You can use block explorers to work out where your funds went too. You just need to put in the address you sent funds from and keep clicking until you get to the exchanges address (often one that holds a lot of funds but sometimes one that has lots of inputs and outputs - like a wallet that's actively processing deposits and withdrawals).

The security of usdt and tron gets tested quite a lot by its existence on defi platforms (like exchanges/liquidity pools).

If it were insecure, it wouldn't have lasted this long. If it didn't have a full reserve it probably would have though as people will mostly assume it's 1:1 and an attacker probably wouldn't have enough money to compete with usdt's fund even if they only had a few % of a reserve (some coins have taken 20% to reach their peg with bad liquidity).


Most stablecoins suffer from it.
Lots of tokens suffer from having bad code and vulnerabilities in their smart contracts or dapps. Most actual coins don't suffer as many of these losses as they provide more basic functions (like bitcoin and ethereum).

Yep draining merits and redistributing them is quite useless because of the sources who get a certain amount of merit to send over a specific amount of time - it then refreshes after that time has passes or they can ask for more source merits to be able to spend.

There's no point in deleting old accounts too, what if someone has registered one to use later on or what if someone has an account they use to just read threads (or receive certain notifications from) - there's people who haven't posted here that linger as guests, there might be a lot of accounts that look to have not been used that get used for other things. Also why reclaim their username for someone else just to take it? One extra person having that name is going to leave another person wanting it and not being able to have it - what if it becomes a contest too after those 4 years have passed to see who can register the name first? And then what do you do with the threads and posts of people who's profiles have been inactive (the guest title stands out a lot on old threads) and if you're banned, I don't think you should get chance to recover your profile that username should be gone with the ban..

It remains to be seen how long twitter can survive on it's own and how long it'll last. If done well it might become much bigger, then he might be able to ipo a part of it for less than he bough it for (like was done with Tesla) if done badly it'll probably suck money from him until it gets shut down, resold, reinvented or open sourced.


This is the biggest change I expected to have happened at some point. Tesla engineers probably aren't constantly working on Tesla firmware so moving some across or getting teams to work on both was the best solution.

Most tech firms have done well from inventing/selling actual innovative technology and selling it (there's a lot of ads for offerings from companies, like Meta's Portal).

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It's strange to be talking about a person as if they're a company though.... Has Elon dehumanised himself somewhere? (popularity and/from controversiality doesn't sound that great).

A good place to start might be to learn a lot of stuff yourself for if he has questions you can't answer (and they're not too hard) he might just get annoyed by the process.

How does he learn best?
Actively doing:
If he learns by doing then send some funds to each other over a period of time, get him to sign messages and encrypt them (electrum has encryption with public keys and private keys).
Actively learning:
Introduce him to encryption or teach him about it. This doesn't have to be done directly, finding cryptogram puzzles (caeser cipher) or mathematic ones can be a good place to start (applying functions to change numbers into something - maybe a code for letters that spells out a word based on their position in the alphabet).

I'd advise starting with programming too though at some point, don't teach stuff that's too advanced, a lot of the time if you learn a skill when you're young you have to wait to fully realise its potential.

You could also just mention it to him every so often or find some interesting news to start a conversation at some point (that might be the best way to introduce it more slowly, make his learning more organic and give him additional skills - most people can find it themselves if they want to and have the means like a laptop/smartphone it might just take a while - the person who first mentioned it to me waited 2 years before I started looking into it more and actually engaging with the crypto community).

How much are you wanting to convert? If it's more than a few thousand euros or could be you might want to try to find someone who can handle the conversion for you or use another service (coinbase prime gets mentioned a lot I think for charging a monthly subscription instead of trading fees).

The not wanting to trade thing seems quite confusing as generally placing market orders on exchanges will work out a lot cheaper than using their regular gui services (or at least did when I last bought).

Arbitrage has been a good solution for making money in bear markets before (when there's low volume on major pairs). For a long time the ethusd pair was out by about 3% among many exchanges in 2018-2019 so it was a good opportunity to arbitrage then.

