My limited knowledge leads me to believe that BTC is truly independent of the U.S. dollar, and of all the U.S. markets.  However, watching the value of BTC, and indeed pretty much all of the crypto currencies, it appears they are very strongly influenced by markets.

Indeed, I often think that cryptos should move in opposition to U.S. markets and fiat currencies.  If something makes the market weak, resulting in a drop in values, the cryptos should hold their own and even go up.  Obviously my thoughts don’t reflect the real world.

So,…, what do you think BTC, and cryptos in general, will do in the event of a U.S. government default? 

I would really like to see that.  If too much to post here I will PM an email address.

BTW:  As I was going through this thread a few minutes ago there was a post where someone provided a list of about eight links to various descriptions of the process of private to public key.  I have some hand tremors and while looking through the list I clicked something and went to a totally different page.  Now when I scroll through the posts of this thread I cannot find that post again.  Is there something I might have done that will hide a post?  Something that will unhide the post?

I don't agree with that by force concept in the slightest.  No one's property need be taken.  It might be the case that all the mining hardware becomes useless, but that does not meet the concept expressed of "... by force,..."

No, I don’t see that at all.  Bitcoin is not what it is only because of the mining.  If it the first decentralized currency.  It would stay the same and continue to operate in the same manner.  All the current operating relationships between nodes would remain the same.   Consider this please:  What will Bitcoin become when all the coins have been mined?  Will it be something else?  I don’t think so.
I am a newbie here but it looks new to me.

---

Completely agree.  Still, the amount of energy can be reduced significantly.  It will take significant thought.

---

I don't see anything there, and so far anywhere, that explains how Bitcoin is more secure because there is mining.  Well, acknowledging my lack of mathematic skills, at least not that I recognize.

On the page about addresses the first three line items are
0 - Private ECDSA Key
1 - Public ECDSA Key
2 - SHA-256 hash of 1

For item 2 it indicates to create it via a hash from 1.   But I don't recognize anything that states how to get from 0 to 1.  What is that transformation?

I would really like to hear about that and see your code.
A large part is the question of what transformations are applied.  I cannot find the post from here right now but someone provided this link:
https://gobittest.appspot.com/Address
Its the best I have seen.  But in this one, it shows item 0 the private ECDSA Key, then item 1 the Public ECDSA Key.  I don't see anything about how to translate from private to public.

"... inevitability of lost coins"

That is a really interesting concept.  While not mathematically inevitable, human nature makes it, in practice, inevitable.  This should be given serious consideration.  But it will be very far from easy or simple. 

When are there two few coins?  That might be determined by some combination of the cost of coins becoming too high, and/or the churn/turnover rate of coins in circulation becomes very high.  Both of those are almost completely subjective.  But maybe some top-flight number crunchers can get together and make some objective criteria.

Once that is determined, then the path to resolve the situation needs to be considered.  I see a couple of possible solutions, but this conversation is already complex so omit that for now.

I visited the site, and do not agree with everything.  Consider the future when all the coins have been mined.  There is no further mining.  If mining is what makes Bitcoin secure, then when there is no further mining, Bitcoin will no longer be secure.

I am reasonably confident that the mining of the last coin, and the complete lack of additional mining, will not make Bitcoin insecure.  If not then, then it will not now.

My apologies for not replying sooner, but, the two recommended pages are far better than anything else I have found.  I am just not good at arranging my search string and found neither of them.

Thank you so much for your time and patience.

Tromp: Not only is that next-to-impossible for nodes to come to agreement on right now (you need a concensus algorithm for that in turn), but it's utterly impossible to verify current uptimes in the future when nodes must verify the history from scratch.

Bitcoin already has a consensus algorithm, to verify each block as it is written to the chain.  Its already there, another instance is not at all impossible.

NotATether: This is almost like Proof of Stake except it rewards nodes for doing no work at all and without locking up an incentive such as crypto. In other words, block mining abuse will be rampant with such a model.

