Yeah, I have similar views toward democracy as well specially since majority of the people who vote are sheeple voting for whoever gives them the craziest promises and then we all end up with thieves in office
The best example is the Biden vs Trump s**tshow in America ...

Then what's the point of parliament and legislation body that people chose to pass those laws? If they chose them, then tax is not taking their property without consent, they've already consented to it.
If they don't like it, they should change the law but until then it is not theft.

The only real questions that should be asked are:
1) Where is that money being spent? And if it is being wasted somewhere, how can that be fixed?
2) What's the alternative if there were no taxes? Tax is being spent somewhere, right? Like the defense budget. Where should that money come from without taxes? Who's going to pay the armed forces to defend your country specially at this time that the global tensions are rising.

To be honest I have no idea about what percentage are running pruned nodes which is why I asked.
I even tried checking bitnodes.io[1] but that chart doesn't make sense because AFAIK full pruned nodes advertise NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED and NODE_NETWORK together and non-pruned nodes advertise NODE_NETWORK alone so unless I'm wrong there should be more NODE_NETWORK count than NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED service but it is the opposite!

[1] https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/#services

Overall I agree with what you're trying to say here. It's been like this for as long as I can remember as well. Don't forget that the following is one of the oldest memes in Bitcoin World:

People expect the market to always be volatile and something crazy to happen, and usually they expect that thing to be a massive jump up. When that doesn't happen, they start talking about poor performance.

From a global economy perspective, I can also say that bitcoin is performing more than fine. Don't forget we have a recession+inflation going on in most of the world with high "sticky" interest rates. Such an economy puts a lot of sell pressure on markets like bitcoin that are considered "high risk assets" since people tend to liquidate such "assets".
Bitcoin had a bull run over the past year.

We saw this in the crash of 2022, something we have been recovering from in the past year, but we ARE recovering which is what the good performance is.

The verification is important and the fact that all full nodes (both full archival nodes or full pruned nodes) perform verification, construct their own chainstate and can verify and relay any new transaction or blocks that are sent their way.

BTW do you have a reference for 95%, I'm just curious?

This happens when a radical side polarizes the nation to get votes. We had the same thing here many years ago and in that election we both had one of the highest participations and the mot polarization of the nation. When the radical side loses they create chaos with empty claims like electoral fraud, demanding recount, etc.

So the solution isn't to pardon the convicted felon, the solution is to battle the polarization and shut down its outlets like FoxNews that was one of the main reasons for that "insurrection"...

That's not the definition of a node.
A node is a software on a computer that enforces the Bitcoin consensus rules. To do that it has to be able to communicate with the rest of the nodes in the peer-to-peer network so that it can download and verify every single transaction from block 1 to the tip.

That's the reason why I said your definition is wrong. We don't define node based on how smoothly it is being run. You can run a full node on a smart phone or the least efficient hardware out there and it still be a full node as long as it can download and verify everything.

We don't really categorize them as "full nodes" and "miner nodes".
A node is a peer in the P2P network so the concepts we have are only "full nodes" and "miners".
A full node is what I explained above (a peer downloading and verifying blocks and has a mempool) and a miner is someone who uses a full node to construct a candid block from its mempool to mine (compute hashes over and over until the desired hash is found).

The way Bitcoin is designed as a whole and the way the rules are ensures that. Bitcoin is a combination of miners, nodes, market, developers, etc.

For example the blockchain is immutable because the rules that are enforced by the nodes dictate that we follow the chain with the most work and it all works based on the assumption that the majority of the network is honest.
So if a minority of miners decides to change history (make chain mutable) they'd fail because they can not produce more work than the rest of the network combined.

Why? What's the benefit of increasing the transaction size by a fixed 4 byte and wasting the block space for something that can be done already using the current method?

Think about that number a little bit. 9500 YEARS. Bitcoin is probably an ancient history after 100 years just like fire that cavemen built thousands of years ago. In 9500 years people may not even remember something called Bitcoin ever existed.
So I ask again what's the benefit of adding an extra 4 bytes that is never going to be used?

