The pardon tool in the U.S. is completely abused at this point. People celebrate Ross Ulbricht like if he was jailed because he was a BTC supporter. The guy was jailed because he run a massive operation facilitating drug and weapons sales and because he tried to hire someone to kill a competitor. Not a good guy, and quite the opposite.

Bitcoin has zero value right now. It used to be valuable as the first way to transfer money digitally to someone else. Nowadays with Venmo, Zelle, etc., Bitcoin itself as digital currency has zero value and zero benefits compared to the other apps I just mentioned.

The only way Bitcoin's value keeps on increasing is because of its pyramid-scheme-likeness. The more people buy into the system (invest in BTC), the higher the value of BTC becomes and the more profits the early investors make.

That's the sadness of it. Satoshi had a brilliant idea a long time ago, but people got greedy, stopped developing that idea and everything disappeared as steam in the air.

When I said I am bored, I meant that being in the BTC world nowadays is quite boring. What do you do? You just keep buying a little bit of BTC, as much as you can, and then you just sit there and wait. My only activity is to make sure scammers don't get me.

It's now a pyramid scheme because the ones who are in the system make a profit only if others "buy" into that system. In a traditional pyramid scheme, investor 1 encourages investor 2 and 3 to enter into the system and pay a fee. The fee goes to investor 1. Then investor 2 and 3 are encouraged to find investor 4 and 5 and their fees will go in small part to investor 1 and bigger parts to investor 2 and 3. And the game continues. In BTC world, I buy BTC and then encourage people to buy more, either directly (by telling friends) or indirectly (because my purchase has made BTC go up). The more people buy BTC, the higher the value of BTC and the bigger my profit is (because I entered into the game earlier than future investors).

When I started being interested in BTC, it was all about experimenting ways to use your BTC. I still remember the excitement when I purchased my very first BTC from a guy I met online. We met at a coffee shop, I gave him some cash, he scanned my QR code on whatever wallet I was using at that time and boom, I saw the BTC in my wallet. And we are talking about a time when there was no Venmo, Zelle, or other peer to peer payment methods. It was all about transferring BTC to friends for fun to show them how the protocol worked, getting BTC from faucets and then experimenting payments with online stores accepting BTC, using different wallets, etc.

It was also the time when mining was still profitable without investing thousands of dollars in useless devices. I recall mining with a Butterfly something (I don't remember their name) device in a multipool website, I remember the good old website (I don't recall the name) that allowed you to mine via web interface and that played the sound of a coin every time you were mining some satoshi, etc.

And no, I am not a BTC millionaire because I sold my BTC multiple times during the years, when it felt impossible that BTC would go even higher.

I miss those times.

I don't really have a solution to the current status of the BTC world. I would just hope to see more interesting posts here, instead of threads talking about how high BTC can go, whether BTC will collapse, if you will become BTC rich, etc.

I joined the BTC movement late, around 2013/2014 (no, I don't have tons of BTC, don't waste time trying to scam me) and I remember the excitement when there were new ways to spend your BTC. Maybe a new store accepting BTC, maybe a new way to sell your stuff for BTC, etc.

Nowadays all the talks are about storing your BTC and hope they go high like crazy. I get it, but that's a pyramid scheme, it's not a digital money revolution.

I am pretty bored right now.

Thank you all for the helpful feedback. It looks like one way to solve all the issues you have listed would be to sync the entire blockchain. But this is the main reason why I was looking for alternative ways, because I have been trying to sync this freaking blockchain for more than a week with no success. My Mac does not have enough space with the internal SD and I am syncing the blockchain to an external SSD connected with USB-C but it's sooooooooooooooo slow.

Hello,

I have a bunch of old wallet.dat files that are very likely empty. I would love to give a final look to make sure I am not missing any money in those wallets.

I don't currently have a fully synced node and I have done the following to check the balance, let me know if this is correct.

I load the wallet.dat file in the Bitcoin Core app (on Mac). The app tells me that it needs to sync the entire blockchain and I say go for it. While the app is syncing the blockchain, I click on the menu Window and select Receiving Addresses.

I then check the balance of all these addresses on Blockchain.com.

Does this give me the full picture of the balance of those wallets?

You are a freaking genius. It was an Electrum wallet and after testing a few passwords, I found the correct one and the balance was...0 BTC. Anyway, thanks a lot for helping!

Let me ask you a related question. I also have a couple of old wallets for ripple, most likely with $0 balance as well, but just in case. These are files that have a long string that starts with:

eyJpdiI6IktqTVJKOG and continues

How would I restore these?

I found on my HD an old file (2017) with name file "mystery wallet" and no file extension. In those times I was playing with so many different cryptocurrencies, mining software and hardware (making basically $0), but I'd like to double check what this is and whether it contains anything, before trashing it.

I added the .txt extension and opened it on my Mac and it's one long string of characters (2,012 to be exact) that start with:

QklFMQJD5E and it continues.