Yes, it is almost POS.  But no, its not a matter of doing no work.  The node must be up and online for some minimum period of time.  Block mining will be gone so there is no abuse of it.  Remember, I suggested that the nodes be monitored as being on line for some period of time before making the eligible for new BTCs.

ETFbitcoin:  I don’t know how to respond to this post.

LoyceV: The problem I am concerned with is the energy being spent to mine coins. Other than earning some coins, it provides no advantage.  From my readings there are thousands of mining rigs running 24/7 and only one of them gets a coin reward for each block.  That means that the energy spent mining is wasted for all but one mining rig.  Again, the energy consumed by mining is quite significant.

Mocacinno:  Your proposal would make mining completely unprofitable, …

Yes, it would do that. It would make mining obsolete.  It would stop the consumption of all that energy.

… completely wipe out the security of the chain. 

I don’t see why.  There is a consensus algorithm for verifying blocks.  Use the same “concept” for determining the rewards for being a node.

Look to the future.  Eventually all the coins will be mined.  There will be no further mining.  Nodes will be profitably only for transaction fees.  My basic suggestion is simple:  Move that concept closer in the future and stop spending huge amounts of energy on mining.

And yes, I am sure my concept has some holes and weaknesses.  However, the problems have already been solved in the current system.  Use the same concepts for distributing the new coins until the list of new coins have been exhausted.

Climate change is real. It is here right now.  It is causing disasters, right now. It is caused by humans.  Put it into the equation.

I don't see why.  The list of nodes is not that long.  When a neighbor pops up, note its identity, add it to the list, along with something about when it is active, and tell the remainder of the network about it.  When a node is acknowledged by N other nodes, it gets verified and added to the list of known nodes.  If its uptime is greater than X%, for Y days/months, it becomes eligible for a reward. 

Well, if I were writing code for a wallet that would be there.

I have read moderately on POW and read about the huge amount of energy required to earn each BTC.  There are other ways to distribute new coins and I find it a bit concerning as to how few are suggested.  The time of 120 years to mine the remaining 2.4 million Bitcoins is a bit absurd. Here is just one possible method.

Let’s say 10 years for the remainder. At 144 blocks per day that is 6,307,200 blocks in 10 years.  Divide 2.4 million BTC by that many blocks to get about 0.38 BTC per block.

Create and maintain a list of all the bitcoin nodes that have been active for some period of time, maybe a year or some other time period.  Node owners must have a certain amount of time invested before becoming eligible for payments.   

As each block is completed, select one node, maybe at random, and the owner of the node gets 0.38 BTC.  Take that node off the list to received block rewards for some period of time to allow for sharing the wealth.

After the last BTC has been distributed, profits are derived from the work needed to certify each block.  Each of the, for example, first 32 nodes that are involved in the original certification of a block gets some percentage of the fees for that block.  Maybe provide a sliding scale based upon the time the node has been active.  Those on online for longer periods get a bit more.  When a node receives a transaction fee, maybe take it off the distribution list for some period of time, share the wealth.

This is just a suggestion and can certainly be refined for fairness.  Any thoughts?

As I read the OP the question that popped up in my mind is:  If I were to have my cold wallet stolen, or if I were to steal one, what is the possibility of selecting seed words at random and gaining access.  I also presume that the seed is not global, but local to each wallet and to each account on the wallet.  A search stated that there are 2048 seeds in the library.

I entered some numbers in an Excel work book for this.  With a library of 2048 seeds, presuming repeats are not allowed, the probably of getting the first one right is 1/2048.  For the second one, divide by 2047, then by 2046, etc.  By the time we get to the

11th word:  1 out of 2.58789 * 10^^36
23rd word: 1 out of 1.27862* 10^^76

That is about the size of the private key.

