Cryptocurrency doesn't inherently fix fractional reserving, you can still have it in some sort of crypto banks. Right now we have exchanges as the closest to such entities, but if they don't support margin trading then there's no incentive to have fractional reserve. If people used crypto as intended - storing it in their own wallet, then it would be a different story, but it would also make lending much harder, and without it you can't have a growing economy. But it all only makes sense to talk about when crypto represents a big portion of economy, and we are still very far from it.

OpenDime is not a wallet, so it's a bit wrong to compare it with a hardware wallet, since they are created to solve different tasks. Opendime is more close to a paper wallet, you can store Bitcoin on it, but you can't make transactions with it, you'd need to connect it to a computer and sweep the private key. Basically, Opendime is a sophisticated USB stick. There's no reason to get Opendime if you don't plan to use its main feature - transacting Bitcoin physically by giving someone your Opendime.

Hardware wallet allows you to securely store and transact Bitcoin, which is very useful for newbies who want a quick and simple solution to managing their coins.

Take a wallet seed or private key(s), encrypt it with your friend's PGP public key, print the cyphertext on paper and mail it to him - that's it. I hope sending encrypted letters is not illegal, right?
Sending private keys in plaintext is very risky, a letter can get lost or stolen, there can be rogue employees, maybe the government likes to selectively read citizen's correspondence, etc.

If I remember correctly, spamming started around the beggining of 2017, as a preparation for SegWit2x, to force community to accepted a big block fork, but at that time the fees were around $1. The rise to $20 and even $50 per tx can't be solely attributed to spam, that would be insanely costly. There's a simple explanation for such prices - it happened at the height of 2017 bubble, so it's reasonable to assume that those were real transactions done by users who wanted to cash out their profits.

There's some truth to OP's statement, as spamming today would be much more costly, but it's misleading to say that $20 fees are gone because of SegWit. I'm sure we will see high fees again during another peak of the market, there's already a strong correletion between price going up and amount of transaction temporarily following it.

Well, OP isn't talking about how to invest in alts, they talk about how people can not notice that their tokens can be sold for some profit. I think it's a valid topic.


There are other ways of acquiring tokens - airdrops, bounties, passive airdrops (when you wallet gets credited without you even doing anything), giveaways, etc. If a person gets such tokens often, it's easy to lose track of them, and then what the OP describes happens - you lose on potential gains by not knowing that you can sell those tokens.

Of course they know how much cash is used in crime, which is why they push for cashless society and also tighten the control over cash transactions whenever they can.


Who will go away? AML regulators? It's like saying "ignore the cops, they can't arrest you if you don't pay attention to them".

IMO it's important to listen to what they say, because these organization have the potential to influence crypto in a bad way - tighten KYC policies of exchanges, tell exchanges which coins to list and so on.

Learning all the pitfalls of crypto is not a matter of a single thread, there's a huge chunk of information that must be learned, and what's worse is that it's all very fragmented. Basically, there are many topics that need to be learned - security, scam detection, fundamentals of cryptocurrency, basics of trading, a bit of cryptography, crypto wallets. You can learn many of it by reading some good book, like Mastering Bitcoin, but it's important to keep learning even after it - this board has some very decent threads, fro example. I'd also suggest to avoid learning from crypto news sites or some no-name bloggers, they often are clueless themselves and can give poor advises and introduce a lot of misunderstandings.

Bitcoin itself is highly volatile because it has quite low volume relatively to its market cap, and there's a strong lack of interest from institutional investors with big pockets, so it's mostly traded by retail investors and some rich guys who are into experimental stuff. Now take all this and multiply it by x10 and apply to altcoins - they are essentially like penny stocks, and no matter how "good" and "promising" it looks, without volume and big recognition it's still a penny stock. People outside of crypto have heard about Bitcoin, maybe about Ethereum, but no one heard about IOTA or XRP, because they still have no real-world uses.

I really like how Bitcoin becomes more and more commonly accepted for donations, it really does bring benefits for this use case, since PayPal and other methods often have some minimal fees or just don't work in some country, while Bitcoin has none of those obstacles. Though it is bad that donations are often accepted via BitPay, which has unnecessary fees and introduces centralization.

