That's not new though. It actually started a very short time after US dollar became reserve currency and I'd say one of the first group of countries that started dumping USD were Europeans in the 70's but US scammed them by doing pretty much what they are doing today and introducing Petrodollar.

Countries like Russia only needed the "last straw" to speed up the dedollarization process and that last straw was the sanctions. Otherwise BRICS for instance has been discussing using another currency for trades for the past couple of years, long before Russia was sanctioned.
And of course China has been planning to replace US as the dominating global force through economy for decades. There is certainly loads of benefits for China in this. But again the trend has been going on longer than this.

P.S. On another news US national debt surpassed $31.6 trillion...

When you use a broken tool you'll get broken results. The chart is most probably the result of running an old client that is no longer "full" node (is ignoring SegWit so they have been receiving "stripped blocks" that are smaller).

Here is a better chart from blockchair showing a similar but technically very different picture.
The difference between peak and bottom in your wrong chart is big (about 250 kb) whereas in reality the average size in that peak was around 1.25 MB as seen in the picture below and the average size in the bottom plateau in your chart is actually around 1.15 MB which is only slightly lower (8% diff versus 30%) and blocks are still considered full on average.


The final peak is the result of Ordinals attack which is another indication of your chart being wrong since it doesn't show that at all.

Even the lowest average block size (in 2021) is 1007 KB (~1MB) not ~620 KB that your wrong chart shows.

That doesn't mean we should indulge miners. They also enjoyed and most probably funded the 2017 spam attack.

LN is not a side-chain, it is a second layer.

It depends on a lot of factors and it is very difficult to analyze based on liquidity or even by having snapshots of the order books. No whale can single-handedly cause a significant price change specially since this is no longer 2013 where >85% of the trades take place in one exchange. In other words even if the whale had a lot of money they still have to dump on all exchanges to cause a significant drop.

What causes the drop (market manipulation) isn't the whale selling alone, it is how the market reacts to the market manipulation. Consequently it depends on the market situation. For example back in 2017 price was rising up at certain time around mid year but some bear-whales didn't want to accept that and tried manipulating the market by dumping large amounts. Long story short, price continued going up and those whales lost a lot of money. The opposite is true also meaning if the whale dumps when the price is already going down the panic sell can become a lot bigger.
As you can see this is not something you can see in order books since when they start panicking, new orders will be placed after the panic starts and possibly after the whale dumped.

We were talking about adoption and it can not be analyzed in such a tiny window.

But since you asked you are ignoring a couple of things. First of all hashrate has been rising even when the fees were low. So making arguments trying to say miners are only here for the fees is just dumb.
Secondly the fees in the window you chose were rising (and falling) because we had the most volatile market in that window. Price went from trying to break $42k+ in Jan to crashing down to $28k and then rise back up to ATH at $65k in April.
Obviously with such huge price swings comes loads of more transactions hence higher fees.
You are also ignoring the fact that afterwards fees came down back to 1 sat/vb and hashrate continued growing by a lot despite the price coming down too!

You are forgetting that SHA256-ASIC and Scrypt-ASIC are different and you can't use one for the other. In simple terms bitcoin's hashrate can not "slide" to shitcoins like LTC and Doge.
If we go with your logic the hashrate should slide into another SHA256 coin!

In my opinion it will depend on the market that these scams are being sold on.
Remember that this is not a normal spam attack. In a normal one the attacker has to spend money and as the fees go up their spam "budget" shrinks real fast.
In this type of spam where they are selling some garbage to idiots, those idiots are going to be willing to pay any fee. Just check out the very high withdrawal fees that exchanges charge to get your bitcoin out. Since the incentive for the Ordinals bag holder is high (there would be money to be made in a parallel market) they would happily pay the high fee while regular/normal bitcoin users don't have that incentive.

So it depends on whether that parallel market is going to get big or not. If we're lucky people would realize Ordinals is a scam and an attack on bitcoin and won't pump and dump the completely abstract and virtual token hence this nonsense dies.

Otherwise the full nodes should take swift steps to reject any tx containing the Ordinals junk and if that didn't work we need a soft fork to make them invalid by consensus rules.

