Bitcoin has never been anonymous and it has never changed direction. It has always been offering a good level of privacy to users while the users sometimes decide to void that privacy by willingly linking their identity to their bitcoins. What governments are doing are also affecting exchanges and other centralized entities while having no effect on bitcoin itself.

I believe that Buffet has either already invested in bitcoin and has a substantial amount of his wealth anonymously parked in bitcoin form, or he hasn't he will invest in some sort of company that has a link to bitcoin when the adoption is grown so much that it can no longer be ignored, like an exchange, a mining farm, a mining equipment producer, things like that.

Altcoins without an exception are only good short term options and only whenever bitcoin price becomes stable. It may be even a short time of stability like a day or two before they are pumped but that would be enough in many cases because traders don't want to stay in one place and whenever bitcoin market calms down a little (like the past 30 hours) they switch to pumping shitcoins right away. As we can see ETH got pumped the day bitcoin price started slowing down a little and with some fake news that initiated the pump. There are lots of other similar shitcoins that are getting pumped over the past 24 hours too. Some of the smaller ones are getting pumped a lot more than the big altcoins on top.

What you have to do is to learn how to read the market and make the moves temporarily (before the dump comes) to take the maximum amount of profit before bitcoin starts rising again and altcoins dump.

You are very close.
My guess is that you have a problem with the depth of the ypub itself, it may not have been the "master" pubkey at depth 0 but at some other depth that you used.
Use a tool to decode the ypub that shows you the depth, if you don't know any you could use an online base58 decoder and interpret the hex yourself. Like this one: https://www.appdevtools.com/base58-encoder-decoder Do NOT enter anything other than ypub here.

Example:
hex:
049d7cb2 is version, ignore that.
the next 2 characters (1 byte) is your depth. Here it is 00 so the depth is 0 and your paths are the same when you use your mnemonic

But
049d7cb2 again is version, ignore it.
Depth is 02 so your depth is 2 and your paths are m/X/Y/{the_rest}.
So for example if you saw your address using your yprv at m/0/0/0 you have to change it to m/X/Y/0/0/0

If that's the case then your other challenge would be figuring out what X and Y are.

Neither retail nor institutions care if a coin is a shitcoin, they all care about the profit that they can make from that shitcoin. Case in point: interest in ethereum!

What I'm more interested in is how long the greed in any of the altcoins stay. Specially the bigger ones with lots of flaws. For example what are these institutional investors going to do when the time comes that token creation hype is completely dead and the excessive amount of circulating supply of etherum that has unlimited supply keeps pushing the price down every day!

You shouldn't look at USD price of altcoins, instead check their price against bitcoin...

I don't think so. I believe that we will see the number of altcoins grow for a couple of years but as the market matures more and as more people get dumped on by the shitcoins and lost billions of dollars among them, they eventually stop throwing their money away meaning the number of shitcoins created decreases slowly.
Basically the same thing that happened to ICO tokens. We were initially seeing a couple of tokens created every day but we barely see another new one for weeks.
Eventually the day comes when we only have a handful of altcoins that are actually decent not just some pump and dump schemes like the current top altcoins, and the rest will simply die.

The bigger problem in this case is that majority of cases that involve cryptocurrency wallets and users losing their funds to malicious ones has nothing to do with malware so it can not even be detected by an anti virus no matter how sophisticated they are.
For example all these fake Electrum wallets for both desktop and android have nothing malware-like but they still rob users funds all the same.

I agree with everything you said! I hate these services and at the same time they have let a lot of people buy bitcoin (or what they call bitcoin!) BUT that still doesn't mean they are the reason for this bull run.

Take your PayPal example here, when an average Joe buys bitcoin from PayPal it won't affect the actual bitcoin price that is determined on bitcoin exchanges such as Coinbase, Bitstamp, Kraken or even Bitfinex. Why? Because PayPal is not linked to any of them. If all average Joes dump all their PP.BTC right now it won't affect the bitcoin price either for the same reasons. Now if the same amount were dumped on Coinbase for instance the price will be affected and will drop.

PayPal itself has bought a certain amount of bitcoin (unless they are lying) and is selling THAT to its users. So if there were any influence it had already happened when they made the purchase not every day. Whereas we are seeing the price rise every day.

If that were true then bitcoin price should have never surpassed $1 and remained around $0.01 forever!

We never see pullbacks, we see corrections or crashes.
Since there is no reason for a crash in a bull market while the adoption is growing fast, there can only be corrections and there has been at least 3 major corrections from $20k to $30k. Anybody expecting more doesn't understand how market works.

What type of characters did you add? Were they "w", "u", "p", and stuff like that because the string you posted makes no sense.
If the characters are all in range of [0,9][a,f] then it is hexadecimal and it could be a "seed" to be fed to a BIP32 or BIP39 to derive child keys. Otherwise if there are any other characters outside of this range you must seek out the wallet that created it and see what kind of encoding it is using, I did a quick check and I believe it is using hexadecimal.
The next step would be figuring out the derivation path.

