Yeah....OP's ideas seem all over the place, and if this is a book about bitcoin (or something bitcoin-related), he might want to tie all of these concepts together as they relate to bitcoin, because I don't see how any of what he wrote is suitable for a book.

OP, have you read any of the books that have already been written on the history of bitcoin?  There are two that I've read: Digital Gold and Bitcoin Billionaires.  They cover some of the same ground, but the authors wrote some very interesting stuff without rehashing things that had already been written about.  If you're going to focus specifically on some of the *very technical* economic aspects of bitcoin, I'm not confident you're going to find much of a following. 

Just look on Amazon and you'll see that there are tons of self-published books dealing with various bitcoin angles.  Crypto in general is a very hot topic, but I don't think a lot of folks who want to learn about it (or are already passionate about crypto/bitcoin) look for printed material--or more specifically, the written word which would include Kindle and the like.

But good luck with whatever you do.  You've got way more ambition than I've got, I'll tell ya that.

Any reasonably intelligent person should be able to memorize 12 words in order, even if it takes a lot of repetition.  Even 24-word seed phrases can be memorized, especially if you use some kind of artificial memory technique.

The problem is, you never know what factors are going to affect your memory as time goes on, and personally I think it's a very bad idea to keep a seed phrase (or even worse, multiple ones) in your head and not written down anywhere.  Yeah, you might be a brainiac and have total confidence in your cognitive skills....but you just never know what could happen to your funds if, say, you should suffer a traumatic brain injury or the like.  If you want to test it with a small amount of funds, I think that's a neat idea but in general there's way too much risk involved.

I don't know what the future of CBDCs is going to be, but if I had to guess as to the future of credit card processors, I'd say they're going to find a way to profit from whatever happens--just like big oil companies will figure out how to make money from whatever fuel source powers our future automobiles and big tobacco companies getting involved with e-cigarettes and/or vaping products.

But Jesus, I'm not looking forward to the day when US citizens have to use a form of money that gives no privacy whatsoever.  That's obviously what people want, since I see people paying with cards or phones all day long.  It'd be nice if physical currency existed alongside CBDCs, but as everyone here seems to be aware of, that's not what the government is aiming for.

Scary, man.

No, there aren't any rules against "offensive" usernames, and I'd argue that Theymos would probably never implement such a rule given how subjective offensiveness is.  Personally, if I just came across a post by hitler420 I wouldn't think anything of the moniker.  Jesus, if your fur gets ruffled by the mere mention of a word or name, you really need to grow a thicker skin.  There aren't any safe spaces here on bitcointalk.


See, I don't think it's a stupid username or a good one or clever or anything at all.  I wouldn't judge that person by what he chooses to call himself on the forum; I'd judge him on the quality of his posts and that's it. 

This isn't the place for people who get offended easily.  OP, you've been here since 2016 and you ought to know that.

Gaaah!!  Thanks for all the compliments, but lately I've been such a lazy-ass merit source and feel incredibly guilty because of said laziness.  The position of merit source is strictly a voluntary one of course, and I could easily just tell Theymos I don't want to be one anymore....but I vividly remember the days before the merit system came into existence and I know how important it became in slaying account farmers who had god-knows-how-many alt accounts making zero-value posts all over the place and in general making it much harder for shitposters to rank up, thereby disincentivizing them from even trying.

So I'm happy to help worthy members rank up.  It's just that when I'm browsing through threads, most of the posts I'd consider merit-worthy are being made by Legendary members.  Don't know if anyone else agrees with that, but I guess everyone has different standards.

By the way, it isn't a question of whether I 'deserve' my monthly allocation of sMerits; it's a matter of whether I can unload all of them each month, and lately I haven't been doing that.  I will strive to do better.

That's nothing new, though I have to wonder if it's gotten worse in the past 3 years or so.  Any time I see a member at Newbie or even Jr. Member rank who's making high-quality posts, I get very suspicious.


I've admitted multiple times that I've been slacking, but I intend to change that as best I can.  Even if newbies are generally undeserving of merits, there are still plenty of members under Legendary rank who need merits.  I just have to read through enough threads to find them.

Which brings me this part of your comment that I quoted:


That might well be the case these days, especially since some of the more colorful members have left bitcointalk.  Forum drama might be silly or unnecessary sometimes, but if I'm being honest it does tend to liven things up.  Lauda, TECSHARE, TMAN, Vod, Lutpin, Gleb Gamow, cryptodevil, aTriz, xtraelv and others used to write posts with bite and some honesty, and they certainly weren't the generic nonsense posts that infest most threads, and nearly always cranked out by people with no presence, no personality, and with some kind of advertising in their signature space.

