That's more like it.
People think that they can get ahead of the competition by buying altcoins or trading, while in reality it's only a rat race to the bottom. In most cases markets will be manipulated just enough to shake off most sats of people in risky positions. Rinse and repeat, it's just like gambling. Trying to win back your losses will lead you to owning nothing.
Don't trust the charts, don't trust anyone's analysis. They all get burned in the end. It's just BTC that survives in the long run and those that hold doing nothing more earn the most.

Έχετε την αναγνώριση μου. 
Ξέρω πως γίνονται χρόνια meetup και δυστυχώς δεν έχω ευκαιρία να έρθω αλλά έχω πολλούς γνωστούς που ήρθαν και μου είπαν τα καλύτερα.
Χαίρομαι να βλέπω τέτοιου τύπου κινητικότητα στην bitcoin κοινότητα.

Και προς το ερώτημα του OP, αν κρίνουμε τις δράσεις «Bitcoin & Blockchain Tech Meetup (Athens)», είναι πολύ αξιόλογη ένδειξη ότι κάτι γίνεται και στην Ελληνική κοινότητα.
Ίσως όχι με την κλίμακα που γίνεται σε άλλες χώρες αλλά και πάλι το κάθε καλό πρέπει να το αναγνωρίζουμε.

Προτείνω σε όποιον έχει λογαριασμό στο meetup να κάνει ένα follow λοιπόν.

I wonder why we have to keep conflating the discussion with BSV and BCH.
Already I've seen some BSV fans here (to clarify, I'm not one of them) that voiced their opinion saying that they're against a block capacity increase for BTC.
Obviously their reasoning is that they believe they can do it bigger and better... But why should that concern us?
Is the goal to improve BTC or not? Because obviously BSV as a ton of faults, and just because CSW is acting the way he does, it doesn't mean that bitcoin would have to fall in the same traps when implementing an improvement.

At this point I find these arguments quite counterproductive to be honest.
Bitcoin's development is supported by many scientists, if we all agreed that a slight block capacity increase is warranted, they'd find a way to implement it well enough so there are no fundamental issues.

Being profitable in gambling is based on luck. So don't trust anyone claiming to be a successful gambler too much.
Yes, there are exceptions, but with chance based games such as blackjack, roulette, slots, dice and crash games... If you play long enough, you'll lose everything. Statistics dictates so.
There's certain gambling games such as sports and poker that one could claim some skill and knowledge is involved.

But still even there, compared to the thousands of players, if someone had a successful formula to beat the bookmaker or other poker players, how common would that be? Let's just all agree that being profitable in gambling is based on luck. At least for the most popular games, it's the only acceptable statement. So even if someone is profitable as a gambler, what else would it be based on? Maybe it's a trick question but we have to pay attention to these details.

I was looking at some statistics about FIAT money, taking the European Union's Euro as an example.

When comparing physical money, i.e., banknotes and coins, bank deposits, a stark difference can be noticed.

physical Euro money:
~1.5 Trillion
Source: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/html/index.en.html

All while the Euros in bank accounts peaked at a total of 11.7 trillion, now 10.5 trillion
Source: https://data.ecb.europa.eu/data/datasets/BSI/BSI.M.U2.Y.V.M10.X.1.U2.2300.Z01.E

What does this mean? There's undeniable proof that central banks know with confidence that most of the money in existence isn't destined for usage by real flesh and bone humans.
It's printed specifically to be used by governments, banks and mega corporations, that will never need to withdraw it from an ATM like a real person would.
Central banks don't even have to "print" money anymore if they want to inflate the monetary supply. They can just add more digits to a bank account.
Of course, increasing the monetary supply results in us, individual people, having to face higher prices which means our money is worth less.

Many of bitcoin's detractors will often say that it's held by too few people. Well, look at "actual money" then. 85% of it is completely unaccounted for.
Keep this in mind next time someone says anything about bitcoin.

The thing is, BCH is alive only because Roger Ver was rich before he created it.
He turned blockchain.com, satoshidice, bitcoin.com and some other ventures of his into hubs for BCH. If these are gone, its questionable if BCH will also survive.
Roger Ver is bitcoin cash's strength due to his support to it, but also its biggest detriment. I think no sane bitcoiner would lend his support to a coin that's so centered around the support of a single person.

The ideal solution would be for the main bitcoin code base to implement a solution that would accommodate on-chain scaling, while keeping all its merits in decentralization, talented devs and community. Bigger blocks might address the issue of scaling but as many have rightly pointed out, it's not the single most important issue for bitcoin, and especially in 2015, it wasn't a good time to split from core over this issue. A more scalable solution for transactions is needed now more than ever. In 2017, when BCH split from core, it failed to demonstrate the need for bigger blocks, and was just seen by a greedy move. Years later and BCH is still Ver's cash cow while he has altogether stopped interacting with the bitcoin community.

