La partea cu site-urile de stiri, sugerez din toata inima sa cautati in mai multe surse si sa nu luati neaparat stirile de pe un singur site ca atare. CoinTelegraph s-au prostit si ei, parerea mea. Fac paid advertising, ceea ce pent ru mine e ceva negativ.. in special cand in unele postari mai si uita sa mentioneze.

Nu stiu daca e prea mare diferenta intre un site care prezinta BCH drept adevaratul Bitcoin si celalalt, care prezinta stiri pozitive despre shitcoins. Eu ma informez mai degraba dintr-o multitudine de surse si niciodata nu citesc o stire fara sa o privesc cu "un varf de sare", cum s-ar zice.

Din ce am observat, in ultimul timp au inceput sa apara tot mai multe grafice cu posibilitati diferite de miscare a trendului; dar cum zice si Neurotic, nu te poti lua strict dupa un grafic. Graficele sunt facute avand in vedere conditiile actuale, iar orice mica stire poate provoca o schimbare a acestora. In consecinta, orice mica variabila inseamna un alt curs al graficelor.

Eu urmaresc destul de des TA, insa nu ma iau dupa ele. In principiu, cand incepe un altcoin bull run, toate monede pleaca pe acelasi trend. De acolo inainte, orice veste negativa sau pozitiva despre una dintre monedele alternative pot crea o schimbare parabolica a pretului acesteia.

I would not sell it tbh. In fact, I'd buy as much as I could unless the reason it dropped so low makes another price pump highly unlikely.

This applies only if things don't turn upside down, which I personally do not see as an impossibility since Bitcoin has not had a drastic price correction like it had back in 2015. The trend could change at any time in a way it's never changed before. Perhaps it'd be impossible for this trend to only keep continuing.

But this is what speculation is.

If you're willing to create a Live CD for Electrum, I would use a HW in combination with it. It's much easier than having to restore the seed every time you have to use your wallet. You just plug it into the PC, open up Electrum and create a wallet using the HW.

If you want the safest storage, create an airgapped PC for storing your coins. You could use an old PC for that purpose.

Pentru a evita majoritatea problemelor, sugerez fie sa ii scoti prin ATM, fie sa ii iei cash printr-un schimb p2p cu cineva. Prin cont.. e cu dublu tais. Pe de o parte, e bine pentru ca pare sa fie mai sigur decat schimburile face-to-face. Dar pe de alta parte, incluzi o parte terta, ceea ce Bitcoin incearca sa elimine. Si fiind o parte terta cu drepturi asupra ta mai multe si mai dure decat cele pe care le ai tu asupra ei, exista sansa sa ai probleme in urma unor astfel de incasari. Problema nu este ca ar fi ceva ilegal in a schimba din crypto in cash, dar cree ca da mai bine sa depui tu personal banii in cont dupa ce ii obtii decat sa primesti banii direct din contul cuiva cunoscut pentru tranzactii crypto, inclusiv din contul unui exchange.

Banks are taking your freedom, but partially and so smoothly you don't notice. They're just disguising removal of freedoms into freedom. Bitcoin doesn't need banks. It'd be straight against Satoshi's whitepaper.

How does storing BTC under a third party's custody even make sense? I mean, first and foremost, why have BTC banks if the customers have their own ".dat" files? We need to eliminate 3rd parties, not promote them. Bitcoin certainly isn't the best system when it comes to convenience, but this is the best we can do to be under control of our own money.

I've seen quite a lot of posts and "opinions" recently about Bitcoin in which banks are included. Why? Where are these opinions coming from all of a sudden?

Banks. Institutions of enslavement.
Bitcoin. Currency of freedom.

How are these two supposed to go together, honestly? They never will. You have to choose between the two.

Props to them for being against complete surveillance and control and now supporting a decentralized free currency. But if I were to organize this, I'd eliminate the full name option. Is there any advantage to it at all?

Nu prea pare a fi o minune de a transforma din $2k in $620k din moment ce e un hack, lol. Observ ca o parte destul de semnificativa din hackerii gasiti pana acum in crypto sunt romani, ceea ce mi se pare destul de interesant.