I suspect that after some number of tries each cold wallet will do something like: 
A) delete its private key(s).  Not the best, but at least the thief is not rewarded. 
B)  each time a bad sequence is provided slow down the response.  Start with, maybe 1 second of additional time, then double the time for each attempt.  It could write the number of attempts into a storage location and reset it upon getting the correct seed.

When I did a seed check with my wallet, there are a few seconds delay before it was ready for the next word.  That would introduce sufficient time to deter any thief.
Is this reasonable?  Or do I have a flaw in my understanding?

Does the term “crap altcoins” refer to everything but Bitcoin?  Or does it refer the, let’s say, “poorly designed and implemented alt coins?”
 
If the latter, then we all need to reminder ourselves that for every good creation there will always be those who create a cheap knock-off and try to cheat others of their money/resources.

If the former, that’s a problem, maybe even bigger.  No single currency like Bitcoin can ever serve the entire U.S.  Much less the world.  There is about $45 billion in currency in the U.S. as of 2019,  per the response for a google search.  But the GDP is about $23 trillion, about $23 thousand times a billion.  If we used only U.S. dollars, each one would have to be spend over 500 times each year.  (its much more complicated than this, but I think the point is valid.)  I just visited coinmarketcap.com and added the billions column for the top 10 coins.  It is about $707 billion with bitcoin taking the lion’s share at $327.  These are world based currencies, not just U.S. 

Another google search for Visa transaction is 24,000 per second with Mastercard at 5,000 per second.  The Tether coin has a 24 hours transaction of $65 billion compare to Bitcoin of $19 billion.  Those transaction levels simply cannot be attained with a Bitcoin type of foundation, a single thread that tracks every single transaction.

So, I say, let's be wary of, and maybe even have a watch list of the “crap altcoins” but let's not be arrogant about Bitcoin.

I have read that the SHA-256 and the RIPEMD-160 are both used to produce the public key, then the address.  Am I wrong about that?
And from the reply I presume that the hex or base58 version is converted to binary before the conversion?

Edit
I just looked at the only SHA-256 code I could find and its input is std:string
Maybe this is not what I am looking for.
Do all the engineers that make wallets use math guys with Master's degrees?  Or can they find example code and detailed procedures that I cannot find?

At about 7:50 the narrator states they will call the function and not use the code to implement the function.
That does not help me.
Thanks for the reply.

As I read about Bitcoin and the keys used, a thought occurs to me.
When the value of an example key is shown, it usually takes one of three forms:
Hex looks like:  50863ad64a8  …
Base58 looks like:  1AQXmgRZTXr …
And on occasion binary looks like: 01010000100 …
But these are all representations so we can view them.  Computers deal with binary but we cannot display the binary directly, just the ASCII representation of the number.  When our wallets begin with a private key, do they translate to binary or do they start by hashing the hex or Base58 ASCII representation of the number?

Seems to me its quite a bit harder than at first appears. 
Re: “you take a generator point of secp256k1 elliptic curve…”
There is much more to that than immediately meets the eye.  I tried reading about elliptic curve and have no idea of how to implement it into code.  I looked at your Python and see many steps in there I don’t know how to translate into C code.  I don’t know Python.

The best I have found so far is here: https://academy.bit2me.com/en/como-se-crea-una-direccion-bitcoin/
But when the private key they used is put in an on-line translate page, the numbers do not match the public key of that page.  Well, that is to say I have not been able to produce identical results.

I have code to do SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160, and wrote some test apps that does those translations, and they get the same values as some on-line tools.  But there are intermediate steps that I have not figured out or found.

Is there anyone that knows the step-by-step process to translate the private key into the public key?

Does anyone know where to find the specific steps to convert from private to public key?
By that I exclude library functions from Java, or Perl or anything where the transformation takes place in a pre-written function that the programmer calls.
In other words, maybe something than can be written into C code and make the transformation. 

I have found code for SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 and can do those individual steps.  But I have not figured out how to put them together to go from private to public then to address.

I am not a math major.