Yesterday, I went to watch a Ukrainian movie and was pleasantly surprised that it casually mentioned Bitcoin. I know that it's pretty common these days for American TV shows and movies to have some crypto references, but it's really nice when something local follows the trend. Ukrainian movies are generally far from being good, but they're slowly getting there, trying to find their style and place.
The movie is Luxembourg, Luxembourg, and it is definitely one of the best Ukrainian movies so far (but again, the bar is very low), and Bitcoin was casually mentioned in a dialogue. A guy asked his wealthy son-in-law what kind of currency would be a good investment nowadays, and the son-in-law replies that it's Bitcoin because nowadays, Bitcoin rules the world. I was pleased to see such a casual and positive mention in a movie that's not about technologies or finances at all (it's a social tragicomedy or something like a slice of life).
Do you know of local movies that mention Bitcoin? By 'local' I mean those that aren't American or British, not something that people widely watch all over the world.

My friend and I were discussing Bitcoin transaction fees yesterday, and he believes that transaction fees are related to the difficulty rate, and since the difficulty rate is adjusted roughly every two weeks, transaction fees will go down after the adjustment. I wasn't so sure, as I've never thought of it this way and thought that the mining difficulty and transaction fees are two very separate things that don't affect one another. There are too many transactions, and thus the transaction fees have spiked, but I don't see how the hash rate has got to do much with it.
I asked ChatGPT and got the following reply:

No, transaction fees in the Bitcoin network are not directly related to mining difficulty or hash rate.
Mining difficulty is a parameter that adjusts every 2016 blocks (approximately every two weeks) to ensure that blocks are added to the blockchain at a constant rate of one block every 10 minutes on average. The difficulty adjustment is based on the total amount of computing power (hash rate) that is currently being used to mine Bitcoin.
Transaction fees, on the other hand, are determined by the supply and demand for block space in the Bitcoin network. When the demand for block space exceeds the available supply, transaction fees will increase as users compete to have their transactions included in the next block. This can happen regardless of the current mining difficulty or hash rate.
So, while it is true that the mining difficulty adjustment can indirectly affect the transaction fees, it is not a direct relationship. The mining difficulty adjustment is designed to ensure the stability of the network, while the transaction fees are determined by the market forces of supply and demand for block space.

While ChatGPT can often be helpful, it can also hallucinate responses that sound like they make sense but they are actually incorrect. What do you think about this matter?

I was browsing YouTube and saw this new Vice News video about lost bitcoins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_OPJMoLVdw. I found this video interesting because it has interviews with quite different people, so I thought I'd share it here. Perhaps you could comment what you found new or weird about it.
One guy had a password written in a notebook, but he was pick-pocketed and the page with the password was ripped out of the notebook.
It also features people who work on helping others recover cryptos (they need a client to remember or have at least something, of course).
There's also this very bizarre guy who has implants in his hand to access his stuff, including Bitcoin. That was something I had no idea people did.
It also sheds some light on how 'lost bitcoins' number is estimated: if the coins aren't moved for 5 years, apparently they're presumed to be lost, which seems like too big of an assumption.

Hey, I just wanted to share something I saw today. As you probably know, Ukraine won the Eurovision this year. And you probably also know that Ukraine is quite crypto-friendly and has been increasingly so during the war. Today I saw this Instagram post by the winner of Eurovision Kalush that they're doing a charity auction to help the army. They're selling the pink hat to a random person who donated at least 5 EUR (so, it's a typical fiat thing) BUT the auction for the Eurovision mic is both in cryptos and in fiat, and whoever donates the most gets the mic. I don't know if any of you are interested to take part, but I thought it's an interesting contest to share, as it is yet another example of usage of cryptos, and a Eurovision mic is also an attractive prize. Unfortunately, I think that crypto donations are in ETH only, no BTC, which is why I'm putting it in the Altcoin section.
The Instagram post is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd-aAKrotr6/.
The bio of Kalush has a link to addresses for taking part in this thing.