Triangular arbitrage might be a bit harder but would work on general principle (I assume you're doing it because you don't want the 2nd currency or think it's too volatile but could make something - it's probably something you'd need to experiment with to see if the exchanges are fast and reliable enough).

If you want to get into arbitrage build the bot yourself or find someone who will and release the source code to you. Don't do anything stupid (like granting withdraw permissions on the api keys) and don't hold too much money on an exchange for too long if you don't need to (especially if it's not well trusted).

Perhaps they wanted to use some of their rewards and actually spend them, maybe they have with some too (would we even know?)

It might be more of a question of why they didn't change it back after setting the addresses to change for each new reward - perhaps it was testing a function in the wallet when it used to mine and they didn't bother changing it back. Either that or testing how many addresses the bitcoin client could actually handle over a course of time and transactions.

It also sets a bad example of reusing addresses and might have been suggestive to users to keep reusing theirs rather than shuffling around the addresses they normally use and refreshing new ones.

It looks like a modified martingale strategy that's being used here so there might be a chance OP's actual loss/profit is smaller or larger than that. (since martingale is being used here, I'd go with the averaging figure you had above of the $3-4).

The house always wins when taking an averages of bets, it might come out a bit different with a strategy like this (it'll likely come out similar to placing a small number of larger bets with low odds - like a 1-1.05 bet or a 94% win chance).

Inflation compared with bitcoin over the last year would be nearing 100%. It's easy enough to say it'll act as a hedge in these situations but what if it doesn't? Most of the inflation now is because people are forced to pay those higher prices and fairly willing to do it to not change their lifestyle (you did include the Netherlands in your list). Inflation can make people panic spend in cases where they expect it to go higher too, which would drive down the price of bitcoin quite dramatically if it were implemented as a full fiat currency and the only method of exchange (I don't think governments or people are going to leave fiat alone for a long time because they have some levels of protection and value as determined by those trading in it).

Governments are "helping" by throwing more money at the problem imo instead of doing as some are going to do with electricity and offering loans to suppliers if their costs go higher (as a pay as you normally do and we'll cover the rest - which is what should really be done in these circumstances and wouldn't be too expensive to do).

Tor/onion routing integrated into Firefox would be great (even if you could just securely connect to dot onion sites via Firefox).


It can't be shutdown now but it could be heavily controlled to an extent where it might be.

There's often going to be lingering software vulnerabilities that could be exploited by anyone wanting to kill your privacy as well as things like the repositories for tornado cash being closed and wiped a few months ago in the news (there's likely backups but it might be hard to work out how trustworthy they are - especially if lots of maintainers use remote management systems for storing and accessing their code thst are all hosted by companies one government can control).


Even if they don't, someone else could likely sell your data. People's behaviour patterns likely aren't hard to predict and spot, if you go from.not using a vpn to using one, you can't expect to be well hidden and may take more risks as a result.

I'd trust a free vpn as much as I'd trust a paid one though (paid services will just have highe rprofit margins when they sell your data).


There's probably going to be little in the way of ads when they get rid of that sort of thing. They'll probably do like a lot of companies seem to and tell you they're updating their privacy policy, give you a few weeks for it to come into effect and you to get annoying of hitting "remind me later" and then they'll get a lot of data to sell. It's also not like you'll spend $1500 on a phone only to decide your privacy is worth more and buy something else - I expected them to pull their privacy thing long before this time though.

I've noticed there are so many technology firms trying to make the bulk of their profits from selling privacy or infrastructure solutions (like cloud services) and with other companies like antivirus (cheaply enough that they started to offer VPNs for free) and Web browsers moving into the space too in recent years, are we going to see there being too much competition soon and perhaps peer to peer solutions taking over at some point once tracking improves for services like recaptcha.

This became more noticeable to me recently as duckduckgo have started a marketing campaign aimed at privacy and Apple have been trying to do similar for a while too with their OS/device ads.

