Thanks for the wish and Happy New year to everyone who still frequents the forum despite not being on a signature campaign.

You are the people actually keeping this alive.

While a lot of real information is still available on the forum, I think most of the really cool stuff has ceased to happen because well, I guess the quality of people has declined over time in terms of their technical proficiency. The technical proficient have a lot more crazier and far better things to do. I be-grudge the fact that despite being here for over 4 years now, I have really not buitl anything.

Like zero, nada, zilch.

I am pretty thankful to those like Roobet and Bestchange who let us earn a little here by engaging and pretty much trying to guide the newbies to not do stupid shit. Here is hoping to a lot of brilliant mind continuing to contribute to Bitcoin and let more meaningful interactions be created on it.

I am hopeful about a few things in 2022. Lets see how it works out for each one of us.

Elon again..

Ok, that tweet was from Jack, who is staunchly Pro-bitcoin (even bitcoin maximalist) about ETH being centralized and under the influence of VCs.

In comes this Doge clown with his claims about Doge being special and decentralized (which it clearly isn't based on the richlist).

Now that Doge was mentioned, Elon had to have his fun by trying the pump and getting his tiktok army excited and hopeful again. That one tweet is enough to revive the sagging morale and make another few of them buy and pump it, Which the smart ones will again dump to cash in on Musk's idiosyncracy as long as they can.

Everyone in Bitcoin goes through this phase about resenting the so-called nouveau rich of Bitcoin. Elon is clearly going through that same phase where he thinks that he should have been the one to re-define internet's currency after Paypal. This didn't happen so his Bitcoin prejudice is pretty much just an unfulfilled desire.

When does an asset gets hard to "manipulate" and becomes part of efficient markets is probably a question for the academics. The good thing is that as @hd49728 pointed out, all of this information is openly available on the blockchain and several analytic websites have evolved there own parameters for following Bitcoin's price. All of them point to one thing that the Bitcoin market is indeed efficient.

Same cannot be said for crypto in general where whales can easily manipulate prices. The less said about NFT manipulation, the better.

Although Bitcoin trading seems to be stabilized, Bitcoin is still subject to sudden events like an announcement from Musk or extension of ETF grants by SEC. This means that even though people and institutions are using it, the regulatory environment is uncertain enough to cause major shifts.

Those were quite heartfelt turnaround stories from the both of you.

There is no doubt that Bitcoin has provided opportunities to a lot of people, especially in the SEA countries and other countries where earning opportunities are very competitive due to populations and small sized economies. With crypto, there are no borders. Value is created in a decentralized way and stakeholders benefit in a decentralized way.

While the going has been good till now, I'd definitely submit that these are not really established opportunities at present. Things can change at anytime with a prolonged crypto winter. Then there are other risk factors like:
1. Ambiguity in regulations and general reluctance of governments.
2. The space getting more and more limited in terms of open opportunities with formation of big boys' clubs and VCs who are always the first in projects.
3. Too many people using unethical methods like bot-farming, wallet farming rather than genuine engagement. While these maybe beneficial in the short run to individuals, it damages the overall ecosystem.
4. Too much money still being allocated to vaporware and false promises of decentralization.

So, while its good that crypto is helping people, its up to the people to grow it and save it. Unethical means and lip-service will only go so far in the real world.

Hard to disagree with this because the stuck transactions and network congestion resulted in a lot of vault holders losing their collateral with no refunds on liquidation. It was indeed due to the inability of the platforms to handle such events. Though if you compare them to centralized system, people do lose money in black swan events but I'd have to dig a bit more to find a analogy.

I was meaning more like Compound, Ave versus the farms on BSC and Polygon. There is really no comparison to Bitcoin. These are all quite risky plays but one can't deny that people are certainly making life-changing money from them because of the exact same reason.

Great question. As mk4 said, I would be out of depth talking to anyone with an understanding of the code. This is something i ardently wish to pursue but the distractions in this space are unfortunately too many. From the lack of newbie focussed bitcoin development to the allure of finding that DeFi gem that can help me stack more sats, there are plenty of reasons that keep one occupied.

Conceptually, I think the hardest part to understand for me is the ECDSA and its implementation on the "finite field" with a "Generator point". There is just a lot of esoteric mathematics involved.

