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).

There is no plans nor even any serious discussions on this topic since everyone knows PoS is garbage from the day it was introduced about a decade ago.

PoW is already optimized, and having ASICs isn't in contradiction to that. Besides there is nothing wrong with having to buy (read make a solid commitment) ASICs to be able to mine bitcoin. In fact that means you can't just flip a switch to start mining and turn it off any time you liked, in case you were mining with your CPU for example. This makes the hashrate more stable.

The issue is not about something working, the problem is how it is working. A centralized shitcoin is also working but that doesn't mean creating a centralized shitcoin is the way to go.

There are a couple of reasons. For starters people are usually introduced to bitcoin first and then find out about altcoins, or even if it is the other way around (eg. finding out about shittokens like NFTs) they eventually realize that the only viable cryptocurrency that is actually offering utilities is bitcoin so they all eventually end up wanting to own bitcoin.

As people start accumulating bitcoin, some of them will start thinking about ways to increase their "wealth". That means investing the bitcoins they already have and one of the options is by entering the market to start trading bitcoin/fiat or bitcoin/altcoin pairs and to make profit.

This means each time bitcoin price is not making big moves these traders tend to move to altcoin market and trade them more. Which is why we see more pump and dumps in the altcoin market during stable periods (even short ones) and we see altcoins get dumped each time bitcoin starts making a big move up or down. This is because people dump their altcoins to rush back to the bitcoin market.

That's some interesting data, thanks for the link.
I ran some analysis on it and it shows what we've been saying over the past year. A lot of countries have been abandoning US slowly but surely, some of which are in the Eastern bloc.

Amount-wise we have a total of $253 billion dollar dumped over the specified year (Jan 2022 to Jan 2023) with Japan ($195.5 billion) and China ($174.4 billion) on top as the "biggest dumpers".

Percentage-wise we have Sweden on top with 28% dump which is $15 billion. The more interesting one is the terrorist organization known as Israel that has dumped 28% of its securities and bonds worth $17.7 billion.
After that we have France (21%-$49 billion), Ireland (18%-$55.2 billion), China (17%-$174.4 billion), Thailand (15%-$9.3 billion), Korea (15%-$18 billion), Japan (15%-$195.5 billion), Vietnam (14%-$6 billion), Kuwait (14%-$7.3 billion) as the "top dumpers".

There are of course some interesting names in the list that have been trying to "pump" money into the failing US economy and some of them are the  usual suspects such as UAE that has increased its holdings by $20 billion (45%). Interestingly enough Saudi Arabia (the 51st state) that has actually dumped 7% of its holdings equal to $8.4 billion.
The biggest "pumper" position goes to Belgium with $88.1 billion bought securities and bonds (36% increase). I have to dig deeper for more reliable information but with some quick search Belgium as one of the handful of European countries with LNG terminals have increased its Russian LNG imports by a lot (nearly double). It looks like they were "taxed" by US for the increased income #cashcow

They want control and adoption preventive measures without bringing down the ban hammer. The more people flee their grip by dumping centralized fiat and buy bitcoin, the more they are going to push back and add more restrictions. Specially with the worsening economy, the fear will continue to grow about more people finding the "exit" called bitcoin...

It sounds easy on paper but to truly implement the same algorithm takes a lot more than changing two lines of code. Specifically speaking the normalization method that Electrum uses for both mnemonic and the extra word (AKA passphrase) is very specific and slightly complicated to duplicate. As we can clearly see in this copy you shared the code for normalization is not implemented at all. If we test the html result it also doesn't support other languages and it also doesn't normalize the passphrase correctly. Test vectors can be found here

Nah, the only reason for BIP39 adoption is lack of alternative or better say a "better" alternative. There are two other options and they are, lets say, "challenging to adopt".

- There is what Electrum uses but there is no documentation of the algorithm, you'd have to read the code in python and understand what it does which is not suitable for someone who wants to implement it for another wallet specially if the program language is different. There is also certain features of the algorithm (like being loose about the word list used) which is not something all developers agree is a good idea.

- There is also Aezeed which is pretty new and the algorithm makes implementing it is very complicated because it depends on an cryptography algorithm that is not common at all called AEZ. That means the developer is not being able to find a library/package for it to use in their project like they'd find for something like SHA256. There's is pretty much only the official C implementation on their website which they'd have to write a wrapper around for any other language which is a pain in the butt. It's also an overkill since a mnemonic's strength is in the entropy it uses not the key derivation algorithm under the hood.

It always comes down to the purpose of the project. Bitcoin's purpose was financial sovereignty whereas ethereum's purpose has always been to create a platform where people can make money out of thin air by scamming others.

This is why you can't pull the same thing in bitcoin while you can easily do it in ethereum. Nobody cares about ethereum being a scam itself or being very centralized or raising the stake threshold 64 times as long as everyone has the "potential to make profit", some more than others like the creators holding the ginormous premine. They just keep changing the name of the "dog poop in pretty bags" (ICO, IDO, IBO, IEO, ITO, STO, DeFi, NFT) every now and then and keep selling it to brainless newbies, making a lot of money in the process.

So why shouldn't the creators of this scam platform get a piece of the pie? To be honest I wouldn't even be surprised if some day they added a new rule where every token sale or even every transaction on ethereum platform had to pay them some money in addition to the network fees!

Some services in descending order of profit they make (my own speculation):

• Centralized exchanges like Coinbase, Gemeni, Bittrex, etc.
• Mining hardware manufacturers like Bitmain
• Payment processors like Coinbase and Bitpay
• Gambling sites like Primedice
• Semi-decentralized DEX where they run a server and get paid in trading fees like Bisq
• Semi-decentralized CoinJoin services like the honeypot called Wasabi
• Wallet developers like Electrum running a side-service (TrustedCoin) for their users