If you want a 4 year old wallet (or similar tools) that has not yet been updated after all this time (hence is insecure) to be able to recognize the address you give it (like entering your address in an exchange to withdraw your funds into) you should use any of the legacy address formats such as P2PKH addresses (starting with 1) or P2SH addresses (starting with 3). Since P2SH can be any arbitrary script, it can use SegWit specific scripts so they can be SegWit addresses too. So in this case you can use Nested SegWit which is backward compatible.

If you are using any of the modern wallets (or similar tools) that have been updated over the past 4 years, you can use any address format because they will recognize it and you will have no issue. So in this case you can also use Native SegWit addresses that are using bech32 encoding and start with "bc1".

For storing funds there is absolutely no difference between new address types and old ones. P2WPKH is exactly the same as P2PKH and P2WSH is exactly the same as P2SH (if they use the same redeem script) and their nested types (P2SH-P2WPKH, and P2SH-P2WSH) are the same respectively too.

For spending funds from each of these the only difference is the transaction size and weight (weight is important for the fee you have to pay), the Native SegWit format will always consume less weight ergo requires less fee. Then the Nested SegWit ones are bigger but still smaller than legacy formats (assuming scripts are similar).

Fun fact:
First block (height #1) was mined 6 days after the genesis block (height #0) on 2009-01-09

It's simply a "timestamp" and the purpose is to show that it is highly unlikely that this block was created any time before 2009-01-03 since the popular paper article didn't exist before this date.

Without that little string you could claim that for example Satoshi might have created genesis block 10 years ago in 1999!

I agree with half of what you said, it is an excellent idea to buy every month on regular basis or basically any time that you have some extra fiat that you want to get rid of.
But I disagree that people should avoid buying bitcoin just because it has hit ATH. The ATH price is simply another number, for example $1300 was also an ATH back in 2017 so was any other price ($1400, $1500,... $2000, $3000,...) that was reached. We are currently sitting at ~$34,000 which is simply another number.

The only time that buying should be avoided is the bubbles. Like $20,000 at the end of 2017. Similarly $20,001 about 2 months ago was an excellent buying opportunity even though it was an ATH.

Yes, that is something that they can tell you easily by knowing how their platform works under the hood. Otherwise you will have to go through the most common derivation paths one by one to see if you can reproduce the same address. That is assuming their system didn't have any bugs and didn't give you a wrong key that can't be reproduced through conventional methods.

The problem is that the "education" is already found on the internet with hundreds of similar cases and not just in bitcoin! Majority of scam methods used are oldest tricks in the book, but some people don't want to bother ever spending a little bit of time to do some research and find that "education". So in the end it doesn't matter (for them) how much effort we put in warning them.

I don't think so.
The "current bull run" started about 2 years ago while these "mainstream" dudes started recently. Additionally platforms such as PayPal aren't buying bitcoin every day, they don't even let people deposit/withdraw bitcoin, they aren't even trading bitcoin there! They bought bitcoin a while ago and if they sell THAT to people it still isn't affecting the bigger market that the price is decided in.

So how can an IOU trading platform that is not even linked to the real world's bitcoin market can affect bitcoin price?

Actually each year is different, most years bitcoin price is moderately stable during first month of each year, some years it drops and some years it rises!
For example in 2020 price went up from $7160 to $9529 then the year before that in 2019 price remained stable in $3k range or more precisely between $3698 to $3532. The year before that meaning 2018 price dropped (this is literary right after the bubble burst) from from $13880 to $7620 then in 2017 it was rising from $885 to $986 and so on.

xpub, ypub, zpub strings don't add any kind of restriction on the type of address that can be derived from the extended key. They are more like guidelines, otherwise the actual data they contain (public key + chaincode) that is used in deriving keys is the same for all of them. The interpreter has to check the version int and decide which address type to derive from that data, which it fails in this case to check it.

Keep in mind that if any service exists that doesn't support SegWit transactions it means that the said service has not updated their infrastructure for 3.5 years and it is wise not to use such incompetent services because they definitely haven't updated a lot of other things including their security.

In that case, the term "bitcoin maximalist" was created by shitcoiners who kept being criticized about the garbage they created and everyone kept telling them shitcoins can never grow. Since they had no valid arguments against that, they tried bashing those challenging their useless project by using this term.


Bitcoin dominance has never changed and it has always been nearly 99%.
Over the years people started thinking that market cap ratio is the same as dominance and as an enormous amount of shitcoins were being created from time to time that ratio kept jumping up and down hence this new false "dominance" kept going up and down and each time the shitcoins die or get dumped hard on a large scale the ratio goes back up again.

They were never alive to begin with.
Just because bitcoin price is above a certain level now doesn't change that.

So did STO before that and same with IEO and we will definitely see new ways of scamming newbies soon.

You've already found the popular pattern sometimes referred to as "cycles" but the start time of each round that you chose sounds wrong to me. Each cycle doesn't start from halving but the halving falls nearly at the middle of each. And it does affect it because after all the production rate is cut by 50% each time but the effects aren't right away and they are not the main driving force for the rallies, the adoption is.

Consequently your 2024 is off the mark too. This Cycle began at the bottom about 2 years ago and it is possible that only one more year remains from this cycle meaning by the end of 2021 we will see the new bubble. So your prediction ($200k) should fall there although I personally think price will be at least twice that.