It is actually very clear to me why it happened. It is also very simple. It is a reverse bubble popping. Just like bubbles when price crashes out of an unrealistically "high" price, in the reverse scenario price jumps up from an unrealistically "low" price. This is what happened here and we have to see a couple of other jumps before the reverse bubble is properly deflated.

Here is another reverse bubble example from 2020 and 2021 and 2018: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5339896.0

Non-standard is just a point of view. For example OP_0 <160-bit> is non-standard if you ask bitcoin core v0.13 or OP_2 <256-bit> is non-standard if you talk to bitcoin core 22.0. That doesn't mean you can get rid of any of them though.

Only coins sent to OP_RETURN outputs are burnt, everything else including the 2 examples here are NOT.


P.S. At least if you want to talk about deleting UTXOs I was expecting you to mention unspendable scripts not spendable but small ones! That would have at least made some sense. Outputs like the one that used an empty hash like this:
This is provably unspendable.

The binary, just like BIP38. In fact that is why I used that example above. If I do anything else the length could be arbitrary and encoding becomes slightly more complicated.

No arguments there. My method requires some knowledge of programming since there isn't any implementations of it as far as I know but it is pretty simple to do.
I really hope someone comes up with a BIP38 like proposal for mnemonics to standardize it (at least to some extent).

I don't think you can do that without modifying the source code on both client and server to skip the SSL encryption and verification. It was designed to add some layer of protection for the communication between clients and servers so it is pretty much part of the protocol.

I don't know the Canadian laws and that doesn't matter because what I do know is that laws can be and have been bent by the governments whenever it suits them. For example all it takes is using certain keywords like "national security" and it simply overrides everything else.

I don't think that's what we want.

Some may not agree with this part of my views but we don't want more investors, we want more users. People who aren't in bitcoin because they think they can make some fiat profit and get out and not care about anything else.
Even if you don't agree with that, I think you can agree with the fact that volatility has been one of the reasons that adoption has been slow. More brokers, banks, etc. coming in and getting involved in trading bitcoin is only going to increase the volatility and market manipulation specially if they also control the media which they do.

But I agree that regulations could potentially remove some obstacles against adoption. For example businesses and merchants who couldn't accept bitcoin payment due to lack of clear regulations could start accepting it which helps adoption by a lot.

It is an interesting journey in my opinion. First they pretty much ignored bitcoin as a passing thing that won't grow beyond a fraction of a cent, then as bitcoin continued growing and 1 BTC was worth more than 1 USD they realized this unique currency is now worth more than their centralized shitcoin so they started to slowly panic.

Then came the FUD campaign against bitcoin to try and prevent its growth but it was already too late as bitcoin was already worth a couple of hundred times more than their centralized shitcoin ($200 to $1200 in 2013) so the FUD campaign grow bigger too.
This FUD campaign turned into strict regulation and KYC storm on centralized exchanges since they were naive enough to think hitting exchanges would hit bitcoin!!!

After years of losing the battle against bitcoin as it gained more value against their centralized shitcoin (ie. fist such as US dollar) they decided to fight fire with fire but were dumb enough to think bitcoin is bitcoin because it is using blockchain technology so they started planning to create a copy which was yet another centralized shitcoin.

So here we are, CBDCs that are the same centralized shitcoin as fiat.
All it does is proving how successful bitcoin is and how afraid the corrupt and obsolete those in control of centralized money are.

Dog shit is as much store of value as NFTs are.
Essentially NFTs are useless virtual things that can cease to exist at any moment and have no connection to whatever object in real world (like the art piece) they are selling unaware people. On top of all that, the centralization and mutability of the platforms these tokens are built upon makes them even less worthy, in other words they have no value themselves.

Here is another funny thing, the person who creates the NFT and sells it to idiots for things like their "art" can easily create more duplicates of the same NFT and sell it to more idiots and there is nothing stopping him from doing that.

I believe that is a UI thing not a Smart Phone thing. Basically your UI framework has to have a textbox that takes the password, open the virtual keyboard itself and set its properties like disabling the "shift" button at the start or showing the characters as * instead, etc.

This defeats the whole purpose of bitcoin! Bitcoin was created, and we use it because it doesn't need any third parties and middle men to be used. If we go back to using them through custodial wallets, then there is no reason to use bitcoin in first place.

