I still believe that ETF effects on bitcoin price has been greatly exaggerated, although it will definitely have a positive effect on the price.

In any case when it comes to the next big rise, as I've said before the global economy is the major factor affecting the market for now. The rising inflation was excellent for bitcoin but then recession started and ruined its effects. Now they are trying to reach an equilibrium which is why we don't see rise (or fall) start.
But the inflation is still rising very fast and its effects on bitcoin price is growing. After all this fast growing national debt[1] due to nonstop money printing is bound to push bitcoin price up. $32.5 trillion US debt, $14.5 trillion Chinese debt, $13.5 trillion Japanese debt, and so on. US alone printed over a trillion in the past couple of months ever since the debt ceiling was raised.
In other words 6 digit price is definitely possible in the next major bull run.

[1] https://www.usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html

To be clear Ethereum was centralized even when it was using the PoW algorithm. In fact we could say it was centralized from its inception and we had a lot of simple and very obvious hints. From the 72 million premined ethers before it was even released to the biggest disgrace any cryptocurrency can have with the centralized authority controlling ethereum rolling back blocks just because they lost some money in a gamble called DAO.

The move to PoS was the last nail in Ethereum's coffin that proved it has always been a centralized shitcoin. The recent decision to centralized the validators even more by significantly increasing the amount needed to be locked is just kicking an already dead horse.

It's not just about being centralized or decentralized. The centralized currency already exists in many different forms from fiat that we use day to day to online payment systems like PayPal. Each are solving a problem and providing a useful utility hence they have a "value". Creating another centralized currency can only be useful if it actually provides a useful utility. In fact this is one of the criticism of the CBDCs that are the hot topic these days, they don't seem to offer anything new.
In comparison bitcoin as the only decentralized currency offered a new form of money that didn't exist before. Which is why it gained popularity and a growing value.

Months ago when I said that there were very few who were saying it, today even the Americans are saying the same thing Even the US senators are saying "this is the best money they've spent and they will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian". Whether you admit it or not this has always been a fight between Russia and NATO or more specifically US dictating NATO aggression.

Why aren't you ever talking about the Iranian weapons used by Armed Forces of Ukraine? Oh, I know it doesn't go with the ongoing propaganda. Here is one example showing Iranian made Fadak anti-armor rockets used by Ukraine's Mi-17 helicopters.




The fact is that Iran as one of the most advanced arms manufacturers have sold many defensive weapons to many countries including Europeans. Many of these weapons are resold to third parties like Ukraine and Russia.

P.S. Those living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Next time you wanted to accuse others of selling weapons to Russia first think about Ukraine's cooperation with bloodthirsty invaders such as US in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq over the past two decades or the large amount of arms Ukraine sold others like Saudi dictatorship regime to help their genocide in Yemen. To this day the carcass of Ukrainian Practika made armored vehicles like Kozak-5 can be found in Yemen as a reminder of the Ukraine's help in the genocide.

Considering the outcome I don't think it was actually a "mutiny" to begin with
Russia armed Belarus with nukes then sent these mercenaries there with the nukes. Before this so called mutiny, Wagner was nearly 400 km away from Kyiv, now they are 80 km away from Kyiv and a stones throw from Poland ready to do another possible "mutiny"; maybe shoot something in those directions while Russia claims they have no "control" over them referring to their shenanigans...

As for Ruble, I don't think it has to do with the recent shenanigans since the long term trend looks normal to me. Like majority of fiat currencies it is losing its value. Back in 2021 1 Ruble was 0.013 USD and then 2022 occurred where Europeans started purchasing Russian energy using Ruble instead of dollar so it was strengthened. Now in 2023 it is going back to normal and 1 Ruble is 0.011 USD with a 15% dump.
Most fiats are like this. Yen from 0.0095 to 0.0072 (-24%), Pound from 1.40 to 1.30 (-7%), Euro from 1.20 to 1.12 (-6.6%), Rupee from 0.014 to 0.012 (-14%), ...
Specially since US started mass exporting its inflation by printing trillions of dollars in the past year while increasing interest rate to keep the dollar exchange rate high, such dumps hastened. In fact this is one of the main incentives for dedollarisation.