Heh heh.  Thankfully a kind member PMed me about my fuck-up and I fixed it.  And I do thank you for pointing it out here.

No doubt.  Except last I knew, Robinhood absolutely sucked as a company and they let customers buy and sell cryptocurrencies like they were a bucket shop from many years past, i.e., people basically bet on whatever crypto they bought or sold but there was never actually any buying or selling going on.  You weren't able to withdraw the crypto you bought, nor could you deposit any.

Is Robinhood still operating like that?  I had an account once but abandoned it after they weren't able to provide me with a phone number to call in order to solve a problem, nor were they willing to call me.

You might truly find this hilarious, but to me it looks very grim.  Americans are already taxed to death (which is why very few people can attain wealth and preserve it), and they're going after wallet providers with this idiotic piece of legislation with ignorance combined with great power, and that's a disastrous combination.

Hopefully this shit never comes to fruition, but with the government's microscope so focused on crypto as of late, one never knows what's going to happen.

I just have to say that it's kind of sad when I made 69th on the list simply by giving merits to a single newbie.  I'd have to go look through all the data in this thread to confirm my suspicion, but I think there used to be a lot more members giving merits to newbies in months/years past. 

Assuming that's true, I wonder if newbies are just getting their posts ignored from potential merit-givers or if the overall flow of merits has slowed down.  Once again I really wish Theymos would drop some data and give us his thoughts on the merit system.  I'm very curious to know if he thinks it's still functioning like he thought it would when he created it.

Anyway, thanks again for the data, OP.

I merited your post because of the statement above, which does seem to make sense even though there's no way in hell any country is going to go back to having a gold-backed form of currency.  The merits have nothing to do with the argument between you and stompix, which I don't want to get in the middle of.  Just clarifying that.

Silver dropped a little since I posted here last, but not by much.  Meanwhile the stock market is all in the red today and I'm still waiting for a crash or a major correction that never seems to come.  How long can a bull market last?  I mean Jesus, this one started right after the crash in 2009!  With all the debt the US has and the state of the world economy ebbing and flowing over the past 15 years, you'd think there would be a break at some point....but nope, everything in the stock market just keeps going up, and precious metals haven't quite kept pace even though gold is soaring.

I'm rooting for silver as always, though.  It's the poor man's gold, so it's been my favorite for many years.


I don't know where you got those notions from, but since a lot of people recycle copper I don't think we're going to run out of it, much less in six years.  Helium I have no idea about, but that'd suck for all the kids' birthday parties that depend on balloons.  AFAIK there's no substitute for helium.

It's unfortunate (assuming your claims are true) that the instant exchanges might need to be dismantled completely, because they do serve an important function, i.e., quick trades with no KYC and without the hassle of having to register with an exchange.  I'm pretty sure Changelly was one of the biggest--and probably the biggest--players in the space, with Changenow being close behind, and ShapeShift if they're still in business.  Those guys don't exactly publish their trade volume, so it's hard to tell who the big dogs are.  In any case, I don't know if I'm alone in thinking that those services are important, but I hope when the dirt is revealed that they don't all just disappear at once.

Curiouser and curiouser, I watch like the Cheshire cat awaiting the bomb.

Interesting--I'll definitely be keeping an eye on what develops here. 

Wasn't there another big company (I'm thinking a hardware wallet) that partnered with Changelly, or am I thinking of another instant exchange?  And I've always given them the benefit of the doubt when it came to complaints on the forum, since many times whoever was making the scam accusation never followed up on whether the problem was resolved or not.  That said, I've seen enough scams in the crypto space to know that things are rarely what they seem, and even long-time, seemingly legitimate businesses can turn rogue at the drop of a hat.

Are there any instant exchanges that Changelly isn't a part of?  I'm not sure how popular the other ones are, but I know Changenow has been around for a while and has also had tons of complaints.  There are a bunch of smaller ones if I'm not mistaken, and they've got to be registered in some country with lax crypto laws--if they're registered at all.  Anyway.  I'm not sure what to expect at this point, but I can't say I'm excited about this drama.  Shit like this does not help the cause of bitcoin in any way.

The conclusion from the massive drama that happened when Ledger announced the Recover option was--and someone please correct me if I'm mistaken--that regardless of whether you have a subscription to the Recover, the secure element in the device allows the company to gain access to your private keys, and that was never ever disclosed before.  If you're dabbling with small amounts of crypto, you're probably going to be OK even if something catastrophic happened with Ledger, but I would not trust them at all.

