I've said this a million times now and will repeat it again each time another person makes the same mistake again.
You don't get to compare the dump part if you are not comparing the rise part. The huge drops in 2018 happened because price had gone up 13233% you can't expect the same drops and claim the charts are the same while you haven't even looked at the whole cycle to see that this time price only went up about 2056%.

That is 11000% smaller.

This is how the rise part of the cycle looks in comparison:

Why do you try to stick shitcoins to bitcoin?!!
Whenever bitcoin goes down all shitcoins including ethereum dump much harder. For example in the past 24 hours bitcoin dropped 1.6% while shitcoins like ethereum dumped 4+%. Not to mention that the long term dumps of shitcoins like ethereum are still massive, in this particular case it has lost more than 60% in the past 4 years consistently going down despite all the short term desperate pumps.

If you look at any other shitcoin, they are behaving similarly. So don't try to separate this particular shitcoin and stick it to bitcoin alone!

Your mistake is that you think the surprise is the drop while forgetting all the things that led to the drop.
Months ago when I was surprised and was fighting those who insisted that after 13 years bitcoin should abandon not-following any markets and start following US stock market, you should have been worried and surprised not now that their FUD efforts have succeeded in convincing people to panic sell due to US stock market burning to the ground.

That is wrong.
A USB disk can not function like a hardware wallet that you connect it to your PC and sign transactions but it also doesn't have to only be a dumb storage. You can create your own advanced setup where you can safely sign transactions too. One way would be to install a Linux OS on the USB disk, encrypt the home folder, disable certain options that would allow access, disable network, etc. install Electrum, boot the OS and easily sign transactions offline in a very secure environment.

Well bitcoin provides a very unique utility which is to let people park some amount of money in a place where nobody could know or touch (unlike fiat in the banks). Rich people have always been looking for such opportunities and diversifying into bitcoin is a strong possibility.
Who cares about reputation when money and financial sovereignty is involved?
This is why I believe that there is a strong possibility that he and people like him already own a lot of bitcoin without letting anybody know.

I wouldn't be surprised to see something like PUSD token created by PayPal to compete with USDT and similar centralized shitcoins. There is a good profit in processing payments while having full control over the shitcoin's network considering the huge altcoin trading volume that uses stablecoins.

That's not even close to what really happened. Taliban kicked US out of the country, they even received a donation of about $100 billion worth of advanced US military equipment as the US military was escaping Afghanistan.

What sanctions? Everyone is buying Russian gas and oil and everything else.
The only thing that changed was that before the invasion they were paying Russia in USD and now they are paying Russia in Ruble.
Have you checked Ruble exchange rate? It has gone up to its highest value ever since 2020.

Governments have never shown any interest in helping anything that is "decentralized" that would reduce their power and control over money. None of the things they would ever do is going to help anything in decentralized world, specially the US government that has never looked kindly on those who would go against the USD dominance.
When it comes to stablecoins, they are simply printing money which is illegal. So if anything the government is going to shut them down in the name of "regulations".

They don't exist.

This is called being a fully regulated centralized company.
I wonder what you would have said if zkSNACKs was the same centralized company but located for example in China and nopara73 was Jihan Wu... Would you still consider their actions "protecting its users"?

Isn't TrustedCoin owned by the same Electrum developers and aren't they making money from the fees there?

You mean the centralized HIVE and STEEm with their centralized token swap is what we need? I don't think anybody agrees with you.

You seem to already know that the only purpose tokens serve is to be traded and yet you think eBay and Etsy should get on board!!! On board of what? They want a currency or payment system not some speculation tool that is only used for pump and dumps.

The answer is "in bitcoin".

I know it is hard to believe since the price is going down but it is true. When other markets tank, people have always pulled their money out of those markets and have been putting it in something that is not related to those market and bitcoin has always been one of those things and that fact hasn't changed.

But the problem is that bitcoin market has a lot of weak hands that are beneficial to the whales. They manipulate them by doing a big sell-off with a big FUD campaign convincing them that "because other markets are dumping you should sell bitcoin too" then they buy all their bitcoins at the bottom as weak hands panic sell.
If you look at the charts and compare it with the media over the past 13 years you can clearly see that this is not even the first time they've done it. Only the topic of the FUD changes. The major ones have been 1. China banned bitcoin. 2. Bitcoin energy consumption 3. (the newest one) There is a correlation between bitcoin and other markets but only US markets!!!

