ViaBTC does have a Paid Service for their so called "accelerator" that accepts the payment (the fee that won't show up in the block) in BTC, BCH or LTC. So it is possible that such low paying transactions in these blocks paid the additional fee in a shitcoin like bcash to get their bitcoin transactions included in the block. In fact this is a good way to get rid of your shitcoins without having to sell them...

I don't think Taproot is going to be supported directly in Electrum any time soon (it is only supported through hardware wallets now), since I don't see any code being added to master branch and there is no separate branch as far as I know working on it. The issue on it is also old and not updated for a year https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/7544

It depends on which country you have in mind! There are nearly 200 countries in the world and every single one of them export goods to others and all their people pay for stuff in their local fiat not in $ or €.

As for education, I don't know under what government you've been living that's made you think this way but the scientific growth in the Eastern bloc has been fast. For example in the past 4 decades Iran has been leading in all the rankings like WOS which puts Iran as #1 in the list in Asia and I believe somewhere between #15 and #17 globally.
In fact one of the reasons why Iran has been under this many sanctions is this growth and also the reason why they fear BRICS as a whole so much. All these countries have tremendous amount of potential.

That has nothing to do with the part of my comment that you quoted!
For example Saudi Arabia has is both a rich country with the largest number of poor but at the same time they were dictating the oil price BUT for United States with Petrodollar. Ever since last year they stopped and haven't been doing that and were instead dictating or rather helping Eastern powers dictate the price of oil. They even threatens US regime with "major economic consequences"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/08/saudi-arabia-cut-oil-production/

Sorry for going OT but I wonder what aircraft you consider "obsolete", specially when you compare it with F-16 which you refer to as "latest weapons"!!!
The fighter jets that Ukraine has/had were MiG-29 (introduced on 1983), Su-24 (1974), Su-25 (1981), Su-27 (1984). None of these are considered obsolete specially when compared with F-16 (introduced 1978)! which is older than 90% of what Ukraine had before!

People of Niger just arrested the French ambassador This is after another french official (possibly an intelligence officer) was arrested the other day.
It appears that the colonizers are not going to leave peacefully but they'll have to be kicked out by force.

Well the thing about Iran's economy specially the foreign trades is that most of it is not made public. We only have a handful of official statements to work with. For example the statement by the official at the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade last year is the first official statement I can think of about cryotocurrencies being used to make an actual trade worth $10 million. Less than a month after that the regulations were published on using bitcoin mined in Iran for imports like importing vehicles. And the latest news I read 4-5 month ago was that the progress is slow and so far a couple of mining farms have joined and the trade size is only in tens of millions.

That's the challenging part though.
But at the same time all fiat currencies in the world are like that! It is also how euro was created. Euro like the dollar is not backed by anything either and it is used in an "economic bloc" called Europe! So in a way euro is like the BRICS currency. It will be backed by its supply and demand and the economies that are behind it.

If an asset is needed to back BRICS currency they can use a basket of them instead of gold alone. That can include:
- Gold (Russia and China have the fifth and sixth largest supplies)
- Oil (Saudi Arabia + Iran + Russia = 30% and if you add their "friends" like Venezuela, Qatar, etc. it is >60%)
- Gas (Iran + Russia = almost 50% of all the gas on planet)
- Lithium (Iran started searching recently and one of the first things found was 8.5 million ton reserve + China 5.1 mil ton + if Argentina 20 mil ton and Chile 11 mil ton join BRICS that's again more than half)
- Plus some other minerals that I can't think of right now and is rich in the East

This also means that in the future BRICS has the potential to effectively dictate the price of all these resources.
Not to mention that they could effectively recreate Petrodollar concept with the new currency, meaning selling all these resources for the BRICS currency only.

When you make a claim like this you should explain their motivation too.
In this case from what we know, FED is not trying to crash anything. The economic hardship in general is the side effect of FED desperately trying to keep the Dollar strong as the world keeps dumping it by increasing the interest rates.

Unless your "good sources" are working in FED, they can't make such claims. Besides raising the rates more is not going to make any difference in keeping the inflation low so the chances of raising it is lower compared to the past which means even though such a raise is not impossible but nobody can "swear" on it.

This is something I've been analyzing for some time too and even though I disagree with you on some points, I'd say your theory is a pretty solid one.


