If there are increasingly more Bitcoin hodlers, even those purely holding for profit, there likely will be more merchants that will take that as an opportunity.
Assuming volatility continue to fall but as long as Fiat exist Many would still prefer using Fiat for payment since Bitcoin is deflationary. We are talking about merchants here, right? In that case, what you have written is false. It is a theoretical economic argument, and while it is true in theory, in practice it shows the exact opposite. Merchants do not care at all whether the thing they are accepting is inflationary or deflationary. They primarily care about getting paying customers and minimizing negative impacts on their direct profit margin which would come for example in the form of credit card fees. Inflationary or deflationary effects are more long-term, and it is unlikely that an average merchant would keep Bitcoin for long periods of time in order to expose themselves to the risk of it. If you were by any chance talking about the customer side, it is incorrect as well. I know plenty of people who use it and then buy it back as to not reduce their strash, and frankly I have seen this practice mentioned countless time on the internet too. Who would not want to use Bitcoin and especially after it has appreciated significantly since you purchased it? ~snip~ Like I said the narrative being pushed is that Bitcoin is Gold not a currency.
And who is pushing this narrative? Those who have the most power and the most BTC in their possession. If we consider that most people in the world blindly follow those who have political power and who are extremely wealthy, then how can we expect anything to change in terms of how the average person perceives BTC? Bitcoin has both features of gold and currency but it neither, that is the correct way to describe it. What we also lack is general interest in BTC, and I think that from 2009 to today we have at best about 5% of people in the world who are involved in BTC in any way, and on the other hand, millions of BTC have been bought by people who see them as something completely different than currency.
This is not an issue with Bitcoin, this is an issue with the wider society. Most of the society are distracted and manipulated in all sorts of ways. Think about something more immediate, urgent and tangible: physical health. How many people in % are overweight? How many in % are regularly doing exercise in the minimum amounts prescribed? There you have your answer. Bitcoin can't fix society, it is not meant to fix society. Everyone will come to BTC at the price that they deserve, that is how it has always been. Oh I agreed on falling volatility just that volatility can never be eliminated even Gold and Fiat have some level of volatility.
I agree that Bitcoin will probably never fall to the volatility level of major fiat currencies like the US dollar (even if even the USD fell about 15% vs. the EUR in the last years). It can't and it shouldn't, that would be a bad thing. Those currencies and markets are extremely controlled and manipulated, that is why the volatility can be so low. My point is for Bitcoin adoption it would be positive to reach a lower volatility to be really usable at least for saving by everyday people who cannot afford to lose 50% in a capitulation crash nor to buy just into the moment of maximum FOMO and then lose 50% too because that price level was unsustainable.
Gold volatility (which has ramped up in the last year) or an "average fiat currency" like the BRL (which tends to go up and down but has a higher volatility than the USD and the EUR) would be the goalpost to reach.
It needs time to mature, and users need patience to let it mature. In each cycle we are overcoming some hurdles and making progress in various terms. For example, if a merchant has 10% less cost in total in BTC considering credit/debit card fees, chargeback fraud, clearing time and on the other side resting volatility cost, then he may be able to offer 20% discounts on selected articles for BTC payers just to attract this crowd and reduce the total cost. And if they do promotions anyway, for example because their storage is full, they may go much lower for BTC payers than for fiat payers.
The volatility cost is still to high for this to work, probably, at least to that extent (and thus most BTC-accepting merchants will use Bitcoin payment processors with only slightly lower fees than credit cards). But if volatility reached around half the current value, it may be possible to generate such a dynamic.
Actually you can already find this at certain places by only by merchants who are hard core Bitcoin supporters. I don't really expect to see this with average merchants, even in the future when the volatility cost goes down. One must remember that generally people don't think about what is the best thing to do (aside from perhaps a superficial overview), they just do things. Often these things are directly harmful to them and their business.
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Yes I agree with Katie Martin that Bitcoin is not for the faint hearts because it is a psychological and emotional driving assets which can be traumatic over impatient and greedy mindsets of aiming short term goals. Perhaps volatilities can be unpredictable while patient and firmly holding wins the market in the long run.
The volatility of Bitcoin is pretty low these days, and you can find this kind of volatility or worse in other markets. Even silver did a massive crash recently, so it is time to stop signaling out Bitcoin with this bullshit argument. It was an accurate argument many years ago, it no longer is. Bitcoin is pretty tame these days except when it does a large movement, whether up or down, but that is how other markets behave at times too. Katie is said to be a Financial established journalist that had also been camping around Bitcoin and crypto speculations but had gone insane here expecting her teeth to be evaluated as asset as Bitcoin is being speculated over scarcities.
Perhaps a case like this can be seen as a learning opportunity for you and other people who assign value and respect to useless titles. Do not treat people differently based on perceived expertise, but verify their claimed expertise based on what they say and what they do. In this case, you can see that Katie is a complete idiot that does not even know the basics of economics. Just too unserious of her comparing (questionable) why her value and scarcity of teeth has not worth billion of dollars as Bitcoin scarcity has also been a deemed as store of values.
