FWIW There are always market makers and market manipulators that affect the price but that should not be confused with "controlling the price".

There have been altcoins that were also decentralized, Monero could be considered as a decentralized altcoin. However, many of these altcoins were too insignificant and without innovation to last long or become popular. Usually it is the centralized altcoins that despite having no innovation get pumped and become popular.

To be fair it is not just US that prints money without any cap. Any fiat currency in existence is like that. The only difference is that dollar used to be the dominant global reserve currency for the past couple of decades.

Not always. It's just hat people don't like the constant money printing without limitations that leads to eventual and inescapable inflation.

Not necessarily. When bitcoin price goes up, as a currency your purchasing power increases so you can for example buy more groceries with your bitcoins. In other words you don't have to measure bitcoin price in fiat or convert it to fiat ever.

For exactly what I just explained bitcoin is a currency. But a currency can be an asset too.

The challenge I always have is to convince people not to invest in bitcoin. After all bitcoin is not an investment and it is not meant to give you profit. It is a currency and if you want to introduce it to someone you should introduce it as a currency too. That way they won't have a heart attack each time price has a sudden drop or a sudden rise while using bitcoin the way it was meant to.

That's very interesting, I didn't know that. As someone who is interested in military technologies I would love to read up on more details about this if you can share them. For example what type of weapons are we talking about here?

I'm theorycrafting but because Ukraine doesn't have the air superiority to conduct air raids, so it has to be from afar but certain technologies like the technology to manufacture MRCM/LRCM, MRBM/LRBM is not something you'd just come up with that easily without prior infrastructure and decades of development, also nobody is selling such technologies this easily to anyone least of all to a country at war where it could leak it to the enemy or third parties.

Edit:
I did some research and the only missiles I could find that Ukraine manufactures are very short range ones such as Kite-2 a subsonic cruise missile with less than 300 km range, ОТРК a short range ballistic missile with a range between 50 to 280 km, R-360 Neptun a subsonic anti-ship cruise missle with very short range of 280 km.
Please tell me if I missed anything but it seems like Ukraine's reach has always been kept very limited. To be honest I don't see how there can be a leap from subsonic 300 km range to supersonic 3000 km range. Developing the engine alone is a massive and impossible leap.

That's not entirely accurate. There are in fact two additional costs to using multisig.
The direct cost is the increased fee. A mutisig transaction requires multiple signatures and public keys to be included in each transaction so the transaction size will be bigger than a single-sig transaction. So you pay more fees.
The indirect (or non monetary) cost is the extra effort it takes to set the wallet up correctly and safely and also to keep it safe specially when using the wallet each time you want to create a transaction. Depending on the number of signatures (eg. 7 sig!) it could be a tremendous amount of effort. Not to mention the time it consumes.

OK. Keep your shirt on!

As they say facts are the enemy of truth. It's easy to make up truths and "document" them, it is not easy to to bring up facts.

Where are you storing your bitcoins? In a hot wallet?
What would you do if you found out that a bunch of thieves were planning to rob your house? Will you leave your door open?

I can't explain it any simpler. When there has been multiple terrorist attacks on Iran's facilities using drones and micro-drones like the one on Bushehr power plant a couple of years ago that put it out of service; when Iran is being threatened every day with an attack on its infrastructure, etc. only a fool would ignore the threats and not think about defense.
Moving under ground is called passive defense.

Iran is among the top 3 to 5 countries with most amount of oil, natural gas, lithium and a lot of other natural resources.

It is not a possibility, as a matter of fact there have been at least 20 serious invasion plans on the past 8 POTUS's desks.

• The most recent one in that list were Trump's (as reveled by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gen. Milley in at least 5 occasions the last of which [among other reasons] led to gen. Milley effectively removing his authority as commander in chief to prevent him from what he referred to as "pulling a Reichstag Moment").
• The other serious one I'd say was Bush's (as revealed by many including by general Clarke who says he received direct order from the president to destroy 7 countries [includes Iran] in 5 years).
• Last but not least the oldest was Carter's which was supposed to start with Operation Eagle Claw (aka the dumbest military operation in human history if you read to declassified documents released by Pentagon) to rescue CIA operatives from post revolution Iran to be able to follow that up with a full scale invasion and re-install the pro-US dictator.

Sanctions are the indirect method of regime change, their success rate is not going to change their main purpose.
Basically they are meant to ruin regular people's lives so that they revolt against their own governments just because US ruined their lives! After all that is a page from color revolutions.

They also work well in some cases, like in the case of Iraq. You see contrary to "documented assertions" the project called "invasion of Iraq" started at least in early 1990s in Clinton administration not in 2003 with Bush. The start was with sanctions. Why? To target the economy, create famine, starve people (I mean that literary, look up oil for food in '95), create unrest so that people revolt and from inside pressure the Iraqi regime to accept US demands making it easy to invade in about 10 years.

