Because the placed block timestamps are used for (eg. verification based on median of past 11 blocks, difficulty readjustment based on time of the past 2016 blocks, etc.) there isn't really any exploit so there is no reason for manipulation. Wrong time values would act as divergence.

People like that are always the reason why price has big jumps (and dumps). They are the weak hands who think bitcoin will never rise again or will rise forever.
In any case ever since the momentum got slowed down, $25 target became too hard to break let alone reach the $30k. We need a big positive news to get the ball rolling again otherwise it could take much longer than Q1.

Good points but the problem is that the regulations are made by governments to monitor people's activities not to ensure their security. This is why they enforce a lot of restrictions on customers such as KYC which is not going to help with the business owner scamming its users but instead will give all your detailed information and your activities to the authorities.
We see that in the banking system too. Remember the disasters leading to 2008? All those banks were regulated and members of FDIC and yet they ruined the economy and in the end they were bailed out while their "customers" were crushed.

In recent news China and Brazil agree to use Yuan in cross-border transactions effectively replacing US dollar for the largest country in Latin America. Considering Brazil is in a couple of organizations including BRICS and an important regional player in Latin America this is a big first step in moving an additional of more than two dozen countries away from US dollar.

Yes, Yes. NSA also knows the color of your underwear from another continent while pinky swearing that they are protecting you from "the bad guys" and doing it for the national security.

One way of looking at this question is from the utility for the government perspective.

You should expect resistance from governments (the centralized authority) in all countries without exception simply because bitcoin is decentralized and they can never have any kind of control over it. But if bitcoin has a certain utility for the government or has a certain utility against the government, they will choose a different approach.

Lets see some examples.
El Salvador government adopted bitcoin because it offered a lot of utility to the government. They could invest in it and in the long term build up a good reserve currency that would be worth a lot of money. They could also attract a lot of investment to their country and build their economy. They still tried a centralized approach with a government created closed source non-custodial wallet!

US government has been against bitcoin and they have been trying to ban it and is enforcing bans little by little simply because bitcoin offers an option to dump US dollar and it ruins US government.

China has been putting a lot of restrictions on bitcoin because like US, bitcoin is used as an option to dump Yuan and China was also creating a CBDC which they tried to get everyone to adopt and bitcoin was and still is a serious competitor.

This doesn't mean things will remain the same though. For example in a year from now we may see a complete ban in US and in a couple of years when US economy is fallen apart completely we could see a mass adoption of bitcoin in US completely replacing dollar.

This is not surprising at all since it has always been how the modern dictatorships work. They quietly enforce their illegal authority on people and call it democracy and anybody who speaks against it and gains momentum will be "deleted".
This is also not surprising knowing that US dollar is losing its dominance slowly and in a couple of years its value could be lower than Venezuela bolivar as more countries dump it. The US regimes fear is obvious so they try to eliminate all competition, whether it is Chinese Yuan or decentralized bitcoin. Funny thing is that they lose in all cases...

If there is any truly decentralized cryptocurrency including stablecoins, they shouldn't be affected by anything centralized (ie. CBDC). But the problem with stablecoins is that they always have some degree of centralization, DAI is not an exclusion even if that degree is low for it.

They are not going to default, they will do what they have been doing all this time when the nation debt sets a new record, they just increase the debt ceiling and continue printing more dollars.

The only thing that is concerning is the world dumping US dollar which means all the trillions and trillions of dollars they have been printing without it being backed by anything is coming back to America and will become a tsunami hitting US economy.
In which case US will experience Venezuela like hyper inflation but on steroids and it would the time for every American to buy as much bitcoin as they can to flee the sinking ship. That means there is this possibility that bitcoin price could reach levels that we can not imagine now.

Everyone is trying to jump on the bandwagon of "crypto" these days. They are just as hyped up and stupid as those who jubilantly invested in ICOs back in 2017. lol

I've always said that the way they are centralizing the technology introduced by Bitcoin is not going to work and soon the problems will start showing up. The existing centralized financial system is good enough and if they want to do anything they should try to improve that. There is no need to create a token for it in platforms they try to build from scratch which is also not tested before!

The only good thing that may come out of these govcoins is the death of stablecoins. Fingers crossed

I don't think there will ever be any direct armed conflict between US and any of the existing super powers because this is no longer World War 2 and similar wars where US mainland is not reachable. Any war that US starts won't be thousands of kilometers away, but it will be fought inside US soil too.

If you look at all these years US is at war with the rest of the world but through proxies. The Chinese war will also be yet another proxy war like the war with Russian. In other words Taiwan is China's Ukraine. I believe Chinese authorities know this very well which is why they haven't invaded Taiwan to this day despite most of us thinking they would and despite all the tensions US tried to increase like sending 80-year old Pelosi to Taiwan trying to make her cannon fodder.

I posted some thoughts on this conflict last year. I still think that conflict would bring energy price down since it would put one of the biggest consumers out of the market (decreased demand) but we have to consider that US economy depends on Chinese economy more than Chinese economy depends on US economy! Look at the huge US trade deficit that is increasing year by year. In other words it would terribly ruin US economy.

On top of that, everything specially military equipment is ridiculously expensive in US. If they start a war where their economy is already in ruins, they will not be able to keep it up financially speaking whereas it is not nearly as expensive for China to keep fighting.
The US military think tanks are already talking about the fact that US has already run out of a lot of strategic weapons trying to fight the proxy war with Russia and they won't even be able to refill their weapons cash for years specially with the way inflation and recession is hitting US.

From a military standpoint US is too weak and behind in the technology to fight other actual militaries. Check the US airspace in the past decade. It is regularly being invaded and they can't even detect majority of them and the handful they see they can't detect (UFO) and they struggle to bring down. In short US air defense is a joke.
Compare that with what other super powers can and have done. My current avatar is actually a jab at that

When it comes to any cryptocurrency what people should always check out is their utilities which is why we keep telling others to avoid altcoins because they simply don't have any utilities in the real world. Majority of them are created to only be pumped and dumped, a lot of them are created trying to pursue a flawed idea (like a smart contract platform) that fail because it couldn't be implemented correctly and a lot more.

That's the main reason why altcoins should be avoided anyways. There are of course other reasons like them being centralized, not having a mutable blockchain, having serious security flaws in their protocol that can be exploited, ... But almost all of them can be stored in non-custodial wallets specially when you find out that a lot of them are actually copies of bitcoin! so they at least inherit that much from it.

We talk about the uselessness of NFTs and their scam nature but that is not the debate.

Bitcoin was not invented to become some sort of cloud storage where people upload their files. The debate about NFTs and other tokens on bitcoin blockchain is also not about their usefulness, their value or anything like that. It is all about using a system in a way that it is not supposed to be used.

Bitcoin is meant to be a currency people use for payment, using it for anything else is actually against its "Ethos". Also:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5437787.msg61733370#msg61733370

IMF is not at all independent. It is located in Washington, D.C. United States and despite what they officially announce, they have always been enforcing US interests. Their only concerns regarding El Salvador and their warning is not about bitcoin in El Salvador's economy. Their concern is that a country that didn't have a national currency and was using 100% US dollar is now slowly dumping the dollar and moving away from it.

Governments, specially in democracies don't give a shit about respect. They want obedience and we've already seen that when they ban something, regardless of how ridiculous, majority of the population obeys.
As for taxes, the cryptocurrency market hasn't grown big enough and the revenue service's income is not big enough yet for them to really care about taxes. IRS in US for example has an income of about $5 trillion!

You are not wrong. There are many similarities. That economical crisis also didn't begin with the energy crisis/embargo but it was part of it (from the middle).

1. That crisis started in early 70's. Maybe we could put the start in 71 when the monetary system starts falling apart (namely Bretton Woods system). Similar to this time where it started in 2019 when the monetary system starts falling apart followed by a pandemic.

2. By the end of 73 the economic crisis has grown so big that it leads to the complete stock market collapse which they refer to as "biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression" specially in UK.
This is similar to what happened a couple of years ago and the stock market hasn't yet recovered completely and it is still seeing big dumps.

3. Nixon in US has been fucking US economy ever since 1969 that is also being poured into Europe affecting their economy too. US dollar is also dumping at this point specially starting in 71 continued to 74 when the world finds out they've been lied to and dollar is not backed by gold at all. Oil is priced in dollar making the economic crisis even worse.
Similar to the past ~5 years that US economy has been struggling with increasing inflation, recession, unemployment, trade deficits, budget deficit, increased national debt, etc. that is also being exported to Europe.