Ma intreb totusi de ce nu s-a vrut sa se mentioneze numele exchange-ului respectiv. Pana acum, au fost suficiente exchange-uri mari ale caror reputatie a fost patata.

I'm kinda under doubts tbh. Bitcoin was amazing back when only few were using it. Many coins seem great before they get congested, and then you find out they aren't as strong as they were supposed and presumed to be. I honestly think the LN is no different. At one point, having enough adoption, the mempool will be challenged even with LN widely adopted.

As I mentioned in a recent thread of mine, the problem is with the first layer and not with the second one. Bitcoin will need some changes before it can technically challenge centralized fiat convenience. But let's not forget that technical specs don't always mean similar results.

It's such a big failure we have never had successful 51% attacks. One country having a large % of the global hashrate power doesn't mean China is controlling BTC. It's not just 1 miner doing this. It's lots of farms doing so.

And then, remember any attempt of an attack against us will be counter-attacked by the devs with properly implemented "antidotes". Bitcoin is about being open-source and decentralized. What centralizing it does.. is it makes Bitcoin completely useless, just like all the other shitcoins we have around.

Bitcoin was invented to avoid centralization. This includes banks and governments. If Bitcoin's mining power is concentrated in the hands of the Elites, what happens is we only create a digital version of fiat that is controllable by them and even worse than cash.

PoW works wonderfully with decentralized mining. Don't let your mindset be changed by the fact that Bitcoin consumes power. The enslavement system we are currently living in is using a ton of resources yet those same people complaining about BTC's mining power don't complain about the system and how awful it is.

We're going to go "eco-friendly" soon. That means we will use more electricity than ever before. I don't see the usage of energy as a "waste". Decentralization is not a waste, and this is the price we currently have to pay for it.

I'm not sure requesting investment advices on a forum is a good idea. You have half a million bucks - maybe request the help of a professional or use your own time to do some research and see what your best option should be?

Bitcoin has always stayed up the most and the best. Besides this, nobody really knows an accurate answer to how much we should wait or how deep a dip will look like in the current market conditions. Crypto markets are new. We're still early birds, and the conditions of the market change second by second..

Unfortunately, yes. There was no other alternative - confirmation within the next few blocks was quite essential.

Unfortunately, a combination wasn't possible since I paid through various non-linked addresses.

---

You're right, and this might get worse as the price of BTC grows. I wouldn't mind paying even 200sat/vbyte if it wasn't worth so much in its fiat equivalent.

---

I think patience should slowly be put to the side right now because there's currently a domino effect going on where corporations and Elites are moving their funds into BTC. Since this is happening and big money is moving around the blockchain, things might get sped up in such a short timespan the system would quickly get overloaded. It already is, and this is a quite strong warning sign imo.

People usually care only about either how much money they can make off a shitcoin or how fast their money moves from point A to B. Not caring at all whether the blockchain is truly decentralized as advertised or not. So at the end of the day, if Bitcoin loses ground in front of falsely advertised shitcoins, it's bad.

There are batches of transactions that I have sent within the past few months. For some of them, I've paid max fees so that my tx could be included within the next blocks. These are the ones I talked about when I mentioned paying $200 for a handful of txs in a matter of weeks. For other transactions, I've paid less since I only wanted them to be confirmed within days. But there are also some txs for which I've paid under 10sat/vbyte since I did not care when they'd get confirmed.

The issue is, back in 2020 there were lots of times during which all my 1-2sat/vbyte txs have been confirmed within at most a few days. LoyceV has a thread where he announces every time the mempool is so clear you can send money for almost nothing.

What I would expect is that for max fees you get the money confirmed within a few blocks, for half the fees within a few hours and for under 10sat/vbyte within a few days. If it takes months, I think it's pretty bad.

Well, even if I do not want to pay high fees, the current conditions of the mempool are basically forcing me to do it. But as long as the block size limit is reached continously for months, this will be a never-ending problem. Unless more txs can be included in blocks, there are going to always be high fees since some people need to pay more for faster confirmations..