They could have just hosted those documents on a website instead of on Github considering how Github is mainly a "code" sharing platform not documentation.
In any case a lot of countries have been working on their own centralized "digital" currency for a couple of years now and a handful of them even have working ones in testing phase. The Brazilian CBDC seems to also be one of the projects in the research phase being worked on for about 2-3 years which can also be found here: https://www.bcb.gov.br/en/financialstability/digital_brazilian_real

You are forgetting the witness transaction IDs and the fact that a merkle root hash of wtxids (computed using everything in a tx including the junk) is also created and stored in an output of coinbase tx and is verified as part of the consensus rules to prevent transactions inside the blockchain from being modified when relaying blocks.

The whole SegWit soft fork would have been broken if what you described were correct, not just the Ordinals Junk.
In simple terms, like before if you change a single bit anywhere in a transaction you have to mine the whole block again, and essentially perform a 51% attack to change the chain.

Being part of the protocol needs actual script that is verified and enforced by the protocol not arbitrary data that is only being pushed to the chain to be verified and enforced elsewhere (ie. on a centralized website).

Ordinals is using an exploit in the protocol where certain limits were not introduced in SegWit scripts where it allows injecting large arbitrary amount of data into the chain to abuse Bitcoin as a cloud storage ergo it is an attack.

The only achievement of something like this is forcing people to spam the blockchain with pointless transactions.
For example I have coins that I acquired back in 2014 when I found out about bitcoin and have not moved them since because there was no reason to move them and I don't want to! Something like this is going to force me to move those coins for no good reason!

In that case we would be back where we started, meaning you'd have to now protect your encryption key and if you forget that key there won't be any way to recover your private keys or wallet anymore! You may think that remembering a password is easier but that's a mistake because if it is easy to remember, it can be weak and can be broken which means low security.

Besides, relying on third parties defeats the purpose of Bitcoin and not only it lacks privacy it is also less secure.

It will never happen because there is no reason for it, at least not in our lifetime and most importantly the bitcoin supply and how it works is one of the main principles of Bitcoin which means it is extremely difficult to get anybody to accept a major change in it.

That's true you can put dog poop in a bag and sell it for a million dollar.

There is a difference between building something on top of bitcoin and finding an exploit to abuse the protocol.
Your statement also has nothing to do with the fact that the garbage being injected into the blockchain using the Ordinals Attack has zero utility.

LOL that was cute.

Let's just say such a change is much better implemented through a hard fork than a soft fork but it is not impossible. We should technically be able to come up with a very messy way to implement it and still remain backward compatible (ie. through a soft fork without needing others to upgrade). It requires adding a new field (and stripping it for old nodes like SegWit did) that holds the fractions but it should keep them there even when they overflow.

Lets say we have a UTXO worth 2 satoshis to break into two new UTXOs worth 1.8 and 0.2.
- UTXO_1 would have two amount fields, the old one holding the 1 satoshi and the new one holding the 0.8.
- UTXO_2 would have two amount fields, the old one holding the 0 satoshi and the new one holding the 0.2.
When spending UTXO 1 and 2 the new UTXO would have two amount fields, the old one holding the 1 satoshi and the new one holding the 1.0 satoshi.
This way the old nodes see the amount field is not overflowing (1+0<=1) while the new nodes seeing both fields can see the fractions and verify that it also is not overflowing ([1+0=1] + [0.8+0.2=1] <= [1+1]).

The thing about selling bitcoin is that until it reaches mass adoption, the price is going to continue to rise. Which means no price is a good price to sell unless you want to pull out temporarily on a peak to re-invest when the correction occurs.
For example selling close to $20k by the end of 2017 to re-buy bitcoin when it comes down below $10k.