In any case any bitcoin wallet should satisfy the following conditions:
1. Is 100% open source (even if a single component is closed source, the wallet should be avoided)
2. Is old (it has to have been around for a while)
3. Is popular so that it is reviewed by enough experts and most bugs are fixed

No, you don't lose it. When you encrypt a 128-bit entropy for example, you end up with 128-bit encrypted data if you don't use IV. You can easily convert that to a human readable format, like with already available algorithm such as BIP39.
As an example you can check out BIP38 where we encrypt the 256-bit private key and get 256-bit result which we encode using base58. Just replace the last step with BIP39. You can even use a BIP39 library/tool that takes entropy.

Mining pools, like exchanges, are custodians of bitcoins not the owners. They have to pay their miners and only get a very small fraction in commissions, part of which they definitely sell to cover their costs. So there is no way for them to own 7 million!
Also that payment to miners from pools, breaks the calculation used here so they end up with a wrong estimate of how much bitcoin miners have held on to.

It is not quite right because for starters it is categorizing whales (generally speaking) and exchanges into different categories where all they have to work with is the balance of addresses. In other words a lot of the "whales" are simply big custodial services such as exchanges that don't own any bitcoins themselves.

So we can't call this chart a "bitcoin distribution chart" it is more like "address balance distribution" which means very little. For all you know there are whales who own 1000x addresses each with 1 bitcoin in them. Or you have an address with 1000 bitcoin that belongs to 100k people.

I disagree, the distribution or concentration of wealth is not the problem, how it got like that is a problem. For example the 1% you are talking (which is a US thing, I believe) about accumulated their wealth by infiltrating the government and changing the laws in their own favor. They ended up paying little to no tax at all while the middle class was squeezed out of their last penny. Many of them also acquired a large part of their wealth through illegal and immoral ways. And that's the problem.

I'm afraid it is more complicated than that. Basically I'd say it depends on the regulations and how restrictive and terrible they are. For example Japan and El Salvador both regulated bitcoin and that led to an increase in the speed of adoption. But if we see restrictive regulations as US loves to implement and they end up with huge taxation, a lot of nonsense intrusive KYC and things like that, it could actually slow down adoption, at least in US.

But as I said things are a lot more complicated than that. The more restrictions could actually backfire and it could push more people towards bitcoin specially as US dollar keeps tanking and inflation soars. If we see another recession then bitcoin adoption could also go through the roof with US dollar value dumping harder than ever.

Dude use your head a little!
How could inviting someone else to use the app increase your computing power (aka hashrate)? What you are involved in is clearly a Ponzi scheme, that is a scam to rip people off and the only reason why they ask you to "invite" other people is so that they can have more victims, the victims that you help bring into their trap.

Besides, how are you going to invite others? Are you going to tell them that you haven't been able to earn anything in these shady applications for months or are you going to lie to them and tell them it is a gold mine giving you millions? LOL

Just because it is "facebook" it doesn't mean they aren't doing something dumb. Otherwise there wouldn't have been so many news about facebook hacks where they leak user data.
But also you have to consider the target audience of Facebook. There is a lot of dumb people who don't realize the difference between upper and lower case in a password, specially those on phone where for example the first letter is capitalized automatically.

And here we go again, the panic buying at its finest. It only took a couple of hours to go from $36k to $42k as they started to buy a little at first but that causes a ripple effect and suddenly we have a big green candle on the charts where we are now seeing $40k+ prices. Just like that.

Today could be interesting, I'm curious whether the panic buying is going to continue and we can see much higher prices (maybe break another resistance) or a slower rise to >$50k price.

It's like saying "I bought a car but I never drive it. However, I can still sit in it and blast the radio".

If creating your own wallet and storing your bitcoins (like through one of the easiest to use wallets called Electrum) were difficult then what you said made some sense but it is not. There is simply no excuse to use a custodial wallet.
Using exchanges to "trade" bitcoin is a different story than storing your coins with them though.

As far as normalization goes, the rules are clear. It is using NFKD if my memory serves, the problem is that this is not enough restriction on inputs because it is basically accepting all Unicode characters which may not be possible to enter in another UI.

Such webpages or any tool that does this should never be used because that is the dumbest way of modifying the input that is reducing the strength of the given password by a lot (roughly 40%).

You can't have decentralization and promissory notes at the same time. The whole purpose of bitcoin was to introduce the decentralized payment system that doesn't need any third parties to handle transactions and "promises of payment". Bitcoin is working very well too without needing any change.

If you like promissory notes there are already centralized payment systems (like banks) that do that well with fiat, you shouldn't use bitcoin.