To be honest, the comparison is so stupid that it is not even worth validating through a proper rebuttal. The claim is both intellectually lazy and complete nonsense, you can't dismiss the value of something or add value to it just because it is scarce. My arm is the only arm in the existence that is exactly like this, it is very scarce. So what about it? It is mostly useless to others and does not have any more value that the average other arm, even if it is unique and scarce. Scarcity itself does not mean much, market-driven scarcity based on fundamentally valuable features is something else entirely. Her argument is intentionally malicious and is designed to confuse people who do not know better, it completely misses how value is determined in financial markets or any free market. I agree too, Bitcoin is not an investment for anybody that doesn't have the zeal to become successful, the zeal to be successful will make a person to be diligent, will make the person go extra mile to learn how every choice they make will affect them positively, if the person's choice is to invest on Bitcoin, they will learn towards the risk so that they won't sell because of panic, because they want to be different from those that won't be profitable, they will learn all the necessary steps that will make them successful as Bitcoin investors, so I agree with you that Bitcoin is not for the faint hearted.
This useless shitpost has nothing to do with the topic, you just rephrased in many ways the same thing and added nothing.
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To be honest I rarely check TOS and I admit it is fault from my side. I just hate to read pages of legal phrases when it can all be explzined with one sentence.
This is done intentionally, and while some idiots may try to defend these practices as a necessity for legal reasons -- they are not. There is no reason why two versions of the TOS could not be provided, a simpler one that is not legally binding but is essentially an simplified interpretation of the key points, and another one that is the standard long and complex legal TOS. With these, both things would be satisfied. Users would more likely read the TOS and at least understand the main points that are relevant to them, those that want more detailed information could go to the legally binding TOS and explore it should they choose to. Lastly, from the side of the casino there would be no issues since they are still defaulting only to the legally binding traditional TOS -- the other one is just an helpful interpretation for the users. One other thing is that some casinos are intentionslly vague with their terms and conditions (untransparent kyc policy, unknown minimum witgdrawal amount etc.) and catch you off guard later usually when you want to withdraw the funds. To me it is borderline scam.
It is a borderline scam, but I would not single out casinos because this is happening in many places and in many ways. I'll give you some examples, and we start from our very dear centralized exchanges. There are some that have limits for an unverified account, and generally you can use it because they essentially handle this part of trading as a DEX. Since they are not touching fiat in this case, they don't have to ask you too much upfront. However, there are many reasons for which a KYC ask can be triggered. We are not talking about receiving coins from a tainted address and something obvious as that. We are talking about innocent things that can trigger them to ask for KYC. If you were working under the assumption that you can do the operations that you wanted without KYC, and would not do KYC in any case, you essentially have coin that is stuck now. That is a scam, because in the case where the platform is entirely transparent and honest they would just refund you back what you put into it. Sometimes they would have to trade back, for example if you traded some stablecoin deposit to BTC and now you got asked for KYC. They could trade it back and send you back the stablecoin minus the fees incurred. Nobody does this, and almost nobody seems to care about these things. The similar story is with swap platforms. Even in traditional sectors like banking you have these things, and the reason why I mention "innocent things" is because in many of these cases if you provide information/evidence it gets unlocked and normal which means that the trigger was false (compared to receiving coins from crime for example, where the trigger would be accurate). The only real difference with this is that the banks have had more time to mature these systems, or well maybe they put more resources and will into maturing them, and they have created a better balance of security and compliance even if they are subject to stricter regulations than some CEX is.
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Correct me if I’m wrong but I feel some of the reasons why people pay to watch those matches that feels mediocre to you is simply because of anticipation or hope that those athletes will deliver more than they expected from them. Trust me if they knew right from the start that those games wouldn’t meet up to their expectations they wouldn’t have even bothered to pay, they’d simply just wait and see if it’s as they had predicted.
What anticipation? The super majority of people who are watching these events do not have adequate information to make any assessment of what is reasonable to expect of these people. Having unbased expectations is just dumb, but I don't think this satisfies as an answer to the question being asked here. And then again, there are some diehard supporters who don’t care about the state of the game, as long as it has been organized and a date has been slated for it, they are going to pay to watch it, while the rest falls under the category I mentioned above.
With this part I agree more, even though it is probably only a part of the overall picture. Many people bring up the names of these previously popular athletes as if they were at all relevant now and as if they weren't old and boring. People have a hard time dealing with nostalgia, that is why they have unhealthy obsessions over some of these things. It is a money making machine, basically. People do not pay for seeing two professional boxers giving the best of themselves. Nowadays, the names of the boxers an the artificial hype created is more important than discipline itself
Which is pretty boring and a reflection of the stupidity of people that watch these things and pay for them. What is going to be the next step then? Are we going to hype up battles between boxers to see who will come out with the best pair of shorts?  These events are completely unnecessary. Since the organizers are solely focused on profit and are able to easily manipulate the public to give money for things like this, I believe that it is just another form of reflection of the sorry state of the current society. Many people are addicted to consumption, many of them are very unhappy even those who would refuse to admit it, the economic situation is quite difficult and so forth. They think that they need these events as a form of coping.
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But on the contrary, poor people easily admit that they're now rich when their earnings exceed their expectation, or when finally they can afford to buy luxury items, that only rich people can do. But mostly, they have poor mindset when it comes to investments, and just focus on accumulating liabilities than assets.
