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.

Technically every script we make in Bitcoin is a smart contract. A more accurate statement is that Bitcoin doesn't have smart contracts that let you create tokens including NFTs.

I hope for above $60k, like many others, but it doesn't look realistic anymore because as I've said many times in the past the global economic situation is still dire and with the recession growing we can't expect massive amount of money to come into the market creating a big >2x rise. Best case scenario is small rises and above $40k seems more realistic heading towards $50k by the end of the year. Again if the global economic situation doesn't get worse (ie. if it remains just as bad as it is now) and if it improves (ie. recession goes down) we can then expect bigger rises.

I don't disagree with this question which is why I said the idea itself is weird.
On the other hand, the solution I offered is only aiming to solve the main flaw in OP's idea that was reducing the key's security while making the assumption that there is a reason for having such a scheme. That is from purely a problem solving perspective.

It's because of the difference between the format used for each drive (your system's storage and the USB disk). Your HDD/SSD which is the source is usually using the newer and more reliable NTFS format while your USB disk which is the destination is using the older and less reliable FAT/FAT32 format hence the warning.

To solve it you should format your USB disk (create a backup of any files you have on there) using the newer and more reliable NTFS format if you can.

Maybe in a very weird way we could find a utility for something like this. For example having an indicator of what the private key was used for (eg. MyHotWallet). But as others mentioned you are reducing the security of the private key so here is a better idea: why don't you use a different encoding and change the algorithm itself?

that means instead of modifying the key itself, you could just add extra bits on top of the untouched random 256-bit key to indicate the utility.
You don't even have to reinvent the wheel, there is Bech32[1] encoding that is very suitable for this purpose. You just replace the HRP part with the string you want. It can contain between 1 to 83 US-ASCII characters then use the key bytes as the data part without modifying it at all. So your final key string would become something like this: MyFirstBitcoinAddress1{unchanged 256-bit encoded key} where 1 is the default separator.

I used a version byte (=0) and the BIP350 (Bech32m)[2] in the following:
5JYkir7... is a randomly generated key without modification and second line MyFirs.... is the different encoding of the same exact key without any difference between the key bytes whatsoever.

This has so many benefits:
- It doesn't reduce key security
- The restriction on the size of the "string" you use at the beginning is big enough (83 chars) to contain any note
- You don't have to write that much code to guess the range like you did here, everything is pretty straight forward and you can use already existing Bech32 encoding libraries
- The code and the result is neat and is easy to verify so the chance of bugs is minimal
- The encoding is fast and has a checksum and error detection built in.
- It can contain a version for future expansion of the algorithm

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0173.mediawiki
[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0350.mediawiki

No, we can't know the range of the private key by only having the public key. Searching random ranges also doesn't give us any information without actually finding the public key.
In other words if that were possible you could just look at any random public key, guess its range then limit the search space and brute force to find the private key.

Growth? Maybe a picture can help you see this "growth" better.


I don't see "growth" in this year long trend, more like a dead cat bounce. It has to go back to near $1000 billion for it to be called "growth".

This actually looks somewhat like the bitcoin price situation. It has massively crashed down from $70k and has only recently recovered to $30k. We can't say it has "grown" and things are fine until at least we see $50k+. Of course if you zoom in, it would look like "growth"!

That's your statement not others. China never "rejected" US bonds, they dumped it because they wanted to reduce the amount of risk they were taking since US dollar started tanking (crash postponed by hugely increasing interest rates) and US-China are practically in an economic war. This is also not the only thing they did. They've been pulling out of each other's markets for the past couple of years. For example in the most recent news Apple revealed plans to pull a big part of its production out of China and move it to India.

Although fiat and shitcoins look similar but there is a major difference between them which is the "utility". At the end of the day the shitcoin has no utilities which is why it literary collapses and dies but fiat does have and will continue to have utility as a medium of exchange. This is why it  doesn't collapse the same way a shitcoin does.

In other words the similarity stops at the uncapped nature and the fact that there is a catastrophe ahead for both of them because of their bad designs.

