage! In other words the question is already answered if you zoom out. For example when I started using bitcoin back in 2014, the price was around $400 and today with all the ups and downs it is between $25k-$30k. Do you really think 7400% rise is not enough to outperform any inflation?

I also don't see this trend ending since we are far from reaching mass adoption. These big rises will continue to happen even if they are currently "on pause" because of the ongoing global recession and the new world order being established.

Neither.

The real problem to solve is the problem that created the poor and the rich in first place. So the fundamental economical, social and other issues that led to the class gap in first place needs to be solved so that we no longer have anything called "the poor" that need their problems solved.

Otherwise we end up with examples like United States where the gap is so massive that there are only a tiny 1% that are categorized as ultra rich and the rest of the 99% of the population are categorized as poor and lower class with nary a middle class in sight.

That's a naive way of looking at economy. Devaluing the currency is not going to help the economy on its own. A lot of other things have to happen alongside that to maybe help the economy. The best example is China. They intentionally dump their fiat so that they can remain extremely competitive on the global stage. The reason China can do this is because Chinese economy is a productive economy not an artificial debt based and service based economy.

Any other country that does that, needs to have a growing economy with lots of products to export (and be a net exporter) otherwise the only thing devaluation of currency would do to that country is inflation and more economic hardship.
This is even worse if the country in question is a net importer (has a huge trade deficit).

P.S. The COVID situation you mentioned and the money governments around the world printed was not to devalue their currency, its purpose was to inject liquidity in a dead economy so that they can overcome recession. Pretty much the same thing a lot of countries like US are doing starting from last year. The devaluation was the side effect.

I don't think there is any documentation that you can find and read specially since "ban score" is not part of the protocol (it is not part of consensus rules), it is what bitcoin core defines and uses internally to prevent abuse and can change.

You'll have to read the source code to understand the details of it. As far as I can tell it is all happening in the net_processing.cpp file by making calls to the Misbehaving() method and passing a value as the "points" to add to the misbehaving point of the peer (that is the ban score). As long as the total point doesn't surpass the threshold (default=100) the connection will remain open otherwise it will be terminated.

Some examples of the "unacceptable" behavior that would disconnect a peer is sending an invalid block or block header or transaction which would ban the peer.

Other times where the peer would be given a "yellow card" instead of being banned are when they break some other "soft" rules like sending more headers in a headers message as they should, or when they send you a block that you don't have the parent to.

That's not changing enough though. This is pretty much the same as double SHA256 hash we use in mining bitcoin. With the size being fixed and we knowing most of the initial blocks for each iteration, some of the computation can even be skipped during the internal block compression in each round of SHA256 and in the second SHA256 which would optimize the code significantly.
The reason why KDFs are created and used for storing passwords is partly this. You can't just skip computation like in a simple subsequent SHA256 computation.

It's most probably because like me you are an old user of Electrum who remembers how it used to be
Over the years with each release, the Electrum team keep changing and improving everything including the Network related stuff. Specially when people request new features or find bugs. Some of these changes are somewhat hidden so they are easy to overlook.
Here is how simple the Network window used to look in version 2 with Network also having an option for non-encrypted communication over TCP (I think it was without SSL encryption)

The principle is the same, there is a private key in a certain key range that we only know the corresponding address or public key. Whether it is a WIF missing characters or a puzzle with a key intentionally created in a certain range. The methods used for finding that key is the same too.

Apart from price fluctuations, the process itself has some additional costs.
One cost is the network fees you have to pay to create transactions in bitcoin and monero networks that can add up.
The other cost is the exchange fee you have to pay the platform like Bisq that you are using.
The last cost I can think of is the spread. Sometimes if the trading volume is low, there is a spread in the orderbooks between the top sell order and the top buy order. So even if price remains the same and you buy that altcoin and sell it immediately you still lose some money because of the spread.

The other disadvantage I can think of is the complication of this method. Someone who has never used Bisq before or have monero wallet/used monero will have to learn how to do these things first which is time consuming and could be difficult for some people.

I am not as familiar with the communication protocol that Electrum uses as I like to be but as far as I know the communication with the servers are actually encrypted using SSL encryption and you also store the servers' certificate on your device found in %APPDATA% \Electrum\certs.

There is also a "Proxy" tab in the "Network" window (found under Tools menu) that allows you to enter a custom proxy to be used (SOCKS4 or 5).

Imagine that you are rolling a 6 sided die to get numbers between 1 and 6, you can set a condition to only accept numbers that are smaller than or equal to 5. So the number 5 becomes your "target". Now each of your rolls have a high chance of giving you a valid number (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). To make this harder you decrease this target to something like 3. Now each of your rolls have a lower chance of giving you a valid number (1, 2, 3) so you need to roll more times to get what you need.

In bitcoin mining instead of "rolling the die" we compute a hash which is also random and instead of a small range of numbers like the die example, it gives us a big number in a much bigger range between 0 and 2²⁵⁶.
Our "target" is similarly a big number between 0 and 2²⁵⁶; to make mining harder (ie. increase difficulty) it goes down (towards zero) and to make mining easier (ie. decrease difficulty) it goes higher (towards 2²⁵⁶).

We readjust this target every 2016 blocks in a way that it takes 2 weeks to mine them. Meaning if it took less than 2 weeks to mine the previous 2016 blocks we increase the difficulty and if it had taken more we decrease it.
The target value is deterministic (reproducible by everyone) because we all have the same blocks and use the same algorithm to compute it using the time value already inside the block headers.