In the majority of cases, poor people are stupid and that is why they are poor. Very few extremely intelligent people have remained relatively poor voluntarily, and those that are intelligent (as measured in IQ) and have remained poor have generally made terrible decisions that are similar to the decisions that stupid people make. Therefore, they themselves are to be considered stupid despite their high IQ. When we can eat full and sleep well from starving condition, we feel happy. When we have debt and we can pay of debt and being debt free we feel happy. I thing common rich people (not 3% in the top of pyramid) has passed / achieved/completed each stage in their financial live which we not yet pass it.
None of your examples have anything to do with happiness, there is nothing subjective about that otherwise you could delude yourself that you're the happiest person in the world while you are getting butt fucked to get a dose of good crack cocaine in return.  Most people do not even know the basic difference between pleasures and satisfaction, and happiness. Happiness is not a fleeting thing, and the reason why many people tend to contemplate these two is because they would have to admit to themselves and others that they are leading very unhappy lives. If people were generally happy, there would not be a need to cope with so many activities: binging entertainment or social media, junk food, smoking, drinking, gambling, drugs, and whatever else delusional people do. Keep that in mind. For me, money can not buy happiness but money can buy decent living, proper house, access to best health facility and the best education, and the most important thing money can buy spare time and many option in our life.
Actually for many people extra spare time does not increase their happiness, it does the exact opposite. They start behaving in very degenerate behaviors, you see this with many rich people. Spare time is only valuable and beneficial to the one that knows how to use it wisely. For everyone else that spare time makes things worse for them.
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Lopp is generally a short-minded idiot, he is focused only on the $ value of his coins in the short-term because he does not have any other considerable sources of wealth. The good thing about posts like this is that it guarantees that there will be no consensus on freezing versus not freezing, or as he puts is "burning", which means that we will default to not doing anything which is the same as not freezing.  I posit that the corollary to this principle is: Your keys, only your coins.
Stuff like this in the post is factually false, nothing really makes keys "yours". I could roll a very lucky dice and generate those keys, does that make them mine now? If not, why wouldn't it? Imagine, for example, being James Howells, who accidentally threw away a hard drive with 8,000 BTC on it, currently worth over $600M USD. He has spent a decade trying to retrieve it from the landfill where he knows it's buried, but can't get permission to excavate. I suspect that, given the choice, he'd prefer those funds be permanently frozen rather than fall into someone else's possession - I know I would.
He even quotes this fake story. Overall it is a pretty shitty article by a money-hungry individual who wants to violate the core reasons for Bitcoin's existence. How about instead of doing this, we freeze his coins rather than mine for an arbitrary reason that I find important and that I believe is an existential threat to Bitcoin?  I will never vote yes towards freezing. Fuck you Lopp and fuck anyone else who wants to freeze other people's coins. You exactly like the very pieces of shit that are controlling the centralized systems that Bitcoin was designed to get away from. Interesting, let's see what others have to say about it and whether it has any chance of acceptance. Will there be a narrative shift in crypto? - A shift that will indicate which blockchains will survive and continue to chug along, producing block after block for decades, and which of those blockchains will be abandoned by their developers because updating their shitcoin networks to achieve Quantum Resistance won't be worth all the effort, and/or because they lack the technical knowledge and skills.  Most layer 1s and layer 2s are completely dead, ghost chains. They don't need the quantum threat to kill them, they are already dead or dying.
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If they had asked for Monero, they may have a chance. The Bitcoin can still be converted through decentralized means in a fast way, but this way the attackers are leaving breadcrumbs everywhere. With Monero they could sit on it for a long time and then use it with very little risk.
What stops them from Atomic Swapping the Bitcoin to Monero? It is a low chance that the attackers know how to properly keep their identity hidden, they will probably do some thing really stupid some time in the future. You often see these criminals successfully plan out and carry their attack really well but then they end up depositing it on Binance or bragging about it on Tik Tok. Knowledge and liquidity depending on the actual case. If one is asking for Bitcoin instead of Monero for a high-level criminal act such as this one, then one can reasonably assume that the knowledge of the perpetrators is extremely low. Therefore, I highly doubt that they will find their route to atomic swaps and actually be able to pull it off without making some grand error. Anyway, Monero is not bulletproof either and such individuals would probably run a light wallet and thus open up another avenue for de-anonymization. Another way to see these things is that we should be glad that very few criminals of the world are smart and technologically competent. This is good for Monero and good for people who could possibly become innocent victims were it not the case. I keep seeing criminals demand BTC and USDT for ransoms and I just facepalm. Especially the ransomware orchestrators, so dumb. Now they will get caught because of their foolishness in not using Monero, which is a good thing.
USDT is even so much worse than demanding BTC, incomparably worse. The issuer of USDT can freeze any address arbitrarily, no court order is needed for this. Therefore, all it takes is to report the address to which the payment should be made in advance and have their system follow and freeze it automatically as soon as the reasons for which the ransom is being paid have been executed. I believe that one of the reasons for this is that the idiots mistakenly believe that the ability of being able to use decentralized swapping services somehow adds privacy and anonymity to their transactions. It does not. All of this can be still traced, and if not done by a quite competent individual and many transactions, it is not even that hard.
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The issue is that after the emergence of L2s nobody wants to pay L1 fees while they can get the same equivalent service on L2s so Ethereum has returned to inflation in spite of the sweeping changes.
