This brings in the much needed moderation on such a thread. The Chinese have been able to expertly channel a lot of manpower and public energy towards the target of upliftment and national pride. A lot of it has been driven by ultra-nationalism and carefully crafted messages through public outlets, while blocking most of what the rest of the world takes as free access to information.

It looks like a very patriachal, disciplined sort of system where people are doing things and living their lives a certain way, not because they love it, but because the party says that its best for them and for the people. For example, making billionaire organization trim down by donating or committing to social welfare will affect all of those who have worked hard to reach at that level. Whether they will continue to love doing this cannot be predicted. Would another "Jack Ma" work his ass off to raise a corporation like Alibaba? This is basically forced philanthrophy. I don't think that money is what matters here. It is about the perception that no private entity should become too big. The West has had this argument with the negative feelings about corporations that become "too big to fail" and are regularly bailed out.

So, we can never know what the stakeholders and owners in those corporations actually feel, but this isn't something completely radical.

Thanks for chiming in. Discussing these things is always interesting. You are talking about the time complexity of such a search and match algorithm. I read some of this stuff back when I took a course in Python. It was enlightening to read about algorithms and make small enumeration programs. Programming i guess is all about practice and actually building upon existing complexity. I did make a program to sort for myself a very poorly formatted data fed into excel in CSV forms. But having been busy in other stuff did not leave room to continue learning.

You'd first need a set of master data with all possible 6 word snippets of text from all the existing posts. (provided someone is copying only from existing Bitcoin posts). This would then have to be compared with the set of snippets formed from every new post. While this could be done, I believe the space and memory requirements would be pretty huge. Though, doesn't google do it for like, all of the internet? And Altavista used to do it at one time. Now, google has humungous capacity of course but I don't think that the old sites like Altavista had those.

Just nature of man i guess. Some try to find God no matter how much evidence they have that they cannot reach him.

Then there is an abysmal class of people that try to masquerade as him.

So, What exactly happened to your English writing skills? When i last read your posts, you seemed pretty erudite.

Seriously though, with the kind of popularity that Bitcoin has seen and how it has spawned a whole generation of other corporate/ private chains, Satoshi would have by now came out in front of the world. All we can now speculate is that Hal was probably Satoshi or that Satoshi is no longer in this plane.

Great man. Much respect and awe as always.

I think more than just the bounty earners or Sig campaigners (myself included), this forum has a lot of people deeply involved in the functioning of sub-boards and economies there. There are the campaign managers, spam hunters, scam catchers, plagiarism catchers, Alt-coin evangelists, hardware sellers, collectible enthusiasts, gamblers. A huge group of users deeply invested in the platform. As @mk4 said, it is still better than having to go on facebook and go through an AI suggested newsfeed.

The forum still hosts the likes of G. Maxwell and Achow who appear once in a while with the core updates as well as to provide information in the Technical discussion section. Even a decentralized cryptocurrency which cannot be taken down by anyone needs a roundtable once in a while. In a scenario when all else will break down, i think the forum will still remain a congregation spot.

If i had anywhere near the skills needed to do this, I would probably be a software dev myself and not installing propulsion equipment in train engines, LOL. Its more of an idea for someone with the dev skills to do it. I can then give myself one of those pompous managerial designations like "Research design consultant" or something.

A general algorithm would probably parse through all of the post history and compare it with everyone else's in snippets of 6 words each finding a match percentage. Lots of enumeration, which I was never good at. Then you'd have to root out the edge cases like quotes and references. It can be done and could even be an interesting open source project.

EDIT: Maybe if we had a sort of hackathon bounty for it for building this and some other tools on a platform like Gitcoin. Would be great to see a Bitcointalk Tribe in Gitcoin. See, there i go giving away "ideas" again.What say ya? @Theymos

I have always had mixed feeling about the 777 and Bitvest campaigns. I always wanted to express that I felt the rates don't justify the amount of effort it takes to make all those posts. Now I realize that as time passes by and those Sats rise in value, I truly hope that some of the oldest posters in this campaign will look back at these sats with gratitude.

It also says something of the commitment from 777 and BitVest that they have continued to keep their end of the bargain by continuing the payment in Satoshis despite the rise in prices. I hope this will continue to remain the case. It is also heartening that Bitvest has a Tier E with "Infinity" number of seats. I guess it gives a chance for almost everyone to earn some minimal sats for the time they spend on the forum.

Here is hoping that the Sats continue to dominate the world and the people who come everyday on the forum and make it lively will all have sweet memories to reflect back at.

Well this issue really isn't just one for the forum but probably one that linguists and proof-readers must also struggle with. Isn't there some advanced software that academic institutions use to detect plagiarism? Wonder if we can get an overview of the algorithm used by that software. That could easily govern the set of rules that should form plagiarism.

One more thing to take note is that most users who get onto good campaigns start getting scrutinized by a lot of people. I remember that there was an instance of plagiarism even against someone like "Lauda", who i believe was never at a loss of words and would have been silly to use someone else's words.