That's correct and that's how it works under the hood but I simply used this project which has a function under Tools called "WIF Helper" that can convert WIFs to mnemonic and back very easily.

First of all if he didn't care about bitcoin and he believed half of the things he has been saying about bitcoin, he shouldn't have even bothered talking about it. Would you talk about a topic that you don't care about at all? lol

Secondly, the number 25 may have some significance in my opinion. It could actually indicate that he has invested $25 million into bitcoin and is one of the biggest whales today since I believe he bought bitcoin years ago when it was a lot cheaper and he was calling it "rat poison".

Russia's goal was neither what the Western propaganda says nor what the Russian propaganda says. It wasn't to occupy Ukraine, control large territories, take Kyiev, denazify,... It was simply to neutralize the Ukrainian security threat posed through US and NATO, and that is achieved by 2 things: first by destroying Ukraine's military capabilities which Russia has done to some extent and to capture key territories namely the eastern Ukraine (border with Russia) and the south to cut off access to the Black sea. That part of the plan is also 90% complete. In fact annexing Crimea back in 2014 was also both a warning and part of this plan.

P.S. Funny how at least 10 members of European Union are currently paying Russia in Ruble (not even in Euros or USD but in Russian currency) to buy their gas and oil while they publicly say everyone else should stop doing it
P.P.S. Russian Ruble is currently at its highest value ever since 2020. In other words their currency got stronger after they invaded Ukraine thanks to Europe
The politics are so funny sometimes specially when you think about how Ukraine's regime was so eager to join Europe, in other words to join the same alliance that is currently helping Russia in reality while bashing it only in words...

Something is unclear in your post. When you say "start somewhere" what exactly does it mean? Are you talking about investing in cryptocurrencies and choosing something random and jumping in so that you have started somewhere or are you talking about the technology and starting to learn more about it?

I have a feeling that you are talking about the first one (investment) and I have to tell you that for years a lot people did that and lost a lot of money. They start reading stuff on the internet about altcoins and how to invest and make money and because 99% of them are garbage the newcomers become very confused and end up either giving up or deciding to jump in blindly so that they have "started somewhere". Obviously that leads to disaster.

From what I've seen those users who focus on earning merit so much that it makes merit their whole reason why they are on this forum, will never earn merits. It's simply because their posts are always clearly made to receive merit and people don't like that.
Otherwise there is no "standard" and I have to say that it is very odd that you are asking about merits and hardship of earning them after only 10 days and 10 posts from your account creation!

Earlier versions (I believe pre 3.0) didn't encrypt the whole file and only the secrets but they've always used AES which would return a byte array (each value would be between 0 to 255) hence the result on disk would always be gibberish and not ASCII.

It is pretty easy to manipulate a wallet file simply because wallet files don't really have any kind of checksum or integrity check to make sure the file is not manipulated. It is jut raw data that can be modified and any part of it like the addresses can be changed to a funded one and the encrypted keys to garbage undecryptable data.

LOL. I don't think the whole pump and dump scam he performed with Dogecoin has given him $44 billion to let him buy Twitter alone, let alone give him enough money to buy "anything". This shitcoin's entire market value is not even that big

The "super cycle" is already broken because unlike the previous cycles that we had, this time we didn't reach the big bubble that indicate the end of each cycle. Price only went up a much smaller percentage of what it should have.
In my opinion it is a good thing but the transition is going to be interesting since the market behavior is unpredictable and at times unreasonable like these days. We even see fanatic ideas where people suggest correlations between bitcoin and other completely irrelevant markets.

Well a vanity address is a single address it doesn't matter if you created it alone or used a seed to create it (the rest of your addresses derived from seed are not going to be vanity addresses). @hosseinimr93 is right, you are just adding extra steps and making the process to find the address a lot more expensive.

P.S. if you are looking for a way to write down the private key in another form than WIF you could just convert the key bytes to a mnemonic.
For example: