Bitcoin can pretty much run amuck in the country I live in. Heck there are so little regulatory laws about bitcoin that it might as well just be outright legalized without any repercussions/regulations. However, banks are our greatest enemies here. For the most part, when a bank finds out that you get your money from cryptocurrencies, it's either they won't grant your request of opening a bank account with them, or they will allow you, ban your account eventually for some reason, and then subject you to a lengthy and arduous process just so you can claim your money back.

A lot of us here resorted to centralized Digital Wallet Apps like Paypal, which isn't the most secure but in a country where fiat is still the king, you'd need to have cash in hand if you don't want to starve to death.

To watch this guy from way back then become this husk of a desperate man is just depressing. Way back then you'd really root for him, especially since we love impossible stories and he's pretty determined to find his lost treasures and earn back his fortune. Nowadays you can't root for him anymore. He's exhausted all efforts, time, and money for an impossible task that has spanned years already. We all know it's better for him to just quit and move on with his life so he can I don't know, earn his lost coins in a more established way instead of looking for something that is already gone forever, but due to sunk cost fallacy you can't make this guy relent.

This story will either end with him getting arrested for it or dying, or him actually finding his hard drive which is even more impossible. I'm pretty sure of that.

So in retrospect, the cheapest iPhone is actually the most expensive in bitcoin!

I get people who are really keen about buying these "pseudo-luxury" items. The fact that this elevates their innate status amongst their friends (you can't deny that copping the latest iPhone is one of the biggest conversation starters amongst friends) is one of the biggest reasons why they buy these. Another would be the fact that for the most part, these phones are perfected to a T. They may not have the latest specs or the fastest processors nor the best refresh rates out there, but you can bet your bottom dollar that whatever feature they offer, you can guarantee that they have made it as perfect and tailor-fitted to the user's needs as much as possible. Plus it's just so cool having an iPhone in your pocket. Call me materialistic or something but there's this certain form of ego-boost that one gets when they know they have the latest device, let alone an iPhone.

So you can't really fault your friend for having the latest iPhone just cause she likes it. It could've been that there are a lot more reasons under the surface that she's just not able to convey to you.

Going to your local produce has always been the best choice for me. Not only are they cheaper, you can also guarantee that they are fresh and straight from the farm/fisheries. I live near a coastal area, as well as a piggery so when I look for meat I don't go any farther. To some especially those that live in tight urban cities this may be a massive ordeal especially since most of these places are monopolized by large groceries and supermarkets, but if you're willing to take that 30 min. walk which you can also portray as your exercise for the day, you're getting the epic guarantee that not only are you getting fresh, cheap, and healthy produce, you're also making sure that you're fit and healthy on the way there.

There's a saying in my country: "Where there's a will, there's a way". In times when resourcefulness is necessitated, we gotta keep our brains fired up else we're risking losing those important few cents you know.

Bitcoin is not necessarily known for its functionality and versatility. It's awesome at 2 things and nothing else. To implement smart contracts in the network shouldn't warrant any negative side effects or whatever since after all, smart contracts do nothing but what they are told to do and nothing else. But in my opinion, since there's nothing much to work with anyway, I don't see any "massive benefit" so to speak that the implementation of smart contracts could offer to the table. Best is it could automate most of the processes within the network but bitcoin is already automatic as it is and I don't see any more need for it to be more automated lol. It could also bring in more people who could build within the bitcoin network but with what happened with Ordinals, it's plain to see that bitcoin's not really that awesome when it comes to fathering crypto projects.

I'd take inflation out of this. Bitcoin and USD aren't connected in any way whatso-ever, let alone any other currency in the outside market. To think that your currency has become more valuable cause everything is now in the gutter is a little skewed in my opinion. Just because the USD or any other reference currency for that matter is at the lower end of the spectrum when compared to bitcoin (keyword: compared) doesn't necessarily equate to a gain in bitcoin's end. All the world could burn and the USD could collapse but if bitcoin doesn't increase in intrinsic valuation, it's not going to increase in value no matter how hard you try. Everything else is good, just had qualms with that part lol.

