Debit cards might eventually become obsolete, but credit cards cannot be replaced by the central bank unless the central bank itself starts issuing retail loans, which doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. However, I wouldn't consider it entirely impossible; it would just require a tremendous financial crisis where all retail banks go bankrupt, allowing the central bank to seize the opportunity.

Asking about the survival of debit cards differs greatly from asking about the survival of these companies. These companies will likely survive, because they're not directly linked to retail banks, which are the entities that might ultimately fall in terms of economic prosperity, or even cease to exist at some point.

OK, I see. It's still a little unclear, though. If a transaction takes a long time to verify, then it can act as an attack vector. Disabling it is more of an argument in favor of robustness. Multi-sig transactions are allowed, but with M, N limits. For example, AFAIK, you can't spend from a 1000-of-1000 multi-sig.

The work is done by miners, and the pie is split on that work. If you think running a node helps on bandwidth and needs a piece of the pie, then what happens if you spin up 10,000 nodes?

Then, Bitcoin is more of an asset than a currency. You wouldn't ever insure a big pile of cash. You would just add them to your bank account, and this would convert them from an asset to a liability for both you and the bank (since it'd loan it afterwards). But, Bitcoin cannot turn into a liability for everyone, someone always have to have it as an asset; be it you, or Coinbase.

Isn't that correct?

The way I understand it is: of course you can ensure my deposit. You can literally print it in the worst case scenario. You can't print a bitcoin, and that makes me wondering what happens in that case.

Mt.Gox hacker funds are still unspent: https://mempool.space/address/1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF. If the hacker is a good one, I doubt they'll find him.

OK, that's what I thought. This is a problem, because if Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency or asset, then we can't rely on other currencies or assets to insure it. At the moment, if 100,000 BTC are lost, they can pay $6B on paper and that's it. They can't buy what they can't insure, so even if they have $20T, they can't use half of it to buy bitcoin.

Am I wrong anywhere?

I get it, I'm just thinking what happens in a scenario where these people get ripped off by a hacker. It has happened before, just not with BlackRock.

My understanding is that in ETFs, the safety of funds is ensured. When investors invest in ETFs, they are assured that their funds are secure. Investing in the S&P 500 offers certainty, providing assurance that investments are secure. The same principle applies to gold or real estate investments. It's reasonable because these assets can be confidently secured (some even just on paper, see S&P 500). However, with Bitcoin, only the knowledge of a number can swiftly move those funds. And the difference with the previous assets, is that the thief can be anonymous, or doesn't risk their physical well-beingness as a gold thief would.

Bitcoin ETF has bitcoins in reserves. These bitcoins may be stored either inside a fund, or a centralized exchange, doesn't make much difference. The only difference I can think of, is that Coinbase holds its clients' coins in a hot wallet, where the ETF's bitcoins are stored in a cold storage.

My question is essentially, what difference does it make to make an agreement with Coinbase to hold your bitcoins in their cold storage, than buying an ETF? An ETF can't provide more "funds safety" than a Coinbase cold storage. How is the ETF more significant than that?

The main argument of the ETF is that it makes it more appealing to investors who don't want to hold their own coins, which I get it, to an extent. An investor may want to gain capital appreciation from Bitcoin long-term, without worrying about losing access to their keys. It's been also said that ETFs are convenient in terms of regulation.

Before Bitcoin, legislation is what protected your property. Examples following.

• If you buy a car, and a thief steals it, you have all the papers to prove it belongs to you.
• A thief can't just steal your house, because it's yours on paper.
• You can't have your company stolen.

This "mechanism" attracts investors. An investor won't buy a million dollars worth of gold, to keep it to their basement. Instead, they would buy a promise of that gold, because in the end, all they want is the capital appreciation, not the gold per se. The real gold is guarded and kept on secure vaults, inside banks. A thief can't just steal that gold.

How certain can investors be for the security of a Bitcoin ETF? What's the difference between that, and a centralized exchange? Both are supposed to safeguard their setups, yet we frequently notice centralized exchanges suffering from cyberattacks, resulting in clients' funds being stolen.

But... It doesn't matter already. What makes you think it does matter?

Ordinals can be moved to the UTXO set. Take an Ordinal, split it in an array of 256 bits, convert these bits to addresses respectively, send 0 sat to each address. You just created another representation of the same ordinal.

Storing and sending/receiving blocks and transactions are not done "for free". This is the only way to be certain that your ledger is intact, pure, true. And it's not that it costs a thousand dollars to do it. You just need a decent Internet connection, any modern computer and a terabyte.

$68,300

Thanks!

$69,000

Total Goals: 24

$66,063.20

Thanks!

This forum is not decentralized, neither democratic. It is owned by a person, and we are all forced to either use it under their terms, or not use it at all. Bitcoin is truly decentralized, and therefore not democratic. You don't vote for changes in the Bitcoin protocol under the accepted sense of that term.

A truly decentralized system can't be democratic, because democracy requires a government, which by definition makes the system centralized.

So Bitcointalk defines the voting rules. This means it isn't truly decentralized. Theymos can pop a few Legendary accounts and use those to increase his votes.

• Bisq doesn't use the Bitcoin network to do everything, only the trades are settled on-chain. If you use the blockchain to create a decentralized forum, you'll be forced to keep at least the forum posts on-chain, which means it cannot scale.
• BRC20 tokens are worthless trash, and the fools who buy them spend millions of dollars. To give you an analogy, think of forum user who would have to pay thousands of dollars to take part in discussions.

If you think it's easy, then a generous donation from theymos is waiting for you:

You're kidding, right? Democracy is centralized.

Who's "we"?  

