Many look (and follow) athletes, singers, football players and other similar VIPs, which earn huge amounts of money, which invest in many directions and still get poor after not too many years.
And many forget that these people usually have no strong school background hence they can easily get fooled by bad advisors, hence many won't follow the best investment (or cash in) advises.
Also these people are oriented toward entertainment industry and will spend shitload of money for having fun... as long as the money lasts.

Of course there will be a long list of Bitcoin millionaires (or virtual millionaires) that will almost certainly not have an easy and worry free retirement.

This is exactly the part I don't like in Bitcoin: why is everybody so curious about that happens inside this or that person's pocket?!
Would you like if everybody would look into your pocket and speculated what will happen next or why did you spend certain money?

For this obvious reasons I expect that VIP wallets stay safe and unknown. And there's quite a big chance that also it's not all the money on the same address, so it's much more difficult to narrow the search in case somebody tries that. I also expect that the (big) money is held by 3rd party custodians that know how Bitcoin works, not directly by Tesla/Elon Musk.

Some are saying that earth is flat, although it can easily see that it's not true.

1. No money is locked nor stolen. Fiat money has changed hands between those believing that Bitcoin worth more than fiat and those that had bitcoin and decided to sell.
2. Bitcoin is something that many consider it valuable and pay for it (invest into it). The code and principles are freely available on the internet. No stealing is involved.

I love how some so-called-news used buzz-words like Chinese, stealing and security threat to make you think that fishy things are going on.
I'd say that you seem to read "news" from the wrong sources and you should work a little on that  

The alternative is to keep 100% offline and hidden the money you don't use on the daily basis.
It will clearly not mitigate all the possible attacks, but it will reduce greatly the chance for them to happen.

Generating the seed on a HW and writing it to a paper wallet may be safe enough, I think. But clearly, nothing is 100% sure.

I agree, a database would do (not really excel, but you have a point).

I was thinking at first that there's a risk that somebody could alter records there (make fake passports). But then somebody can just add records to blockchain and it's the same result.
And maintaining a database is much much easier and cheaper than for a blockchain.

Let's not use blockchains just for the sake of it, OK?

Prove it. Prove that mixers are used only by criminals and nobody else benefits from them.
In the modern world it's you who has to prove that somebody is guilty, you know that, right?
And when you'll actually attempt to do that you'll understand how wrong you are and how pointless this (yet again) topic is.

1. it steals, not stills (evil maid)
2. I think that you've missed Man in the Middle attacks. Ledger had this vulnerability in 2018 and in theory it's fixed, but newer HWs may be vulnerable to that without knowing it yet. So I would not rule this out.


I find HW a great tool for every day payments, but not really for keeping life changing amounts on them. And your pretty impressive list tells that I'm right about this.

95+% of the world today still goes on without knowing or at least caring about Bitcoin.
If you are serious about this topic you should really widen your circle of friends and acquaintances...

No, sorry.
I've read only parts of the text (it's big...), but no, imho this won't work.

With the current system, the ones doing good already have their incentive - they can sell those carbon "shares" to the wrongdoers. And this makes the polluting businesses have to pay for their actions.
All the businesses care about is money. And imho the only way way to make them do good is to increase - year after year - the "toll" they have to pay for their wrong doing.
If you only reward the "good" businesses, that's nothing. The bad businesses may earn more continuing to pollute than by improving their habits (i.e. upgrade their technology).

So there's a working system and the only thing that can be made to improve it is to continuously increase the financial burden for the polluters. I see it as an opposite of your proposal (which gives more rewards to the good).

Having your own coin is a tricky direction. You have to advertise it. You have to make it valuable. You have to pay exchanges to trade it. It can easily become the failure point of your project.
I would rather divert the miners do different lucrative tasks that can still produce money (for example actual mining) instead of coming with my own coin. But it's really up to you, it's your project.

I agree with joniboini here. You don't need your own coin/token for this.

You can make some sort of "shop" where some will "order" work, pay for it and you can take your cut and which also acts like a mining pool and based on the work done, the accounts of the workers will accumulate money. And that money can be in any form, from Bitcoin to major altcoins or even fiat.

The problem you may have to think about would be what happens when you have "miners" and no orders. Since the miners may find some other work to do if you don't have anything to offer and they may be gone for good.

Clearly a new generation of HW should come with better protection against tampering.

And a feature could be to also sell it as a package of parts that can be put together easily without tools. The parts don't have to be complicated, but once put together they cannot be taken apart without damage. And the device cannot run/get powered without such assembly. Something like this could ensure that the buyer is the first one running the device, hence the firmware is 100% sure not "touched". (Maybe the idea can be improved though).

Well, I don't 
And in case it helps anybody, I've got used with https://bitcoinwisdom.io/markets/bitstamp/btcusd and for me it's just fine. It probably doesn't have all the exchanges and pairs tradingview has, but still...

I know all this.
There was not constant HDD access, but there was pretty much access. After the initial sync Bitcoin Core also don't need "constant" access either.
And the HDDs have worked way more than the expected 5 years, just after around 5-7 years they got retired i.e. less use and non-essential one; last time I've seen them working days before the pandemic.
And I didn't encounter any bad sectors.

It may worth adding that (many) browser extensions also can basically read everything you do online, still many people use (too many of) them when accessing everything, including ... exchanges and web wallets.

When Bitcoin price stabilizes (no big fluctuations for more days in row), the mempool tends to free up and the tx fees also tend to decrease.
If you have the patience to HODL it, you'll also have the patience to cash in if you want.
Also as collectible you may sell it some day (preferably not in the next 5 years) as a whole and the buyer will have to handle the tx fee or whatever means of payment you guys will be using.

There was a similar topic not long ago. I don't know if it's the same situation here, but there the answer was:

It was already said a couple posts ago that the nodes aren't the ones drawing much energy. The topic is greatly misleading.
And you guys should not make this thread an altcoin fiesta, unless you want to move it to altcoins section.

---

Now back to topic:

I like the idea of this project: a silent Bitcoin node.
And while reading another topic something has occurred to me: how is the HDD doing over time? If it would not be an old HDD, wouldn't a 512GB microSD card be more appropriate for this setup?

And something else: if this setup is already done and running, wouldn't an ElectrumX (or similar) service come as an obvious "next step"? Is the overhead/extra disk space significant?

If I understood the question right then:
1. If the value of the stablecoin will drop to 0, you will end up with the same number of coins, just now they will worth 0.
2. If the coin underlying architecture (blockchain) fails then you (and everybody else) will be unable to withdraw (and also most probably the value will drop).

I am not familiar with those platforms, but why would they exchange the worthless coins into something valuable (hence lose money) because you made a bad investment?

I'll ignore the "rhetorical" part and I'll answer
I expect most computers' HDDs not be designed to run 24/7. The theory nowadays tells that if one has installed there proper NAS HDD, he should be fine.

However, I've been using (in the last 20 years) in many occasions computers 24/7 for many months with no visible consequences on the HDD. I don't expect the same with external HDD.