For starters there hasn't been any real world application for DeFi so far and it has been the continuation of the same ICO scams as before. The only reason why people keep going to ethereum as the platform to build these (despite the fact that it is the worst, slowest and most expensive platform for smart contracts) is that they are trying to sell garbage and the only way to sell garbage is to hype it up first.

That's why RSK isn't popular! It takes more effort to build one in that side chain and also it has to have actual utility which none of them have.

The only available option is to look at the given chart by those services listed above and by zooming in and moving your mouse around find the peak and see what price is reported there as the High (in OHLC charts).

I don't think we can categorize this as a "different implementation". It is a direct fork from bitcoin core and the only developer (luke-jr) is part of bitcoin core team.
This is just additional features on top of core from what I understand (I think it belongs to the same category as something like Armory).

With a quick look at its source code it seems like another copy of bitcoin core but starting from a very old version and I don't think it has been updated either!!! I can't even find OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY in its source code let alone any SegWit stuff

Also my number 4

I have to check these two out by spending more time.

(Thanks for all the links above.)

All exact copies of bitcoin core and they even forked core. Besides they are all altcoin clients whereas so far all the listed projects were bitcoin clients.

haha. Yeah someone ruined it about 2065 years ago for you guys, otherwise for the past 3000 years we have been celebrating new year at the first day of spring which makes more sense

The day that $20k resistance was broken I talked about momentum of this rally and how if it was maintained we could see it start the consistent rises with small corrections trend. Now that 1.5 months has passed from that day we are seeing that momentum grow every day and since every higher price that is reached is all new there isn't any psychological resistances to slow it down in ways like before so the price keeps growing a lot easier than before.
This strong momentum will remain strong like this for months possibly with no growth while the price keeps rising with the same speed. However, At some point the rise will lead to a lot more attention that it will bring a lot more "fresh money" in which in turn increase the speed and finally after a year (probably) we see another bubble which I predict to be above $400k.

To be honest I have seen anyone having their own prediction that had a range from $10,000 all the way to $1,000,000. I can't categorize any number at the top of the list as "most predicted". $100k specifically wasn't even the most predicted price this round, it was mostly popular during 2017 rally and then by the deniers of the bear market during 2018.

Again I don't recall anyone (specially no "most predictions") even mentioning $10k to be the top. In fact I remember $100k and $1 million repeated a lot more in 2017 than anything else.

I wouldn't call them "investors", they are either gullible gambler or day traders that are increasing their bitcoin capital by going into altcoin trading.

The thing about altcoin market, even the scammiest tokens, is that they can be super profitable ONLY if you know how to ride the pumping tide AND know when to get out before the unavoidable dump begins AND are willing to take huge risks getting involved in a super manipulated market.
Otherwise looking at altcoins as "investment" will always end in loss.

Trump won the election on November 9, 2016. Bitcoin price started rising on January 20, 2015 and by the election the price was up 233% already!

There were many corrections during that "cycle" but it took until December 2017 to start to fall.

Your times are way off the mark.
Please don't try to link bitcoin price movements to irrelevant things.

You will continue being confused and will face new problems any time you see a different transaction from the last one you saw when you jump in at the middle instead of starting at the beginning!
You should start by first understanding the structure of a transaction (https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/transactions.html#raw-transaction-format) then follow it up by learning how bitcoin scripts work (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script) and finally start looking at transactions to try and find the public keys in them.

These two points have always been my guess also and the first one would neither surprise me nor would it be the first case.

I disagree. The bull run didn't started recently. It started 2 years ago when price started reversing from the bottom at $3122. The "institutional investor" thing as a hype is a very recent thing and most of those investment companies that we keep hearing about have been in bitcoin for at least 5 years. Their size is also not as big as the market, the rise happens because billions of dollars worth of bitcoin are being traded on the market every day not on centralized of the market third party IOU trust funds! Each time price goes up $100 it is because at least $100 million worth of bitcoin was bought on exchanges not on those platforms.

You can encrypt or sign any arbitrary bytes, the source of those bytes doesn't matter. It can be a text (string) or it could be a small file or a gigantic one line a Linux iso file. In this case the binary file is read as a stream of bytes then passed to the signing algorithm which will then produce a signature.

Go to https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ and enter your ypub in the "BIP32 Root Key" textbox then scroll down to "Derivation Path" section and play around with the options (it is probably the last one, BIP141, that you are looking for) to try and find the address they generated. The list of addresses are found at the bottom under "Derived Addresses".
If you found your derivation path you can then go back to your wallet and see if you can find a way to change it there. If not you can always import your mnemonic into another wallet that lets you set the derivation path such as Electrum (or even the site above BUT only offline after cloning its repository and running it on an airgap computer). Keep in mind to verify Electrum's signature if went that direction.

Happy new year everyone

"New" year at the start of "winter". I still find it odd

Is it really?
The government printed a shitton of money and handed it out to people to do whatever they want with it. There is no law saying it must only be spent in a certain way and investing it is the wisest thing anybody can do assuming they don't need it to buy groceries, etc. specially when considering how much money they have been printing over the past year and how that will cause inflation.
After all US dollar is already losing its value.

Your private key is not created from your password, the only usage of your password is to encrypt the wallet file contents. The private key is generated randomly (or from a random seed in HD wallets).
You need the encrypted file to then try and brute force it remembering parts of your password. Try some data recovery tools on your hard disk and see if there is any success.

In many ways Warren Buffett was right, bitcoin is a rat poison. The rats are those corrupt powers that had the centralized world by the balls all these years and have always been feeling threatened by anything decentralized that could take that power out of their hands and give it back to the individuals that deserve it.

We recently reached a new milestone that you may not be aware of, the total bitcoin market capitalization is now bigger than Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.
Berkshire Hathaway stock has been getting pumped all year to finally reach the price of last year after pouring so much money in to it meanwhile bitcoin is 292% higher than its last year price.

This was never crazy
But you got your initial numbers wrong though. Based on past cycles the price has to go at least above $423,466 (same rise as previous cycle) and drop down to $85,333 (same drop as previous cycles).
Although I believe that with each cycle the size of the rise should grow while the size of the drop shrinks. Not to mention that we don't know how much FOMO the world is going to react with when something they were ignoring all this time surpasses $100k value.

Back in early days people were trying to expand on the idea of bitcoin and create something new while exploring different ideas that couldn't be implemented on bitcoin. For example one of the first altcoins called litecoin experimented with a different mining algorithm and block times.
Nowadays on the other hand innovation is dead and is replaces by greed as it was mentioned before. Everyone is trying to make a lot of money in fastest way possible which is exactly why ethereum was created to let people create garbage as fast as possible with virtually no effort or cost and sell it to people to fill their pockets while pumping the shittoken of the platform called ether.

I don't remember Electrum ever releasing checksum of their releases and the reason has always been to prevent people from relying on checksum for authenticity checks. The signature verification does a much better job compared to checksum already.

Keep in mind that the number of valid checksums with different combinations are an estimate because we are talking about collision and it can technically be between 0 collisions and maximum possible ones meaning 2048 with 1 missing word.
Probabilistically we say with 1 missing in 24 words there can be 8 valid combinations on average.

Example:
Only 5 are valid here:
While there are 9 valid combinations here:
And 13 here:

With 12 words:
135:
130:
128