So just my two cents, but saying to people that they might as well go support BCH if they want bigger blocks, isn't really something productive.
Increasing block capacity has some merits and these should be examined individually. Goal here is to improve the bitcoin we love, not shoot each other in the foot.

Nobody said we should straight up go to 1GB blocks. Indeed this would introduce issues like affecting the fee market very negatively and also inviting a lot of spam to be on chain, let alone that nodes would be hard to host.

And yes, with 1 GB blocks propagation would be hard. My upload speed with an ADSL connection that's still very common in my country, would have me taking longer than 10 minutes to download a block.
But honestly for bitcoin nobody talks about blocks that large. Even back in the day of the "blocksize wars" the proposed solutions were much more conservative.

These were the main proposals back then, circa 2015:

source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy

Given that so many years have passed, today there would be even less issues in terms of networking infrastructure or hardware to support these changes.

I'm sure that FIAT casinos are more guilty of this than anyone else.
First off FIAT-only casinos almost never work with provably fair games. So that's red flag number one.
Red flag number two is how FIAT casinos don't disclose their ads on streaming sites, especially when they hunted casinos other big casinos off streaming sites for good.

My country is a good example of this for instance. The local "licensed" casinos in Greece pushed the local regulator to block crypto casinos, and in the meantime the local ones are allowed to advertise with big streamers as they like. But in reality they're even more shady, because they don't explain anything about volatility and RTP to their players.

Federal agents and authorities are really spinning up laws just to say they're doing something right now.
For them, ousting Palestinians and funding Israel's genocide is something that has to happen fast, because they know the tide is turning against them.

The new generation, be it from a conservative or progressive upbringing, they are all against war abroad. Younger people don't want all this military spending, they don't want soldiers abroad, they don't want a military industrial complex. And more than anything else, they don't want billions spent on a murderous state with criminal leadership. In 10 or 20 years, unless Israel moves away from its murderous Zionist agenda, it's going to lose all support. So it's really vital for politicians to rile up crowds by re-creating the ghost of "terror-financing". Just as they did with iraq, then touting weapons of mass destruction...

Deep inside they know that crypto is the most peaceful form of money. They know that throughout 74 years of NATO's existence we've only seen more terrorism, more dictatorships, more destruction and overall more violence and conflict. So they're really afraid of crypto gaining more momentum, because it has the potential to pull the rug under politician's feet if people decide to rise against them and their blood hungry agendas.

I think this is something more people should be aware of. To begin with, it might seem like common sense to people in this board since most here are experienced with games and gambling platforms.
But to any new comer into the gambling scene it probably isn't as obvious.

What am I talking about? Well, at least once you must have stumbled upon a stream where someone plays slots. These streams are normally sponsored by the casino that hosts the games. They pay the streamer a salary and even fund his account. So the casino knows who the streamer is, what his account is and when he'll be playing.

The thing is, that these streamers get big wins so often that it seems very unlikely for their streaks to be happening at random.

We would know this as casinos say in their terms that playing with fun money does not incur the same level of randomness when playing with real money, which is really code for saying that fun money results to more flashy wins when you really can't win anything. So it's not unlikely that streamers are also getting some similar treatment as they don't play with their own money. This can attract their viewers to deposit and gamble with real money of course, but they'll very rarely get the same results.

This is something I've tried to highlight to my friends that want to get  into gambling, but overall not many people seem to be aware.
What has your experience been? Has this affected you or your friends?

I wouldn't consider myself an addict or a problem gambler. I've gone years without gambling and don't mind going off the thing for as long as needed. Frankly, I don't have gambling in my mind all that much. But it does take some philosophy to come to this mindset. I'll admit that once I did lose an amount that at the time was substantial to me. After this I really had to prep myself to understand that working and learning is more important from the momentary pleasure of winning n gambling.

Once you have good end enjoyable things for you to focus your life on, gambling would be nothing more on a hobby. Your bets should always be amounts that you wouldn't mind losing. Just as you throw some cash away at buying drinks every weekend for instance, going gambling should be limited to amounts you're comfortable never seeing again. But if you see yourself getting carried away easily and having thoughts that you must win back what you lost, just stop and think, are bigger losses worth it? Maybe it's time to just stop. So for anyone, a bad moment can be a big lesson. Don't let bad thoughts make you a problem gambler.