There are a lot of things in the protocol that won't work way before 2106 like SHA256 and ECDSA using secp256k1 curve. For example this last part according to SEC 1 v2 the 256 bit curve is only secure until 2040 (B.2.1 page 73, table 3).

The War Within War and Some Silver Linings

Wars are costly, specially these days and the US regime knows this better than others. That is why they have the Nixon Doctrine which has basically been turned into using proxies to fight others. One of their favorite proxies to use, specially in West Asia is Takfiri groups. Two of them you already know of are ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
Over the past years the US regime has been actively using these groups in the world for destabilization, etc. This is exactly why these same terrorists are now found in occupied Palestine fighting for Israel against the resistance in Gaza including Hamas.

Now; the intelligence suggests that the Zio-US coalition was planning on using these terrorist groups as a serious distraction while they conduct their attacks from the air. There has been a lot of movements in Syria (the border with Lebanon) and elsewhere over the past weeks as well. The tens of thousands of terrorists that are armed and trained in covert bases like Al-Tanf cover the shortage of troops the coalition suffers from as I pointed to in the OP.

The "silver lining" is that this plan was known and over the past days the attacks on terrorist positions are increasing. That is like the preemtive strike choking the proxy before it can become a threat.
The illegal US base Al-Tanf that is under occupation has also been under attack. This is the same base that US regime has been using to train these terrorists and if the name sounds familiar that's because months ago Biden suddenly decided to respond to one out of hundreds of attacks on dozens of US bases. That one attack was on this covert base that eliminated the 3 US officers who have been training ISIS terrorists and others.

The other silver lining is that it seems like the damage that USS Eisenhower sustained was sever enough that forced US Navy to send it back home and be forced to pull one carrier out from the 7th fleet in the Pacific and bring it to West Asia (USS Theodore Roosevelt).

That last one is the biggest message that could be sent to Washington that was delivered beautifully by the Armed Forces of Yemen in the Red Sea.
The good news is that it seems like Biden has received that message too since highest US military official, the Chairman of Joint Chief of Staff Gen Charles Q. Brown Jr. announced today that US is unable to assist the Zionists against the Lebanon military forces called Hezbollah.

But nothing is for sure yet, we still have to wait and see what will happen but I'd say the chances came down with the recent events. We'll know more in a day or two as the carriers reach their destination...

I don't think they see any shame in it because they don't consider the rest of the world to even be humans. They even have a word for people who are not born-Zionists that basically translates to "human animals". So for a Zionist there is no difference between tying a Palestinian man to the hood of their car or for example a hunted deer


I have a theory about why they are talking about something they knew from day one, out loud NOW.

In short they hope to relay this message that "Israel is good, Netanyahu is bad".
Then dethrone him so to speak and maybe even execute him themselves and tell the world that "see, the problem is gone and we are the good guys". That way they buy some time to recover from their massive losses and maybe in 6 months to a year resume the genocide in Gaza again.
This is exactly why the Western mouthpieces have been increasingly blaming him and him alone. I dare say that even the ICC arrest warrants is in the same category that is only for him not for all the officers that are committing the genocide on the ground.
All the recent resignations can also be explained this way. They are distancing themselves from Netanyahu even though there is absolutely no difference between them!

I don't think this strategy is going to work though. Because of one simple reason: Zionists' defeat on October 7 (the operation Al-Aqsa Storm) is irreparable.
Majority of the world has already recognized State of Palestine and after more than 7 decades this country is revived again. Countries have clear borders, they have a military, they have a government, they have foreign relations and accept investors (hint: the large gas fields of Gaza that can be extracted and exported for billions), etc.
Even if the genocide ended right now, Israel will eventually be forced to for example pull out of West Bank  and that means kicking out the worst and most radical Zionist occupiers from Palestinian soil. Radicals who are armed and are used to murdering civilians who would then go to war with the Zionist regime itself.
That means internal armed conflict inside the Zionist organization, that means all the Zionist colonizers would start going back home (ie. reverse migration back to Europe, US, Russia, etc.). Half a million of the occupiers have already ended their occupation and have flown out in the past 260+ days.

And a lot more things that all means the end of project Israel an the end of occupation of Palestine before its 80'th anniversary.