You don't get the same with an L2s, your whole argument is based on a misunderstanding. It is as if you asked me if I would use Bitcoin because I can get the equivalent or better service of using Visa. See the thing is simple economics teach us that if a service is equivalent people can have a very high tendency to use the cheapest alternative that is essentially the same. If the goal is to get BTC from point A to B most people won't care about decentralisation. Yes, if visa comes up with a fully compromised way to transfer BTC that is free, many people will use it. This is evident by how many transactions happen within any exchange. We see numbers that are up to the 10s of millions for any singular exchange. Bitcoin on chain transaction capacity can't even accommodate the number of transactions an exchange does in a day off-chain over the span of whole months. No, because those things are not substitutes. They are complements. You are confusing the basics, and I made an extreme example to try to highlight where you error is and yet you still persisted with it. But that's besides the point here. The issue here is a much more fundamental one. L2s and sidechains create a very odd situation especially if CORE decides to intergrade such functionality. It will be economically pointless to transact on-chain while at the same time the security of the chain heavily depends on there being on-chain transactions so miners can have incentives to continue.
"Core" does not need to "integrate" anything. We already have LN and sidechains, and we will get many more. It is not "economically" pointless to transact on-chain. Again, you are making false assumptions and rolling far with them which leads to errors in conclusion. The security assumptions and guarantees of Layer 2 are completely different, and the overall security of it is nothing compared to Layer 1 on Bitcoin. You can argue from a theoretically narrow perspective all you want, but as long as we can easily draw on counter examples of users that disprove the theory it is a moot point. I've already told you that it is never going to happen. Read the bold point. It has nothing to do with the usability or UX of layer2s, and nothing to do with the economics either. You do not get the core benefits of Bitcoin only because you are on a layer 2, they do not get passed down this way. Things don't work that way. Luckily nobody listened to people like you when the internet was built, otherwise they would believe that somehow the layer 5 of the internet would have destroyed layer 1.  So what are we going to rely on LN, L2s and sidechains to be hard to use forever? Based on this do we accept that if off-chain transaction solutions become easier it's a threat or we'll just apply wishful thinking that we'll never have to face that issue because adoption will never pick up off or on chain regardless of off-chain solutions
Again, stop making a conclusion based on false premises and then try to stir panic with the assumption that your conclusion is true. There is no issue at all, and you don't have a "solution" for your "issue" either. If others don't believe that your "issue" is a thing, what is the point of talking about it? This is not any different than quantum thread, a block reward thread, or many other similar threads. The economics are only one side of the story, and when it comes to Bitcoin they are a side-effect and not a primary feature or driver of usage. A L2 can not take away utility from the base layer that it does not provide itself. It is not a substitute, it is a complement. Learn the difference.
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I often see rich business mogul say that “money can’t buy happiness.” That may be true for them, but for many ordinary people, money means something different.
Money can't buy happiness, and if you have not yet passed that lesson you do not know anything about either money or life. In today’s economy, a lot of people struggle to make ends meet. Having enough income brings security and peace of mind. Less stress about money usually means a better quality of life.
Struggling is not a cause of stress, you are the cause of your own stress. How many rich people do you see that have a healthy life and healthy mind? Most of them have terrible lives, many of them basically got mentally sick from their wealth. So use your own brain and learn that it is you who is causing this, it has nothing to do with money. If people who don't have money and people who do have money both experience all kinds of issues, the claim "money doesn't buy happiness" is already been proven. So I wonder, is there a level of income where more money no longer improves happiness? Or are very wealthy people simply out of touch with how most people live?
Furthermore, there are many studies that have been conducted on these topics that you could have found by asking AI instead of acting like a jeet and inviting a flood of generic and wrong spam here. $75k in the USA back then, but the number is much less for many countries in the world. Yes I am aware that the headline says something else, but read the details before you conclude something wrong. For 80% of people, happiness continues to rise with income past $75,000. But for an unhappy minority, those individuals’ unhappiness diminishes as they make more money — but only up to about $100,000 (about the same as $75,000 adjusted for inflation).
Yet this is probably a biased take in times of economic hardship to motivate the gullible labor force. Based on my own observations, many more unhappy people were found in the rich group than the poor group. However, many people that are rich are also stubbornly in denial and want to prove to others that they are "enjoying life" which is ironically proof that they are unhappy and miserable. 
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The issue is that after the emergence of L2s nobody wants to pay L1 fees while they can get the same equivalent service on L2s so Ethereum has returned to inflation in spite of the sweeping changes.
You don't get the same with an L2s, your whole argument is based on a misunderstanding. It is as if you asked me if I would use Bitcoin because I can get the equivalent or better service of using Visa. After all, both have transactions and this one does more and does it faster?  The security assumptions of layer 2s are completely different than the security assumptions of layer 1s. You do not get the "same" by using a layer 2, you get much less. This isn’t entirely true. Ethereum has always had high usage despite the existence of cheaper L2s.
Most of the usage is automated and not done by users. Even though both networks are similar in that they have different layers, Ethereum’s overall approach to scaling is very different. Ethereum is constantly increasing capacity on their mainnet, which is something that Bitcoiners are reluctant to do through block size increases.