What prevents someone from creating alt accounts and voting for themselves? Will you impose KYC to prevent that? If so, then what will prevent buying and selling KYC votes from the Internet? (The answer to the last one is obviously "nothing"). And even if you have a solution to both, to whom will trust the KYC data? We obviously can't publish all that data, because then there would be no privacy, which is devastating for democracy.

Our best course for censorship-resistant communication is Tor, but that wouldn't be a decentralized forum. It'd just be more difficult to shut down.

I don't think people think twice before parroting this. Explain me your thought on this. Step by step, how would it work? I want you to realize yourself how dumb idea this is.

It's not the best analogy, because in the case with using a third-party full node to sync your wallet, there is practically no incentive to cheat and serve you false transactions. It's not in their interests, unless you're running a big company, like a popular anonymous swap service; it's the kind of service I'd expect such behavior to be incentivized, but if you were the operator of that service, you'd be running your own node in the first place.

If your partner is the watchtower without your knowledge, theoretically they can take your money without you noticing. This can't happen in a lightweight Bitcoin wallet.

Εγώ το καταλαβαίνω ως εξής: ο πληθωρισμός μόνος του είναι ένα σύμπτωμα, δηλαδή δεν αποτελεί κίνητρο. Το κίνητρο είναι η αιτία που υπάρχει πληθωρισμός, και προκαλείται αν κάνεις φθηνό το χρήμα (χαμηλά επιτόκια ή τύπωμα χρήματος).

Άρα αυτό που λες, όπως το αντιλαμβάνομαι, είναι πως το να ρίξεις την τιμή του χρήματος ενθαρρύνει τις επενδύσεις σε επιχειρήσεις (με ευνοϊκό κρατικό πλαίσιο). Το οποίο είναι σωστό, γιατί έτσι παίρνουμε περισσότεροι δάνεια, εκ των οποίων πολλά ενδεχομένως να επενδυθούν. Αλλά μέχρι ποιο σημείο συμβαίνει πραγματικά αυτό; Θέλω να πω, αν ρίξεις κατά πολύ τα επιτόκια, δεν προκαλείς μια "υπερθέρμανση" στην οικονομία; Π.χ., housing crisis το 2008. Η γραμμή που διαχωρίζει τον υγιή πληθωρισμό (δηλ. αυτόν που φέρνει ανάπτυξη) από τον ανθυγιεινό φαίνεται να βασίζεται αυθαίρετα στην ερμηνεία του καθενός. 

Θεωρητικά μπορεί να δουλέψει με ένα DAO, όπως στο Bisq. Θα έχεις ένα μεσάζοντα σε περίπτωση απάτης βέβαια, δεν γίνεται να μην έχεις απολύτως τίποτα. Απλά ο μεσάζοντας δε θα έχει custody.

Πάντως στην Κίνα δεν χρειάζεται να δουν το πρόσωπό σου στην κάμερα για να καταλάβουν ποιος είσαι, κάνουν ανάλυση του τρόπου που περπατάς και βγάζουν αποτελέσματα, π.χ. πόσο γρήγορα περπατάς, τι ρούχα φοράς συνήθως, κλπ. (Δεν έχω source, το έχω ακούσει απλά)

Πολύ άσχημο να λογοκρίνεις την τέχνη. Η κάθε ταινία, το κάθε τραγούδι κλπ, είναι φτιαγμένο για τα ιδανικά (και στερεότυπα αν θες) της εποχής του. Αν θες μη διαιωνίζεις τα ιδανικά αυτά, αλλά μη το λογοκρίνεις κι όλας... (Η ταινία του λινκ ποια είναι btw;)

I remember when we were both newbies and exchanging PMs. Both of us joined the forum the same week. I now look at us after four years; we've both grown. 

Whoever chooses to use Charles-Tim's signature space for their advertisement can be certain that it will appear on lots of interesting topics, under the posts of a reputable member.

I don't see the connection. What makes you not care about your privacy? I neither have a credit card; I hate the concept of borrowing money to spend it on luxuries more than anyone, yet I don't see why I wouldn't want privacy. Bitcoin is a public ledger, open for scrutiny by anyone. Maybe you think you can't be surveilled effectively, and that's why you've adopted this behavior. You would be surprised by how much information an expert can work out by just having your Bitcointalk username and a chain analysis program.

Malware creators might be choosing Windows as their primary target, but Linux isn't a "nerd's operating system" anymore. Android is based on the Linux kernel. Most web servers run on Linux. Exploiting a vulnerability in Linux could potentially lead to a more lucrative and advantageous disaster compared to targeting Windows.

"Don't trust, verify". If you don't know what's running behind Windows, how can you be confident it is secure?

I have said that I, and all of us, would rather leave Ordinals as they are, than moving them to the UTXO set. I don't think anyone would disagree with this statement. Ordinal users would continue clogging up the network with trash, it's just that this time, we'd have an extra burden to account for; an inflationary UTXO set. Why should we incentivize ourselves towards that direction?

If something can't be judged as good or preferred according to you, then why are you arguing that Ordinals should be moved to the UTXO set?

It's called a penalty. When your partner tries to cheat, they publish one of the earlier commitment transactions (not the final), which has been revoked. Revocation is an anti-cheat mechanism. Lightning nodes monitor the blockchain to check if their partners have published a revoked commitment transaction, and if they have, they can claim all the channel's funds before the timeout; if you fail to claim the funds before that time, which can be hundreds to thousands of blocks, the other partner's attempt to cheat will be successful.

You can issue penalties without running a full node, by using watchtowers, but this is trust-requiring. Essentially, you're entrusting that someone else will do the task described above, who's running a full node.