The first thing you need to determine is the encoding. You can't determine if or how the data is encrypted before you determine the encoding.

There is no official Bitcoin Twitter account.

I am willing to bet that you have absolutely no evidence to support that statement.


Again, a completely baseless claim.

There are other possible encodings. How about base-64?

Revealing the characters in the key without revealing the key itself would help determine the encoding.

I hope you didn't pay for those. If you did, then you were probably scammed.

Requiring the server to provide a signature by the owner of the address might be a solution, though that might defeat the purpose of having a Lightning address.

As @o_e_l_e_o points out, there is no need for multi-sig. You just create a single transaction with N (or more) inputs, each signed by one of the N participants.

BIP 174 (Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction) is designed to handle this use case. I don't know which wallets support PSBT, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some that do.

If what you want to do is more complicated than a single transaction, then the multi-user transaction could first send the bitcoins to a multi-sig address, with some sort of governance set up to spend them from there.

FYI, anonymous multi-user transactions are the basis of CoinJoin, though whether they use PSBT depends on the implementation.

Bob can only spend Alice's bitcoins in the transaction set up by Alice and Bob. The point is that Bob cannot hold Alice's bitcoins hostage.

Its density has been determined, and it implies that it is from the core of a planet. They they have some knowledge about the composition of the core of a planet, so they use that to estimate the amount of gold and other metals.


Assuming that it would not be profitable, I suppose an entity could mine all the gold and sell it at a loss, but why would they do that?

Updated 2022-11-08

They may take the blame (or not), but you still won't get your money back.

It may be possible, but the likelihood of success is low..

There are services (such as Chainalysis) that monitor the blockchain and with the help of their clients they can track who owns which addresses with limited success. As mentioned elsewhere, walletexplorer.com may be able to help, but it is not likely.

If the address in question is owned by a custodial wallet (an exchange, for example), then law enforcement may be able to get information from the custodian about the person that is associated with that address.

You can try a google search for the address.

Hopefully, it doesn't mean he is a "premium" or "gold" member of a pyramid or ponzi scheme.

Deflation reduces the motivation for investment and borrowing, locking up value and preventing it from being used. The result is lower productivity. At high levels of deflation, when the gain in the value of the money is greater than any investment, there is the risk of a "deflationary spiral", which will end in a breakdown of the monetary system.

I'm sure there are other problems, but I'm not an expert.

What is interesting to me is that deflation and inflation are both bad, but for opposite reasons. I could have replaced "deflation" above with "inflation" and changed the effects. However, the end result for either is a breakdown of the monetary system.

I would also like to point out that although it is commonly said that the rays from the sun are parallel, the ray are actually approximately parallel. If the rays were perfectly parallel, then shadows would be sharp (except for the small amount of fuzziness caused by diffraction).


The light from the sky doesn't contribute to the fuzziness of shadows, but it does explain why shadows are not completely dark. Since the light in a shadow cannot come from the sun, it must come from elsewhere, such as the sky and reflection off of surrounding surfaces. The light from the sky is what makes things in shadow look a little blue.

Safe? I bought silver a few years back at around $40. It went up a little from there but then the bubble popped. I managed to dump mine at $34, which made me happy because at least I wasn't holding on to it as it dropped below $20. Now where is it? Gold has recovered since then but silver still has a way to go.


The world is constantly changing. If there no reason for a 40-to-1 ratio, then there is no justification for believing that it will ever return to 40-to-1.

It's like the GBTC discount. There is nothing forcing its price to align with the price of BTC, so there is no reason to believe that the discount will go away. If the situation changes, then perhaps we will return to the status quo.

But at this point it is just wishful thinking, for both GBTC and silver.

Gold has not lived up to its role as an inflation hedge. Prices have risen about 25% over the last 10 years, but the price of gold is the same as it was 10 years ago despite that inflation.

I believe it is due to the falling demand for gold.