I would not put it like this, because it comes off as something that we should do but are refusing to do. Ethereum L1 is extremely centralized compared to Bitcoin, and shitcoins like Solana even more so. Even with all their trickery of skipping real validation of the chain, it is still extremely hard to synchronize it on home hardware and impossible on low end hardware like Bitcoin is. You can run a Bitcoin full node on Raspberry Pi, but you can't run any shitcoin full node on it.
People are seeing this through a reductionist lens and failing to grasp the full picture. There is a fee market on L1, there is a separate fee market (albeit less active in terms of competition due to massive scaling) on L2, and there is a fee-market between interaction L1 and L2. These markets are self-balancing. I love the use of LN, and will use it where appropriate regardless of the situation with L1. However, in most cases when fees are not extremely high, I will always use L1. Furthermore, empowering layer 2s too much is extremely dangerous. Ethereum has basically dead locked itself in. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in layer 2s. If they "scale" layer 1 more to make it have even more TPS (at the cost of further centralization), it would wipe out many of these L2s. Incentives matter people, learn how to think about incentives.
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From what I have read, these are the alternatives to Curacao [2] [3]I mean, if I were the business owner, I would follow the instructions of the current license provider I hold and comply with them. I don't want to make things more complicated than it is. If they become stricter, that's better, as it improves trust and reduces scam casinos. Isn't that the best end result with this? Those that are running away to these ridiculous places to get a license are terrible. As long as the regulatory requirements are not a draconian bureaucratic nightmare like they are in many places in the EU, a legitimate casino should not shy away from them. Curacao needed stricter rules and it got them or is in the process of getting more. Staying with Curacao gives more legitimacy. I have seen this example of Anjouan just a few days ago. Yea we definitely need to see some laws in favor of the gambler and some protection of our money. It's ridiculous how wild west the crypto space still is after what 17 years now? Slowly starting to see some regulation happen but still no protection at this point.
Casinos should not be allowed to operate globally with a license from some obscure shithole called Anjouan. Some people write posts as if this was a good thing, it is not. If the owners of a coming casino are not able to gather enough funds to deal with some basic regulatory requirements, they should not operate a casino to begin with. I've never come across the newest alternative for Curacao before, but I doubt Curacao will be silenced so quick by all these new ones, I haven't noticed that Curacao is out or less in the industry, it they are not consistent again, why can't they find out what makes their service more less valuable, let them find out and work on it immediately.
Read all the posts of this thread, just because you haven't noticed something that does not mean that it is not happening. It seems to be a fact that new licenses are emerging rapidly in recent times. Does that mean that Curacao will get replaced entirely? That can't be said at this time.
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So fast!
In times of war, every country will have to device mesns to get more revenue since there will be a high budget deficit. Russia's case is critical because it is under severe sanctions and still at war. As a superpower, they still have an interest in other countries which increases their expenditure. Some of these autonomous states like the Altai Republic that depended on Russia for financial support will have to find means to cushion the effect of reduced financial aid.
Those activists and politicians who are protesting should understand that the Republic needs money to keep the government running.
People who believe western propaganda nonsense about Russia are funny. Russia can run a budget deficit for decades and nothing would happen to them. Were it not for the human cost of the war, they would continue to fight until Ukraine is razed to the ground. Any day now Putin will die of the deadly disease that he had in 2021 from holding a table too tightly. The western experts diagnosed it after all.  This measure does not really have anything to do about the war, even though some experts may publicly comment it that way. After all, why would they not? It makes sense and you can sell it more this way because a lot of people have no clue that keeping this illegal does not do anything at all, as I explained in the reply to your next post. What will work exactly will depends, but for the most stupid the best way to sell it is "the prophet said so".  It is the Altai Republic Parliament that approved it. In the original post Russian parliament is proposing to legalize gambling. But it was opposed by some politicians like Nikolay Novichkov saying that it will affect vulnerable groups, specifically pensioners and low-income earners. The Russian Orthodox Church has also criticised legalizing gambling because it will increase addiction problems, affect family welfare, and negatively impact the nation’s demographics. But the Russian government is also seeing it as a move to curb illegal gambling. Illegal online casinos account for about 40% to 50% of the Russian gambling market. I don't know if Russian have finally legalised it. It is not Putin who supported this move but the Governor of Altai Republic Andrei Turchak. They are not online gambling platforms but will be located near the Manzherok resort and managed by Sberbank. https://news.worldcasinodirectory.com/russia-considers-legalizing-online-casinos-amid-financial-strain-121471Those that are concerned about those things are public figures that are not educated about these things. Keeping platforms illegal does not solve anything, and actually often the data shows that legalization leads to a reduction in the userbase which is the exact opposite of what those people expect. Weak minded people and people with less developed brains tend to subconsciously get off from doing things that are forbidden in one way or another, it gives those things more appeal. Of course there is some risk in legislation, but any sane approach towards any topic like this would assumes that adequate protections would be asked of the establishments.
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Then you will be crying to Uncle Sam, but Uncle won't come to save you.
