It's an unfortunate situation and understandably anyone in his shoes would be desperate to recover even a tiny bit of their lost coins, however I do not think the plan would work. He is proposing getting investors to fund the retrieval and pay them with the Bitcoins on the hard drive, but there is no guarantee it would be found or is recoverable. 8 years is a pretty long time.

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I don't understand the comparison between the pizza sale and the lost hard drive. Bitcoin is used as a means of exchange and people who use it to pay for services are usually aware it could have a higher market price in the future, but still chose to utilize it. If everyone simply hodled, it would likely not be as popular as it is now.

If you still have the wallet address, you can check the balance on https://blockchair.com/ and select results for BCH
It shows the results for different blockchains, which would also include forks of Bitcoin such as BCH and Bitcoin SV.

You would also have to consider the difficulty adjustments. Averagely, a block is confirmed every 10 minutes, however if there is huge competition among miners and increased efficiency of mining ware, it could be done faster than that, when this happens difficulty adjusts to make it more difficult to find the next block and keep the time at the average.

This also functions to keep mining profitable, if Bitcoin's price drops, it becomes less profitable to mine and ideally more miners would quit, this would lead to a drop in hash rate and block confirmation would be slower, when this happens the difficulty drops and it becomes easier to confirm the next block, making it cheaper, and keeps mining profitable.

Basically, asides the price changes, which is expected to increase overtime to keep mining profitable, adjustments to the difficulty also helps to balance it out.

Nodes are programs or computers which are connected to the Bitcoin network, all nodes are interconnected. There are different type of nodes, such as full nodes, pruned nodes etc.
Full nodes have the complete data of all transactions on the block chain, they verify and relay transactions to other full nodes.
All miners are nodes, but all nodes are not miners. However, while miners are connected to the network (nodes), they do not have to be "full" nodes.
Read more here - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node#What_makes_a_full_node.3F

Close to 90% of Bitcoins have already been mined, so new rewards do not much increase the supply.
However, consider that mining accounts for all Bitcoins in circulation and it's hardwired, so an increase in demand would not result in a change in supply.
Trades are constantly being made on the different exchanges, and halving introduces new coins into the Bitcoin market; When that supply flow reduces and demand increases, buying pressure increases.

The software protocol was designed that way, every confirmed block comes with a coinbase reward and every 210,000 blocks (~4 years) that reward halves. Same way difficulty is adjusted every 2,016 blocks (~14 days).
Full nodes verify all transactions and ensure it's following the designed protocol, this is the consensus rule - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Consensus

After any halving, there's 50% less Bitcoins being mined per day and as such less available for sale leading to lower sell pressure and hence demand grows against supply. Of course earlier investors have Bitcoin to sell, but miners are the only source by which new coins are introduced into the market.

There is also the psychological effect, for a long time halvings have been associated with price increases, so investors and traders expect bull runs after the halving leading to an increase in demand and the propensity to hold for higher prices.

I don't think miners follow a particular rule book, some hodl their coinbase rewards, while others sell them off as soon as they're received. But as I mentioned earlier, they are the source of all new coins so a decrease in that supply would affect sell pressure.
The price of bitcoins is expected to adjust inorder to keep mining profitable, whether they're are getting 50BTC per block or 6.25BTC or none at all, when all bitcoins have been mined.

Bitcoin is constantly being traded on a number of exchanges, on these platforms there is;
• Demand - how much people are willing to pay for it, and
• Supply - how much traders are willing to sell it for
Basically, the price is calculated based on these factors, the higher the damand against supply, the higher the price. These market factors are in turn affected by secondary factors, positive news would grow demand as investors try to buy in, while negative news would reduce it and grow supply as people try to sell off

There are different order books on the different exchanges, reason why there is no fixed price. The value on binanace would be different to that on coinbase.
Cointrackers like coingecko and CMC calculate the average price on various exchanges and give an aggregate value.

IIRC, the newbie warning flag is shown to newbies and members below a certain number of days logged in, but for this to appear the member needs to already have active flags. Not sure how effective it is at this time and more policies to protect members from scam would always be welcome; Maybe a warning at the top of certain boards (visible to guests and members) where trades are more likely to happen.

Scams are not moderated, so the mods cannot take actions against scam posts or members who make them. There has been lots of discussion about whether to moderate scams and the consensus seems to oppose it as it could give users a feeling of faux security that any unhandled case isn't a scam.

The DT system is in place to warn against scams, but as all systems, it's not a 100% efficient.

TryNinja's bot is very robust and I get notified in seconds when I'm mentioned or my reply quoted, whether or not the user includes the @ symbol.
I assumed op mistakenly opened a new topic rather than replying to an existing one, cause it's not practical to open a new topic for every post you find helpful. I think that error occurs when one takes to long too SEND their reply and the session times out.

But from the topic title it seems they deliberately created a new thread to ask how to send merits for posts they consider to be good.

You learn by doing something often, reading posts is a good place to start and what every member should do, whether newbie or higher ranked as there's always new knowledge to learn about. It's also totally alright for most of what you read not to make much sense, it's a new space and you'll need time to understand the basics of it. Here's a reply I made recently to another member asking about getting into Bitcoin, it could contain some information that will be useful to you - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5307733.msg56047673#msg56047673

I actually consider this forum to be very lenient and allow members lots of freedom to express themselves. If you're an honest member, you'll likely not break most of the forum rules, as plagiarism is frowned upon in different settings on and offline, and spamming is usually financially motivated.