Only tradition has supported demand after the gold standard was finally abandoned in 1971. As time goes by, that tradition will continue to fade and people will have less desire to hold gold as an asset. Its falling value will also cause a reduction in demand by central banks, and that will eventually result in the abandonment of gold as a purely financial asset.

I decided all of this recently, and I plan to sell my gold as I don't see prices ever going up from here.

Here are my responses, but seeing how much people disagree, I don't think anyone cares.

There are generally two ways to describe inflation/deflation.

• The more common definition these days is the change in prices. The benefit is that it is a much more practical definition. It describes what people see. The problem is that it is result of many factors and that makes it difficult to measure and impossible to control.
• The other is simply the change in the amount of the money supply. The benefit of this definition is its simplicity and its preciseness. The problem is that its real world prices are not predictable because of the many other factors that affect prices.

Question: Regarding the premise, is Bitcoin deflationary?

Bitcoin's money supply follows a schedule. It increases over time but the rate slows over time until it reaches 0. Whether you are measuring inflation/deflation by changes in prices or changes in the money supply, the effect is inflationary until the rate of creation is exceeded by the rate of loss, at which point it becomes deflationary. If you disregard loss (because it can't be measured), then the effect goes from inflationary to disinflationary instead.

Assertion: Bitcoin's annual inflation rate is ~5%.

Bitcoin's inflation rate as measured by the change in the money supply drops as the total supply increases and the subsidy is halved. At this moment, the annualized inflation rate is 6.25 btc per block / 19190512 btc * 52596 blocks per year = 1.71%. As measured by the change in prices, the inflation rate is simply the change in the value of a fiat currency in terms of BTC plus that fiat currencies inflation rate. I'm not going to calculate that because Bitcoin's price is too volatile.

Assertion: Deflation is when supply reduces over time. It is not a finite supply metric.

As I wrote above, there are two ways to define inflation/deflation.

Assertion: Bitcoin's divisibility will solve demand issues.

If the issue is that there is not enough bitcoins to go around, then I just have to point out that there are 2100000000000000 satoshis -- 100 times the world base money supply in USD. As afar as dust goes, the Lightning Network solves that problem.

Assertion: Bitcoin is neither deflationary nor inflationary.

It depends on how you define inflation/deflation, whether you disregard loss, and whether you are referring to now or in the future.

Debate: Has Bitcoin shifted to store-of-value over being a medium of exchange or unit of account?

Bitcoin has aspects of all three. It isn't one or the other. In order to be a store of value, there must be some source of value and that source is the value as a medium of exchange. In order to be a medium of exchange, Bitcoin must be a store of value because there must be value to exchange. In order to be a unit of account, the value must be stable. The stability comes from Bitcoin's ability to store value and be exchanged.

Reasons "why" deflation is an admirable feature:

Deflation is not an admirable feature. It causes just as many problems as inflation. High deflation is just as bad as high inflation. In the optimal scenario, there would be no inflation or deflation. The benefit of Bitcoin in this case is that nobody can manipulate the money supply for their own benefit.

Of course there is some diffraction, but it is negligible in this case. The fuzziness of the shadows that we see are caused by the apparent size of the sun. I don't doubt your microwave diffraction experience, but the the wavelength of visible light is 400 - 700 nm and the wavelength of microwaves is 150000000 - 300000000 nm. That difference in wavelengths has a huge effect on diffraction.

Try this: view a shadow of yourself on a wall when lit with a larger source like a lightbulb and when lit by a smaller source like a phone's flash, both at the same distance. You will see a difference due to the change in the the size of the light.

Ask any photographer and they will tell you that the size of the light determines the softness of the shadows.

Sorry, the fuzziness of a shadow is not caused by diffraction. The edges are fuzzy because the sun is not a point. A solar eclipse, which is the shadow of the moon on the earth, demonstrates the effect well. In the fuzzy part of the moon's shadow, you see see a partial eclipse.

This is the appropriate wikipedia article: Umbra, penumbra and antumbra