Hey everyone! I just wanted to share a story of mine about using Bitcoin, defying Putin's regime and getting a cool zipped hoodie all at once. I went to a pro-Ukrainian rally in a city I currently live in, and I saw a couple in merch that I really liked: a blue hoodie with yellow text, and a yellow hoodie with blue text (colors of the Ukrainian flag). The text is in Russian, the famous "Russian warship" phrase. I asked them where they bought it, but it turned out they've made them themselves. They said they make them for friends in exchange for a donation to a Ukrainian charity of one's choice, and said they can make me one if I'm interested. It's kind of their way to do something to support Ukraine. I asked if it would be okay for me to donate to a charity in Bitcoin, not fiat. They said that it's all up to me. As you probably know by now, Ukraine as a state as well as some private foundations accept cryptos. I donated Bitcoin to our most trusted foundation that helps the military called Come Back Alive, and I got a great bright-blue zipped hoodie with a yellow phrase on the back. While I've been here on the forum for many years, I believe it's actually the first time I sort of (although not technically) paid for something directly in Bitcoin (transferring money to a wallet address) and got something in return.

Perhaps in the thread, you could share your opinions or your stories of using Bitcoin as money.

This info seems very fresh (at least, I didn't see it in the news when I googled it in English), and I'm not 100% sure if it will be confirmed later, but my source is the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak. In his official telegram channel, he wrote that Coinbase will follow something similar to what Binance did when they restricted Russian wallets with over $10 worth of cryptos. He says that in case of Coinbase, the limit will be restricted access to wallets of Russian citizens whose balances are above 10,000 EUR. He says that the ability to top up the account is already restricted, and that the blocking of accounts will occur on May 31. Actions are explained by the approved package of EU and Switzerland's sanctions from April 10.

What do you think of such actions? Is it the problem of centralization or the strength of consolidated institutional response to you?

Amidst the war, the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law "On virtual assets", as the minister of digital transformation of Ukraine Mykhailo Fedorov reports.
According to Fedorov, crypto assets became a powerful tool of financing the Armed forces of Ukraine since the beginning of the war, and the crypto market is one of the most dynamic markets of the digital economy, which is also actively developing in Ukraine. Fedorov says the law legalizes foreign and Ukrainian crypto exchanges, allows banks to open accounts for crypto companies, allows Ukrainians to protect their investments into virtual assets and means that the state guarantees court protection of the rights related to virtual assets.

Another step towards the future, another step toward crypto adoption in Ukraine. After the war, Ukraine will need anything it can use to boost the economy, and I don't think the state plans to miss out on the crypto industry as a way of doing that.

I'm not very focused right now, but I think I didn't find a topic about this. Forgive me if it was already posted. Binance announced on Twitter that they're donating $10 million to express their support with Ukraine. They are now gathering donations for the Ukraine Emergency Relief Fund here. The usage of cryptocurrencies and crypto businesses are starting to become relevant in the ongoing Russian invasion. Fewer and fewer areas are holding their apolitical stance, even if they used to be apolitical before. I wonder who will be next. It's interesting how Buterin will react, given that he's originally from Russia.

I'm Ukrainian, and while by a mere coincidence I'm currently in relative safety abroad on my PhD exchange, my family, friends and colleagues are not. I talked to a guy I used to know who's from Moscow, and even though he's against the war and has an audience of thousands of Russians who look up to him, he's afraid to protest or even publicly express his opinion about the war, saying he'll be immediately imprisoned. I don't think there's a good excuse to stay silent now, when your country is sending your boys to die in my country, hits our homes and kindergartens, but if you're afraid and yet feel ashamed and want to do at least something to compensate for the actions of your country, now's the time to use Bitcoin.
You can use Bitcoin to donate to Ukraine's biggest charity that helps the war efforts. The address is bc1qkd5az2ml7dk5j5h672yhxmhmxe9tuf97j39fm6, you can check it here, on their official website. There's also another wallet, the one shared by Ukraine's official Twitter account, and they accept BTC, ETH, USDT.
I'm not here to change your mind if you don't feel responsible and don't want to help Ukrainians (or don't feel like donating), or if you indeed support the actions of your government. I'm only writing this for the sort of people from Russia whom I know: people who feel ashamed for what their country is doing and for being afraid to stand with Ukraine openly. If you're careful and use Bitcoin wallets that are not linked to our IDs, sending money to our military forces in Bitcoin is the simplest way to show your support without much risk to your lives.

