Why should the thread be locked? It is not necessary, that does not mean there wouldn't be constructive discussions speculating about what Bitcoin price can be before the specified date. Leaving this thread unlocked is better, any quality post will be welcomed imo, but just that no more new entries.

This video would be of help, but it is only all about using credit card to buy Bitcoin on ChangeNow.

How To Buy Crypto With a Credit Card on ChangeNOW

If your computer is not transferring any data at all but just reading files and the USB is just removed while not first ejected from the computer, it may result to hanging of the computer that may require system reboot, but if data are been transferred in case of USB, the major problem that can result is the lost of data. Although, hardware wallet has no file to transfer but removing the USB directly without ejecting it first could lead to your computer misbehaving until you reboot it, this alone should be a good reason to first eject the drive from the computer before removing the USB, this will even make many people to feel secure and operating their hardware wallet safely, it takes less than 10 seconds to eject it. But, I do not think this has anything to do with the hardware wallet safety so far you have finished making transaction.

For example, coin A is trading on three exchanges that Coinmarketcap listed, if the coin is trading on exchange A at $10, while trading on exchange B at $5, and on exchange C at $9. The average of $5, $9 and $10 is $8. So the coin will be $8 on binance. Coins are not having the same price on individual exchanges while Coinmarketcap will list the average price according to the exchanges listed on their site.

Online multisig wallet is still safer if compared to the use of just a single master public key wallet, if enabling multisig using hardware wallets, this will be a means of maximum security and safety while Taproot fee is still 30% to 75% lower than those that required script hash (P2SH and P2WSH).

Yes, but I want to make comment about what I have found out about Taproot in regard to low transaction fee, the transaction fee is indeed low if compared to the recent multisig (P2SH and P2WSH), and as the pubkeys increase, the fee increase, unlike Taproot transactions that 50-of-50 multisig will still pay the same amount of fee as 2-of-2 Taproot multisig, and also as the same required for the one that require 1 pubkey, this as a result of key aggregation with the help of schnorr signature.

But I have found out that comparing segwit with Taproot using single pubkey payment still has low fee if compared to the lowest minimum amount paid in Taproot transaction, and this fee increases gradually as the transaction output increases (not the transaction input).

Pay-to-taproot
Input vbyte counts = 57.5
Output vbyte counts = 43
Vbyte count = 111.5

Segwit
Input vbyte counts = 68
Output vbyte counts = 31
Vbyte count = 109.5

For 1 inputs and 10 outputs
Vbyte count for Taproot= 498
Vbyte count for Segwit = 388.5

Like the Campaign Managers on this forum that can make use of 1 input and many more output, SegWit (P2WPKH) will still reduce the fee than Taproot if not comparing it with multisig. But Taproot will save much more while comparing it with multisig.

Why would such result to selling of Bitcoin which will lead to decrease in Bitcoin price, nobody know where the coins are sent to until it has been researched about, the bitcoin sent would have even gotten to its destination at the time. What can leads to selling is exchange inflow in which whales are moving bitcoin from wallets to exchanges, this will result to many people to be selling while many of the whales may sell, but exchange outflow will likely lead to buying.

I think it depends on how individual are protecting their wallet device. For beginners, I can recommend Ledger Nano, but experienced users can use Trezor and have his coins completely safe from any form of attack while using a completely open source wallet, the reason I will prefer experienced users to use Trezor is because it is completely open source. The microchip in the Ledger Nano is close source. So far a strong passphrase can help protect coins stored on Trezor from physical attack, I think it meets experienced users needs like you for complete coin protection.

What supposed be our focus is to invest at the right time, as Bitcoin price reach all-time-high, it is normal for the price to retrace, it will also still reach a low price but not up to the previous low price, investing at the time is better. Some people have good investment strategy and they are very patient. The price of Bitcoin will still later reach all-time-high which will be greater than the present one but it will take time.

