US is one bad decision after the other in the past ~70 years after WWII. The last straw was the Bush decision that led to wasting of $10 trillion in West Asia that is the main reason why US economy is falling apart today.
After US escaped Afghanistan there was some small hope for changing those stupid decisions but it turned out that it was also a stupid decision since the rest of the US forces in West Asia still remain and CENTCOM is still hemorrhaging money. For example over the past couple of days at least 5 of those bases were bombed into oblivion, that is tens of millions of dollars vaporized on daily basis.
Domestically the regime is messing up too, with constant money printing and banking system that keeps collapsing. When looking at the infrastructure in US, it is all decrepit and is falling apart too which requires massive investment to fix. From the trains that keep derailing to everything else that is falling apart!

Exactly.
That should be the biggest concern of every country but unfortunately some are caught between a terrible choice (US) and a less terrible choice (China) so they choose China. In ten years from now we could see China do the same thing US is doing now.

Maybe, but the world also has no other choice. They either have to accept massive inflation that they endure because of US constant money printing to dump dollar.

Speaking of problems for Europe, the protests across Europe are getting worse specifically in France where the new retirement rules was the last straw that broke the camel's back. Some stats are putting the number of protesters at 3.5 million with dozens killed, and thousands wounded and maimed in these protests because of the police brutality. Of course the official stats only talk about the 441 police officers that were injured.

Like always this statement is 100% correct about altcoins (crypto) and 100% wrong about bitcoin.

In any case the US and consequently dollar hegemony is threatened as dedollarisation is spreading across the globe and USD gets weaker and the SEC is afraid that more people are going to choose bitcoin as an escape from the sinking ship called dollar. Hence they try to discourage at least some of the people who are fleeing...

That is a possibility too although US is already too late to the CBDC nonsense game and I don't see how that could be able to compete with the existing CBDCs while dollar itself is being abandoned.

So far when we talk about the Ordinals Attack we've covered the effects of this attack on the mempool size, blockchain bloat, high fees and the fact that they are using bitcoin ledger as a cloud storage. Another damage that I've not seen anybody mention is the increased burden this attack puts on full nodes when loading UTXO set to verify blocks/transactions.

Usually these spam transactions are using small value outputs that are a little higher than the dust threshold. As the scammers join in and start spamming the chain, they would want to decrease their cost hence they would decrease that amount as much as they can. Not to mention that as these outputs are spent they go down in value too (fee deduction). In the end the fools who "buy" these bitcoins would want to hold them hoping they can find another fool to sell them to.
After a while the UTXO database that nodes need to load up whenever they want to verify transactions, is going to be bloated with a lot of these unspent outputs. That would make running a full node harder as time passes and the bloat grows.



This chart shows the number of UTXOs and their total size. Seeing a rise in this chart is not abnormal, it is being affected by the adoption (eg. the recent price rise) and other factors. However the slope of this chart in the past month is higher than it usually is at similar times which shows the effects of this attack.
We still need more data to make a solid conclusion which could be acquired in a couple of months or when more scammers start participating in this attack.

I don't know who these people are but they are just as wrong. In fact all the efforts in the past 7-8 years put into developing SegWit, second layer and even Taproot (introduction of Schnorr signature algorithm) has been to improve bitcoin scaling and its capability to handle a lot more transactions as the adoption increases. One of the results of these efforts is keeping fees low.

That's not exactly correct.
Price goes up because of adoption not because of supply (it is called supply AND demand after all). In other words as more people buy more bitcoin, the price goes up. If it were anything else the altcoins that also have halvings should have gone up in price instead of getting dumped and in some cases die.

Do you think it is time to reassess the claim made in the article that OP shared almost a year ago?
In it the "The Institute of International Finance" claims that Russian economy is "imploding" and is going to "collapse" and the GDP shrink by -30% by end of 2022.

Now I don't know which source is the most reliable but they are reporting numbers that are close. For example IMF reports a slight growth in Russia's GDP in 2022, some other sources talk about a tiny decrease (between 1 to 2%).

I think we can all agree that both businessinsider and IIF were full of it and were spreading propaganda. Of course we bitcoiners already knew that considering how many FUD businessinsider has spread about bitcoin.

In my opinion there is a very high chance that we see $1 million target reached somewhere in the next 5 years but $10 million sounds unlikely to me. $1 mil itself can be the peak of a bubble not a sustained price (like $20k in 2017).

There is a couple of things to consider here though.
We have the global economy changing very fast, a massive shift from West to East with the Western economy collapsing. This New World Order will create a lot of chaos in the coming years. This chaos will create a lot of volatility in bitcoin and it could slow down that adoption.
Namely the recession going on mostly in the West means less investments in bitcoin ergo a smaller rise. We've seen this over the past year when the bitcoin guaranteed bull market was significantly postponed and eventually was replaced by a bear market where price (for the first time) went below the previous ATH (ie. below $20k) after the crash.

That's the negative part, the positive part is the collapse of US dollar.
Considering how everyone measures bitcoin price in terms of dollar, as dollar becomes weaker (gets dumped) bitcoin price should go up against it. For now that dump is slow specially since FED is artificially keeping it strong by manipulating the interest rates but it is a catastrophe waiting to happen specially since US regime is about to print trillions of dollars to rescue its failing economy. That is in addition to dedollarisation that is happening across the globe that weakens US dollar even more.
That rise against dollar itself will attract a lot of additional investment.

It has nothing to do with criminal usage otherwise they would have shut down United States as a whole since the amount of money used by the US banks for all kinds of illegal activities from arms deals to terrorism is in the trillions.

