Hopefully. I don't see any reason for Pakistan to face an energy crisis when their neighbor in the west has the biggest supply of gas and oil in the whole world. All they have to do is to stop letting a foreign country dictate their policies. Although I'm not that familiar with Pakistan politics but it looked like Imran Khan was working towards more independence before he was removed from office in a suspicious way.

I'm hopeful for the future though. A lot of things are changing like the news you shared. So far the Eastern Bloc is working a lot better than before (eg. pre-WW) and based on mutual benefits. Some countries like Turkey that played the middle are screwed but everyone else seems to be finding their sides already.

I started this topic 4 months ago and warned about the food crisis that is going to be caused by fertilizer crisis. The "European Fertilizer Producers" just figure it out recently! Their representative announced that the fertilizer industry is already in a full-fledged crisis!
"As a result, over 70% of European production capacity has been curtailed. If the situation prevails, we fear that remaining producers could also be affected."

Interestingly enough they blame the over 1000% increase in gas price, but that is only part of the reason. The major imports of components they used to produce the fertilizers are no longer being sold to them as I said earlier which is why they can not produce enough fertilizers anymore.
Lithuanian fertilizer company, Achema AB has already said as much when they announced they will shut down soon.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-26/europe-s-fertilizer-crisis-deepens-with-70-of-capacity-hit
https://www.newsweek.com/europes-energy-crisis-turning-food-crisis-opinion-1740228

That only works with products that the customer can live without.

That's the same thing. Controlling the supply is one way to control the price.
I don't know the reliability of these stats but they say currently there is about 103.5 mbpd demand for oil while there is only about 96 mbpd being produced. Part of it is because they are intentionally keeping the supply low.

That's a good point but again the same problem with demand comes up. Even if they succeed in forcing everyone in EU to not buy oil (or gas), others will still continue to buy it happily. For example India has been increasing their demand consistently and it is almost back up to pre-pandemic levels despite the price rise. Same with China and some others.

With that in mind what is the private sector going to do in EU? Are they going to keep their money in EU or will they take it elsewhere?
For example will the car industry remain alive in Germany assuming they stop buying energy from Russia because it is being sold to them at a price higher than what the Union set? Or will they move elsewhere like for example India where they can still buy energy and at cheaper prices, on top of that have access to cheap labor and pay lower taxes?

P.S. The amount of money from foreign investors going to India these days is increasing which is why I use that example. Their economy is also growing while the Indian stock market has been booming ever since June.

I wonder how successful this can be even if they could force others to obey. I've never heard of the customer setting the price instead of the producer. It's like going to a grocery store and demanding to pay less than what the total was.

Same with oil, OPEC consists of producers not consumers and they decide the price. If they are pressured they could simply "shock" the market and increase the price if they wanted to. They've been doing it over the past couple of months, and we know how a simple decision like the recent OPEC+ small 100k bpd reduction (out of 3 million) affects the price (oil jumped up 3%).

All those who think like this have to first ask themselves a very important question: why did I buy bitcoin?

Did you buy bitcoin to make a quick profit?
Then you made mistake buying bitcoin regardless of the price, bitcoin is not going to give you quick profit. It is too risky for that specially at times like this when the market is very unpredictable and manipulation is at highest.

Did you want to make a long term investment?
In which case there is nothing wrong with buying at $23.5k. It was a good price to buy at since nobody can see the future and the analysis says bitcoin is currently undervalued regardless of how much lower the price goes. For any future purchase I'd wait a little to see how effecting this current market manipulation is before deciding what the bottom is to start buying.
Long term investment is at least a year or two.

Did you want to day trade?
In which case you should be actively buying and selling bitcoin in all dips and rises not just any specific price.

When you think about when Proof of Stake was created (2012) and the fact that all the coins that have been using this consensus algorithm are either dead or centralized (like Peercoin), it starts looking weird how we have to restart decade old discussions about an algorithm that everyone knew is flawed. All that began when a superpumped shitcoin called ethereum started switching algorithm to ensure its own survival and free money for the holders of premined ethers!

Always remember that PayPal works too.

How do you know what kind of hardware Satoshi was using? He never announced it publicly and he had access to decent enough system(s) that allowed him to mine bitcoin in very first days. If Satoshi's hardware were weak the time between blocks would have been a lot higher than what they actually were in first couple of days.

I don't know where you got this information from either but lets assume you are right.
Satoshi was developing bitcoin before 2009 (at least for a year so from 2007 to 2008).
A lot of Windows users never upgraded from XP to any of the versions released prior to 7 because of how terrible they were. And Windows 7 was release late 2009.
As for VS6 I'm having a hard time believing that since there is 7 released in 2003 and v6 is from 1998. This has nothing to do with being poor, why would someone use such an old version?