I remembered a month ago when I wanted to make a topic about this, I later thought it is not necessary but I still have the screenshot of the search engine of the best Bitcoin wallets (not even crypto wallet, but Bitcoin wallet is what I searched for online), only very few sites recommend Electrum and Wasabi, I did not think I even saw Bitcoin Core. I saw many noncustodial wallets that can not help in privacy, what I later saw mostly are custodial wallets and exchanges which can be very misleading. The first wallet I used and I thought was good was Coinbase.com until I joined this forum to know they are wallet misleading people, making people not to know they have no full control.

Whales are still contributing to the healthy growth of Bitcoin, if whales are moving bitcoin from exchanges to wallet, it means they are not selling, while the price have more chances to rise at the time. If whales are moving bitcoin to exchanges, it result to selling pressure as other Bitcoin users will know they are about to sell. What makes Bitcoin growth healthy is the buying and selling, there has been whales many years ago, and Bitcoin is still growing, but there will be time of growth (price increase) and a time of plummet (price decrease).

It is called correction or retracement, that gives opportunity to new people to invest and also gain, the price may decrease today, but it will still later increase and reach all-time-high.

Why? When Bitcoin is completely transparent. With what I explained above, you can know when whales are moving their funds, and if moving it to wallet or exchanges. Whales buying and selling is an opportunity for experts to make more money.

There is no problem.

There has been improvement with the adoption of Segwit and Taproot in which the transaction fees are reduced up to 50% while the Taproot transactions will be more efficient with also 2.5x faster block validation and 30% to 75% savings on multisig.

No, but the Bitcoin community are always looking for more way to improve scaling. Lightning network is still part of the process because it will actually help which can reduced on-chain transactions if adopted by people.

Not necessarily 10 minutes, it is 10 minutes on average, it can take 1 minute, it can take 2 minutes, it can even take 30 minutes.

But what concerns me most is that most SPV wallets do not have the special coin control feature, it is few that have it, I even only know Electrum to have it out of all the wallets I have used before. Most all other wallets choose the address to spend from automatically and not having the manual section option, depriving people of privacy because I believe without people manually spending from a particular address, wallet automatic selection may not be perfect.

I am always excited to read this kind of post, especially introducing someone to know about Bitcoin. I believe you have let Dan known more about bitcoin today even as he has heard about ethereum or Raven before. I also believe you would have let him known about security and safety too especially waiting for certain number of confirmations before accepting the bitcoin paid. I too like to introduce Bitcoin to new people, but I noticed I introduced it more to friends, I even prefer to make use of Bitcoin to make transactions with friends because it is convenient for me, rather than first converting it to fiat which I am lazy about.

Everything about Bitcoin is completely transparent, Bitcoin transactions are just to be like that. Ones you spend from a Bitcoin wallet, the change address UTXO is traceable on the blockchain. I see it as a special feature to make bitcoin transaction completely transparent, but experienced Bitcoin users knows how to maintain privacy by not having their coins on single address, but well distributed to other addresses while making use of coin control when necessary.

Taproot was locked-in on June 12, 2021 and will be activated in November, after its activation, some reputed wallet will will support it. Taproot is the second part of the Schnorr (BIP340), Taproot (BIP341) and Tapscript
and (BIP342) proposal, Taproot and schnorr signature helps in efficiency, scaling and privacy, reducing transaction fee and making indistinguishable spending possible. Schnorr Signatures is a standard for 64-byte signature over the elliptic curve secp256k1 unlike the traditional ECDSA signatures over the secp256k1 curve with SHA256 hashes for authenticating transactions. Schnorr signature in comparison with ECDSA will be briefly emphasized on in the significance of schnorr. The spending rules is based on Taproot, Schnorr signatures, and Merkle branches but the focus of this article is about (pay-to-taproot) P2TR transactions and the significance of Taproot that was proposed. While Schnorr adds a new signature type, Taproot builds on this further by introducing a new transaction output version and a new way to define spending conditions.