It's the same in the future, you just have to try and guess the peak of the bubble which is a hard thing to do. For example in 2017 many thought $1.2k was the peak lol. Some others thought $3k-$4k was the peak and so on until we reached $20k.
It's all about the momentum and how much money is flooding into the market. Back when price was $1k, $3k etc. the momentum was getting stronger which meant it was not the peak.
That also means we can't predict the next peak right now that the momentum has not yet started. We can give random guesses and mine is $400k.

I don't remember anybody saying these junks aren't going to be traded. After all scams will always find their victims. They just change tactics and sometimes get more complicated with a prettier front making it harder to detect the scam underneath. I remember the early days one of the most popular scams were "bitcoin doublers", they started by convincing newbies that they had "found a way" to double their coins in 24 hours if they sent them their coins. Eventually it became a thing where they no longer claimed to have any kind of magical exploit in the protocol and just came out with it and said it is a Ponzi scheme and people still sent them their coins!

The two are not comparable though. When fiat like dollar is printed, it makes it worth less not worthless (that is to dump in value!). Whereas the Ordinals junk is just junk and it is worthless because unlike things like fiat it has no utility.

Technically by seeing an address you can only know the type of address not the type of wallet. Although in practice since majority of wallets are deterministic and produce the same type of address, it can also indicate their wallet type.

Yes and no. Multi-sig address doesn't become safe just because it uses more than one key, it can become safe if the keys are created and kept separately on safe airgap systems.
Additionally you should know that P2WPKH (a single sig address) is safe and multi-sig is adding another layer of security on top and it is used for a different purpose. In other words it is not about being safeer but about offering a different utility.

And finally apart from address length, there are other characteristics that define the type of the address. Two of which are the starting characters (bc1 vs 1 vs 3) and in case of SegWit addresses the first character right after the separator "1" which indicates the version of the witness program used in the address. In these cases it is "q" so it is version 0.

That still doesn't make them "tokens". The non-standard nature of such outputs and their rejection and how many of them you can make are not the reason though. The reason is that a UTXO is not a UTXO because of its amount, it is an output containing a smart contract that creates a "lock" that can be "unlocked" when spending that output. That's all there is to a UTXO.

Since that won't be part of the Bitcoin protocol, it can not be considered a "token". Similar to the Ordinals attack, it would be arbitrary data injected into the immutable distributed ledger called blockchain.

Because it is for testing and there is no guarantee that we don't decide to move to testnet4 some day, discarding the whole testnet3 chain. As you already know, testnet coins are worthless so there won't be any incentive to keep them, which means migration to version 4 won't be met with that much resistance.

Who would buy such at thing? The answer is nobody. Tokens are useless as it is, which is why they have to build their nonsense inside bitcoin so that they can abuse the name and popularity to catch some victims!

In the cryptocurrency world a token is defined as something that created on a token creation platform as a separate asset and can have its own independent supply.
In bitcoin the UTXOs represent units of bitcoin itself, they are not called or considered "tokens".

You can't create a UTXO "out of thin air". It is always an output of a transaction (whether the block reward resulting from doing work or the result of "consuming" other UTXOs).

That's more of an attack surface you are describing involving copycat-coins which is prevented by adding "replay protection".

They are actually enforced by a centralized set of rules created and decided by the creators of these silly things.

There already exists token platform creation altcoins that people should use to create such things.

There is always one guy who has some data saying month X is the best or worst performing month for bitcoin
The reality however is that months don't affect the market, the participants do. This is why we are still in sideways market and will continue to remain in this "limbo" for some more time which is what I voted for too.

My guess is that it's either a new change in cloudflare and/or has to be about the settings that bitcointalk is using because for the past day or two it shows up randomly for me too and I don't even use Tor or any kind of IP changing. It hasn't shown up on any other site I visit that has cloudflare, yet.

Yeah, Electrum is mainly "supporting" Taproot through hardware wallets that have the option. More specifically Ledger and Trezor. Other than that it can only send to Bech32m addresses (witness version 1 address encoding used by Taproot) otherwise it can't create nor sign such transactions spending from such addresses.