CBDC is pretty simple in concept. Money that is exclusively available digitally. There will be no difference, other than the lack of physical currency (i.e., banknotes). You cannot understand the difference when trading fiat with CBDC electronically; it'll be like trading national currencies via some Internet broker.

I don't understand how a CBDC can completely forbid its users from buying bitcoin, unless there has to be a justification for every transaction happening, which besides utopian is neither going to work in practice.

I've always like that analogy. I mean, remember the Internet FUD, and then realize that Bitcoin's FUD is even greater than that. I don't want to sound very optimistic, though, because I think the Internet is more useful than bitcoin.

Yeah, but how often is that happening anymore? I mean, we're like in mid 2023, and the price is barely moving due to news nowadays.

We can't actually. That's one of the reasons people are afraid of deep learning. The better it is, the less capable we are at distinguishing it. If you write a program, that learns how I'm writing, responding, which are my preferences, interests etc., then you can clone BlackHatCoiner. At that point, only my digital signature will be sufficient for proving I'm indeed me.

But at the moment it isn't so concerning. I'm myself detecting and reporting newbies who use ChatGPT. But we won't distinguish that forever. I suspect that, at some point in the future, there will be users talking, who will not exist.

There's no such thing as "ungenerated address". All addresses are generated. What counts as "generated" to you, is an address with a known private key. But they all exist, hence are generated. Even LoyceV's shared "burning address" tool, is actually generating addresses; it just skips the private key part and chooses the RIPEMD-160 hash instead of producing it with some SHA-256 hash of the public key.

All Bitcoin addresses exist, and that's the way you should see it. We just don't know who holds the key for which.

Yes. When using lightning in Electrum, you're actually running a lightning node, therefore it's self-custody. This presentation shows briefly how it works. The tl;dr is that you're not forfeiting the ownership of your coins to some third party, but due to the nature of lightning, the user should pay a watchtower to watch for cheating attempts, unless they're willing to watch it themselves which requires to run the software non-stop.

Calm response: I'm not pretending I'm having moral principles. I'm not a hypocrite of that kind. I'm actually living by some morals, lots of which I wouldn't compromise for a short-term profit. While I hadn't considered cryptocurrencies from this perspective before, observing the altcoin industry and recognizing that I don't truly value what I own, getting involved into that market for profit only would be a moral compromise.

I mean, completely irrelevant? I cannot control how fiat currency works, nor do I have the expertise to; I'm living in a world where it works as is, and I'm forced to use it. However, I'm definitely not forced to attempt to profit from purposeless, financial schemes.

I don't want to hold or trade something that has no utility. It's just a principle I live by, where I only want to possess items that truly demonstrate their value and usefulness. This can be extremely challenging sometimes, especially when it comes to things beyond cryptocurrencies. Verifying whether a habit or a product is as useful as I imagine it to be is an ongoing process. It challenges my values and reminds me to prioritize what truly matters every day.

Why would I want to be involved in this fraudulent scheme? Acknowledging it serves no real purpose and is just a scam with fancy-sounding words, making money out of it means being part of the deception too. I believe screwing my morals in such a way is probably one of the last things I would do when I'm in need of money.

You can make one yourself, to avoid being caught for buying one. Just buy yourself a Raspberry Pi zero, a WaveShare LCD display, a Pi zero compatible camera, a micro SD and with a little DIY hand-work, you've made a SeedSigner, which if you're asking me, it's better than a hardware wallet as it's really airgapped.

But, true, if it's illegal, better just get yourself an airgapped machine with Electrum (preferably using Tails as it comes pre-installed).

Quite obvious. Large lightning nodes which are the default hubs for custodial wallets have respectable part of the network's funds. Wallet of Satoshi is a good example of a custodial wallet with large capacity; they have 200 BTC, in more than two thousand channels. That's like 4% of the total bitcoins of the network's capacity.

When it did exist, yes, but isn't BlueWallet's hub shut down?

Nevermind.

I'm not feeling certain if you really want to know. Every day when I wake up, a thought lingers in my subconscious - a dreadful scenario that could render my wealth worthless. I would never advise anyone to invest in bitcoin unless they are prepared to throw that money in the trash can. For some, it might seem like an unreasonable risk since they lack access to insider information (which is, again, what sets the rules).

However, I can't disregard all the utility it offers, with people using and needing electronic cash. I can't overlook the astonishing facts about anonymous (or pseudonymous) transactions, decentralized money minting, collective transaction processing, Proof-of-Work, etc. It would be unforgivable not to trust my instincts on this one and witness its rise as I had anticipated. Regretting not taking action outweighs the regret of acting.