The device itself might hold more sentimental value to you, as it was your brother's, and for that reason alone I'd hold onto it regardless of whether you're going to use it as a wallet.  I don't know you, but I'm sorry for your loss.

The rise of instant messaging services?  Say what, now?  I will grant you that discussion forums have lost a lot of popularity over the years, but that's been because of social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and all those other privacy-destroying, soul-sucking entities and not what I think you're referring to.  Jesus, I remember when IM became popular back in the AOL days, which was what, nearly 30 years ago?

What's keeping this forum "great" is primarily the existence of signature campaigns and whatever other ways to earn money there are, and the popularity of bitcoin in a distant second place.  What'd make bitcointalk great again is if all the morons who came here just to wear some advertising in their signature but can barely put together a sentence, much less write 140 characters (or whatever the minimum amount is for whatever campaign) of coherent thought, would just go the fuck away and never return.

But I've been railing against those degenerates since I registered, and nothing's changed much.  At least we've got the merit system that keeps account farmers in check.  Yay for that.

I would love to see a forum-based feature like the one OP suggested (and I've seen the suggestion before and am aware of the telegram bot, btw).  If I might ask, doesn't it seem kind of odd that a lot of members trust telegram, since it doesn't appear to be very privacy-oriented?  There was a time where I tried it on the suggestion of someone, and in order to register they wanted all sorts of personal info--including your phone number, which if I'm not mistaken, had to be a real one in order to receive an SMS text.

Man, I really hope that New Forum Software is going to be released soon.  I betcha it's only a matter of weeks, right?  Right?

A bump?  It might technically be considered that (even if it's stretching the definition), but it's not a bump in spirit and I think we all probably can agree on that.


Trust abuse without consequences, though, unless one or more DT members decided it was so egregious that counter-feedback needed to be given or the person(s) who tagged those involved with the post recycling needed to be tagged.  Sometimes you just have to use the tools at your disposal.  Having said that, I'm not tagging anyone for this but nor would I harbor a grudge against anyone who saw fit to do so.

Me, too.  I don't doubt that this crap has been happening as long as idiots have been able to get away with it, but I'll be damned if I ever noticed it myself--or if it's ever been reported as being a problem in a thread like this.  Nice eyes, OP.

Well, I guess this is one way to avoid using AI to generate posts, right?  Fortunately, uncovering recycled posts is way easier than ones made using some kind of program.  And I'll admit that I've tended to use some of the same phrases over and over again in my posts over the years, it's not because I don't know how to write anything else.  It's just my style, and sometimes I just have the same opinion on whatever the topic of a thread is.  But there's a difference between that and actually "self-plagiarizing" (which isn't a valid phrase IMO, but you all know what I'm talking about).

Shut these fools down!

*Groan*  That's a horrible business attitude, I just have to tell you that--especially when the business is exclusively on the web.

So I click on this thread and see some bitching about feedback given by some of the most reputable members of the forum who've been here seemingly forever (Poker Player hasn't been here as long as Vod or suchmoon, but he's got my trust anyway), and I'm inclined to advise you to cease your complaining immediately without even looking that deep into whatever's going on here.  Those three members aren't in cahoots with each other, either.

I'm going to read the rest of this thread, but OP I'm telling you that you aren't likely to get much support here unless there was some serious misjudgement on the part of the members who left you negative feedback, all of which have generally proven themselves to have a good nose for bullshit.  You're just going to be pissing into the wind and in the end you're not going to gain anything except more red trust (maybe).

And it's pretty active, too, as far as I can tell from my infrequent visits. 

My experience with other discussion forums has been that pretty much every one has had an off-topic section or at least a politics & society one, because members of forums (but not this one so much) tend to get to know one another and sometimes like to talk about topics that don't pertain to whatever the focus of the forum is.  If sections like the two I just mentioned didn't exist, you'd probably see a ton of posts veering way off-topic into things like religion, politics, and so forth.

I get the feeling that OP thinks bitcointalk is where people make money online and nothing else, but that could just be my jadedness. 

And where in the world did The Pharmacist go off to?  I haven't heard hide nor hair of that member in what seems like ages.  It's almost as if he left but you can still feel his presence, you know?

You know?


Wowza....I haven't thought of good ol' digaran in some time.  It's strange how usernames just slip in and out of my brain, even if they were personalities I ought to remember, and I know there are probably two dozen more that wiggled their way out of my noodle over the past 9+ years.  At this point I probably should just keep a list.