We're likely quite a bit of time away from getting a fully decentralised and stable storage solution (even though there's competition for it) and website throughput (as tor seems to work fairly well for addressing but it's also prone to being attacked in ways such as dos/spam attacks to take parts of the n network down and won't boost the power of the servers hosting onion domains). It's well known Amazon and Microsoft make a bulk of their profits from cloud services.

This probably means things like web3 and whatever the metaverse gets reinvented to in a few years is probably going to either directly compete with a lot of large companies already in this sector or will be directly boosting their profits (or - and most likely - both).

I do remember that Greece used to be the largest producer of olive oil in the world (they got overtaken by another EU country fairly recently if I'm remembering that right).

Olive and rapeseed oil are the two main ones that get used in the UK imo. Rapeseed is grown quite a lot here too because its oil is quite useful - it's potentially legal to water down diesel with it in newer vehicles or run older vehicles directly off it. There's a chance it could've been cheaper too if we're going off last year's prices when I paid £1.54 for a litre.

Olive oil has a history of being used in oil lamps too in the UK. Rapeseed can serve similar functions to both sunflower oil and butter too (a lot of it gets used to make butter spreads).

I'll have to trust your stats as I'm without a PC for a few days and my phone will be awful at displaying those CSVs. I'm surprised the EU is doing similar tactics to the UK though to drive up prices....

Retirement funds are quite well protected from making poor investment choices (most of the time) so altcoins and leverage are unlikely to be seen imo.

What is likely and a good idea is if proportions of funds invest in crypto. If you make 4% in dividends omin the first year of your pension or first year of holding the asset, investing that and just that into bitcoin would be a great idea that would mean you lose 4% of your entire pension (which could happen anyway with stocks pretty easily) or you gain an extra bit of diversification that could be reinvested. If you're not good a picking stocks too, 60% in a globally diversified stock etf, 20% in real estate and 20% in monetary value related assets (like bonds and crypto) doesn't sound a bad place to start if investing when you're young (and then taking down those percentages heavily as you get older and moving more things into bonds or shares).

It does seem like he could be right about the mainstream media narrative hiding things. I didn't see anything on TV saying El Salvador passed the bitcoin bill. It's hard to tell if they saw the news as potentially negative though (if people hadn't heard of El Salvador before or only heard of it negatively) or if they were actually just trying to hide it.

I wonder if this is him still trying to defend his insistence of his country's investment in bitcoin or if it's him trying to attract a certain audience (like we saw with gamestop).

The second would probably be a lucrative strategy for them (as it was for gamestop) but I imagine, if it is that, the hedge funds are going to start doing exactly the same thing and try to profit off it too...

It's quite impressive they are laying the groundwork for a web3 integrated economy though (as it'd look like they are by sending citizens bitcoin) it should make them much more capable of embracing new technologies and allow their economy to boost as a result (it's probably something other countries will and should do, at least with a CBDC as the fastest growing economies will soon be the most adaptive - or may already be).

Whenever they want to invest in crypto and have enough cash reserves and profit margin to do it (and the knowledge to set it up). If you're a business that can barely afford running costs then it's not a good option for you imo (although I'd argue cash isn't good either as it could be stolen).

If a business owner wants to make a crypto investment or diversify into something that isn't a native currency then that would be the best time to start accepting it, as well as companies with good profit margins that don't need to care as much about how much money they have (such as Software, Coffee shops or graphics design businesses over places like convenience stores).

The chance of a chargeback is also a consideration (choosing coins from faster networks like litecoin and tron/sol stablecoins might be a good way around that though) as well as the fees you're going to be charged if you're using a payment provider and whether these are affordable to you (there's less point in accepting crypto if you can accept cash and buy the crypto with that for cheaper).

There is still a chance we drop further too from this current cycle but weak hands will still make the highest losses regardless (and there's a limit to how much further we can fall).