Other than that, I think most other concepts need a bit of in-depth research but the understanding without reading code is always going to be wanting. So, it is indeed one of my goals, to grok Bitcoin, the network, wallet and miner; although they can all even be the same.

You are just theorizing a bit too much. People on this forum are well aware of these trial concepts like DAOs.

This concept of DAOs and Sub-DAOs seems to be borrowed straight out of how Cosmos and Tendermint deal with it.

When you talk about creating a Parent DAO by getting funds from Sub-DAOs, this is nothing different from asking individuals for investment money and then making a DAO to manage it. This has been going on for ages now. There is nothing gained by confusing it with Sub-DAOs.

If you really want to talk DAOs and governance, go to Alt-section and start a topic on this. This theorizing helps nobody and I don't know why so many people seem to have been inspired by RainbowKun..

Most of the mature platforms that have people locking in billions of dollars worth of BTC actually just rely on the smart-contract for liquidations if the collateral falls below a certain level. So, there isn't really a risk of default to these platforms. They have already functioned the way they were supposed to. The main issue is that the collateral cannot be expanded to include all kinds of shit. This is something that the established platforms shy away from.

Its those cheap, degen farms on BSC and MATIC that these anon "devs" keep throwing up everyday with only one purpose. To scam away at newbies like OP trying to understand the difference between Proof of "Stake" and "Stake" on a platform.

It seems to be some kind of app you will have to install and use which will apparently put your BTC into a financial product they call as "covered calls". I am familiar with options but have no idea about covered calls.

These have been implemented using DLC (Discrete log contracts), which apparently enable smart-contract like or similar capabilities. (And why haven't we heard about this more in the forum is another thing).

Whatever the idea is, the fact that you install an "app" that manages your BTC just means that you are trusting the application and it will of course use your keys at some point in time. This is the same idea implemented by apps like Binance where you can "store" your BTC and they will allow you to earn yield. The blog is also unclear about where the "yield" comes from.

Don't know about mintlayer but Sovry has been a sore disappointment till now. Of course a lot of early people made money when SOV pumped but that is about it. They are just another smart-contract platform and I have no idea why they want to show themselves as different from Ethereum. Its really the same thing with much worse UI/ UX. And to think that they got almost 200-300 BTC raised.

LOL..I love these judges.

He effectively rejected everything that the liar has been doing. I hope Poor Craigie finds out that it is not so easy to bamboozle actual judges than newbies and poor third worlders who make a beeline for him hoping to have some kind of returns on their BSV shit.

@Lucius already pointed out the most fun part of this decision. He literally trolled Poor Craigie by plainly refusing the childish insistence on being addresses as "Dr."...LOL, WTF..

This was a good read and I truly, deeply hope that this manipulative liar gets the kind of treatment that he actually deserves from a court of law. Although it won't make a difference to the crackpot, hopefully the English judge will be more direct and to-the-point in his words to call him a forgerer and a fraud. This seems to be heading that way considering that he made it a point that all of those topics were to be a decision on forgery and not "innocent claims".

Thank you COPA and the people behind it. Much Love and a Happy New year..

Facebook has been declining for several years now. Zuck and his company faced enquiries into their shady, unethical practices and employees were becoming whistleblowers due to the level of corrupt practices.

Zuck needed some idea to divert. So he did what most of the 20th centuries "great minds" are good at doing. Stole an idea. Right from crypto's experiments with metaverse and calling it his own.

This is just a desperate band-aid to pivot facebook. Because the name "facebook" had become synonymous with unethical, evil-mastermind practices. So now its "meta" and Zuck and his marketing team hopes that people will slowly forget Facebook. In short, there is nom grand vision behind this step. Its just a silly diversion.

I can completely understand the feelings. This token and a hundred like this were launched on almost every chain including BSC and MATIC when the price for deployment was reduced to pennies by these new chains.

It is hard to say if its a good thing or a bad thing. All that Shiba token has going for itself is the fact that thousands of people have bought boat-loads of it and they all just hope and pray every minute and every day of their lives that it'll reduce more zeros. Everytime it moves one zero, they get 10X richer, at least in terms of crypto. Of course a lot of people will burn and the only ones who will benefit are the founders and Binance, which legitimized this shit in the first place.

It is an example of the fact that anything is possible in crypto. If Elon Musk can portray DOGE as an alternative to BTC, surely this guy can do the same. It ultimately comes to the fact that nobody with an actual working brain and with actual skin in the game will prefer DOGE/ SHiba over BTC. Its just that a lot of poor noobs are desperate to make it worth something that they become part of "community" and keep shilling it.