Anybody who claims to be Satoshi in a newspaper is definitely not Satoshi. More so when they don't offer any proof.

I agree but this is easier said than done.
Research requires time and some knowledge. An absolute beginner who doesn't understand the market, the technology and the ways they scam people is not going to be able to make a conclusion based on what they research.

Take bitcoin for example, searching could bring up a lot of FUD about how bitcoin is "wasting energy", is "fraud", used by "criminals", ... and majority of them are coming from people that a newbie could trust like CEO of a big bank like JPMorgan who was spreading FUD back in 2017 when price was barely $1000.

And that's just FUD which is easier to figure out, the technical lies are harder to detect. For example take shitcoins that tell people that they are solving a "problem" that doesn't exist in reality just because they copied bitcoin's source code and changed a thing or two! They sell their shitcoin to newbies with the promise of huge returns. How is a newbie supposed to know this is all fake if they don't understand the code and how it is a exact copy of bitcoin?

To be fair scammers like Wright are exploiting the public using their lack of knowledge and also exploiting the legal system by finding loopholes in it (like the court against someone who doesn't show up which votes in the scammer's favor). So I seriously doubt that the type of license or if whitepaper wasn't under that license would have changed much.

I wanna vote both but it is not possible
That's the "prediction" anyways, it can go both ways but obviously the reality is not changing and it is best summarized by this picture:

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/x6pae2/inflation_relief_packages/

Technically it could be implemented in a more decentralized way with a little more effort which would also solve the security problem.

For example the user's phone could send a message to the centralized server with the user's address to first fetch a list of UTXOs. Then the user can locally build a transaction spending any of the given outputs, even sign it offline (for example on another device) and then send it back to that server through SMS.

The first contact could also act as a registration so that the server can associate your phone number with your address so that if anybody wanted to send you coins they send a message to that server with your phone number and get your address.

The only limitation I can think of is the SMS size which user may need to send/receive multiple ones per tx considering the size of the transaction could be bigger.

How about using "Korsi"?



This is an Iranian traditional way of getting warm in at least a hundred years ago when there were no gas pipelines all throughout the country. Basically in addition to a fireplace, our ancestors used to go under these things to remain warm.
The benefit is that it is pretty cheap while efficient since you don't need to burn wood. It can also be used anywhere without needing a "fireplace".

It's pretty simple and you can build it yourself. It consists of 4 main parts:
1. Table
It's a pretty simple 4 leg wooden table, depending on the number of people it could be of any size but usually a medium size table would work since the actual bigger space is provided by the big ass blanket like the picture below. The height shouldn't be enough to have enough space between the heat source and the ceiling.

2. Blanket
It needs to be big so that multiple people can go under it around the table and it needs to be thick to not let the heat out.


The size is flexible depending on the number of people or if for example you live in a tiny apartment:


3. A cover
Usually a simple pretty cloth is thrown over the blanket, to prevent it from getting dirty considering that food and snacks were placed on Korsi.

4. Heat source
The modern versions used for nostalgic purposes use electric heater but since we are talking about high energy costs and burning wood, the old traditional "brazier" should be used here.
It's usually a "metal container" to hold the red hot charcoal and it is placed under the table at the middle, usually in a hole at the bottom or dangling from the ceiling.
Considering charcoal is cheap and you don't need to exactly burn it like firewood so you don't need to use much of it. A handful should suffice to keep you warm.


There is a trick to increase efficiency which is to cover the bottom of the brazier with ash and place the charcoals in the middle.

P.S. Be careful not to burn your place down

In addition to testing your actual cold storage/wallet you can also always try things for free using TestNet.
Just run your Electrum using --testnet command line parameter or make a copy of the shortcut on your Windows desktop and change the target like this.
Then all you have to do is to claim some free TestNet coins from a faucet and since those coins have no value you can easily test anything you like without worrying about losing actual money. Here is a faucet list:
https://bitcoinfaucet.uo1.net/
https://coinfaucet.eu/en/btc-testnet/
https://testnet-faucet.com/btc-testnet/
https://testnet-faucet.mempool.co/

Sorry, forget what I said before, the order of a point on elliptic curve is defined as smallest integer m so that mP = O
I don't understand your question to answer it though.

I believe that until proven otherwise all the old models are broken, whether the Stock to Flow model or the modified version of it, or the traditional 4-year cycle with halving model, or any other ones that could be calculated based on past behavior.

Over the past couple of years with the global economy getting worse due to pandemic and now the energy crisis in the West, the markets are not behaving "normally" so we can't expect the bitcoin price to behave like before too.
Which is why the previous cycle (starting from $3k) didn't end up at a bubble like it was supposed to and fell a lot shorter than that (a couple of $100k shorter in fact).

I say we are in uncharted waters and the future price behavior is very unpredictable. Specially with the "cost of living crisis" and the "energy crisis" that most of the world is facing.