Then again, writing 2000 plus posts over 4 years while reading articles and gathering information from multiple sources, is it possible that a person's words may seem plagiarized. I think it is difficult to come to a conclusion without some real world exercise. Why not do a challenge here at the forum. I think there are a lot of original posters here with 2-4000 samples of their writing available. I can emphatically claim that I have NEVER copied anything verbatim or intentionally. If i use an article, i just put them in quotes. Yet, who is to say that I never missed adding the quotes in making 2000 posts, or that my thought train was not somehow affected by what I may have read somewhere else, in a way that even if am writing those words on my own, they are sub-consciously mirroring something I have read the same day or a few days before.

This could be an interesting exercise if done on the, say, 100 most prolific and discernibly original posters on the forum. I think I will make the cut in atleast the top 200, if not 200100. Anyways, that an idea right there for the OP to check "Where to draw the line".

I think the article does present a pretty unbiased view of the pitfalls in allotting part of your investment portfolio to Bitcoin. There is nothing wrong in writing down the cons as this is a bearish article. For anyone who believes in bitcoin, there are pros that outweigh these.

For example, when it talks about volatility, i will mention the long term  upward trend as well as considerable stability compared to old times.

When the article tries to compare the supply cap benefit with real estate, it is pretty easy to distinguish that while real estate is just many of the existing assets, bitcoin is clearly the first and purest asset class of its kind. Mathematically sound, open source and based on permissionless, peer reviewed software.

It mentions that institutional investors make the wrong bets all the time, I point to Musk saying at "The B Word" talk with Cathie Wood and Jack that "its ridiculous that Teslas cash earns negative interest rates" and

See the difference. These bearish articles and their pragmatic analysts view the world of bitcoin with a conservative viewpoint. They fail to see the potential of bitcoin and are justified, but incorrect IMO, in their analysis

Coinbase having low bitcoin reserves can also mean that these centralized exchanges are diversifying more of their value into Alts and not just Bitcoin by, for example, exchanging their BTC for these Alt-coins. Any such analysis that only considers the level of Bitcoin reserves will be misleading without the data of how overall reserves have changes and what part has been taken over by Alts.

Coinbase and every single centralized exchange exists for the trading fees they get from people dabbling in Alts. In fact, they actively encourage all kind of Alt-coins to as a strategy to create a market. Exchanges run promotions for Alts and give away tokens to people for learning about these new coins. They are the ones that stand to benefit the most from more and more retail consumers getting into trading Alts.

What do people think about exchanges biases towards Alt promotion??

The initial article is very hazy and difficult to understand due to the formatting and lack of clarity. Yet, I think you are speculating that Bitcoin has been made by the United States to gain some kind of "control" over world assets.

Not that it matters really. When things are at this scale, it is virtually impossible to control anything. No matter what the conspiracy theorists think, it is pretty much impossible to govern the outcomes if you try to control EVERYTHING. The continued failure of US agencies to influence almost anything beyond little pieces of land as per their demands is proof of that. Just see how they were caught unawares by the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is because things happen way too randomly.

Even if a nation state or a collection of secret agencies made bitcoin and crypto with some dreams of world domination, such things eventually become part of actual society and there are too many influences. Although, I pretty much agree with your price target for Bitcoin. What is exciting to see is that how will more of the value from the lower level cryptos will begin to move towards the secure bitcoin network.

Russia and Russians are really such an enigma. The country that stopped the Nazi march dead in its track, gave the world the idea of unity of the working class and built some of the most imposing machines and structures in its era, is now looked down upon as an "also ran". One can only wonder what these Vodka guzzling , cold resistant bears would have accomplished, if not for all the lies and secrecy inflicted by the Oligarchs.

When it comes to bitcoin, i think the ability to run your own miners, nodes and actually be part of a decentralized network is something that naturally holds a lot of allure for free-minded men in countries like Russia and China. So, even though Bitcoin's popularity may be because of its usefulness in skirting sanctions, one cannot be sure that there aren't a bunch of real, working class Russians who have a love for Bitcoin and crypto. I mean even at the height of KGB and USSR's power, brave souls still dared to defect to the free world. That too in the absence of secret modes of communication and ease of access. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that quite a few people would prefer Bitcoin over almost everything else, not just gold and forex.

This is the exact kind of bullshit that becomes a big red flags for shitcoins. What exactly do you mean by a Google Cloud partnership. Similar posts have been made on the very isolated reddit of this project as far back as 2 yrs ago. Just because you can launch a node using the Google cloud marketplace does not mean that there is a "partnership".

I have no idea if you are a team member or just some useful idiot trying to earn tokens in their telegram group, but this is not what a partnership looks like. Not one legitimate website has this same information. Its just a bunch of obscure websites and blogs which are repeating verbatim these lines about OLT. Has it been a real partnership, it would have been in mainstream media. (Not Coindesk and other crypto publications). Even coindesk is well known for promoting all sorts of scam articles.

So stop this stupidity about partnerships.

What you are experiencing is called as FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). When you hear stories about people in the forum making wild returns due to spending time here, you can quickly feel like you have missed out. This is especially true in the kind of speculative bubble that we are in right now with all the NFTs and new launches. I understand that this is not a good feeling and it can make you take some very stupid decisions.