If by "choosing" you mean putting 100% of your crypto portfolio into either BTC or ETH, then it would be the most foolish thing to do to put it into Ethereum.

Ethereum solves no problem by smart-contracts that cannot be solved otherwise. Its just that the open source ethos of development get a boost and people are thus building on it. Even then, all that it relies on is the ethos and community.

Every single solidity dev can scam you whenever he wants. There is literally NOTHING people will be able to do if they just decide to make this thing centralized and run it for their own profit. This is the reason that despite the promises, major companies have not gone full-time into Ethereum. This is also the reason that people are looking towards a multi-blockchain future when it comes to smart-contracts.

Bitcoin on the other hand solves an actual problem that nobody else has or ever will. It will exist as "money" even if everything else goes away. This is why, you may "choose" ETH if it excites you more but choosing it for your portfolio over BTC is plain ignorance.

I am surprised that BADecker is asking this question. I have seen you as a pretty old member in the Politics & Society section. Still, These are valid questions whenever you try to wrap your head around Bitcoin. I don't claim to know it fully but will try to answer what I understand. So,

The blockchain is data like everything else on the internet. The difference is that it does not have single centralized servers storing all of that data. Instead, every single "Full Node" keeps a copy of the blockchain whenever you run the software for the first time. This is why it downloads a few hundred GBs of data.

Blocks are made by the consolidation of all the transaction data that is happening every second. It keeps getting stored and keeps increasing in size with every new block.
Miners do not "maintain" the blockchain and the blockchain does not need maintenance or administration like any other centrally stored data would need. Like I said above, every Full node has a full copy of the blockchain. Whenever someone installs a new instance of the software, they too can opt to keep a whole copy of the blockchain, or just be a client accessing the transaction records from other full nodes.
The nearest you can be to being a "maintainer" is to run a Full node. Though it is completely community service and it won't benefit you in any way. Though, people are indeed earning sats on LN by becoming LN nodes.

When we "send transactions", that data gets transmitted throughout the peer-to-peer network and gets stored by every miner and full node in its fast memory (generally RAM). This pool of transactions is called the mempool. Miners pick the most "expensive" ones which have the most fee attached to them and start processing them into blocks. If your transactions has enough fees attached to it, the miners will pick it instantly and it'll be finalized. In times when lot of transactions are happening, only the most expensive ones go through. This causes several "normally prices" ones to stay/ get stuck in mempool and not being put into blocks.

The Bitcoin blockchain started the day Satoshi started running it on his 2008-era PC. If all the miners just shutdown, the blockchain will continue to exist in the thousands of full-nodes. The difficulty will take time to adjust and then it'll continue like nothing happened.

Kind of, yes.

Which "work" are you refering to?

Dude, you sound like you are talking to someone on whatsapp after they friend-zoned you..

Seriously though, If you aren't going to show an actual analytical mind and respond on the stuff that the people are telling you on this thread, nobody is ever going to take you seriously. Like WTF? Just ignore the bitching and think about the shit you've been saying about "Server" and "This directs a finger to Satoshi".

It is natural to be out of one's depth in crypto if you aren't serious about learning or discussing and are just doing it for the sake of it. It inevitably shows after a certain time. Even then, such questions definitely open up the discussion for other newbies but it is of little use if you do not try to wrap your head around it by doing some actual thinking.

And for god's sake, stop with the "Sir this, Sir that".

Shusssh you all crazy Bitcoiners....Shusssh!!

Let me just first sell-off some of my "art" in the form of NFTs and auction it off to the biggest fool...Stop exposing the plan to everybody..

LOL. I totally agree that this NFT business enables complete nut-cases. The pump and dump here is way more easier than even the ICOs. You just launch your project, do a fake whitelist, then do a public mint. And on the day of mint, buy some of your own JPEG's on Opensea from some other accounts. The people who haven't gotten into the "whitelist" start FOMOing and then you take the money on re-sales, on re-selling from your Alt-accounts and your brothers accounts.

It totally works.

Despite this, Just like alt-chains, it is a lot about community than just these pump and dumps. There are indeed some NFT projects where people are putting in money and ETH, simply because they believe in the concept or want to be part of the community. Like checkout this group called as @nounsdao. They sell 1 NFT for upwards of a 100 ETH every day. and they are still going strong and using that treasury to fund more projects and artists.