What the arguments about lack of internet usually forget is that internet is used in a lot of things and without it majority of what we do every day becomes impossible or at least extremely hard. It is the same with bitcoin, it will be extremely difficult to make it work without the internet.
Besides, a lot of villages and rural areas have already gotten access to the internet. We have a lot more to worry about regarding the adoption among average Joes first before wanting to get everyone else who don't have access to the internet to adopt bitcoin.

Technically a mempool visualizer/analysis tool like https://mempool.space (which your screenshot seems to be from) should not purge its mempool or at the very least have a much larger cap compared to what the default is for most full nodes, so that it can give a better view of all the number of transactions and their fees.

If you want to know the real behavior of a node you should check a real node (like your own full node).

I don't know how to respond to that!!! You are bringing up the main reason why bitcoin was created (payment) and you argue that it could be considered arbitrary too which makes no sense otherwise why do we even bother with bitcoin in first place. lol

You are making a wrong conclusion based on false data. In 2017 bitcoin was experiencing the biggest spam attack of its entire history (biggest until today too). The number of transactions then can not your baseline.
In reality if you check the stats rarely released by payment processors, check out number of merchants that are accepting bitcoin each year, countries adopting bitcoin as legal currency, legal tender, reserve currency, for international trade and a lot more you can clearly see that usage of bitcoin as a currency has been increasing by a lot.

Lets fact check your assumption.
3675 blocks had "barely any transactions" and a small size between 2015-01-01 and 2017-03-09 (a rough 2 year window).
632 blocks had "barely any transactions" and a small size between 2021-01-01 and 2023-03-09 (a rough 2 year window).
That's an 82% reduction!

I intentionally chose 2015 to 2017 because the end date is approximately when the spam attack gets worse and also the huge bull run and the bubble has not yet started. The window from 2017 to 2019 isn't that better though (~1400 ie. ~55% reduction) which proves my point about increasing adoption as a payment network.

No. You can't even begin to compare using bitcoin for payment (whether for a cup of coffee or a house) and using bitcoin as a cloud storage.

Miners are already "extracting fees" they don't need Ordinals for that unless you mean spam attacks like 2017 which artificially inflate the fee is a "good thing"!

If that's what you want then there is a much simpler way without filling bitcoin with garbage and making it unusable which is to use a side-chain. There is already a couple of projects out there like RootStock that actually create real smart contracts and transfer actual tokens around instead of the fake thing in Ordinals that has no value.

If this had actually happened he would have filled bitcointalk about it instead of spreading misinformation with vague claims. As I pointed out above even if a PR is removed from BIPs repository it can not and will not be removed from the original repository of the person creating the PR.

There is a joke going around that if you get a cold in US and visit a hospital you'd go bankrupt.

Ever since they infected US economy with capitalism, everything went south. From all the industries that went bankrupt and had to migrate overseas leaving millions unemployed and many homeless in America to every other service that got worse over time. Over all the quality of life in US has been going down every year for the past 40+ years.

Medical services is not an exception either. It slowly got more expensive and at the same time the quality of services dwindled. At this point it is safer to receive medical services elsewhere including Mexico than inside US not to mention that it is way cheaper.

There are no "tests" to go through first. Like any other repository on Github There are certain criteria before the PR is merged otherwise abusers and trolls would spam the repository.

Post actual examples of these cases. It is not like the proposal disappears from Github, after all you have to first create a fork of the repository then make your commits.

That is mostly because price failed to break $25k resistance. Usually the day traders panic sell when something like that doesn't happen, hence create this kind of drop. We are still far above the resistance so I wouldn't start talking about pessimism yet.
The other reason is of course the terrible economic situation that is going on everywhere with inflation and recession.

There are always gamblers around who want to make bets on price of anything they buy in the cryptocurrency market. If you manage to put dog poop in a pretty package and advertise it well, you will be able to find lots of them who would buy it.

Bitcoin was never "coupled" with any market, least of which US Stock Market for it to want to decouple with it. This idea started ever since the global economical crash after the COVID19 pandemic, people thought just because bitcoin dropped while other markets were also dropping, that must mean there is a correlation!