It is all about control and surveillance. If they can control and surveil the service and gain access to all the data they need, it won't be shut down. Otherwise there is a centralized point of failure and if they resist cooperating with the government, they will be shut down in a blinking of an eye.

There are always a vocal minority who have such weird expectations and even call that "speculation". Some of them are even referred to as "experts"! The fact is that they have no understanding of bitcoin, its market and in some cases economy in general

I agree but at the same time we should consider that the market is so much more complicated than that. The banking collapse is going to continue being a strong cause for the price rise (in the future too) but also recession is going to be a negative force that prevents more investment from coming in to help the future rises.
Specially when FED is still keeping interest rates high and there is a risk to increase them even more, things could get uglier.

If Wasabi isn't working with blockchain analysis companies and is in complete compliance with the government in deanonymizing transactions, then why haven't they been shut down already? Their company is located in a British jurisdiction and we already know that these anti-privacy/anti-freedom governments (US and UK) have been cracking down hard on anything bitcoin related that improves privacy. How is it that zkSNACKs Ltd. became an exception?

And that's your opinion because what I said is a fact.

There is no vulnerability in Taproot, there is an exploit in implementation of Taproot that is in bitcoin core. The core devs either didn't foresee this attack vector or they saw it and didn't care enough to prevent it just like they'd prevented similar attack vectors in the past through standard rules.

You should always report transaction fees in terms of "amount per size" instead of raw values and definitely never in dollar terms for it to be a clear and understandable value. For example right now the fee rate is between 17 to 20 sat/vbyte.

The problem is not with the fee amount, the problem is with the reason for the high amount. Just like 2017, it doesn't sit well with users to pay a high fee just because someone is maliciously spamming the chain.

Miners compute hashes using their hardware, that means as long as their hardware is constant (eg. the miner has 10 ASICs) the number of hashes they can compute per second (aka hashrate) is also constant.

Don't confuse that with the total hashrate, that is not constant since the number of miners is never constant. They always come and go, upgrade their equipment to newer hardware, add more hardware, etc.

There isn't any tutorials because the only popular method is for single private keys[1] and single private keys aren't popular anymore since majority of users use deterministic wallets with a seed phrase and there is no proposal for their encryption.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0038.mediawiki

Encrypting a message is slightly different from encrypting your private key(s) since it is a broader concept that could cover for example encrypting a message using someone's public key (eg. ECIES algorithm).

Thanks for your input but you need to explain your claims better than this.

Then how do you explain the fact that slowly but surely Yuan is already replacing dollar?

The Ordinals Scam is not an NFT, it is a one time transaction that injects a junk data into the blockchain. From that point the rest of the transactions spending the coins from that transaction (and the chain of transactions spending the outputs) are simple bitcoin transactions that can be send from any bitcoin wallet.

In other words only the scammer who creates the initial Ordinals scam tx needs a special software to sign the scam transaction containing the junk data by exploiting the Taproot protocol.

The thing about bitcoin has never been about anonymity, it has always been mainly about removing the middle man. When you use bitcoin you no longer need the banks, the same banks that use YOUR money to lend money to other people and worse of all run "fractional banking" (they lend more money that they have!) and have turned to basically usury centers and are also ruining the economy by creating more and more liquidity and inflation.
With bitcoin you eliminate them.

When it comes to regulations, I never had any problems with the spirit of regulations. After all we are living in a regulated world. The problem is always about the fact that when most governments (specially in democracies) talks about regulation, they are talking about control and surveillance. It is also extremely rare that a regulation helps bitcoin or its users.
Take regulating exchanges for example, all they do is increase their surveillance on exchanges. They don't do anything about the scam nature of them or the fact that when they run away, go bankrupt or get hacked the users have nowhere to run to.

It is extremely risky to bag hold altcoins in general, it is even riskier if the altcoin is centralized, flawed and most importantly has an unlimited supply such as ethereum. In 10 years, it may not even be around let alone be worth higher than this. Not to mention that the past 5 years that ETH has been dumping consistently (from 0.15 to 0.06) has proven that it has no long term potential.

As for bitcoin, the way I wouldn't rely completely on bitcoin for retirement. In 10 years with the way inflation is going and if the adoption is slow and price doesn't go that high you may not have enough bitcoin to retire comfortably. In most countries the cost of living is already huge and is increasing fast.
It is best to diversify into other assets and I mean real assets not altcoins.

Satoshi has already disagreed with this type of abuse in multiple places. From the whitepaper title where it calls bitcoin a payment system not a cloud storage to his clear stance against storing junk data (like DNS) on bitcoin blockchain.

But unfortunately because bitcoin core developers screwed up in implementation of Taproot soft fork, we ended up with an attack vector that is being exploited with the code-name Ordinals, and so far there isn't any serious work being done to mitigate that.

History proves this to be fallacy. For example ICOs are widely known to be scams, yet they are not dead yet and people are still being scammed under the same name or alternative names (ICO, IDO, IBO, IEO, ITO, STO, DeFi, NFT).

That is called censorship, besides it has nothing to do with Ordinals Attack. You should try to first learn what this attack is and how it works.

Bottom line is no matter how a small group of people swing this, Ordinals is an exploit since it is using it in a way that is should not be used, ergo it is categorized as an attack on bitcoin.

For the sake of European economy you should hope not.
In a world where the cost of energy is directly and significantly affecting the economy and the competition, if India and China are indeed receiving "super cheap" energy that gives both these countries a massive edge to take over more of the global market out of the hands of Europeans which would consequently deindustrialize Europe even more and put the whole region into a deeper recession in the coming years.