When it comes to altcoins, I don't see the same potential.

Definitely not the latter.

Financially speaking, I have become more educated. I don't hold any other asset, though. So, my portfolio's worth varies from time to time, according to the price of bitcoin. I wouldn't say bitcoin has taught me to be financially dependent; I think that's rather difficult, and can't come to you without lots of action. No, bitcoin holders from the early days aren't counted.

What I do acknowledge, though, is that bitcoin has given me the interest to study money. As a politically neutral currency, it raises you concerns of whether the financial system is working as envisioned, and pinpoints its flaws.

It does mean that they all have the potential to fail if they share similar properties. For instance, when two dog coins have already failed, it would be foolish to believe that the thousands of other worthless tokens won't experience a similar drop in value. We are all aware that these tokens are not taken seriously; they are simply fabricated, zero-sum financial schemes. Another illustration is the Proof-of-Staked copycat tokens, whose creators aim to generate hype.

I can't, because I don't see good opportunity for earning from gambling either.

There are going to be coins robbed, no doubt. However, I wouldn't take it for granted there will be millions. Sure, there are millions in P2PK, but perhaps they get spent until then; especially after the cryptographic community accepts some quantum safe alternative.

I'm genuinely curious to which math you're referring to. Those I know, which are discrete math and cryptographic-inclusive math, are certainly not pure and simple! 

Besides not using that money and living with God knows what as you're saying, you also have to assume that:

• the minimum wage will not change (lol).
• you will still be working at the same place (double lol!).
• the bitcoin price will not change until you manage to accumulate one (triple lol!).

Also, in Greece the minimum wage is 780 EUR, so I'm not quite sure how you calculated 1,018 days. I find more than 1,150.

Wasabi is inferior in privacy than Joinmarket (for obvious reasons), but speaking out of experience with Joinmarket, I've got to mention these two big downsides:

• Expensive for market takers. The TL;DR of Joinmarket, is that there are always some makers online, so when a user who isn't a whale wants to mix their coins, they don't have to wait, but they have to pay the mining fee for all the makers' inputs. Makers don't pay their inputs, takers do, and when there are 9 to 12 inputs, few of which are theirs, then the cost of coinjoining can become really high.
• Not exclusive to Joinmarket, but it isn't realistic to be a market maker if you don't own lots of money. Software does include a default of 12.5% chance of ignoring fidelity bonds, but it's really improbable to be picked if you're not going to see this seriously.

I have also talked about this in here: https://github.com/JoinMarket-Org/joinmarket-clientserver/issues/1506

Actually, even P2P, decentralized exchanges do depend on other price indices, like centralized exchanges'. For example, you can check on Bisq[1]. It fetches the latest price data from various providers once per minute. The more the providers, the less it depends on each one as it calculates the average.

Which currencies are "pegged" to their USD value? And what do you mean exactly?

[1] https://bisq.wiki/Bisq_Price_Indices

Yes, but if only one co-signer makes their setup airgapped, it is superior than an airgapped single-sig wallet in terms of security.

One very recommended solution for handling multi-sig wallets is SeedSigner. It lowers the cost of multi-sig security and setup of an airgapped environment. You don't have to carry abandoned computers, and the process of airgapping it is much less complex.

I'd actually trust a centralized exchange more than that. At least if you register on some popular, regulated exchange you know that you're sending your coins to some licensed company. Sure, it can go bankrupt or/and hacked, but at least you know it isn't your fault. There is no way to know with certainty you made some mistake here during wallet creation. The software is closed-source; the developers can rip you off, blame it to you, and you could have nothing to say in your defense.

That's probably the best way to burn coins without anyone knowing you've burned them, but it's quite the worst way to do coin burning in general. As already said, these coins aren't actually burned. Spending them would require finding HASH160* collisions; they are perfectly existent with current rules (which have no business to change), even though there isn't evidence of feasibly finding such collisions.

If you want to burn coins, and be certain that they aren't spendable by some future, crazy-genius guy who solved some old, abandoned mathematical problem, just utilize OP_RETURN.

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* HASH160(x) is RIPEMD-160(SHA256(x))

That's the problem I'm trying to point out. The user can't just study the market well, because they can't reach everything. There's private data that is inaccessible, and owned by the few big folks who do the manipulation. Unless you don't think that info is very important for the user (and neglecting it would make the study "well") then they can never be confident they've studied properly.

By the way, I'm assuming the user can perfectly filter public information, which is also not true. "Filtering" is subjective, because different users will prioritize different parameters that affect the price.

This argument holds as much water as the S2F, or the one which says we will have bull markets every 4 years. There's no evidence other than "look in the chart, it will probably repeat".