What could it be? I tried to rename it wallet.dat and tried to import it into Bitcoin core with no success.

For scammers, don't even waste time sending me DMs, I don't respond to any DM.

They might definitely be legacy wallets. I think I created them back in 2013 or close to that. So that means that there is no easy way to import them into Electrum? My only option is to sync the entire blockchain (which is taking forever)?

I have a bunch of old wallet.dat files on my computer who are most likely empty. Just to be safe, I am trying to find a way to check their balance without having to re-sync the entire blockchain all the time.

I have been successful in using the command dumpwallet, get the extended private masterkey and import it into Electrum. This was a non-encrypted wallet.

I have two more wallets that are encrypted and I know the password. I have used the command walletpassphrase "PASSWORD" 60 to unlock them for one minute and I immediately run the command dumpwallet. I was able to obtain the dump, but it does not contain any extended private masterkey. It's just a list of BTC addresses. Why is that so and how can I get the extended private masterkey for these wallet files?

Do people use Bitcoin Core on their own computer and keep BTC on that software's wallet or this is something that people used to do only in the good old times?

If I just want to check the balance of some old wallet.dat files (most likely they are all empty, but you never know), would it be OK if I launch Bitcoin Core, restore the wallet and then check the balance of the addresses in the Receiving Addresses window? Would that window show all addresses of that wallet that might contain some BTC?

Hello,

I have a bunch of old wallet files on my computer. These are most likely empty or contain some Bitcoin dust. What is the easiest and fastest way to check their balance? Also, is there any way to check whether this dust (if available) also generated some $ on forks like Bitcoin Cash?

Google has just announced Willow, their first quantum computer chip. It's incredibly powerful, having solved in less than five minutes a computational problem that would take the fastest computer available right now more than 10 septillion years (a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe). Will this chip be able to break the cryptography behind BTC addresses so quickly that it will make the entire BTC network insecure?

In my opinion the main problem is the lack of easy and secure (for expert and newbies) ways to store your coins.

You can get a hardware wallet but they cost money, they (or the app working with the device) can be hacked.

Same thing for a software wallet.

And then you have the issue of where to store the seed phrase, what if I lose it, etc.

At the end of the day people leave coins on exchanges because it’s just more practical. You forget your password? The exchange will help you recover it. You don’t need to buy an extra device, you don’t need to trust an app on your iPhone, etc.

We need better and easier to use solutions to store coins.

Interesting topic and arguments. To me something has value if it can help people do things that they can't do right now, or it can help people do things that they can already do now, but in a much more efficient way.

Some examples:

- the car has value. Yes, people could go around with horses before, but the car allows people to move more efficiently;

- the iPhone has value. Yes, people could make phone calls with mobile devices before, but iPhone was the first incredibly advanced device that expanded what people could do via mobile.

What about Bitcoin. Bitcoin seen at the early stage definitely had value in its electronic currency version. People at that time could transfer money online (wire transfer, maybe PayPal), but there was no way to transfer money peer to peer all around the world almost instantly. Now there are tons of apps that allow the same thing: Venmo, Revolut, etc. Yes, it's true that Bitcoin allows you to transfer money without the need to create accounts on other platform, it's true that nobody can stop you from using your Bitcoins, etc, but I would not say that this changes the transfer of money much more efficiently...quite the contrary.

Then we are left with something that definitely has a lot of potential (think about the blockchain), but we are still missing, in my opinion, a true user case that will improve how we do things more efficiently.

Fantastic, congratulations! Super happy for you and super happy for the network. I love it when small players win on those massive mining pools!

I have one related question on seed phrases. We know that seed phrases can be used to access wallets compatible with BIP32 protocol. What if in the long distant future there will be no wallet supporting BIP32? Does it mean all my coins will be lost?

I was checking a few transactions online on the Dogecoin network, and I found this one:

https://blockchair.com/dogecoin/transaction/457e7bf8060f6040d571b6451a31eccab51dd919a9d98b2fa11db8f2a69a5a48

I see several sends from the same address to one single address. What's going on here? Was a single send split for some reasons in multiple smaller sends?

That's my issue. I live in Los Angeles and I have never seen any store displaying a BTC sign. Wait, I might have seen one, and it was a sketchy jewelry store.

---

That's my issue. If BTC has value because it can be used to buy goods, what happens where everyone is HODLing and nobody is using it to buy goods? It will most likely see a continuous decrease in adoption and, as a consequence, a decrease in value because at that point you own a digital coin that is completely useless.

And now that I think about this, one solution could be to introduce a system in the Bitcoin protocol where a small, but increasing portion of BTC that are not moving from an address are transferred automatically to a "community address" for other users to buy, or maybe it goes to active nodes as a way to incentivize network security. The more you hold, the more BTC are transferred to this community address or to nodes.

This would solve the hoarding issue and would also re-appropriate tons of lost BTCs.

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]