If you were to go to ordinals.com and check the contents of blocks, you'd notice that much of the block space is taken over by "BRC-20" token transactions, which are really inefficient, as well as uploading pictures and portions of pointer text on the bitcoin blockchain to represent avatars and whatnot for the so called ordinal NFTs.

So really the bitcoin blockchain is going through a lot of spam from these types of transactions. Recent updates like Taproot and its opcodes, along with segwit discounts, make it comparatively easier for these large transactions to get sat/vByte discounts. So they have an unfair advantage on how they fill up the blockchain, and do it for on-chain tokens like you'd see in Ethereum.

So really, this is what's causing all the bloat. There's no way around it and I predict this time it's going to last longer or perhaps not even end. Exchanges like OKcoin have really been promoting these types of tokens, even encouraging their users to transact in this way... So there's a lot of promotion to just add bloat to the bitcoin blockchain.

Yes reports work for excessive spam but we'd need new sticky posts. The ones up have not been updated for over 5 years. Someone speaking the language is needed to pin these posts and curate them.

Withdrawals are important and more on that, I like when sites are honest on fees.
A big issue is when a site tries to profit from fees, which imho is a bad practice from a gambling site as they have other avenues to normally have good profit from.

Another important thing for me is to adjust bets so once you press the button to send it, the odds don't change in the meantime. This is another bad practice that I have come to dislike from certain sites. Thankfully the bigger sites no longer do this.

Any altcoin can face congestion. During the 2021 altcoin rally I faced congestion even in BSC as well as on polygon matic and of course Ethereum too.

I remember in matic especially, due to some specific NFTs and shitcoins going on auction on-chain, the nodes would fail from how huge the mempool would become and their admins had to manually restore them. Many people ended up running their own nodes and front-running became a big issue too.

Weirdly enough, coins with a higher TPS capability handle congestion even worse than BTC. Having a TPS of 7 or so, st least it's stable. 🫡

Trading really is something that you have to get used to and not get carried away.
For one, you have to know what amount you can take risks with. And especially given that most people will trade with leverage you must know that such activities can result in total loss of your principal amounts too.

Really it can be very tough to deal with losses, but one must stay principled if you're going to win anything.

Only go in positions gradually and close or improve your position accordingly. If it goes well immediately you'll have small but certain profits, if it goes bad, which happens often, you will be able to afford the loss. This is the most basic principle that most traders totally forget about.

I'm pretty sure most people aren't aware, but you aren't really obliged to pick up a cheque in person. These ceremonies where someone is handed a huge check for lottery winnings are just for show mostly. There's much more paperwork.

If I won millions in the lottery, I'd just send an actor to attend the event for the pictures maybe. Surely I wouldn't want my name to be on the record either. But there also exists a thing called power of attorney. Everything can be handled by a third party so long as you give them legal permission to overtake some of your duties such as signing on your behalf for certain things. Surely something equivalent could be arranged with any lottery organizer. They just want their pictures, it doesn't have to be the actual winner in them and get exposed.

And if they force you to attend or lose the money, show up in full face and gloves. Protecting your facial identity is no crime 

Y'know, this makes sense and I kind of agree too. But I wanted to see what other people would have to say too.
Seems like most people responding in this topic don't take the league's break as a chance to stop but would rather seek alternatives, which is very interesting to me.

Seems like there's many people that feel the need to gamble frequently, which is no surprise really. As a past time, gambling is something many people do every day, and I guess this type of gambler wouldn't give it up so easily even if their league was in break.

lol at these numbers, the beast is calling 



I hear a lot about how big blocks will reduce decentralization and make things harder for I dividual miners.

Can somebody show me some data or a paper to support this?

I am genuinely curious, bitcoin's block size from 1 MB going to 4 MB didn't cause any such issues. Propagation time on Bitcoin is already pretty good. We are not talking about decreasing block times here.

Mining is already pretty centralized, almost no blocks are mined by miners outside of pools... The difficulty is so high it's hard to mine on your own. But even with bigger blocks, how would that prevent someone from mining like he does now? If someone is going to invest hundreds of thousands $ in mining equipment, are we to assume that they can't invest at an internet connection that is at least at ADSL or 3g speeds?

From a theoretical standpoint, anyone can post whatever imagery in the Blockchain even now, no matter how expensive. Ordinals tech which utilizes Taproot along with SegWit discount make that even easier to happen on bitcoins chain.

As of orphan blocks, I think miners will be able to handle having access to decent latency internet... Even most miners connect to pools these days and let them handle block propagation so this affects very few parties which are big enough to work on it I think. They were complaining about going above 1MB blocks then but handled 4MB well...

Can anyone tell me if the data I see on Blockchain.info is true? Is it true that there hasn't been a single orphan block since 2017 or did they just stop counting?