So frankly, its not all bad. There is of course a lot of scammy shit but its up to the individual to discern.

Cobra obviously chose to remain anonymous rather than present himself in court and doxx himself to the world. This is something that has made it possible for newbies to get fooled by CSW, Calvin Ayre and their propaganda outlets like coingeek.

Recently when a few Bitcoin devs publicly announced that they are stepping away from Bitcoin development, the whole troll brigade was sending memes about how CSW will get them all. It would have been funny if it wasn't such a tragedy to realize that there are so many idiots in the world who fail to understand that Bitcoin is not "owned" by one person or the Core Devs. So yeah, if someone will try law, nobody will give a fuck and won't even respond. If the court rules in his favor in absence of any opposition doesn't make it law.

The OP could as well have put up that case and won it if he had the money and the time to hire lawyers and file lawsuits.

I always heard that "Common Sense isn't Common". I never imagined it'd be sooooo damn rare.

I think your question is adequately answered by @DaveF as is usual for the likes of him who come up with to-the-point explanations about such confusions. Thanks Dave. This is what makes this forum still so awesome. There are a lot of people who have authoritative understanding on the different aspects of Bitcoin and whatever question one has, you can always get the answer.

Let me also thank @franky1 and the likes of @BitcoinFX who keep removing misconceptions about people like CSW and so many other things. Now if i keep thanking, this list would not end as there are a lot of these people in the forum, who are active (Thank God) as well as very knowledgeable. May you all be healthy and happy.

As far as anybody can tell, Satoshi ran the client on his own PC and when he asked other people like Hal Finney to run it, the network was formed. You keep saying "server" like its some special entity. Your own PC could be a server hosting a program it is running.

It seems to me that you are abstracting things wrongly. Like when you say "communicating with blockchain and node". As soon as Satoshi started the client, the block production had started. It has never stopped. You are probably thinking in terms of these other PoS chains that have led to such confusions with their concepts of validators/ stakers/ Master-node and such made-up words to make it sound like they are somehow not centralized.

These concepts do not apply to  Bitcoin's PoW. Sure there can be different kind of nodes based on how much of the blockchain's copy they are keeping but there is no "central" server. Of course its not straight-forward to get your head around this and that is one of the reasons that Bitcoin's strength lies in its continuity, its network and the community. These things are not replaceable. Otherwise anybody could run a few nodes and start calling their new copied coin as Bitcoin.

You work hard enough to get the capability to put sentences together in a coherent manner and understand statistics, probability, calculus and basic algebra that is needed to keep track of your investments; you too can become like one of those wall street guys.

All of these stupid excuses about the scales somehow being in their favor is just the economics of scale at work. The world certainly isn't fair and wealth distribution will definitely never be equal, despite that anybody with enough knowledge, skill, and most importantly, luck can become wealthy. There is no other reason.

Loan against equity portfolio is definitely a good way to get investment cash if you already have a considerable portfolio. The middle class mostly has to depend on the loan against property stuff.

Borrowing against equity is something that people are already doing on these Eth based markets like AAVE and COMPOUND where you can lock certain tokens as collateral and borrow stablecoins or other crypto. These two universes will continue to draw parallels now.

Thats a savage take mindrust.

I am sure a lot of people are going to employ this strategy but you are mixing up the two. Zuck's metaverse has got nothing to do with the metaverse coins. Atleast there haven't been any announcements yet. There have been real deals between some NFTs and big corporates like Nike and Adidas but not with Facebook.

So Zuck really just wants everybody to get hooked onto AR/VR kits and haptic gloves and jerk themselves off to virtual porn. Its a very dystopian vision. The one with people in avatars attending meetings is also very superfluous. Yet, he definitely has the money and the marketing to make it possible. The crypto based metaverse coins actually came up with the idea first but Zuck loves stealing ideas. Isn't there this urban legend about Winklevoss twins and facebook? The bugger stole their idea and now he wants to co-opt the one crypto-related thing that seems to be getting hit with common people.

Its mostly just about ownership of virtual goods rather than the actual experience. Maybe we are too early to write this off, but really who cares about wearing a haptic suit and getting to hug and greet virtual people and shop around virtual items in 3D?