If you look at the 14 years worth of charts you can clearly see that there is absolutely no correlations between bitcoin and any other markets.
However, what happens is that whenever there is a massive economic crash, it also affects bitcoin like everything else in this world.

Besides, even the chart you posted is weird. This year, starting from January bitcoin has gone up more than 60% while S&P500 has been struggling to keep the same level and not massively dump.

Small makes more sense though since these are indeed "small" strings that are used to derive a private key and we couldn't use "m/M" for mini since "m" is used for addresses on testnet already and could create confusion.

Money is store of value and bitcoin was supposed to become money hence a store of value from day one. If you say it is already a store of value them it means bitcoin has succeeded in becoming money.

Bitcoin was never supposed to be perfect but the average block time is not the reason for it.

We haven't established that bitcoin has shifted away from its principles. The number of people using bitcoin for payment has always been increasing regardless of how many "investors" exist who don't. That means bitcoin has never shifted away from those principles to begin with.
Besides it still doesn't justify spamming the blockchain with useless data and use it as personal cloud storage.

We can't because these are not "tokens", they are not even smart contracts, they do not transfer anything to anyone, they also don't add any value to the blockchain. These are arbitrary data that is pushed to the blockchain once to stay there forever, pointlessly increasing the chain size.

This argument has been made ever since block reward was 50BTC and now it is 6.25BTC and yet the hashrate is at an all time high and increasing.
Now look at it this way, in another possible scenario when the spammers will have had filled each block with "cryptokitties" and increased the fees the rest of the bitcoiners would abandon bitcoin and dump their coins which would crash the price. In which case the miners would be the first to see the consequences. The token hype dies like it died in 2018 and bitcoin wouldn't even be used for that anymore.

The real question is "when". I'd say the growth will stop in at least another 2 decades and by then market has grown big enough and matured enough that there will no longer be big drops and small drops like 2% is not going to affect the hashrate enough to be considered a problem.

Besides if you think something like "token scam" is needed to keep bitcoin alive in the future, there is no need to add it now! You are basically saying that just because something may happen in the far away future we should ruin bitcoin today while it is working fine and has no problems!

Bitcoin and gold don't have to compete with each other and these two markets haven't really done that so far either. In other words even if investors prefer gold that doesn't mean bitcoin isn't benefiting from the current ongoing situation.
As for the price, my theory is that the problem is that we aren't just facing inflation but inflation with recession. Which is why people generally liquidate their assets instead of increasing them hence the sell pressure last year.

US dollar has been losing its value in reality (easily seen in increased price of everything) but if you aren't seeing a catastrophe that's because of the high interest rate that is trying to keep dollar artificially strong.

@Upgrade00 is correct, the letter S is simply for identification of mini private keys, in fact if you look at the original source code you can see that S is simply added to the start of the randomly generated string[1] instead of being a meaningful version integer as is normal with other base58 encodings like addresses.

[1] https://github.com/casascius/Bitcoin-Address-Utility/blob/dcfc3b99a3df1427fc19fcfbe18c1bfedfdad4eb/Model/MiniKeyPair.cs#L50

I don't think that can work because of all the other fees involved.

When an "immigrant worker" is working in another country, they are being paid in the fiat currency of that country. In order to send bitcoin back home they first have to convert that money to bitcoin which requires a bank transfer to the exchange (fee #1), buying bitcoin with that money (fee #2) then withdrawing those bitcoins from their exchange (fee #3) then transferring those bitcoins back home (fee #4) and back home they have to do all that in reverse meaning to exchange those bitcoins to their local currency in an exchange (fee #5) then withdraw the fiat from that exchange (fee #6).

So we already have 6 extra costs and only the #4 is cheap (bitcoin tx fees) but the rest can be expensive specially the exchange related ones that you may even end up losing money due to volatility.

The legacy addresses (starting with 1 or 3) and their transactions are the same as they ever were, nothing has changed and nothing is being "penalized". In other words SegWit transactions being cheaper doesn't mean the legacy transactions became more expensive!

lol it's funny that you never complained about blocking all other forms of spam transactions in the past decade like rejecting a transaction containing an OP_RETURN that is bigger than 80 bytes, but all of a sudden you are so worried about rejecting this new type of spam!!!

Apples and oranges...