Most people (myself included) simply see the word "bitcoin" somewhere on the Internet and a mention that it is some form of money, then they google it and in one of the first results they get bitcoin.org, which is pretty much the official site of Bitcoin. It's full of useful information and links for beginners, and then people usually start hanging out around this forum or the subreddit, and maybe read some books. It's really not that hard to start with Bitcoin, you just have to be curious.

I've never been to any such events, and I likely never will, because to me they look like a waste of time - it's mostly just startups promoting themselves, there's not much educational stuff being presented, and if it is, I can just watch a video of it later. Maybe such events are great in terms of networking, but networking never interested me much, so that's just another reason for me to avoid these events.

What do you mean by "wallet encryption key"? There's no such thing in Electrum, there is wallet password if you choose to encrypt your wallet, and wallet seed. If you have the password, you need to find the wallet file, otherwise it's useless. You should search everything you can for this file, maybe even try using file recovery tools if you suspect that it might have been deleted recently.

If you control the seed (12 words) then it's simple, just choose an option to restore wallet from seed when creating new wallet, and you will control your coins again.

These services are still centralized, because despite not owning any property, they provide centralized matching and listing service, so they are subject to regulations. So, you can't just create Uber but with Bitcoin, because regulators would probably not approve it. For this to work, we'd need a 100% decentralized solution, but that would be quite hard if not impossible to develop.

People don't upgrade their nodes because they are compatible with the network, if there was a hardfork, you can expect them to switch rather quickly. Look at ETH or other alts, they have hard forks almost every year and they go pretty smooth.

If quantum computers became real today, the world would be in a lot of trouble - bank account, emails, websites, military communications, classified data and so on - but you don't see them proactively moving to post-quantum crypto right now, which means that the cryptographic community doesn't view as an immediate threat. And cryptographers usually retire algorithms long before they become not even fully broken, but just weakened.

Everything can be hacked/stolen. You know how credit cards get hacked with magnet readers? Same thing could happen to this implant type wallet. And some thugs can always whack you with a $5 wrench till you give them your coins, or they can even cut your finger or whatever bodypart to hack the wallet later. And this whole thing isn't even unique to crypto, traditional banking could also implement these chips, maybe even easier than crypto, since you don't have to deal with addresses.

And you already can store your wallet in your body, I'm talking about memorizing your seed - you can't conveniently pay with it, but you can always carry it with you and no one will know it.

This idea is stupid, it's trivial to create thousands of virtual smartphones that will report that they are moving, and there would be no way distinguish between them and legitimate users. All these "proof of human" type of coins fail to create a truly secure system, because this problem is quite fundamental and people outside of crypto couldn't solve it to this day, so how can some noname startup succeed here?

This Iran-US incident is over already, both sides don't want further escalation, but the price is still growing and defending the recent gains - this only means that the correlation with political instability isn't really that strong, it was more of a catalyst rather than the driving force behind the pump. Trading Bitcoin based on global news is as bad as trading with 8-ball, or maybe it's even worse.

Cryptocurrency is a small niche field, not much actually is going on, and this is a problem for anyone who wants to get into the news business - so they start reporting the smallest events possible, they publish unverified rumors and post really lazy analytics articles. I have long ago stopped clicking on any crypto news site links, to avoid generating revenue for them, and I suggest everyone do the same.

When cryptographic community as a whole will reach both 1) a consensus on what quantum-ready algorithms will become the standard and 2) decide that it's time to start switching to it.
There's no need for Bitcoin to be on the cutting edge cryptography, it would only mean unnecessary risks and forks after forks.

As promised, I made a live leaderboard page for this game too, the address is still the same - https://tiramisu77.github.io/bct-game-leaderboard/

I made a small improvement, now the delta column comes with a sign, so you can quickly see how much and in which direction the price should change in order for that user to become #1 on the leaderboard.

Think logically, people become youtubers to earn money, and Youtube ad revenue is nothing crazy if you don't have a hugely popular channel, while it's very time-consuming to create content, so this all together is just a recipe for a disaster - there's a big incentive to promote scam projects and just shitcoins, especially if there's no punishment for this.

Previous level would be around $7,000 and we are much higher than that, so now if the time to test if we will be able to retain the gains from this pump or not - I believe Bitcoin won't plunge deeper, at least not for long. It's quite ready for growth, the halvening is soon and the market was bearish for more than half a year already, and we have successfully defended the $6,500-7,000 range multiple times already..

I got a popup from the browser today saying "click here to update and restart your browser", which seemed a bit strange since usually updates happen when you launch browser and not when you browse, but I'm glad I clicked it, even though I don't think I was at risk, since I only visit Bitcointalk with this browser.

There was a thread recently about this sort of "rigged gambling scam" - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5215051.msg53529152

Even though it's not the same site, you can see how similar their names are, there's a strong chance they both belong to the same scammer. If someone offers you easy money on the Internet, it's always a scam, because if the method was legit, no one would actually share it. If it requires some help, they'd ask their friends, not strangers.

Now switch to "global" and instead of only the US, and you'll see an interesting picture - this keyword is the most popular in Nigeria (100), twice less popular in Iran (50) and is somewhere in the bottom of the list in the US (13). This means that this keyword is really small, so the fact that it's so popular right now doesn't mean anything for Bitcoin. Don't create hype out of nothing.

Neither Iran nor the US want to truly go to war, they just want to show their strength, especially to their domestic audience - Trump will soon have elections, Iran had protests. So, since there will be no war, there's will be no long term effects on economy, the prices that reacted to the news will correct.

As for crypto, I doubt it will go down to the previous levels, since the market was looking for a reason to turn bullish for a long time.

People often talk about whales as if it is some hivemind that manipulates Bitcoin and can even control it, but it's far from the truth. Whales are individuals, many of them probably don't know each other, many of them are probably anonymous, and they can have very different views on Bitcoin - some might fully believe in its cause, others might be just here for profits, some think how to short it, others want to buy more and so on. So, I'm absolutely not concerned about whales being a centralizing factor in Bitcoin.

For that to be true, whales need to coordinate their actions, and this sounds quite unlikely to me. Imagine one whale trying to crash the market, but then other whales immediately buy all the coins that the first whale dumped and even more - now he lost a lot of money with his attempt at manipulation. Or consider this scenario - a whale tries to start a pump by making big purchase, and the "newbies" continue the pump, and now it's time for the whale to take profit by dumping, but another whale proves to be faster and takes the profit instead - the result the same as in the first example - a whale loses a lot of money.

Things like that happened in the past, remember the legendary bearwhale story?

Yes, there already is such token, it's called Wrapped Bitcoin - https://www.wbtc.network/

It is centralized rather than being implemented purely with smart contracts, but it's managed by more than one entity. Also, only special users called Merchants can initiate the creation of this token or redeem it for BTC, regular users can only buy/sell this token.