4. There is a war in the oil rich West Asia and Roughly in 74 (basically the middle of an already ongoing crisis in Europe, US and elsewhere), Arab countries placed the embargo on oil only on a handful of countries (US, Canada, Japan, UK and Netherlands) for supporting a terrorist organization commonly known as Israel.
Similar to 2022 where Russia reduced its exports to some European countries that were already struggling with economic crisis.

Wasn't Germany making a lot of money by increasing their car sales? In fact them and Japan effectively killed US car industry which was huge and took over that market in those days exactly because of the shit that was going on!

The crisis eventually passed but I wouldn't use the word "dignity" explaining it.
For example did you know they rationed energy and imposed prison sentences for anybody who used more than their ration? Kind of like what Switzerland has been planning with their temperature laws (up to 3 years in prison with a 19 degree temp cap). Luckily this year the temps didn't drop that low and they had shut down enough industries that the law wasn't enforced (AFAICT).

Also as I mentioned above a ton of industries (like the American automobile industry) turned to dust. Kind of like today with de-industrialization of Europe.

History truly repeats itself...

They have to answer

But generally speaking a hard fork comes with a lot of work and risks. Literary everyone has to upgrade to the new protocol, a regular user with a full node can no longer run their old version anymore, the businesses that were accepting payment using their own setup have to upgrade, exchanges, payment processors, mining pools, etc. all have to upgrade. Anybody who doesn't will automatically split the chain. Depending on the changes, the SPV users may also be forced to upgrade.

The bigger the community gets, the harder it gets to pull a successful hard-fork with least amount of network disruption but I wouldn't say it is impossible though. With enough time (like a year) we could make it happen clean enough.

Another way of looking at Ordinals is (to put simply) a brand new scam method to sell tiny amounts of bitcoin to idiots at much higher prices.

• First step is to come up with some arbitrary data which can be anything like byte presentation of a picture and create the Taproot script.
• Second step is to compute the corresponding address of that script and sending some small amount of bitcoin to it (eg. 10000 satoshi)
  
• Third step is to find some idiot who would pay a lot of money to buy 10000 satoshi (of course minus the fee so in reality in the example above they are buying 5920 satoshi) for a lot of money.
• Fourth step is receiving the money and sending them the tiny amount of bitcoin whilst revealing the garbage data you created in step one.

There are no NFTs, no arts, no ownership, ... being transferred here, individual satoshis have no extra value, ... and all the other lies they tell in step 3.
Bottom line is anybody who paid more than $1.28 for the example above is being ripped off while contributing to an attack on Bitcoin. Arguing over UTXOs and how they are involved in this spam attack is pointless in my opinion

You should do some research before saying random stuff like this
Iran used to have a dictatorship before 1979. A dictatorship that was backed by United States. Then there was a revolution that ended that US back dictatorship in February 1979 and replaced it by the Islamic Republic which is a democracy with "free elections".

By complete accident 2 Zionist terrorist officers were also eliminated this week in occupied Palestine and by pure chance they were both involved in the organization's drone program

When it comes to scaling I always believed that we need a middle ground to do everything but not rely on one solution alone. For example you can't just increase the block size and call that a solution just like you can't not-increase the block size and say second layer is the solution alone.

We basically need 3 things at the same time: increasing the capacity, compressing the blocks/transactions and working on second layer solution.

This is also why I liked the idea of SegWit2x although it suffered from a flaw. It separated the hard fork and soft fork whereas it should have done it all in one hard fork.
In my opinion we need a hard fork sooner than later. A hard fork not only to increase the capacity (to something like 4-8 MB block size) but also to solve a lot of bugs lets say "weirdness" in the protocol that can help with the compression too. Weirdness like the one extra wasted byte that all OP_CHECKMULTISIG(VERIFY) scripts must contain, or the couple of extra bytes that are wasted by all transactions with witness, the 4 byte transaction version that is almost completely useless,  the flaws in ways [sig]OPs are counted, the existence of P2PKH and P2WPKH at the same time while they serve the same exact purpose (same as P2SH and P2WSH), and a lot more.