A better alternative to this is just buying a spare accessible HDD (hard disk drive) or SSD from your local computer parts shop and using that as your makeshift paper wallet. Just download electrum or whatever regular wallet app on that particular hard disk, make sure you can pull it out of your pc whenever you want to (I advise using a dongle instead of connecting it directly to your motherboard) and then from there, you got yourself a hardware wallet that is virtually as secure as your regular trezor, just don't connect it through the internet and only transact in equal amounts and you should be good to go.

Or better yet, if you're risking prison time just don't. Bitcoin is good and all that, but you can't spend your money in prison.

One can't say for sure even though we're at the cusp of a halving, with it happening some time next year. The issue at hand is that for someone to be able to confidently say that the market will be bullish or bearish come next year, we have to have a definitive reason as to why it has to. For instance, back in 2020 we had a reason to believe that bitcoin will be bearish, with a good majority of people even believing that it's over for bitcoin since way back then it dumped as low as 7k from a whopping 20k valuation not too long ago. And then the confidence of the people struck up, allowing many to invest in bitcoin with the sense of security that COVID-19's not gonna do shit against bitcoin anymore.

The same needs to happen for bitcoin come next halving, we need to have a sustainable cause as to why we would invest in it, investing for the sake of halving is just not gonna cut it.

It's a classic ethical problem. The miner gains nothing and loses everything from whole ordeal. 500k is 500k after all and it's not like you could find a loose 500k when you walk out your door for that morning jog or to grab a bite for breakfast. The miner has to give the money back to the user out of his own pure moral compass and all that. Which I myself don't think is a great basis anyway considering the implications of todays' world setting. In any case, I still think the miner should return the fee since that's still someone else's money. But we can't be very hopeful really, since the miner's anonymous, and we don't have any way whatsoever of rendering him accountable should he run off with the money.

Not really scared of what bitcoin is at currently. It could be worse that's one thing I'll give ya. Last bull season it literally took us 10 months before bitcoin was even able to recover and that was even past the halving period mind you. So for bitcoin to be in this state of limbo at a very healthy price point, I don't think there's a massive cause for concern here. Sure it could be better, we could be getting 40k now considering we're almost at the end of the year and the halving is just around the corner, but bitcoin doesn't have a general timeline that it follows to a T. So I say we keep at it with the information campaigns and all that awesome stuff to clear out all the confusions and negative connotations that bitcoin received in the past, but not so much as to do it because we're worried that bitcoin is going to fall in value real soon.

Information campaigns could only go so far. There has to be a widespread protest/campaign with the clear intention of mind you "not painting bitcoin in a good light" cause that would lead people into thinking that we are spreading propaganda to lure people into what they could only see as a glorified ponzi scheme, but to actually just clear out bad air around bitcoin and destroy fallacious or misconceptions about it. If we can only do that with the government's help that would be great since corrupt as they may be, the public still has a fair amount of trust over their government, but as it stands today that's next to impossible considering that a lot of countries either don't have clear set rules about crypto, or are just outrightly banning them to avoid further discussion.

ETFs could push the opinion of the people to the favorable side in the future, but it's always going to be the people that will push bitcoin to 100k. We can have all the marketing and the reasons in the world to push bitcoin even to the 1 million mark, but if we're not eager to invest for whatever reason, we're not going to and bitcoin will not shoot up to whatever price point we so desire. ETFs could open bitcoin to wall street and to investors with higher bankrolls to spend but at the same time since bitcoin is decentralized, they wouldn't be enough to push bitcoin to that desired price point.

So if you're thinking that bitcoin's going to shoot up or shoot down just cause a particular high value investor bought or sold his holdings, you're wrong. Bitcoin, though volatile, is still strong enough to support itself even in the most precarious situations.

Cool? I guess?

Lol Not trying to be a bitcoin hater now but Texas is in no way in shape to suffer the heavy power stress that bitcoin mining could ensue. The fact that he's showed support would really just push people from across North America to Texas, which will literally hurt the people by making technology scarce and even more expensive, which in turn will literally force a pitch fork protest to drive bitcoin away from the state. I think bitcoin mining should be allowed, but at the same time should be regulated at the minimum until such a time when bitcoin mining could be supported without causing a huge power stress on their grid, or at least without any other cryptocurrency detriments. All good though.