I’m not an idiot. I belong to a group of people who are honorable and dignified enough not to want to lick the boots of American or any other country’s soldiers. That’s why I don’t define myself as anti-American. Of course, someone as super-American as you wouldn’t be able to understand that distinction... Yes, you are a complete idiot who just finished promoting a scam casino.  If what you ask for comes to fruition, you will be begging God and Uncle Sam for mercy while your country gets conquered or completely annihilated. I have demonstrated that a multi-polar is significantly worse than a unipolar world, you have failed to refute it in any way because you got upset that your retarded reductionism got exposed. Those who want a multi-polar world are either idiots, or are part of weaker powers that want to regain their ability to conquer other countries. Have you considered the reason for such “behavior” as a consequence of the impotence of the modern world? Examples from the beginning of the 21st century, where one country is waging aggressive terrorist wars in neighboring states for no reason, have led Trump to believe that all this can be done with impunity because global institutions, treaties, and obligations are completely ineffective. If the president of another country can do such things with impunity, why can't Trump do the same?
Trump is the only reason for which Ukraine is not in a nuclear winter. Instead of criticizing him, you should be thanking him. Another shitposting idiot that will get to feel the consequences of your stupidity eventually.  3.Maybe after the Trump administration leaves the White House in 2028 the global geopolitical tensions and uncertainty would slowly go back to a normal level, but I wouldn't bet money on this to happen.
The choice is clear. Either you have somebody like Trump or you have WW3, but the longer the delay till that the stronger will be the factions that start it. Everyone who criticized Trump and similar Presidents will be crying to their Gods and other made up bullshit, but nobody will be coming to save them. Remember my words. All it takes is for one strong country to make a casus belli, and the world would be in chaos. That's how fragile this world's power structure is. "Strong People", who are now in power, desire for even greater power by conquering weaker states and countries to further expand their domain... Sadly, they view their people as something mundane, and as tools to further expand their ambitions. Its just like whats happening right now... And yet people keep advocating on these tyrants to go on a rampage and get whatever they thing is "theirs". At least, this is just my view of things. Its just how nature works, the strong devour the weak, and the weak devour those weaker than them... Its a really cruel world we live in.
Yes and why do they not do this? Because we have a strong America. If we shift to a world with very balanced powers, there is no reason not to attack somebody else because nobody will come to crush you for doing it. If the world is in balance in regards to power, the USA can't come rescue someone on the other side of the world. They would be at a big disadvantage. As long as the USA is the leading power, the disadvantages that come from the location of the conflict can be overcome to a large extent. Any kind of multipolar world, be it with many small countries or large multiblocks, will lead to continuous wars everywhere.
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This particular case is getting more publicity. I read one of the reports about this kidnapping and the writer called Bitcoin a currency that is popular among criminals. Nobody knows how things will turn out because the US has a president who acts like a despot. He can make sweeping changes to crypto laws using this kidnapping case as a backing.
Enough of your panicking and exaggerating with this stupid nonsense. Articles have been written about Bitcoin being popular among criminals, which is not true, since it has been created. It has never stopped, you were just distracted by reading news from other sources so you believe something is different now. Reform could be asked for. My fear is a coin freeze proposal that gets legs and is done in the USA.
my thoughts are your thoughts I bolded in red.
Stop it, you are too old to be panicking this often for nothing. Enjoy your life, and you should know better that a coin freeze proposal is impossible. Anyone who knows even the basics of Bitcoin knows that it is impossible. They do not have anywhere near the influence on the network to pull something like that off. It would take intrusion, bribery, persuasion, and manipulation over several decades to maybe reach that level of influence of the network -- by this time you won't be alive, so stop worrying about arbitrary stuff. You, like many news-reading people, may be addicted to worrying and concern. It is part of the consumption cycle, get it sorted. Why would it be? This is not the biggest ransom or death that involves Bitcoin or Monero? It may be the highest profile case in the US, but worldwide it is insignificant and nothing new.
At first I was shocked that this became so popular news because there is nothing spectacular there and such kidnapps happen often without gaining any attention but I guess, this case became high profile because Savannah Guthrie is a co-anchor of NBC's "TODAY" show and since she is famous, it reached to the White House and then President Donald Trump expressed his support for the family and offered federal assitance and in the end, it became a high profile case. This does not make the case any special on itself, it makes it special in the perception of people who care about manipulated News and public figures. Other than that, it is as classic of a case as any. Many people have even died this way, we barely hear about them.  Since the kidnapper asks for Bitcoin instead of Monero, I'm sure that he doesn't know how to protect his privacy well, so even if he gets paid $6 million Bitcoin, I predict that he will be exposed the moment he tries to withdraw his money.
If they had asked for Monero, they may have a chance. The Bitcoin can still be converted through decentralized means in a fast way, but this way the attackers are leaving breadcrumbs everywhere. With Monero they could sit on it for a long time and then use it with very little risk.
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It seems to me that you want to cause death and destruction around the globe with your mistaken views. When some bad entity launches nukes and kills the people you love, don't come whining here and begging Uncle Sam to save you. Uncle should tell you to fuck off in this case, you got what you asked for.
Hey buddy, disagreeing is normal, but there's no need to get so heated. Respect is good, and I value it!  It is nothing heated, this is what will happen. If you are unable to analyze the consequences of the things that you wish for, that is on you. I was referring to the fact that nobody should have nuclear weapons, including the United States, and I'm not defending the right of countries like Iran or North Korea to have them.