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I'll advice you find a topic or board that really interests you and learn more about it, that could be your gateway into the other parts of Bitcoin.

You're better of buying what you can afford to lose. Investments are huge risks and you should only put spare money into it.

My advice would be for anyone considering buying into Bitcoin, to do their own research on what it is, how it works, how to securely hold it, etcetera. A lot of newbies jump in cause of fomo or cause someone adviced them to, without fully understanding how Bitcoin works.

From the articles I read, bitcoin wasn't called a bubble, they were rather referring to the current price surge and how it is unsustainable and similar to the gold boom in the 70's (gold cannot be referred to as a bubble cause of that). Everyone is entitled to an opinion on price action, some believe it is undervalued, others think it's overvalued, but they are all predictions; What's certain is that Bitcoin is definitely not a bubble and it has fundamental value.

I don't think Bitcoin really has a competition, it's a specific network that hasn't been replicated and at this time there is no replacement for it, you have alternative coins/tokens, fiat, gold, as well as soon to be launched CBDCs, but none of these can effectively replace Bitcoin.

Yes, it's a glitch. There appears to be an error in the circulating supply which led to the inflated market cap of $432,949 Trillion currently.
To confirm it really is a glitch, check the rankings on other coin trackers, or check the top icons on CMC, the total cryptocurrency market cap is still at ~ $1 trillion, and Bitcoin still has a market dominance of above 60%, these contradicts the figures being shown for WBTC.

Edit: The glitch has been fixed and WBTC is back to 13th on the ranking - https://coinmarketcap.com/

I agree that attention has shifted much from the actual qualities of Bitcoin to its USD equivalent, and that is very much expected, price volatility would surely attract speculators. Also, Bitcoin is still a budding market and it would take a while for it to properly fit into a particular market, there are currently more options to spend Bitcoin through merchants than there was 5 - 6 years ago, so I wouldn't say it's dying at all.

Imo, there is no sole aim of bitcoin, the whitepaper describes it as a peer to peer version of cash and as a payment network, this however doesn't mean it is limited to be used as a currency. It's decentralized and can be utilized in different ways, an alternative to fiat, a store of value, a medium of exchange etc.

Being centralized would mean dictating how people use the coins they own, anyone is free to spend them or hold them as part of the freedom Bitcoin offers.

I would like to know how that percentage was calculated. 1% of $600 billion is $6 billion, and Grayscale alone in their most recent update have about $21 billion invested in Bitcoin, they are not the only means by which institutional money enters into bitcoin and some bitcoins are lost permanently reducing the active market cap. When you consider all the factors the percentage of institutional money gets more significant.

There is still a lot of room for growth but the effect of smart money can already be felt in the price fluctuation. Bitcoin has relatively sustained its value during this period even though most predicted a large correction, we are yet to witness such a crash.

Timing an investment perfectly would mean buying at the very bottom and selling at the top, this is however not practical, markets are unpredictable and one cannot guess the direction it would take, if one keeps hesitating before buying they could miss the train and end up buying at a much higher cycle.

The most important factor in an investment is; understanding the fundamentals and putting in what you can afford to lose, not timing the investment perfectly, Bitcoin hovered between the $7k and $12k mark for a long time last year and any of those prices would have been a very good time to buy considering the current price. Same way any buy in price now would be profitable should Bitcoin cross the $100k mark sometime in the next 24 months.

This kind of invalidates majority of the statements, if you've not taken out the time to understand a thing or you don't fancy the idea behind it, it's usually best to just ignore. Not everyone is sold on the idea of bitcoin and that's totally fine, as we all have the freedom of choice.

Old habits die hard, and Warren has most likely picked up a number of habits on his rise to success, Bitcoin may just not be a part of that.

In addition to deleting your posts, although they are never really deleted and archives already exists; you can also try getting your account 'locked' so no one else would access it. It's not possible to do this directly, but if you try to reset your password using the secret question option, your account would automatically be locked. It's different from getting outrightly banned as you can recover the account at a later time should you wish to return to the forum by proving you are the actual owner.

Electrum does not have an exchange option, hence you cannot convert from Bitcoin to fiat or vice versa. What Bitcoin ATM were you attempting to buy from? Were you debited after the attempt to make the purchase?

CMIIW, but this transaction was initiated by Satoshi 9 days earlier than it was received. From what I read the test transaction took six days before it was broadcasted on the main network and another 3 days to be received. So today would be the day it was received, not sent (could be an important distinction).

So it would have been initiated on the 3rd, rebroadcasted on the main network on the 9th and received on the 12th of 2009.

I think it's used to show that Bitcoin itself doesn't change, rather other currencies and assets changes against it. Let me try and use an analogy here;
Think of it like a world class resort located in a remote area or a really precious stone which few know about. Most people are not aware of them or their worth and as such it doesn't really have a value cause there's no market at the time.
After a while scientific research could be done on the stone or more potential buyers discover the resort and realize it's a modern building regardless of the location, their market audience starts to grow and so does the market value, but there always was the intrinsic value even when no one was paying attention.