So just take a deep breath and realize that this is common in crypto. The time to make crazy returns is not through hast decisions but by becoming part of communities, being present and trying to find legitimate projects. Knowing what you can invest and becoming a stable decision-maker, rather than running after crazy returns due to stories you hear from other people. So just slow down. There are plenty of new chains like FTM, SOLANA, DOT that will continue to have new projects. It needs you to spend a lot of time researching and asking questions. Just make sure to gather all the information and invest only what you can afford.

Everyone rejoicing in this bullrun was once experiencing similar FOMO and lived through several years of crypto winter. Some are of course luckier but don't make up your mind based on those exceptions. Slow and steady is a good way to find a footing in this space. Later on, you can start taking more risks.

Projects like OLT/ULT/XLT/ZLT keep coming and going. These are nothing to put too much attention on, least of all your money. If you want to gather people who will follow such projects for you then offer them free tokens and give some incentive to build on the platform. Otherwise, nobody needs another "transaction" platform.

Apart from that, the audit link on CMC is not working and it sure is not Hacken. So instead of making these stupid posts about returns, give one good reason that why we need another blockchain platform when there already are several other, established ones, with low fees too?

Right now the gas prices are too high. I saw another thread where you are asking for a loan of 0.003 ETH. The gas needed to send that transaction itself would be more than this.

This is a common phenomena with crypto. The small fish just cannot move their few 10s or hundred dollars worth of value as the gas itself would cost you around 40-50 USD worth of ETH at current prices of >100 Gwei.

If you are familiar with Metamask, I'd suggest you to use other chains which have projects on which you can speculate after of course, doing your own research. Moving your tokens wouldn't be so costly on chains like Polygon or RSK. If you have bitcoin, I'd highly recommend to check the project Sovryn which uses BTC on the Rootstock network. It is not yet as crazy as some of these Ethereum chains but its a good community to engage with.

Good to know Shiva. Very good to know that you have kicked of the habit and are focussing on the more constructive areas of bitcoin and blockchain. There is always so much to learn and explore. If you keep learning, eventually the doors open for you to become part of something exciting.

If you write articles, then you are welcome to share them on the Indian sub as we are always looking for new people willing to engage the Indian sub. With the bull market, scammers always come onto the scene. We need more people to educate others about becoming financially responsible and Doing their own research. People tend to fall into greed by watching others and then a lot of people lose money and bitcoin gets a bad name. Everybody should try to fight against this at their own level as bitcoin is a beautiful technology with a great history.

The forum doesn't encourage sharing your location and other information but good to know. You can use the "Edit" button to remove such information. Good luck for your journey onwards. I'd look into your post history in a while and merit what I find useful. Good luck.

Nobody in their right mind "invests" actual money into Alts for the long term.

Those who can code and build, work for these and get tokens in return. As part of marketing, these get spread out to the public who form the USDC/ ETH/ BTC pairs by buying them up in open market or ICOs. Most people, who aren't naive, tend to cash out and retrieve their principal soon after listing. In case the rest of the shit goes parabolic, you rejoice and join Twitter shilling about how your coin is the next big thing.

If it catches on, you earn more money. The method is quite simple and just too much money floating around if you can learn about crypto. I won't say its all that easy but if you know the right people and can code and put up a website, the chances of you making a lot of money without worrying about delivery are pretty high. Those who "buy into" Alt-coins hoping it'll be a worthy investment are generally being fooled by someone.

That article is based on just one fact that WazirX has added some banks as a payment option. There is nothing much to read into it as exchanges like coinDCX and WazirX have been allowing this for quite some time.

Regulatory clarity is still missing as the crypto bill is still under deliberation. I wouldn't read too much into this except the fact that this article is a perfect example of Indian media's dishonesty and casual attitude. The person who wrote that knows no better than anybody else and is probably just a low paid normie. There is a speculatory comment about banks allowing transactions amid rising popularity in Tier II and Tier III towns.

Instead of going into the actual details about how these Tier II town crypto peddlers are basically scammers running HYIP and Ponzi scheme, the writer is content to note that this implies popularity. Nothing can be farther from the truth. As @teosanru pointed out in this post, a lot of these are crypto scammers once again vying for blood in a country full of greedy people willing to part with their, probably ill-gotten wealth, in the hope of scamming the person below them. Its the MCAP and Pankaj Bhardwaj level scammers all over again.

This has happened a hundred times now. Every bullrun, Ethereum shillers start this speculation about "flippening". This is mostly the signal that the bullrun is about to end for Ethereum and the Alt-coins. Right now, the fees have been ridiculous on Ethereum for weeks now, especially since the much hailed EIP-1559. There is also going to be a switchover to PoS which means that some other PoW competitor will soon be looking to takeover that market share and the GPU miners.

One reason for ETH increasing in price can be the emergence of yield farming on other blockchains where people end up buying ETH to bridge from Ethereum to that other platform. While this may lead to a temporary increase in price, this shifting of users means that the market share for Ethereum will split up between these alternate chains, and hence, decrease at the end of it. So, no taking crown ever.