You can't prevent anyone from having nuclear weapons except by war and destruction. Furthermore, this is a completely pointless position to have that just strokes your vulnerable ego. It is like saying nobody should have paper currency. Yes and so what, it is already everywhere. The cat is out of the bag, so fuck off with ideological feel-good positions. Nuclear weapons are not going anywhere. I agree, but at no point did I say that nuclear energy is inexhaustible and although scarce, it can be reused/reprocessed, which, in this case, results in greater resource utilization compared to others.
Yes you did do exactly that, you don't even know your own arguments. Nuclear energy could be the solution for a future where natural resources become increasingly scarce or extinct, especially for electricity generation.
This directly implies that it is not scarce, which is false. Nuclear energy is not a solution for this. Trump is no tyrant. Just because someone is rude and mean to you, that does not make him a tyrant. If it bothers you, it makes you a weakling and a loser, that is all.
If I were a US citizen, I would have voted for Trump (he resembles former President Bolsonaro, who did a lot for Brazil, whom I admire and who also did and said many things I disagreed with), I'm just not obligated to agree with everything he does. In fact, "tyrant" was a strong word, but the authoritarianism he demonstrated with some of his decisions puts him in a similar position, and don't take it literally, I didn't mean to offend your president, it seems you're American and voted for him, right? Or are you just an admirer? Synonyms for tyrant: abusive, arbitrary, coercive, imperious, ruthless, unjust, intolerant, uncompromising, oppressive, overbearing, repressive, rigid. You can choose which one fits him (I don't want to risk offending you again). Tyrant would be incorrect, even if words are synonymous they are often used differently. He can be ruthless, that would be the most correct from those for me. He is, and he should be. We live in a modernity of low-willed fags that have no purpose, that have no strength, that are corrupt and biased and often mentally sick. Look at what the Democrats were doing, look at the approval of leaders all around the world. Most have terrible approval and it is not because they are implementing excellent policies that are hard to understand or that are causing short-term harm for long term gain, it is because they are extremely corrupt, incompetent, and not doing a single thing to help their own people unless it benefits them too. Democrats are still stuck at redefining what a woman is, and no trans people are not women.  Trump put CEO mindset on his political movement and policy decision making, He sees everything as hierarchy and dominance and world politic is an arena not a compromise room. Since he is young he consistenly show verbal domination, proud if he can embarrass his opponent, zero sum game oriented no win win solution in his dictionary, sensitively with insult, winner obsession. All showing provocative action, confrontative communication, headline hunter and playing conflict to get attention is his comfort zone. In his age, i worried about his all in for legacy, psychology revenge to system, elite and media and his will of immortality through history. It is a risk taker and very dangerous when he see US as institution but as a toolls for his personal will. Followed by norms collapsed and the dissapears of international law enforcement, US action will create immitation, justification and decrease of fear effect. All Trump's policy bring international institution collapse faster, threat normalization and activated world self help mode.
You meant to say that since he was young, not since he is young? Trump is very old, otherwise the post is correct.
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Tis life, split your stash up across multiple addresses. It's been like this forever.
No it has not. Yes, it has. Avoiding address collisions has *always* been a thing by spreading out your liabilities across multiple keys. Fake quantum computing scams or not.  Targeted computation of a private key from a public key has nothing to do with random and improbable collisions. Therefore, it is correct to say that things have not been like this forever. We are entering a new age, with new questions, issues, and risk. The main disruptive event is the quantum signatures (QS) introduction.
This will be the no-return point after which QS will start being adopted, turn irreversible in practice and congestion starts to blow up into progressive economic exclusion.
Even with delayed/deffered/hybrid mecanisms, custodians and institutions would almost instantly adopt it for compliance...
Congestion may then show up extremely quickly and actual consequences be felt almost immediatly.
You can fuck off with this AI slop. Congestion will be the least of the problems in the quantum story, and the transition will be very gradual. Many will see the new signatures with skepticism and want to wait to see how things play out. Unless there is a panic to convert as soon as possible which is very unlikely, then your congestion bullshit will not happen. It is such a disruptive outcome that a Protective "Sovereign BTC" Hardfork looks as disruptive if not even appealing...
You can also fuck off with your altcoin fork. What makes you believe that it's "bullshit" if the leading researchers in the Quantum Computing field are getting more and more optimistic because of the latest milestones/developments that have been made?
The man whose financial future resets upon selling shovels, tells you that you need to buy as many shovels as possible or you will die soon. There is absolutely nothing that resembles bullshit in that, and you should remember as well that AI will be able to do everything and replace most workers this year. You've heard it here for the first time, sorry I mean for the 5th time once for each previous year.  But developers like Matt Corralo gives us plebs some confidence that everything will be OK.👍 Correct, his financial future does not depend on selling zionist shovels. 
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As far as the discussion about volunteer contributors-- I think most contributors to bitcoin core by numbers are personally volunteers, but those who aren't (which includes many of the most prolific) mostly work for orgs like brink or chaincode which are themselves sponsorship orgs. E.g. bitcoin investors and enthusiasts pooling resources to hire developers. That's still volunteerism but one level abstracted.
