Is it? Usually bitcoiners are not so lenient about closed source software specially one that posts stuff on github but doesn't include any source code (has only binaries) since such projects look extra shady.

Money is something that can be used as store of value and can maintain its purchasing power over long periods of time. Money is also fungible, divisible, medium of exchange, ...
A currency is all that (fungible, divisible, medium of exchange) minus the store of value part (ie. maintaining purchasing power).

Fiat is currency because it can not be used as store of value and it does not maintain its purchasing power over long periods of time (that is what inflation is and all fiats have it).

A cryptocurrency that can be used as medium of exchange can be called a currency. Majority of altcoins (specially tokens) can not, so they are not currencies (they are gambling tools).
As for bitcoin, it is a currency not money because even though it is being used as a medium of exchange and people refer to it as a store of value but its purchasing power is not fixed and it can rise or fall significantly.

You are correct that bitcoin fits the description of money more than fiat. That's because of the limited supply it has but until mass adoption things will remain volatile and bitcoin remains closer to the definition of currency than money IMO.

P.S. Search "Mike Maloney" on Youtube, he has very good stuff about money/currency and economy.

In my opinion based on what I've seen, unfortunately this war seems to be getting more intense instead of slowing down because of cold, etc. United States has already given permission to hit targets in Russian soil and Russia has increased its attack on Ukrainian infrastructure to the point that more than half of the country has no electricity. I even heard rumors (that could be wrong) the capital could be emptied during winter due to no electricity and heat.

Maybe for small fiat amounts but for larger amounts I don't think it is actually cheap because of all the intermediary fees.

Let's say you wanted to transfer $50,000 abroad and decided to use bitcoin.
You first have to wire that money to a centralized exchange that could cost from $10 to $100.
Then you have to buy bitcoin with it and with a 0.2% fee you'll have to pay $100.
Then you have to withdraw those bitcoins and pay something like 0.0005BTC (~$8.5) which some exchanges charge.
Then the receiver has to do all that in reverse to convert the bitcoins to fiat meaning they have to pay 0.2% trading fee or about $100 to convert bitcoin to fiat.
Then they have to withdraw the fiat to their bank and pay another bank transfer fee another $10 to $100!

I also assumed the price is fixed otherwise some platforms have a big spread and you buy bitcoin at a higher price that you sell it.

This is why correct way is to only stick to bitcoin. If you wanted to send $50,000 worth of bitcoin that is 2.969BTC you can send that with about 0.00000200BTC fee and that's it!

That's the perfect answer. Twitter is a government tool used for many "operations" and it needs a CEO that has a leash in the hands of NSA who is also cooperating with other 3 letter agencies. That way they can keep this tool alive. Someone like Snowden who has already ran away and leaked NSA secrets is not a possible choice because that would kill the platform!

There is a "mempool" message defined in the P2P protocol that the nodes can send each other to receive a list of transaction hashes that is in the other node's mempool and then request to receive any of the transactions they don't have using a "getdata" message.

After FTX collapse some people panicked for good reasons and started pulling out of centralized exchanges and recommended this to others also. But also at the same time a big FUD campaign began on the internet trying to create more panic and cause more volatility in the market (we already saw this in bitcoin price over the past weeks) so that they could make profit from day trading.

The risks are the same as always. CEX is not recommended for storage under any circumstance, you can use it for trading if you have no other options but as long as you are aware that you can lose ALL your funds in a blinking of an eye.

Bitcoin price never depended on a centralized altcoin to begin with. The only thing these shitcoins' demises would cause is a temporary panic among weak hands. In long term nobody would even remember such shitcoins existed.

Using a centralized shitcoin in your trades for a brief period of time is not the same as bag holding that shitcoin thinking it is the same as fiat.

Fiat is not money, it's currency. That's the scam.
That is also the case with cryptocurrencies that are not even currencies at all which is part of the reason why they are scams.

This is not how bitcoin is supposed to be used though which is through centralized third party services with a lot of intermediary fees! The correct way would have been to earn bitcoin directly and send it themselves without needing a middle man.

Bitcoin is decentralized so there is no such thing as "official" anything in this world.
There is only a reference implementation that is the most popular implementation of the Bitcoin protocol and it is called bitcoin core and is found on bitcoin.org (and bitcoincore.org).

The work if verify not confirm. Confirmation is the process of including a transaction in a block and mining it that can only be done by miners.
Your whole explanation of how nodes work is a little weird though.

This has always been a very weak excuse that closed source developers use to justify their shady behavior. Otherwise as Leo pointed out, it is very easy to create a fake wallet and fool newbies into downloading it. I'd argue that you don't even need to clone the UI because newbies who download these fake and malicious wallets only seek the "name". The scammer could clone the UI from an open source project (eg. Electrum) call it breadwallet 2.0 and then claim that they had reworked/improved the UI in the "new" version! The newbies would still fall for it.

Look inside any bitcoin library that has the "message verification" function implemented (which is almost all of them) then follow that code to find a method that performs public key recovery using the signature and the message (hash) before it verifies the signature against that public key. That is how you recover public keys from ECDSA signatures.

Unless something very drastic happens like a direct war between US and another power (as opposed to all their proxy wars) I don't see Petrodollar going away in short or midterm. The process is definitely very slow and it is not like US regime is sitting idle watching it happen. They are fighting it hard. For example ever since the Chinese visit to Riyadh there are talks of a coup an a lot of chaos in Saudi Arabia and the unrest is growing fast. Historically speaking whenever a weak country like Saudi did something similar they were bombed out of existence.