---

Unless they somehow prove the service is truly non-custodial, I cannot call it a safe option.

---

If I move to alts, it makes no sense to keep swapping from BTC to alts back and forth. Volatility is quite high with BTC too since it grew more than 1,400% within ~1 year, isn't it?

---

Well, this is a quite contradictory argument. If fee spikes makes us leave, then the usage implicitely drops. And if in the future we will only have a clogged mempool and an userbase that keeps leaving and coming back, this would be a quite annoying ride tbh and after a few attempts of one user to come back I don't see it going very well.

---

I agree with most of your text here, although I find it quite funny how whenever the no of txs in the mempool drops everyone goes wild advertising BTC for how cheap you can move money through it.

Paying a premium to advance in the queue is fair enough imo. However, that isn't the problem. It's that the BTC blockchain cannot scale to sustain a higher number of transactions. Unless it will, there will only be more and more people with more money than you paying a higher fee than you do to advance in the queue. If the mempool wasn't clogged, it would not be an issue. But look how many txs are clogged since January.

This is the poor vs the rich, where the rich are under a large advance. If Bitcoin offers a decentralized economy where the Elites are still the ones to benefit off it while the poorer & average have to wait for months to have their money, then what exactly have we solved?

---

Bitcoin itself is quite hard to understand as a newbie, let alone LN. This is why most newbies (or less-experienced) users will stay away from it. It took even me quite a while to understand what second-layer solutions mean and why LN is incompatible with non-LN wallets.

---

There might not be any worthy alternative, but people will still prefer to choose convenience. Most users don't even care about privacy, let alone how decentralized or centralized a blockchain is. If users leave towards other coins due to the current issues BTC is facing, then Bitcoin will start losing ground in favor of literally shitcoins.

---

Start moving bigger amounts as a time or learn to wait. Isn't this an issue though, since this isn't what Bitcoin was supposed to be?

I've moved large amounts and I am also patiently waiting. These aren't amounts of which confirmation time I care about. However, it's been over a month and I'm still waiting. After one month, is it still me who's the issue since I have not "learned to wait" or could it be the BTC network that might be sitting under some serious scaling issues?

Is that a good way Bitcoin could end up though? If Bitcoin cannot scale to sustain this much load and ends up with a huge exodus of users because of it, then it'll fail as the currency/asset we currently want it to be. Remember that the number of people using BTC around the world is still very, very low. Over the years, if the number grows, then it'll just be today's issue but only worse.

I've been around the times when BTC was $1k and I remember I had to pay around $5 for a $1k transfer. I might be wrong though, as it's a quite old memory (edit: and I wasn't using coin control at the time). As mentioned in the OP, I had to recently pay a quite large amount of money for a few transfers. This isn't something sustainable over the long-term (it barely was over the short one!).

A few days ago I wanted to use Bisq. It required me to pay $30 in fees for two transactions. That's just mining fees. The problem is with smaller inputs - the fees remain the same, but having to pay $10 for a $100 payment is definitely not something I can afford.

Even for investment purposes, it's still a bad situation imo. I've moved a few larger UTXOs with sub-5sat/vbyte fees and they're still unconfirmed although it's been quite a while. Weeks actually. Some of my money is still unconfirmed since early February with 1sat/byte fees. I have a disposable wallet from which I've moved some money back in January with 1sat/byte fees. I am still waiting for it to be confirmed so that I can throw away the seed since I expect the tx to possibly drop from the mempool at some point.

As I said, if this trend continues then larger wallets will be able to prioritize their transactions over everyone else's. This becomes a significant issue once citizens of third-world countries (or average Joes from the EU with smaller salaries) want to decentralize their economies. If the rich are still the ones prioritized and you can't pay or move your bucks, then I think at least one component of what BTC was supposed to be is failing. Imagine what Bitcoin's network would look like if PayPal suddenly had all their txs on-chain.

For reference, in Romania most of the people I know are earning $500-800. Even for $800 a month, having to pay 1.25% of your salary per each tx is imo a burden. But now there's one more issue: my coins are usually moved with coin control so I almost always move coins with just 1 single input or 2 at most. I guess the fees would've been way higher if I had to pay for multiple inputs as the tx size grows, right?..