Confirmed to be a human mistake. Publicly broadcasted, most likely since this is mined from F2Pool the money could be returned to the user since that is a huge amount of money, and it's a huge mining pool to boot. it's either the money's going to be returned, or the money won't be. Either way the user already paid for it, but something that presses me so much about this is why didn't the guy who made this transaction kept his mouth shut about it? Why is it that he decided to not tell anyone, not even F2Pool if I'm not mistaken, about this stuff?

Smelling some money laundering shit going in here, I know i sound like a fucking conspiracy theorist but at the same time the lines meet and if he kept his mouth shut about it it might just mean that he's not really keen about keeping the money one way or another.

It's pretty common for people to jump in late, it's going to be a constant occurrence since after all, there's no end to newcomers as well as people who are not that well-informed about bitcoin. For one thing, at the very least I see this as the industry expanding even more since the influx of newcomers are a great sign that the industry is thriving, on the other hand it's a little too exhausting to tell these people how to invest lol.

At the end of the day we just have to make sure that we're not missing out, that's why investing ahead of the curve is a thing, DCA'ing, HODLing, all that stuff in the mixing pot. If you're doing that, you're already doing better than a large portion of the people in this industry. Take pride in that.

KYC is important in centralized exchanges as they use it for profiling. They require customer information for some sort of data-correlation so they can use it for 2-factor authentication or something, and in some cases they require it to make sure that customers for withdrawals to make sure that they don't money launder. There are other more viable options that wouldn't really jeopardize the customer's identity on the line like Static IP addresses fetching to make sure that they aren't creating multiple accounts, but since these are easier to implement, and since it's a little counterintuitive to not ask for customer's information when you're already working with a centralized exchange, they might as well.

is this standardized? The fact that it's this cheap makes it even less encouraging for people to protect their data, since after all it's dirt cheap!

In my opinion (and I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist as much as possible but it's just so preposterously cheap for me) these journals are hiding something from us, perhaps keeping the fact that Data could go for even more expensive in the market, after all, from a single behavioral data set a company could make millions with it already. Plus we have companies who advertise services where "you can monetize your own data", how does that go for in the grand scheme of things?

This relation might be a little stretch since there's no direct correlation to bear market movements and the existence/increase in use of cold wallets.

You might be seeing the effects of crashes happening within exchanges which drives the public to resort to self-custodial wallets, and the apparent recovery overtime, and then think that it's the switch from cold wallets that's causing this recovery when it's all just normal market behavior in the first place. It's great and all to think that and perhaps even promote the use of cold-wallet since it instills responsible investing and all that nice shit but at the same time, you're painting the wrong picture especially to newbies who aren't that aware of how bitcoin works just yet. This may make them think that just holding their bitcoins on cold-wallets will shoot its price up when that couldn't be any farther from the truth.

If they are holding it for security, sure it's great for the economy both ways, they aren't expected to sell these at a regular company issue, and of crouse this decreases the circulating supply of bitcoin which makes it even more valuable. Plus these kinds of news are great for bitcoin for some reason, as it inspires more people to invest and buy bitcoin just like what happened in 2020 when Elon Musk bought bitcoins for SpaceX, and Tesla, albeit selling these holdings eventually though.

You could also be correct, it centralizes the purchasing power to the few, but if you'll ask me, the dynamic isn't that too inclined towards these companies in bitcoin compared to fiat, which means the public still holds as much power against these private entities as they have over the people.

I'm seeing freelancing and working from home as the primary reasons why the rate shot up all of a sudden. For one, it's way easier to work when you're not forced to commute for 2 hours all the while battling the elements just so you can get paid peanuts in the office. Plus if I'm not mistaken, inflation also forces people who are otherwise jobless to double up on the effort to look for one since now they can't just rely on their parents or whatever, which could also play a part in this increase in employment rates.

I'm basing all of this on common sense so if I'm wrong please correct me lol.