Now guess what those demands were? In short disarmament. Basically Iraq to give up its military capabilities, not WMDs no no, they knew very well Saddam didn't have any for example chemical bombs left from the days Germany+US+France were selling it to him to drop on his neighbor, Iran; but instead they demanded Iraq to give up things like ballistic missiles that could reach US bases in surrounding countries from which they initiated the invasion, the anti-ship missiles and fighters that could reach and sink US navy ships that were bombing their cities in 2003, etc.
Guess what were the main target in operations like Southern Watch in mid 1990's? Air defense mostly but also civilians. For example nearly 700 civilians were killed or wounded in one operation in 1998 to both soften Iraq air defense for 2003 invasion and also to create more unrest in Iraq.
Guess how did US bomb Iraq with 800 Tomahawks when the invasion officially began in 2003? With the USN and carrier groups that Iraq could no longer hit since the regime accepted the disarmament!

Now with a little bit of history, JCPOA can be seen in another light. Specially when you put that together with different US demands of Iran that had nothing to do with nukes but targeted Iran's economy, civilian sector and of course military capabilities just like Iraq's in 1990's.

From what I've seen so far the "consensus" seems to be on a sideways market which I also agree with. There is a chance that in the coming months (Summer mostly) the market could see some excitement with some big rises breaking out into the $30k+ region but I still think this whole year is also going to be like 2022 because of the recession in the world that is not going to go away any time soon.

You sure have a weird way of putting some of these points.
Not entirely correct. There are loads of altcoins with capped supply like bitcoin, some even have less max supply than bitcoin but they do not have any value.
In other words scarcity itself does not "lead to value", the utility is the only reason why something has value. Scarcity decides the level of that value.

Why are you excluding China?!

Bitcoin has intrinsic value because it offers a valuable and unique utility as the only working decentralized money in existence. Not because someone else or some country says it does.

What does Coinbase, a centralized exchange and a custodial wallet have to do anything with bitcoin's anonymity?!! I hope you know that people shouldn't even be using custodial wallets to store their coins...

There is not such thing as BRC-20 tokens, they are NOT tokens to begin with, simply because it is not part of the Bitcoin protocol. What they falsely refer to as "tokens" are arbitrary data injected into the regular bitcoin transactions by exploiting a vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol.

That means there is nothing to store but regular bitcoin transactions, ergo you can use any regular bitcoin wallet to store these regular bitcoin transactions!
The only thing you can't do is to create them because to do that you need to download a possibly malicious software that performs this exploit to create these types of transactions.

There was no coupling to be decoupled! This is also not the first time bitcoin charts look nothing like the stock market charts. The most recent one is the 110% bitcoin price rise from January to April while something like S&P only went up about 3% and something like NASDAQ got dumped -13%.
The oldest one was also a few years back, the same time people were talking about "correlation" was when bitcoin started shooting to the moon from $3k bottom while the stock market continued dumping during the COVID19 Pandemic.

The actual trend was bitcoin market manipulators were manipulating the price by convincing weak hands that whenever US stock market dumps they should also panic sell their bitcoins. Which they succeeded in a lot of occasions to cause panic sell each time US stock market dumped over the past couple of years!

It's pretty simple, wars aren't won against invaders if they are fought in your own country. They are won if they are fought in the enemy territory. But Ukraine does not have the permission to do that. United States is simply not allowing Ukraine army to attack Russian mainland and infrastructure such as airfields, weapons factories, etc. They neither give Ukraine any weapons capable of doing that nor do they allow them to use what they already have (fighter jets and some medium range rockets to hit Russia). The only thing US allows Ukraine to do is to fight Russia in Ukrainian soil with strategies that would only prolong the war not win it such as delaying the counter offensive for so long that it became a nearly impossible task.

Historically speaking, such invasions can only end when the invader's home is threatened. The most recent one is the invasion of Yemen. For about 8 years the US-Saudi coalition was doing a hundred times worse thing to Yemenis as Russia is doing in Ukraine. The invaders were forced into a ceasefire and withdrawal immediately after the Armed Forces of Yemen started hitting them in their homes (airfields, oil facilities, weapons storages, etc.).

This is just one of many reasons why this is an American war. Many of the US officials have already admitted that this is a war they've started and they are dictating how it goes since it is an "investment".
Not to mention that this is exactly the good ol' Nixon Doctrine, word by word.

$25k has proven to be a decent support that is not going to be broken that easily (I mean break and stay below). As for the trend bitcoin will always be bullish in the long term but the question is about the time it would start entering the bullish trend. For now I don't see the sideways trend changing and I still believe it is all about the overall global economical situation which is "severely strained".

The solution to any problem is to first find the reason for that problem (the root cause)!

In this case when people are suggesting bigger blocks or second layer or etc. they are ignoring the main reason for the problem. The congestion and the resulting fee spike was because of the Ordinals Attack, as some users pointed out. This means the solution to this particular problem is to find a "fix" to prevent the attack itself. Otherwise even if all transactions were to be moved to L2 for instance, the fees would still be high because the spam attack will continue.