And of what use is it if this is a continuous cycle? High fees, increasing number of BTC users => exodus of users, lowering fees => higher fees (..)

You probably afford more than the average person does, so you don't see the issue. I might afford to pay $200 for a handful of txs, but for others that is half a salary (or for countries like India, a few months worth of salary).

Not when the average guy using BTC doesn't even know how LN works and so few people/companies are accepting it.. The main problem is currently sitting on the main layer - second-layer solutions aren't imo real solutions to those issues.

I've been around the space for many years but I do not remember seeing the Bitcoin mempool this clogged ever before. It's becoming exhausting even for me to keep paying high fees. For example, due to the necessary fast confirmation, only in the past two months I have spent more than $200 in fees for a handful of txs.

Therefore, what I had to do is.. I had to find a way to use cryptocurrencies while allowing me to pay a cheaper price for my payments. In other words, I still have my BTC but they're kinda useless besides moving money without caring whether they're going to be confirmed today or within a month.

I've moved to alts, at least until the mempool unclogs. This is something I've never had to do before. The main issue I see is.. my partners have started asking me for altcoin addresses as well. They're moving off BTC too. The storage size requirement for full nodes is quite high for the average person to afford running one.

With large billion-dollar companies investing in BTC and trying to turn it into a mainstream adoption, the network is only bound to continue clogging up. If that isn't enough, remember that billion-dollar companies can afford even exceedingly-high fees for their transactions. This means that the more companies join in, the less average Joes will afford to compete with them in fees since my $10/tx in fees is nothing for a Tesla-like brand. Putting it another way, this means the billionaires will continue to be able to use the network while your transactions might not get confirmed even within a week.

I'm in this situation right now. I have over 10 payments that I've sent with a previously decent fee (6-8sat/vbyte) that haven't been confirmed although it's been about two weeks ever since they've been broadcasted.

I'm still a Bitcoin fan - don't get me wrong. In fact, I'd absolutely love to be able to continue with BTC. But between having to pay under $0.1 and $15/tx (with only 1-2 inputs!) in fees, I'd obviously choose the former. Hence, especially since I do not consider myself to be living under poor (or under average) financial conditions, I really think people will be soon starting to steer away from BTC in favor of altcoins. The bad news if this happens? Even shitcoins might get more attention..

The even worse news: unless we change this, the network might make a lot of free space for corporations while we might have to move away. What we've once wanted to do, decentralizing the economy, will only be a possibility for the rich.

Therefore, as the title says.. with a clogged network, current (or future) Bitcoin users will start leaving Bitcoin for alts. Change my mind.

I would suggest not uploading the executable file yet. Perhaps PasswordDecoder is a TXT file (or some other format) that has had just its extension edited. I used to do that before to camouflage some text, lol. Might contain sensitive info.

Do you have any antivirus installed? When you unzip an archive, Windows usually automatically removes files that are considered suspicious. Check Windows Defender (or any other antivirus that you might have installed) and see if the PasswordDecoder file has been quarantined (or removed) by it.

If your AV has quarantined the file, restore it. Right click the file and go to "Open with -> Notepad". Is there any intelligible text in it or just random, weird characters?

Would you mind counting how many characters the long string of characters the "bitcoin" file contains? PS: don't use a website to help you count the characters!)

Bitcoin cannot push the wealth inequality more than, for example, lockdowns do. A lot of the things we do today make the gap between the rich and the poor grow even larger. The more we focus on corporations, the more inequality we'll have.

Taking lockdowns as a real-life example here in Romania: small businesses are brutally failing while the massive corporations are cashing in all the money. What this leads to is the poor getting poorer and the wallets of the rich growing like never before. This sunject is as useless imo as the articles complaining about how much electricity BTC mining uses.

If Bitcoin succeeds, then what happens is we just put history on repeat. Some currently rich people go broke while other poor ones will turn into future Bezoses and Musks. There's currently no way we can equally distribute wealth unfortunately, so the best we can do isndecentralize the economy first.