The core of the problem is that people put their money above their principles, which makes them lose both.

The ideal benefit of bitcoin is that you're free of monetary oppression. That, besides self-custody, you're using something whose supply is programmed, which means safe from any arbitrary monetary policy, and that it's completely transparent and therefore honest towards you. However, it's not easy to get the picture if you've done the opposite your entire life.

The current capitalism relies on greed and the ignorance of the mob; that's why most don't understand the way money works and even worse: Don't care to find out. Which brings us to the second, non-ideal benefit of bitcoin, profit. Lots of people want to abuse the existence of the ideal benefit, to make money. They will portray themselves as cognizant of something innovative they, yet, haven't fully understood themselves, to serve their broken system's ideals.

And that's also the reason we have thousands of altcoins which are gradually forgotten. We've solved the double-spending problem and got rid of trust. Yet, some constantly try to create different mechanisms, which supposedly "work better", to favor mostly themselves financially.

If people had acknowledged the importance of self-custody, transparency and privacy, we'd have hardly any alt, the impact from centralized exchanges would be minimal and the title of this thread would be a joke.

It's the same as running a non-pruning node, you just don't store the entire chain. You'd need it, if you didn't have enough disk space or didn't want to use it for storing the chain. It won't help if the problem has to do with your internet speed.

I thought of the same, but then I saw this:

Which makes me believe that Wasabi wallet, which is open source, works in a different way, making coordinators just single points that help the users gather. I haven't fully understood how it works, so I don't hold my breath about it. Perhaps, one more knowledgeable can give us a helping hand here.

This is not true. The majority chooses to leave cryptos on exchanges, because they don't care about the cryptos at all; they're just buying and selling for profit.

Most of those who use bitcoin for its main purpose, which is paying in cash online, cannot leave their money in centralized exchanges as it circumvents the most significant principle; self-custody. Furthermore, lots have switched to buying and selling using a decentralized exchange, instead.

Wasabi coordinator doesn't know anything that isn't known by the public. A chain analysis can trace the coins as they're all connected in a single transaction; it only obfuscates the final outcome. What zkSNACKs did in the recent update, is to blacklist certain outputs from being mixed, making therefore chain analysis easier.

Good. Bitcoin transactions do not contain information of any purchase beyond the amounts transacted, so there's no need for mixing. Just go with coin selection.

What kind of employers search the blockchain for their employees' sex toy preferences? Proper coin selection should do fine. If they don't feel confident, they should use a mixing service.

Well, it depends. If I have tested the dice and I've verified that, on average, all of the values have a ~16.66% chance to return, then it's safe to assume it's random. At least, that's the definition according to Wikipedia:

I know it sounds paranoid, but I don't know what to answer if one ever made me such question. Like, sure, most of the hardware is very unlikely to have this kind of weakness, but what about hardware wallets? They're designed for solely transacting bitcoins and their random number generator, as in all hardware, isn't apparent.

Couldn't one of all these hardware wallet companies implement something like that and steal millions of dollars worth of BTC, in just one moment? It would probably be the worst scandal of the crypto space.

Relate. 


(xkcd.wtf)

Warning: I don't know much from hardware. And when I say much, I mean nothing.

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I had created a thread regarding this in the Hardware Wallet section, but I choose to broaden it in the Dev & Tech board. Pretty simple question, but I've come to realize that it's much more difficult to answer than it seems.

When we say that a wallet software is closed source, we're afraid it may have access to our keys via the internet, sell our IP addresses and other info, or simply generate predictable entropy to steal our money in the smoothest way possible. We choose open source, so we can have a peace of mind.

So, how do we verify that the hardware doesn't generate predictable entropy, regardless of whether the wallet developers have bad intentions or not? I don't care about the OS, let's assume you use an open-source one; my focus is on those who build the hardware that is used to generate randomness.

Perhaps by understanding the purpose of bitcoin first, which is far more discussed, worked and therefore has more educating content. People can't just jump from not acknowledging the significance of self-custody to buying XMR.

They have to firstly understand what's bitcoin, why is it important, why shouldn't the people use centralized exchanges, how transactions look like, what does it mean to run your own full node, what's chain analysis etc.

