Well OP defines blockchain as a database with a network of nodes and consensus algorithm, but it's confusing because the database itself is called a blockchain. You could say that Bitcoin is a blockchain system to avoid such confusions.

I wouldn't focus on the blockchain aspect at all. There's a ton of blockchains that are totally centralized and share no features with Bitcoin.

Ukraine started the process of cryptocurrency legalization in the end of the last year, but it's still not final yet. Afaik the taxation has not been fully implemented.

Overall this law is about recognizing Bitcoin and crypto as property rather than as currency. I don't think anything will noticeably change for crypto users until taxation will be implemented.

Even on-chain timelocking is risky because one mistake and your coins will be locked for way longer than you intended. But I always found timelocking in general a very poor practice. You don't know how the future will change. Maybe you or your loved one will get cancer and you will need all the money you can get, but because you bought into the HODL STRONG HANDS NEVER SELL meme you will lock yourself out of the very much needed funds. If you have problem with self control then you should solve them instead of making some gimmicks that deal with the symptoms and not the cause.

Why would it need a country? Bitcoin was designed to operate without leaders, without centralized organizations to govern or support it. If you will make Bitcoin reliant on a country, you would only weaken it, because the country could be sanctioned or invaded.

Bitcoin only needs one thing - more users. And to get more users it should become less volatile and make some technical improvements.

Miners secure the network by keeping the cost of attack high. If many miners suddenly leave, the hashrate drops and it becomes cheaper to launch a 51% attack.

Nodes keep the network big, so it's harder to launch sybil-based attacks and not one can monopolize the network. In big block scenario regular users can't run their full nodes and have to rely on big servers that could be run by mining companies and be easily regulated, like for example demanding KYC.

The mining restriction was immediately bypassed, and even when it was enabled, it only slowed down mining and it was still economically profitable to mine. It's very hard for GPU manufacturers to block mining, it would very likely cause unpredictable behavior in their devices that will harm other uses.

Governments regulate many things. In many countries you can't drive without seatbelt, even though it's not harming other people. Alcohol or tobacco advertisement is prohibited, even though it's just advertising. There's no country on Earth that lives by libertarian ideology that allows anything that isn't aggression.

They caused a huge price increase on the hard drive market and a lot of people couldn't afford to buy the drives that they needed and for what? So that some entrepreneurs could make quick money? Altcoins are a net loss for society, they don't create anything productive, they don't have any big utility, it's just a speculation and attempt to find a bigger fool. It alone would have been fine if they weren't screwing up the computer hardware markets in the process.

Some people would say that they will use Bitcoin as a currency, but from a perspective of Bitcoin as an appreciating asset, both selling or buying something is the same - you are liquidating it.

Everyone will do it sooner or later, unless they will die unexpectedly or will want to pass some coins to their heirs.

I personally have some goals of things I want to buy with my Bitcoin gains, but I also plan to hodl some for a long time as an life-long fund.

Why not? The market had no real corrections from $30k to $53k, so it's not that bad to see a flash crash, which are quite common in Bitcoin. I agree that there's a considerable risk of downtrend and bear market, because this recovery could have been just a bull trap, but it just as easily can be a stop on the road to new ATH. This is why short term trading is so risky, anything can happen on a small time scale.

This forum is one of the chillest places I've ever seen, if you don't visit offtopic/meta/reputation/politics boards. I very rarely see any sort of flame in boards like Bitcoin Discussion or Economics, and usually some of the prominent anti-Bitcoiners/trolls are involved, but even that is very tame. And I never seen any high rank or any rank member degrading someone over their rank.

I think some people are breaking the rules of this forum and try to paint it as some sort of newbie prosecution.

Energy consumption is not really a problem there's plenty of energy around. Bitcoin is consuming only 0.1% of global electricity, so it's responsible for even smaller fraction of global emissions. But the impact on consumer electronics prices is far more noticeable.


Yes, governments usually don't act until they have an interest in it.

I think it's very hard to regulate retailers realistically. If they will want to sell to miners, they will find a way.


Governments have power to make things illegal.

It can take many years for the market to fix itself. Nvidia and AMD didn't believe that the mining boom of 2017 could be repeated (and you can't blame them), so they didn't increase their production capacities. They are still not betting on their mining products.