Some worthless startups with barely any users that targets shitcoiners as their main userbase now attacks Bitcoin - is it even surprising? We've seen things like that already with companies associated with Roger Ver or Bitmain spreading FUD against Bitcoin. Sooner or later they will all go broke, cause no one will use bcash and other shitcoins, and they sabotaged themselves by abandoning Bitcoin.

It's unrealistic to expect that a service would allow you to do 20 million requests in any reasonable rate. You should run your own full node and check the addresses yourself. Unfortunately there seem to be no easy way to do it , which means you'll have to write your own code that works with raw blocks or UTXO set.

Or maybe you should stick with your method but modify it to periodically flush these empty addresses to free memory and save resources - e.g. delete all empty addresses every 1000 addresses.

And at some point the Sun will stop burning and maybe even explode, but for us, our children and thousand more generations it won't be a problem, it's just a trivia fact. It's much more likely that in thousands of years Bitcoin will stop existing than that all coins will be lost. And if supply will ever be a problem, it's possible to split coins further - create fractions of satoshis, so that there's enough units for every need. Lightning Network allows it even today.

Whatever. Bitcoin and crypto are such small issues compared to other problems that exist in the US, that I somehow get a feeling that it doesn't matter much who will win from the point of view of Bitcoin enthusiasts. Take Trump for example, he was hyped as almost Bitcoin supporter, and then he tweeted against crypto because some of his advisors told him so. Any of the presidential candidates has capacity to both support or oppose Bitcoin, and no one can say what will they choose later. Or maybe they will just keep ignoring it.

I think it's a really wrong way of thinking about it, Bitcoin's protocol didn't suffer any major changes since Satoshi's initial release, there were only updates and fixes. Small peer-to-peer network and centralized network are not the same, even in early days Bitcoin gave its users full control over their money. So what that there was less developers, you could always choose to not follow their version and stay on the old chain in case of hard fork, or follow some other developers.

Purely theoretically, a coin that is worth almost nothing (like 1 satoshi or fractions of satoshi) has the highest potential for big ROI if it suddenly explodes. Just like Bitcoin went from costing a few cents to thousands of dollars. But on practice it's almost never happens, and if you try to chase such investment, you will end up broke. Trading isn't about making crazy returns on a single bet, it's about steadily making profit over longer periods of time.

China may not need financial aid, but their less wealthy neighbors are at risk because of the virus, and if it reaches them, they'll definitely need outside help. In fact, they already need help to prepare for the virus, and luckily they are getting it, including from charities and governments.

As for prayers - lmao. When did it help at least once? Why do kids get terminal diseases and die, despite "prayers"?

Can you add earned merit count below the actual merit (or maybe even instead of it)? Like this:



Also, could you upload the source on github? Would make it easier for reviewing the code, and maybe some people would like to install it locally or modify some parts.

It was hacked physically, and it's kinda bad, but it could have been worse, it could have been hacked remotely when you connect it to an infected computer. I'd say the most important security feature of hardware wallets still holds - isolating private keys from an untrusted environment and allowing to send transactions while connected to it. I don't think it's theoretically possible to store unencrypted key on any piece of hardware in a way that makes it impossible to retrieve this key while having full physical access.

People view security from the wrong perspective - you can try your best to keep malware away from your system, and I it's indeed a good thing to do, but it's smarter to also isolate your private keys from potentially unsecure environment. Easiest way to do this is to get a hardware wallet, an alternative way is to make your own cold storage setup. Even this might not fully protect you from cryptojacking, so always manually verify the addresses that you are about to send your coins to; but it will protect you from malware that steals your private keys.

Blockchain technology helped some people to become more rich by boosting the value of their stocks or by allowing them to run investment scams (ICO, IEO, altcoins, etc.). On practice blockchain technology had almost no effect - no one uses seriously uses it, at best some companies run trials to see if its worth using.

And cryptocurrencies shouldn't be viewed as application of blockchain technology - blockchain is secondary, not primary, they weren't created by blockchain, blockchain was created by one of them, namely Bitcoin.