Προσθέτω κάποια επίσης πολύ καλά περί οικονομίας: (Και διαρκούν λιγότερο)

• How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio
• Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio

It makes a lot of sense. He's capable of buying it, creating a pump in both Dogecoin/Eloncoin/Whatever and Twitter's shares, and then dump both of them. He has beautified it with "free speech"; a similar alibi to "coin of the common people".  

Is this how we call financial manipulators nowadays?

Twitter has already implemented Bitcoin and Lightning tipping. Elon would probably just add Dogecoin.

Begin studying: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/beginners/nodes

Congrats, WhyFhy, you're now a Senior. 

Cash is anonymous.

But, there's no point in using this technology if what they want is control. The technology frees, gives the control to the mob, if they know how to do it, and respects privacy. This is the core principle. If that's not in your interest, which as history shows, wasn't, isn't and will never be, then don't mess with it. Simply use an SQL database where you'll save each person's balance and whose supply can be changed at any time for any reason.

Call it Central Bank Digital Currency, which gives more prestige, and you're done.

Extending the proposal: Use the hash function thousands of times. Not only you ensure that a dice bias isn't enough to betray you, but you also make it much harder for an attacker to find your entropy.

For example, let's assume that one of the dices you use has a 50% chance of returning the number 6. Let's also assume that your RNG is weakened. Now it's much easier for an attacker to hash the dices' entropy mixed with the semipredictable generated number. But, if you use the hash function twice, you've just made it two times more difficult. Do it a few million times and you've made it realistically impossible.

I can't believe how paranoid, schizophrenic and miserable I've become since I made an account here. 

Of course and they do. They're already selling everyone's data. Would they say no if they were going to be removed from Russia?

Besides privacy, which is seen as an object of exploitation and blackmailing from Binance, you're also trading your right to move your money wherever and whenever you want. On top of that, you're charged 50k sats each time you transact for confirming you're agreed under these unpropitious conditions.

The best IQ test is with intelligence quotient. The second best is with which way you're using bitcoin.

In the same way Google, Facebook and every other company that possesses millions of people's information do. They're going to sell it in bulk to private companies which will later analyze it and resell it, or directly to governments.

Then, whatever you do, don't go with Coinbase. They're the ones who started and supported this KYC claptrap. It is known that they censor transactions, treat bitcoin as non-fungible, sell all of your data to chain analysis companies etc. Obviously, they don't go well with transparency and that's why their wallet is closed-source. It won't surprise me if it contains spyware to maximize their traceability.

Consider using any of the recommended non-custodial wallets from bitcoin.org instead.

This is how I understand it:

• One group proposes a change, let's say miners.
• They suggest on increasing the block subsidy by 6.25 coins.
• They publish the source code with a programmed change on a future block.
• No other group agrees with the change. (Therefore votes against)
• Miners are discouraged to mine in the new chain, because there's much less demand.
• Miners switch to the old chain.

Another example:

• Developers propose to increase the block size by 100 MB.
• Developers publish the source code with the condition that if 90% of the block headers contain a certain version number, then after a future block, Bitcoin Core will limit block size to 100 MB.
• Most of the miners agree with the change and a few hundreds of blocks afterwards, a chain split occurs.
• Most of the users disagree with the change, but no one knows it, because it's not publicly known as it is with the block headers.
• The minority of the miners continues using the old chain and so are most of the users who're running a full node. Their denial to upgrade shows that they're voting against.
• The old miners become discouraged due to less demand and continue to the old chain.

If you don't want to mess with commands try running a node OS such as myNode or Umbrel where they come with pre-installed plugins, such as block explorers, SPV servers, Lightning managers, payment processors etc.

Otherwise, I'll suggest you installing mempool.space which is by far the best explorer out there. The UI is simple, the fee rate is accurate; generally there's a lot of work done.

The mining will continue until morale improves. 

Does it matter? They're probably dividing the computational power required for solving one block with the transactions that it includes, which is ridiculous. By this line of reasoning, a transaction in a block, that's nearly full, is thousands of times more environmentally friendly than a coinbase transaction from an empty block.