Or take Chia coin for example. Came out of nowhere, screwed up the whole SSD market, countless read/write cycles were wasted and nothing productive was achieved.


All the mainstream fields of economy are quite heavily regulated even in western world that is often viewed as the part of the world with the most freedom. So sooner or later when crypto will join mainstream, the government will regulate it. They will never care what people do on their computers, they will simply tell exchanges and other services which coins are acceptable and which are not. Of course you could still use any blacklisted coin, but such coins will have no popularity without access to legal markets.

Because AES is not human readable. It's very tedious to write down a base64 text on paper and screwing up a single symbol will be catastrophic. While this method has all the conveniences of mnemonic seed format. After all, why people use these mnemonic seeds these days instead of printing out private keys like they used to? That's what OP wanted with their method, if they wanted to store their encrypted seed digitally, this would have been a different story.

But I personally prefer to store my seed unencrypted, because I think that the added complexity of managing a key and ciphertext and storing them in separate places is more likely to backfire in some way than someone getting to my unencrypted seed.

Here's a better method.

1. Take your seed, replace the words with their positions in the word list.

2. Generate another random seeed, do the same as step 1, this will be your key.

3. Add the numbers for each word together with modular arithmetic. For example the first word in the seed is 1234 and the first word in the key is 999. The word list has 2048 words. So 1234+999 mod 2048 = 185

4. Do this for all words to get your ciphertext which will be another list of words.

5. To decrypt you need to subtract the numbers of key from the numbers of ciphertext. If you get a negative number, you need to add this number to the modulo. For example 185-999= -814 and then 2048-814=1234 the original number.

This method is a one-time pad, since the key is random and is as long as the message, the only way to crack it is to brute force it, which can't be done because it has the same security as the seed. So you can use it even with 12 word seed.

When it comes to PoW and altcoins, very few of them decide to use SHA256 because of the enormous hashing power amassed by Bitcoin, so even a fraction of it could easily 51% attack an altcoin. For this reason alts have turned to GPU, CPU mining, and now even things like SSD mining.

But there's a problem, this mining has created a huge demand for computer parts, the prices for them have skyrocketed to 2-4 times of the recommended price. Millions of people around the world can't get their hands on hardware for more than a year, and it's not only gamers but also professionals and researchers, while these altcoins don't create anything useful for society, only speculation as a zero sum game. Should the government step in and do something about it? The simplest thing would be do ban mining on PC parts, and order exchanges to delist all the PoW altcoins. If the US and EU would do this, PoW altcoins would be effectively dead.

Bitcoin is on the rise so the announcements of institutional investments have resumed. There's hope that the ATH will be surpassed before the end of the year if there will be more positive news and bullish momentum.


Even if the amount is small, it can inspire other potential investors to finally buy Bitcoin, which can in turn trigger chain reaction, like it happened earlier this year.

There's really only two ways to use Bitcoin - cold storage or hardware wallet. Anything else should be reserved for small amounts because of the risks of malware, hacks, robberies and so on. Hardware wallets are simpler to use, but cold storage are not exactly rocket science, there are lots of good guides that describe how to set it up step by step. I prefer cold storage because it has a little bit less trust involved and you can get one for free if you have an old PC that you never use, while hardware wallet costs around $100.

If Bitcoin was based on a private blockchain, it would have been just another payment company and likely wouldn't exist today, because it would still have many of the drawbacks like the space inefficiency of blockchain without any of the benefits. Like the only benefit is that auditors could have a proof that the database wasn't altered, but you can achieve this even without blockchain just with cryptography.

If Bitcoin is so popular, then why its marketcap is only a fraction of gold's marketcap? Maybe because gold investors are ready to put large sums into it, while Bitcoin investors only put smaller amounts because of the volatility risks. Or maybe such popularity is only present in Russia and a few other countries while the rest of the world is less enthusiastic about it. Though the US and a few European countries are leaders in node count, so this is probably not the reason.

If everything plays out well, Microstrategy will never sell all their coins, but it's expected that they will be taking profits from time to time, what's the point of investing if you never sell? And if they will use Bitcoin directly to purchase something, it still counts as "sell".