The process may be slow and facing a lot of resistance but it is inevitable.

P.S. What we should be worried about is if some day we see USD be replaced by something just as bad like Yuan!

We don't celebrate Christmas and there is still 3 months (92 days to be exact) left to New Year
However, we do celebrate Chelle Night (aka Yalda) which is tomorrow night and is much older and is what some of the Christmas traditions were borrowed from like the lights you guys put on the Christmas tree. We've already prepared for it by purchasing a ton of fruits, nuts and sweets but I didn't have to sell bitcoin to buy any of it though! The shops don't accept bitcoin payments either, which is unfortunate since I would have loved to pay with bitcoin.

The only way that the address could have been wrong is if the destination (I still don't know if destination was OP's wallet or exchange) was using a flawed software to produce the wrong address.
As for Bech32/m differences, any software that doesn't support the newer type would reject it not accept it as valid since the checksum algorithm is different. So it should not have been possible to send to this address in first place if the software didn't support it already.

No offense but this was not something you could have predicted or can continue predicting based on charts (ie. broken clock and all that ). This is all affected by global economics and the more inflation grows while FED manipulated rates to decreasing hence causing recession, the more we are going to see an unrealistic sell pressure in bitcoin market.
Again the inflation-recession combo in US economy (that also affects most of the world's economy) is not something you could have speculated on by looking at bitcoin charts!

It is going to be the same in the future. The moment inflation stops growing and FED accepts the reality and stops manipulating interest rates, is the moment we can go back to realistic bitcoin prices and a realistic market again. Until then we are going to continue seeing a struggle to go back up.
I don't see any more drops though because the more rate increase by FED is not going to affect anything whatsoever.

Nobody should believe in the 4-year cycle from the start of 2022 considering nothing of this last cycle has been like the previous ones:
1. Not the same overall rise at all
2. No bubbles whatsoever
3. A big crash regardless of the lack of bubble
4. The bottom so far has been below previous cycle's ATH which is a first.

People who naively claim this is another cycle are only looking at 20% of the cycle ie. the crash and ignore literary every other aspects of the cycle! It's like saying apples and oranges are the same because they are both round

You didn't say HOW you lost money though!

If the destination created a Taproot address for you and showed it to you so that you can copy it, that means the destination (whether it was your wallet or an exchange or anything else) supported that new address type and any coins sent to that address is already in the destination and can be used.

If the source (your wallet, exchange account, etc.) that you pasted the address in accepted it without throwing any exceptions and successfully sent the transaction, that means it too supported Taproot and successfully sent a valid transaction to the destination YOU gave it.

So I ask again, how did you lose the coins?

Back in school we had something in physics about "expansion" and we used to say that "the hole expands too" (basically the principle behind putting a jar of olives in warm water then opening the lid easily).

My point is that when it comes to bitcoin adoption there are different categories of people adopting bitcoin eg. true bitcoins looking for financial sovereignty and gamblers looking for quick profit. When adoption grows all categories grow not just one. And the "true bitcoiners" are the silent type while the gamblers are the most loud so when their numbers grow and see see the internet filled with their cries about price rise and falls it may look like everyone has become a profit hungry gambler.

So even if we see CEXs are growing in popularity and collapse like FTX, that doesn't necessarily mean anything has changed about bitcoin or bitcoiners.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently mostly because this last week I saw someone literary put a hit out on some people with their full address and information for 5 bitcoin. All on Twitter!

So if laws are bad, regulations are bad, etc. then what is the solution to things like this? How are we supposed to deal with criminals, terrorists, money launderers, etc. who are abusing the same privacy that we so much crave for their own illicit activities?

You should always avoid using anything centralized unless you don't have any other options. It could be a centralized exchange where you give up custody of your funds or it could be a centralized altcoin that may dump down to zero like the stable coins.
If you want to be safe then you should both take control of your private keys using a hardware wallet like Trezor and avoid using centralized stable coins that run the same risk as centralized exchanges.

AI is too literal which is why the technical answers it gives are both right and wrong. Technically one way to censor transactions is to modify the "is_spendable" method that is used on outputs before they are added to UTXO database and return false for the censored transaction. But that is not the way that will be practical and not to mention that this is modifying consensus rules which is impossible without reaching consensus.

It depends on the version and what it changed.

• Some changes don't affect consensus rules are just improvements like changing the wallet layer, changing UI, optimizing cryptography, fixing small bugs, etc. In these cases you can continue running the older version and don't miss on much specially as a miner
• Some changes are bug fixes that could be important like 0.3.10 back in 2010 which fixed the value overflow bug. In this case it is very risky to continue running the older version because the bug that would be known after fixing could be exploited.
• Some changes could affect consensus rules in a backward incompatible way (aka a hard fork), this is the only case that remaining on an older version becomes impossible.
• Some changes are affecting consensus rules but in a backward compatible way (aka a soft fork), in this case you could stay on an older version but as a miner you would miss out on newer transactions. For example if you run a version that doesn't support Taproot you can not mine Taproot transactions and you could miss out on their fee or even run the risk of not being able to fill your block.

AFAICT version 24 falls under the first category.