You stopped making sense in this last paragraph, specially since you seem to have forgotten that the stablecoins are the biggest shitcoins specially the most centralized ones that something like Binance owns/creates.

I don't know about a microchip possibility but what you describe can be implemented into an application that you run on your phone. A hot wallet that stores your keys and transactions (SPV type wallet) and has access to exchange APIs to fetch the bitcoin price live in your local fiat terms.

You can never find a way around on-chain transactions without sacrificing something like decentralization. Even second layer depends on on-chain transaction confirmation. That's because bitcoin is designed this way.

Yes, it is.

This sounds a lot like centralization that we've seen in many of the Proof of anything-but-work algorithms where the developer decides who runs a "seed" or "witness" node that decides which transaction to go through and which doesn't.

The first case can not be enforced globally (someone can decide to store a copy) and the second case should be enforced locally meaning the user's client has to send the email itself not a third party having the content of the email!

P.S. Regardless of my criticism I'm curious to read the details of the project you have in mind.

Some users are mentioning Taxes and KYC as criteria for "bitcoin friendliness". I have to say I disagree. Not having any taxes on bitcoin doesn't make a country bitcoin friendly and having KYC doesn't make one not-friendly. It depends on how much restrictions the government is placing in front of bitcoin adoption. KYC could exist and yet not restrict adoption, meanwhile they could have 0 tax on bitcoin and yet shut your bank account if you use an exchange!

Don't they charge income tax instead of capital gains tax which can be up to 45%?

Most countries have some set of rules for bitcoin that can be changed in a blinking of an eye if they start feeling threatened. Only a handful of countries have banned bitcoin which can be considered "the worst" and a handful of countries that have actually and fully adopted bitcoin that can be considered "the best" like El-Salvador.
Additionally as long as you are not only trading or involved with centralized services (exchanges, processors, etc.) as an individual using a decentralized currency you shouldn't be affected by the rules.

The moment you consider using blockchain for projects like E-mail or social media is the moment they fall apart. I generally see two problems
- First is the fact that decentralized blockchain is a public ledger and should be stored and verified by every peer. In a payment system like bitcoin it makes some sense to do it specially since there is incentive, however it makes no sense to store everyone else's emails in your node or even relay their emails to propagate it through the network!
- Second is the way you would want to secure this chain. Any algorithm you use needs people to have an incentive to contribute to its securing, an E-mail service can not have incentive like a payment system (ie. pay to send email) or it becomes less attractive to use.
As a bonus issue: it is going to be impossible to prevent spam.

A P2P chat like messaging system is different though, it needs no "chain" and it is much easier to build and make decentralized.

Why would an email need to execute smart contracts?

You want to understand how Point Multiplication in Elliptic Curve Cryptography works for the process of computing public keys from private keys. This link has some easy-to-understand content: https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-relatively-easy-to-understand-primer-on-elliptic-curve-cryptography/

From public key to address, the links you shared are already explaining that.

Considering keys and addresses, the only difference between MainNet and TestNet is the version byte in Base58 encoding of P2PKH and P2SH addresses and the human readable part of the Bech32 encoding of P2WPKH and P2WSH addresses. The rest are the same.

China is literary the second biggest dumper after Japan dumping a massive $174.4 billion in a year as I pointed out above in details.

$19.9 billion in $849.0 billion is 2.34% increase not 10%!

It is an interesting short term move though, specially since overall move is still dump down from $1033.8 billion.
It could possibly be linked to the interest rate hike in the same period from 4.33% to 4.83% making this move profitable in short term. Which could also explain the stop and the small $400 million decrease on 2023-04.

A cold storage is just a signer and not much else, so the only thing it holds is your keys to sign a transaction you give it. The "consolidation" or generally speaking the handling of UTXOs and transactions should take place in another wallet that is online and does NOT have any private keys (only public keys/addresses) instead of your cold storage. If you try to go around this restriction (eg. manually importing UTXOs) your wallet could stop being "cold" (ie be considered compromised).