I stumbled upon this article today, talking about Ukraine's roadmap of intended regulations of the crypto industry in Ukraine. Perhaps it was discussed earlier, and I've missed it, but I didn't find a relevant topic, so I'm creating one. Right now, cryptos are in a gray area in Ukraine: lots of people use it, no taxes are paid, and the authorities are fine with it all, unless someone's doing something clearly illegal, such as mining cryptos and not paying the electricity bills. We've had several draft laws before which attempted to regulate the crypto industry, but they all failed to gain enough support in the Parliament. However, I think this time is different because the Ministry of digital transformation is involved.
A local article, and it looks pretty good to me, with the deputy minister saying the following:
"I'm sure that with the community's efforts, in regard to development of the area of virtual assets, Ukraine will not only be able to compete on the global crypto market, but also become the leading example for other countries."
Of course, it's too early to say for sure, as there's no legislation that passed on the matter yet, but what are your thoughts on this?

China hasn't been exactly crypto-friendly, sending mixed signals for years. But recently, it has been quite straightforward and not friendly towards crypto miners. It started with Inner Mongolia's mining restrictions, but is now spreading to other regions, such as Sichuan.
Nevertheless, it seems that mining is still done predominantly in China. Why is that so?
The first thing that always comes up as an answer is cheap electricity, but is it that cheap and a good enough reason to do business in a country with an authoritarian regime and hostile attitude towards Bitcoin? The electricity rate in China is certainly lower than in most of the EU, but there seem to be tons of countries with even lower electricity rates, some of which seem like viable options for mining farms (Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey etc.). So why is China still the #1 country for miners if there are other options and if China isn't that great?

I've recently taken part in the EPL prediction contest, and did pretty well there.

While Superbru says I'm in top-3% in the world among those who were predicting the outcomes of these matches, my success rate at predicting the winner of the match is actually only around 50%. So I'm pretty bad at predicting who wins the games. However, I'm okay if the stakes are differentiated, and you get 1 point for result, 1.5 for a close score and 3 for an exact score.
It would be nice to try betting with money under similar conditions, but to be honest, I've never seen it as an option: you usually choose whether you're betting on the winner of the game, on the score or something else, and if you were betting on the score and didn't guess it, you're losing your bet. So conditional betting could be an interesting thing: you bet on the score at certain odds, but if you, say, don't get the score right but guess the outcome correctly, you still win some money, just not as much. Have you seen this being implemented? Would that be hypothetically interesting to you? Do you think sportsbooks could go for it or is it a bad business model for them, putting them at a disadvantage?

I used to avoid competitions and preferred to just place my own bets on sports to see how it goes. I was glad to win and sad to lose, and it was between me and sports. In autumn, however, I entered a Sportsbet EPL prediction competition, and after months of it going on, I must say that I do find it engaging when various people make predictions for the same games, and then I can see how other people are making their decisions and how they are performing as well. At first, I thought I had no chance there, but I'm currently lucky to be in top-10, so now I do care about remaining there

Do you prefer being on your own with your matches and bets or do you like to take part in various tournament to boost the competitive spirit of it all?

I've just finished watching a TV show "Ted Lasso" which is about a guy coaching an EPL football club without even knowing football. The point is, he focuses not on the strong individual players, but on the team's morale and cohesion for the game. Here's a poster in case you might've seen it but aren't sure:

Image Source
After all, football is a team sport, so the team working hard together is not less important than a few very strong players scoring some goals, right?
Those who bet on football matches and do thorough research often look into injured players and stuff like this, but I have a question: do you ever try to assess the integrity of the team itself in any way before placing a bet? Do you think it matters in real life, or is it just a nice fantasy of a TV show?