I don't think the receiver's bank can handle $100 million deposit either, that raises a lot of red flags specially if it is one of those banks that are already against bitcoin and shut down customers' accounts.

This type of FUD increases in numbers during the times when price is either falling or at least is not rising. Otherwise there is a significant decrease (even drop to zero) of this type of FUD when price is rising.

For example I haven't seen any FUD posts about the ~4900 transactions that transferred between 10k  to 63.3k bitcoins (or $470 million to $1.5 billion) during the weeks when price was climbing up from $40k to $69k (between 2021-09-29 and 2021-11-10).
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?s=output_total(desc)&q=time(2021-09-29..2021-11-10),output_total(1000000000000..)#f=time,output_total,output_total_usd,hash

It always gives me a bad feeling when they use the term "cryptocurrency" instead of just "bitcoin". This has been an ongoing trend, recently Iran publicly announced the same thing also, someone even mentioned Tether which I can only hope they did it out of being uninformed instead of being stupid enough to actually think a centralized shitcoin that can be frozen is a good option to use!

A couple of years ago I said the world is moving away from US dollar but at the time they were still arguing about the replacement. My analysis was that they came up with a couple of options instead of just one.
- Gold (a lot of international trades have already happened using gold directly)
- Each country's own currency (as it was also mentioned in the quote above)
- Alternative payment systems to replace SWIFT like the Russian SPFS
- Finally bitcoin was discussed at that time
(we later learned about gov-coins or CBDCs that seems to be another option, the Chinese one is claimed to have already processed a huge amount of transactions)
My point is that the Russian sanctions aren't the cause of this move, they are the catalyst. This has been going on for a couple of years at least. The reason is just the introduction of the New World Order; a large part of US dominance is in dollar. Take that away and it removes a big chunk of it.

P.S. I'm mostly curious about what each of these countries are going to do about the volatility.

You are right, The United States Defense Department is the name of THE Iranian Media and that eagle thing is THE logo of the Iran's national TV and The Planet releasing the satelite images of the aftermath is an Iranian company

In other words you had nothing to say about any of the points I raised and are just wasting my time by going off-topic.
Back to ignore list. I wonder where you live though and how does your energy bill feel like with all the gas that is "stored"...

Not just in a raid, in multiple openly admitted attacks against US bases in North Africa and Middle East like Al-Asad airbase and Erbil.

You probably know more than former CENTCOM commander Gen. McKenzie.

I don't think I've said that. Sanctions definitely have hurt Iranians but they never achieved what they wanted them to achieve, in fact it did the exact opposite.

LOL

I never said "agreed to" I said they already paid and it wasn't 2 billion it was half a billion:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe-nazanin-uk-iran-b2037030.html
Funny how they paid this much money only for these two specific people and don't even give a shit about the other 6 or 7 UK nationals in Iranian prisons.

Feel free to prove the points I raised here or here are wrong kiddo.

There is no reliable sources for any data which is affecting national security during war times! Not to mention that there are already enough protests around Europe.

It is a simple analysis: Where did Germany get that much gas to fill the storages? It's a matter of supply and consumption, there is significantly decreased supply + slightly decreased consumption; so there is definitely no excess gas to be added to storage.

1. Russia significantly decreased the gas exports very early in the war (down to 40% and 20% exports to EU and they even recently shut down Nord Stream I which is completely removing part of that export).
2. Germany hasn't been able to secure other sources either.
2.1. US hasn't fulfilled the promises and they even created 2 fake explosions in their LNG ports which aren't going to be fixed this year (they needed to dump that gas domestically to keep the price down inside US and save their own economy).
2.2. No success with Canada (they keep saying they can send LNG but they haven't yet!)
2.3. Qatar, Iraq, other Arabs haven't been able to increase their production to send anything major to Europe let alone to Germany. Not to mention they already have other customers elsewhere that have increased their own demands.
2.4. Iran with one of the biggest gas reserves isn't going to send anything (oil or gas) towards EU any time soon
2.5. Turkey (a lot of gas was going through it towards Europe) is being greedy and wants to get gas for $350 then resell it to Europe for $4200 so at least 14 billion cubic meter (that's the confirmed amount which could be higher) export to Turkey was halted.
3. For the very little gas left in the global market, there is a lot of demand elsewhere specially in other parts of Europe, not much is left for Germany.
4. Germany does't have the capability to go in another country and either steal their gas or force them to give it to them like what Brits and French have been doing over the past couple of months in North African and West Asia.

The best case scenario is that they haven't yet touched the stockpiles and the storages are a little less than half full. If you add the amount US promised to send (but hasn't yet) to this amount you get to about 85%.
This is one of the contributing factors to Uniper needing $19 billion bailout money.