The last halving was 11/28/2012 and the price that followed was flat for 3 months before the Cyprus bubble started. Furthermore, after the Cyprus bubble, the price was flat for another 5 months before the China bubble started.

So other than the two bubbles, the price was basically flat. The halving didn't seem to have any effect.

The beauty of a chart is that, like statistics, anyone can interpret it any way they want. That's why so many people believe in technical analysis.

Nothing happened to the price as a result of the last halving. Nothing will happen to the price as a result of the next halving.

A drop in new coins by 1.8k BTC a day is nothing compared to 14 million coins currently in existence and the current 135k daily trade volume. There are so many other factors affecting the price, the drop of 1.8k BTC a day will have little effect on the price (at least in the short term).

That is not necessarily true. It assumes that the velocity stays constant (referring to MV = PQ), which is not likely to be the case. As adoption increases, the price could continue to fall just like it has been for the last year.

Your bitcointalk password is very weak, so it could have been cracked in a short amount of time, but I don't see how anyone could have known that your bitcointalk password was the basis for a brainwallet passphrase. That seems extremely unlikely.

It is much more likely that the hash of "example123", plus variations (such as "example123example123example123"), have been precomputed by the hacker. You can probably store hashes of the 1 million most common passwords with 1000 variations each in less than 100 GB, and looking up a hash might only take a few seconds.

There are two issues:

First, in the current system, the solution is not a hash with a minimum number of leading zeros. That is a common misconception. The solution is a hash that is less than the target value. The current target value is 0x1686F5 x 2¹⁶⁸.

Second, your system only allows a change in the difficulty by a factor of ten. That just won't work.

Give Mechanical Turk a try. You will make a lot more money by doing real work than by visiting faucets, and you can easily convert the money you earn to bitcoins.

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

Vaporware

The "developers", whoever they might be, cannot change the difficulty.

It is unfortunate that so many people believe that the "developers" actually have some sort of control over Bitcoin.

As far as SHA-256 being cracked, it would not affect mining that much.

It is extremely unlikely that an inverse of SHA-256 will ever be found. That has never happened for any hashing algorithm. A realistic scenario would be that a weakness is found that would make it easier and faster to solve a block. If that happened, then it would simply mean that people might be able to start mining on CPUs and GPUs again until ASICs could be developed to take advantage of the weakness. The difficulty would rise and Bitcoin would continue.

I propose these regulations:

• Issue leather wallets and identify the leather wallet owner through KYC checks
• Maintain a compliance status of each leather wallet
• Monitor leather wallet usage to check payments are between other identifiable leather wallets
• Monitor transactions for adherence to sanctions lists
• Be able to freeze leather wallets where they are being used for suspicious activity.

They are just as ridiculous.

It is the number of wallets, not addresses, that is important. Without careful use of coin control, all the addresses in a wallet will be linked to each other. So if somebody knows one of the addresses in your wallet, they can know them all (with some limitations).

BIP-38 is very secure as long as your passphrase is strong. A passphrase with 20 random characters is fairly strong and not likely to be cracked, but a passphrase with 4 5-letter words is not.

Why does everything have to have "coin" or "bit" in the name?

Correlation does not imply causation. Q.E.D.

The least egalitarian way to distribute bitcoins is to give them away. The most is to trade an equal amount of value for them, which is how it is done now.

It has not changed. The fee is paid by making the outputs less than the inputs. The amount is determined by the client, generally by using the policies in Bitcoin Core that consider the size of the transaction and the age of the bitcoins.

I agree that there are a lot of people that should not be holding substantial amounts of BTC because of the risk. However, ...

In general, someone who supports themself but cannot save $20 a month is living beyond their means. Those huge numbers of people would be in much better shape if they would lower their standard of living and save at least a small amount of money each month.

The basis of bitcoin is this: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Gee, if you only had another $150, you could have a whole bitcoin.

Just to clarify ... when people talk about banks or governments printing money, they are referring to general money creation, and not the actual printing of notes on paper. At the height of U.S. QE, the Fed was printing $85 billion per month, but it not was not issuing 850 million $100 bills.