If you're betting on tennis without the slightest idea of how the game works, you probably won't do a good job because you wouldn't even understand what you're betting on. However, if you have some basic knowledge of the game and teams, is it enough to become good at betting? If you really know the teams and follow what's happening to them (injuries and stuff like that), does it really make you good at betting?
I want to draw from my personal experience with football and predicting EPL. I have some basic knowledge about EPL and about football in general, but I'm not deep into the details. However, it seems that I've been improving at predicting how the matches would go by getting the hang of analyzing the odds, previous history of matches between the teams and recent history of matches of some teams against other strong teams. So I've been paying more attention to betting, but my knowledge of football and teams did not change much, but here's some data on how I've been making predictions on Superbru:

So from worse than average I went to top-20. Perhaps it's just luck or some random factors, and I'm not really getting better at it. What's your experience and opinion on the relation between knowing the sport and betting on it?

I saw a thread about a betting broker on Bitcointalk yesterday, and I started wondering why it's even a thing if it's not hard to register and use a betting website directly.
I read this article which states 5 reasons to use such an intermediary:

Access to bookmakers that you are already limited on
Use bookmaker that aren't available in your country
High limits and best odds
Access Asian bookmakers odds
Less administration

The first and the second point sound like cheating because one shouldn't play from a restricted jurisdiction. As for the third one, good websites can offer odds boosts which are also beneficial (I'm thinking of Sportsbet.io where I use the odd boost very often), and the broker's fee will also undermine the better odds one might be getting. Here are a couple of examples of boosted odds on my recent bets:

Another downside of brokers for me personally is that they seem to have a very significant minimum deposit of $150-200, whereas I tend to deposit about $10-$30 to a sports betting website, and it lasts me for a long time.
Overall, is it really worth it? Have you ever used a broker and do you think it's truly useful and profitable to do so?

Today I've watched this video which analyses predictions for life in 2020 in 1994 by Hamish McRae. There was no pandemic in those predictions, and he got some other things wrong, but overall the predictions were reasonable and close to what actually happened. And I've noticed in the video that this guy has an article on Bitcoin, so I decided to look into it.
Being careful about predictions, this guy is talking about the asset market in general, but considers Bitcoin as a part of it as well. And he thinks the whole thing will explode due to investors cashing out on their profits within this year.
Do you think this will happen to the asset market? If yes, do you think Bitcoin will face the same destiny and for the same reason?

I've known about simulated reality matches for a while now, but they weren't of interest to me until I once noticed that the odds can be more attractive there than on the real match. So I've placed my first SRL bet today just to have a start:

I think such events gained some popularity when the real matches barely occurred, but are they popular nowadays? Have you ever placed a bet on one? Would you consider them more "pure" than the real matches since they account for many factors and then let the program to its thing rather than rely on real people playing in out in the field?

I've recently created a discussion about the odds of various outcomes and the gaps between the likely winner and other options, but some replies raised another questions that I believe is worthy of being discussed. When placing bets on sports, I rely heavily on the odds, especially if someone has a very high probability of winning, like here:

I placed a small bet on this match on Sportsbet.io:

But of course when the odds are close to one another (2.5, 3.1 and similar), I try to rely on the history of matches between the teams and recent wins/losses of the teams.
What do you follow when you are betting on sports: is it the odds or your knowledge and experience? Or maybe you're one of those people who bet on the favorite team or perhaps follows a gut? Do odds even matter to you? If yes, how important are they for your final decision?

I'm not sure how to explain my question properly, but it's just something I noticed that seems to matter to me in sports betting. So imagine match A and match B with the odds of the likeliest winner being approximately the same (say, 1.5). But in match A, the other two outcomes in 1x2 are also pretty likely (3.1 and 2.8, for instance), whereas in match B they are way less likely (5.2 and 6.5). So if you choose to bet on the likeliest winner, and the odds for that in match A and match B are very similar, does it matter to you what are the odds of other outcomes? I chose a couple of real examples to illustrate my point, although they are not perfectly similar and the odds are a bit different, but I hope you'll get what I'm talking about.
Here are the odds on Sportsbet.io for Chelsea vs Leeds United:

And there are the odds for Tottenham Hotspur vs Royal Antwerp:


The odds on the likeliest winner are almost the same, but other outcomes are a bit more likely in the first match than in the second (even accounting for the 0.1 difference in the odds).
So when you are placing bets, does this difference between the odds of the favorite and other outcomes matter to you?