Even for people who are paid by volunteer sponsors you should keep in mind any of them could get a high six figure job working for amazon, google, facebook, etc. where they wouldn't be subject to any public abuse/harassment or bizarre threats. Harassing the devs will tend to exclude ones who are doing it for good or benign reasons and leave the space open for malicious parties. Someone who is hoping for a billion dollar windfall when they eventually backdoor the wallet after all the good reviewers and developers are driven out really won't care how many names you call them, and they'll probably just do everything they can to avoid your attention at all.
Exactly, that is why this kind of approach and toxicity to these people -- whoever they are at the time of its occurrence -- is extremely wrong. Nobody should be subject to such treatment when they are doing work for which they should be put on a pedestal and thanked daily. Most often the criticism comes from users who have never contributed to Bitcoin at all. This is one of the downsides of this being a decentralized and open system, and if we tolerate this kind of abusive behavior to our "heroes" (no individual authorities or personality-cults as that is dangerous too, but Bitcoin Core as a whole) it will continue to have a subtle damaging effect that is only going to compound in the long term. I generally find it quite terrible that people have gotten so entitled and want to get involved in just about any topic, as if the end user of any well functioning IT company has any interaction with the engineering team at all. They don't listen to them, they don't interact with them, and it is like this for a very good reason. They are way too many smartasses and "independent thinkers" that have absolutely no fucking clue about any of these things, and the ability to chat with LLMs make this even worse. Core needs to become even stricter and allow even less input by those who do not contribute or do not have sufficient knowledge, meritocracy all the way.
Nevertheless, nobody is being paid to be a maintainer and that is an indisputable fact.
I'm not so sure about that. I believe maintainers are getting paid. No, you are confusing things. Just because I am doing something else in my role that does not mean that I am being paid for it. People are being paid to develop, that is it. Those that become maintainers are doing extra work of high responsibility, but there is no job offer for maintainers. If it were that easy, it would be dangerous.
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Why would it be? This is not the biggest ransom or death that involves Bitcoin or Monero? It may be the highest profile case in the US, but worldwide it is insignificant and nothing new. Therefore, there already exists a precedent for these kinds of cases. When it comes to BTC that will be tainted like this due to a crime there are generally only 2 cases: - Easily traced and eventually the perpetrator is found based on the money.
- Extremely well executed and possibly the perpetrator is not found based on the money.
To do the second would involve high technical expertise. Some people are mistaken and believe that it only involves the ability to use some tools like mixers, but that is not true. This involves deep knowledge against de-anonymization attacks and countermeasures. A whole deal of tools would have to be used in order to cover this up and get away with it, especially when so much attention is given to the case by the US. The number of people who could execute this and not get caught is rather limited. I don't think it an attack to make BTC to seem bad.. there are already lots of people doing the same thing without such plots, just saying it out loud.
Yeah, and like I said this is nothing new. The perpetrators should have asked for Monero. 
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Reviving the thread  I should follow you around everywhere you post, the place is infested with pajeets and there are barely interesting threads left.  Nomic and its Bitcoin-pegged token nBTC is already live since 2023 but its bridge seems to be still limited. There have been no news on their X account since then. The project is thus still evolving slowly, the reason being according to Reddit that the developers aren't working full time on it. Their Github repo is also updating, but slowly.That is extremely slow even for Bitcoin standards, even worse because they are doing a sidechain of this kind and will struggle to gain relevance in any case. I am not hopeful when a project has slow development like that. This is one of the reasons why shitcoins raise money, but often that leads to the exact opposite problem -- too fast, too insecure and full of lies. They call L2s that run on a master-key basis decentralized.  Currently I'm following mainly the Nomic and Stacks projects, as all others seem either be evolving very slowly or are only papers/projects. Probably I will post news about them soon, because on both, in the next months a crucial event would take place.
Shouldn't this part of the OP be updated then, because it seems too like Nomic is moving very slowly now too. What is the state of Stacks? I am getting an impression that some or many of these projects were started primarily to capitalize on attention even if they have ideas that could work, since they slowed down drastically or were stopped completely since. BitcoinLayers, a website reviewing projects claiming to be Bitcoin sidechains and similar layers, has updated their category system for sidechains and other L2s. I was actually about to send you this and was looking whether it was posted by you on the previous pages. The only projects they currently consider legitimate sidechains are: - Liquid (currently a static federation) - Stacks (also currently a static federation, aims to become dynamic) - Rootstock (static federation with some dynamic elements) - Internet Computer (this one surprised me, it's of course not the altcoin itself but its BTC bridge, I have reviewed it here but my impression was quite bad) - Nomic (dynamic federation) - Side Protocol (I don't know this one, will review it soon.) Then there is Bitfinity which is currently under review. I think you will have a pretty negative review for Side too, it seems like one of those shitcoin raises that capitalized on being related to Bitcoin.
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I Am Satoshi Nakamoto
To confirm my identity contact Jeff Garzik, he is the only developer that knows who I am.
No description needed, quoted to have a reference. Feel free to tag him, delusional or will end up with a scam attempt down the road. The thread should be wiped since the bump, but the moderators are busy not doing their job as usual.  The user account was reset & woke up just 2 days ago.  Looks like the clear reason for waking up, is to bump an old thread and waste everyone's time by telling us he's the Satoshi . There's absolutely no reason to start explaining if it's true, he can just provide a signature proof. Maybe it isn't even the same owner anymore. Users need to stop entertaining such idiots, tag and forget them instead.
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