Keys aggregation and transaction Indistinguishability
P2SH and P2WSH multisig transactions require high fee for bitcoin on-chain spending, the higher the number of keys needed, the higher the fee. Like in 2-of-3 multisig, three public keys are required for spending, while the transaction fee will be more higher than two keys needed in 2-of-2 multisig while the fee required for a single public key will still be lower than 2-of-2 multisig higher. The higher the number of public key used to generate the multisig wallet, the higher the bitcoin required for fee. These is the reason it is better to make use of segwit (P2WSH) for low transaction on this multisig wallet rather than P2SH type, but yet the increase in the number of public keys, the increase in transaction fee required. The keys are not aggregated, resulting to more data buildup on the blockchain while such transactions are obviously distinguishable as blockchain observer can differentiate this type of multisig transactions from single pubkey transactions.

                 P2SH/P2WSH multisig transaction on blockchain

Unlike P2TR multisig transactions, the keys will be aggregated into a single pubkey which is the main benefit of Schnorr signature to P2TR multisig transactions, the result is a valid signature corresponding to the same addition (or subtraction) of the public keys, in the key aggregation, several public keys can be combined into one valid key which reduces data resulting to reduced transaction fee just like single pubkey transaction.


Key/signature aggregation with Schnorr

So, P2SH/P2WSH multisig offer little privacy, allowing blockchain observers to easily identify multisig transactions on the blockchain, unlike Taproot transactions that guarantee more privacy, the key aggregation makes this type of multisig to be indistinguishable from single pubkey transactions and impossible for blockchain observers to know if the transaction is actually multisig.

                  Pay-to-taproot multisig transaction on blockchain




https://youtu.be/1gRCVLgkyAE
https://medium.com/interdax/how-will-schnorr-signatures-benefit-bitcoin-b4482cf85d40
https://medium.com/interdax/what-is-taproot-and-how-will-it-benefit-bitcoin-5c8944eed8da
https://medium.com/digitalassetresearch/schnorr-signatures-the-inevitability-of-privacy-in-bitcoin-b2f45a1f7287
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2017/03/23/schnorr-signature-aggregation/

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0340.mediawiki
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawiki
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0342.mediawiki

It is clear that countries want controls is the reason for banning Bitcoin, just like China, but I think country like China need more than control, China created digital Yuan to make sure the value of US dollar and other strong currencies like Pounds and Euro are reduced, so many trades will between foreign traders and Chinese local traders will be directly using digital yuah, so power competition is included.

There are some countries in Africa that ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because they do not know much about it and yet want control, like in Nigeria, during EndSars protest in 4th quarter of 2020, the government of Nigeria block the account of some protesters so they can not have access to fiat (Naira) to be used for the continuation of the protest, the alternative at the time was Bitcoin. After some months in first quarter of 2021, Central Bank of Nigeria banned Bitcoin, stating false information about Bitcoin.

Merit is not the same as smerits, maybe what you meant is smerits. Are users that have smerits stingy? It depends, people can not be the same, there are very cheerful smerit senders, while some just need you to post in certain boards they visit often, you need to study this forum before making conclusion. A student that do not like his/her teacher will likely fail the teacher's subject, I hope you understand this, start being positive about this forum, your kind of mindset will not get you anywhere on this forum.

I knew no one when I started last year, I will encourage those at the bottom to make quality post if they want to rank up.

I get your point, you are definitely right, there was a time bitcoin.com named Bitcoin cash as Bitcoin which was misleading people until this year IIRC when it was changed, now I am not certain about this manipulation as I am not longer visiting the site as often as before. But, I think what OP meant was that is it possible for hackers to create fake Bitcoin and spend it as Bitcoin, which is not possible, while also Bitcoin can not be double-spent in this regard also.

It depends, but most likely (99.99%) No. And also know that making use of recovery services will only lead to scam because such Bitcoin can not be recovered after you send it to scammers. Some that were recovered were obvious ones that are of high amount which governments like United State governments has been tracking while some are not even recovered till today. So, if you send Bitcoin to a scammer, consider it as lost because it is lost already, and Bitcoin transaction can not be reversed. If you make use of recovery service in this regard, that is another scam.

No fake Bitcoin can be created, no fake Bitcoin.

No fake Bitcoin in this regard, those are regarded as Altcoins.