Meh. This news is not big enough to lead to attraction of "huge" investment. Not to mention there are two other reasons why this statement is not true. First is that this is more about regulation than adoption, which means more restrictions and monitoring, specially considering the attitude of China towards bitcoin. It is not like they adopted bitcoin as legal tender.
Secondly in the current economy, with recession and everything, high risk investments (which the crypto industry falls under) are very rare and if they happen they are going to be small. Also one of the reasons why bitcoin price hasn't gone to the moon yet.

You are asking the wrong question. The real question is "can" they stop raising the interest rates?

The answer is too complicated because the choices are all bad. If they stop raising the interest rate, the inflation will start climbing up faster, specially since the oil rich countries are keeping the price up for that exact reason (like the recent production cut by the US cash cow Saudi Arabia!). High energy price will keep the inflation high in US without high interest rates.
On top of that we also have dedollarisation that is sending all the trillions of dollars of unbacked printed dollars back to America and their resulting inflation. In other words if they stop increasing the rates, we'll start seeing what printing fiat really does to the value of it. And dedollarisation is just getting started and is currently on a small scale but it is growing...

On the other hand if they keep the interests high and increase it more, the recession will grow and ruin the economy slowly but surely. Not to mention that it will destroy "production" as it would cease to be profitable to produce anything in US.
The other bigger problem which is showing itself in the long run, is the defaults that will increase over time as people won't be able to afford to pay their debt. This could lead to more banks collapsing too.

The only way forward for US is to find a way to bring the oil price down to somewhere around $30 which is impossible without stopping the war with Russia (and a bunch of other things). Even the release of the US strategic reserves (which are at the lowest at this point and will take years to refill) couldn't help bring it down that low and this year US won't have the same reserves to release and bring the price down as we get close to winter...

Isn't the sticky topics here like this one enough already? Newbies aren't paying attention to that already, and I don't think any additional "policy" would change anything.

That's what I said and that is the reason why Ukraine should not have let Russia to build defenses up and making any penetration into the defense lines nearly impossible.

The news and stats coming out, although unreliable, are telling a different story. What I've seen is both Russia and Ukraine fight the same way with high casualties.

The same situation with lack of training, rainy terrain, slow equipment delivery, etc. all existed on both sides with the difference that at that time Russia was advancing and Ukraine was listening to US and not attacking their weak positions at the time. Now they have to attack much stronger positions that are greatly solidified.

We can be hopeful but this is not the first time a statement like this is being made. At the beginning of this invasion they were saying similar things that Russia will "end" in a few months.
As I said many times in the past year, as long as Ukraine is fighting for United States instead of for Ukraine, this war will not end. It will continue in a deadlock that is meant to slowly weaken Russia over at least a decade.

I guess only time will tell if this time is really different or it's like before...

It is not always about the number of poultry but the production cost. These poultry "farms" need electricity, heating/cooling, vaccination and most importantly food. Due to inflation and energy price rises the production cost has gone up everywhere, on top of that because of the food crisis the animal feed has gotten more expensive over the past year (despite the ups and downs it is still more expensive compared to 1.5 years ago).
This is why the egg price has gone up in most countries.

Why choose between one or the other? Why not use both?
We still live in a fiat dominated world and goods are priced in fiat. So your website should show the prices in terms of fiat (which is more stable too) and then include the conversion to bitcoin on the side. In addition you can provide the option to switch to a different representation of the value in bitcoin, satoshi, mili/micro satoshi, etc. So the customer can see the prices in what they feel more comfortable with because no matter what option you choose, some people will like it and some won't so it is better to have more options.
The choice could also be stored in their account (assuming they make an account to purchase) or in a browser cookie if they don't so that it could be reapplied in future visits.

If we want to dot all the i's and cross the t's, the chance of finding a collision is never absolute zero, that's by design. But the chance of it happening is so small that it might as well be zero because realistically it will never happen.

That's what I said from day one of this conflict and the reason is not that they can't or don't have the means, the reason is simply because the Armed Forces of Ukraine is now a multinational army with troops with little to no training and no coordination and no love for Ukraine (since many of them aren't even from Ukraine) and most importantly they are obeying United States and are fighting for US (part of Nixon's Doctrine).

Take the recent failure of the counter attack. It failed because they waited too long (or rather ordered to wait too long by US). That wait gave Russia more than enough time to solidify its position in the occupied regions, transfer equipment, spread mines in routes leading to their positions, increase the firepower (shells, etc.) that could bomb any progressing forces in the flatlands of Ukraine.
What they should have done was to blow up the Kakhovka (?) dam a lot sooner and started the offensive from the northern river bank to cut off supply routes and even gain access to Crimea.
Blowing it up now is not helping since there is a long way to go and the progress is met with constant shelling and mass casualties!

There is a good chance that we are going to see another wave of food crisis soon considering how the exports of grains have dropped and most importantly the fertilizer shortage of the past year is going to show its effects this year...