From the Sparrow wallet docs and the previews it looks like it does support both BIP39 and Electrum mnemonics and you can also set a custom derivation path. That's usually the basic thing that any deterministic wallet should do (accepting BIP39 mnemonics at least + allowing to set the derivation path + allowing to get individual keys)
https://sparrowwallet.com/docs/quick-start.html

Is there any specific feature in iancoleman that you had in mind that is missing?

Considering how almost all the weapons Saudi family buys is from US, it is not much of a bet to say they pay in dollar
Besides this family has been ordered to invest all the money they had in United States all these years, which means all their money that is in dollar is also tied up in the US.

That still doesn't mean they aren't joining the global dedollarisation movement though...

Yeah, in each encounter they have been masterfully shooting down 50 drones out of the incoming 7 so I'm not surprised the number they're reporting is already above 11k

You can watch the video here https://www.aparat.com/v/hrz3135 and read about it here https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/23/human-shielding-in-action-israeli-forces-strap-palestinian-man-to-jeep

I don't really have anything to say just that the US regime is still supporting this terrorist organization that calls itself Israel.
The next arrest warrant ICC issues should be for the DefSec Austin and people like him...

And by the way This didn't happen in Gaza! This is the West Bank... and there is NO Hamas there...

Day 260
37551 Civilians slaughtered by Israeli terrorists
10000+ Missing or under rubble
85911 Are wounded by Israeli terrorists
---------------------------------------
15821 Children murdered by Israeli terrorists
33 Children died of starvation
10475 Women murdered by Israeli terrorists
499 Medical workers murdered by Israeli terrorists
152 Reporters and Journalists murdered by Israeli terrorists
---------------------------------------
7 Mass graves found after the Zionist terrorists left hospitals in Gaza
520 bodies were found in those mass graves

Your statements about other stuff like running node, using over the counter methods to buy, etc. are correct but not the ones about mining.

You can't compare mining today with mining in 2009-2012. Back then you only used the PC you already had without needing to purchase specialized hardware. Meaning you could mine using your CPU and later with your GPU. Today that does not work. You need to purchase ASICs to be able to mine bitcoin otherwise it is not worth it because statistically speaking you will not find any blocks due to the high difficulty.

It's difficult to say, all these things happen behind the scene. They may just want some lobbying power in the future for a lot of things that may not even be related to cryptocurrencies. But they definitely want something in return which is why I wouldn't use the term "donation" to describe such payments of this scale by such people.

Someone who is already wasting time trying to "brute force" private keys by generating random ones for bitcoin and ethereum thinking they can get rich, should at least run a full node

There is a mechanism. It is through the timestamp inside block headers. The result has some "wiggle room", since it is not an accurate time.

In each tx we only have 4 bytes to work with as locktime, so we evaluate those 4 bytes like what I explained above. The space is large enough to cover everything.
Think about those values:

• Any value from 0 to 500,000,000 is interpreted as a block height. We don't really need any more since after 15 years we are still at 850k blocks and it would take ~9500 years to get to 500 mil blocks so it covers everything we need.
• Any value from 500,000,000 to 4,294,967,295 (0xffffffff) is interpreted as datetime. As epoch, that value is between 1985 and 2106 which covers all datetime values we need.

Although it is hard to say but I doubt it.

The thing about recession is that unlike inflation (that would shoot bitcoin price up) it forces people to liquidate their assets and they always start from the riskiest assets which bitcoin can be called that. So the sell pressure caused by the recession like this could lead to drops and even crashes depending on the severity of the recession and the panic sell!

In fact I've been saying that the only reason why we haven't seen a bull run that looks like previous bull runs in the past 2 years is the ongoing and worsening recession in most of the world.

Or maybe it's just billionaires seeing a corrupt politician willing to accept bribes in broad daylight (the $2 mil) as a better candidate that suites them and helps their growth.

I don't think much is needed. Biden is already losing because of all his failures from his deteriorating mental state all the way to supporting genocide. In other words if his opponent were anybody other than Trump, this would not even have been a competition, he would lose with only having 10% of the  votes

No. It will only improve Winklevoss twin's future.
I also still believe that the crypto community is to small to be impactful and too wise to like a crazy corrupt man like Trump.