It's notable too that most of these aren't instantaneous drops as a lot of newbies would imagine. Bitcoin has spent a long time to reach these -80% in price so that suggests there's support for bitcoin in the worst of scenarios and people still willing to buy the coin at half its ath even after a bit of a fall will come as a surprise to many too.

A lot of crypto trading is done in the background. By the time you have heard of a project's name, it could already have a market cap of $100 million. A lot of successful trading is done without the news on a lot of things and relies on other fundamentals (such as how much a coin is searched or if it's near a significant support or resistance level).

A lot of altcoin projects this year have been playing games with their investors in a hunt for more capital and notoriety - don't be fooled by a short lived wave on some altcoins that can pump and dump or see significant claims the network will change only to post multi-year roadmaps because they lack appropriate competition.

There are crypto based news outlets, this forum, twitter and YouTube to pick from for a lot of information, why not just pick one or two to focus on? It's more important to absorb different types of media than it is to absorb different media outlets of the same type imo. If you're using social media, you'll get accounts of events with less biases that aren't called out. If you're using a Web page or YouTube video, you'll get a more concise article but it might also fit a bias and be inaccurate (I'm not saying to only rely on one though because some social media comes with limited demographics of comments and you could get the same biased/inaccurate view from multiple people/shillers).

As mentioned above there are sites like coin market cap, crypt exchanges and potentially search engines that will be able to deliver you news articles though too.

I'm normally on the idea that increasing regulation increases the sophistication of scams and doesn't get rid of them. In this age of technology, scams move faster than law enforcement can and people are able to scam and go missing still - and a lot do (and once those people are gone you're going to find it hard to recover the money). I think investors are happy to know the source of their funds too, they're a lot less likely to be propping up illicit industries if regulation does well and non kyc coins cost more than kyc ones for example (like how "fund" coins are cheaper - due to management fees mostly - like Grayscale).

I liked the Theymos endorsed ico idea though with howeycoins, I think more of that sort of education might come from regulation which should be supported. Transactions in bitcoin are likely to remain irreversible though too and that's something that could be educated on more too (I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that wallets don't include their own education documents and force them onto their users - electrum's readthedocs seem like a good example of having useful education but aren't something an excited newbie would potentially find).

Getting a user to enter the nmemonic they've just written down and then a phrase of "I downloaded this software from electrum.org and can confirm it by going to my browsers download history or seeing it's been signed, I also understand confirmed bitcoin transactions are irreversible and will try my best to follow the documentation from [source] if I'm using this wallet for any purpose other than testing with a small amount of funds. I understand bitcoin has value and that I'm the sole controller of my wallet and will keep it secure along with my computer to the best of my abilities and not install untrusted software on my computer".

A lot of the features actually still worked as far as I'm aware as I received notifications before then and things still loaded fine from them but I wasn't online at the time to actually see it being offline.

This feels like it's quite normal for a lot of big apps and social media these days. Discord is really bad for going offline too and the fact it was only an hour of downtime is quite impressive for meta (Facebook went away for ages after the last issues they had with it).

I'm not too sure those maps of where Internet cables are located are actually that accurate - there's probably more cables connecting places like Europe and North America for example that aren't included, perhaps some connecting places like Australia, Indonesia, India, China and the US too so it'd take a lot to try to split the connections completely.

If it did happen, most online systems would end up failing anyway so we'd have that to deal with. There would be other ways of transmitting data, such as satellites, which might be repurposed for such things although could also be slow (unless well planned and implemented).

As noted above, block speeds would be very noticeable from the onset, if Asia has a lot more miners than America then the one with the least power behind it would become really slow and the longest chain would win out over the shortest chain when a reconnection happened. If the reconnection happens after 12 hours passes, I'm unsure how a double spend attack could actually be stopped (without the chain being considered entirely insecure and companies stopping dealings in it for a while - since you could hop on a flight or send your private key to a contact on the other side of the disconnect just after sending your transaction and selling your funds).

Information for critical infrastructure could also be flown across if it needed to be and I don't think those flights would be too slow with military involvement (less than 2 hours).