As you can see the correlation here is not that strong. For example from November 2022 the DXY keeps dumping Jan 2023 while bitcoin either drops a little or shows no reaction to the big dump in DXY.
There are two reasons for the lack of strong correlation. One is that a lot of other factors affect bitcoin than just what US fiat does. Another is the interest rate which is not only rising in US but also rising a lot of other places.

I'd say basically it's all about the interest rate as the chart below shows a much better correlation compared to the one above.


You see when the FED (and others in other countries) raise the interest rate it becomes more attractive to invest in bonds (read: buy US debt and get a high interest on your investment). So whenever the US regime increases the interest rate, it acts like a vacuum sucking all the money from all the markets (look at gold chart and you'll see the same struggle there too) towards US bonds because it becomes the most attractive investment at that time. Ergo people dump their other assets like bitcoin and gold.

As we can see the second phase of bitcoin crash (from $45k+) starts as soon as FED increases the rates in March 2022 until the big first jump ends.
We can also see that the second big jump does not have nearly the same effect as the fist one which proves my first point above that there are a lot of other factors affecting bitcoin price.

Interest rate from 0.25 to 2.5
Bitcoin price from $45k to $20k -55%

Interest rate from 0.25 to 4.5
Bitcoin price from $20k to $15k -25%

Interest rate from 4.5 to 5.5
Bitcoin price from $15k to $25k +66%

That's one way of doing arbitrage trading but another way which is less risky is to have funds in both places and perform the trades using those funds. For example you have both bitcoin and dollar on exchange A and B. If bitcoin price is higher on exchange A compared to B, you sell some of your bitcoins in A and buy the same amount (or more) in B. This way your net-worth increases while not moving any funds at all.

After some time and many trades where the equilibrium between your balances is no longer there, you can transfer some funds to reach equilibrium again.

Is it though? Bitcoin adoption, despite what it may feel like, is still pretty small around the globe. A lot of people may have heard the name "Bitcoin" but a tiny fraction of them have ever bothered adopting it. This is exactly why bitcoin is currently priced at $25k instead of a million dollar.

First of all there is a different between using bitcoin and trading cryptocurrencies, the former is what we want and the later is not useful at all.
Secondly you have to first see why these handful of countries have banned bitcoin in first place then try to solve that reason and eradicate their concerns before the ban can be lifted. For example a country like Bangladesh doesn't have nearly enough surveillance capability like United States with its military organization called NSA to be able to fight illegal digital activities so it is understandable for Bangladesh to ban bitcoin but not US.

If you want to know the effects of halving on miners, all you have to do is to look at the past 14 years and the past 3 halvings. In other words people who claim it will have a "backlash" because miners make less money have not checked the history where hashrate keeps on growing after the halving even though the income is 50% less in terms of bitcoin.

As for the price, again the history suggests that there will be a hype during the months leading to halving which could cause a rise which will disappear after the halving and price can come down a little. But in long run the decreased rate of supply creation will reduce the sell pressure and price will go up.

Well that's one way to scam people, since bitcoin testnet has "bitcoin" name attached to it, using them could create some scamming opportunities. In fact this is similar to the Ordinals Attack where people who use it instead of using an actual token creation platform are doing it only because it has the name "bitcoin" in it! which helps them pull off their scam easier.

Things feel the same and have been felling the same ever since 2008 because they never solved the actual problem that led to 2008 economic crisis, instead they just put a band-aid on it and swept the real problem under the rug where it could fester.

There have been a couple of other big financial crises between the Great Depression after 1939 and 2008, some of them were short but some were big like the 1970's and 1980's ones.
- Recession of 1945 (due to high spending by the end of WW2)
- Recession of 1949 that lasted a year (Truman's "Fair Deal" reforms)
- Recession of 1953 that lasted 11 months (aftermath of Korean War)
- Recession of 1970's (lasted 2+ years due to Arabs increasing oil price and sanctioning EU/US),
- Recession of 1980's starting near the end of 1979 started by Iranian revolution increasing oil price then the FED raising interest rates pushed US economy into recession which lasts to about 1982 (~2 years and 8 months)

This "slow" adjustment is the next big problem that prevents the difficulty to go back to "normal" and lets the miners keep mining at low difficulty despite it being on the rise. There is cap on how much it can rise (or fall) in each adjustment because if the time is smaller (or bigger) than a quarter of (or bigger than 4x) 2 weeks in seconds, it will fall down to default 302,400 (or 4,838,400) sec.
In other words in this case, even though it takes them minutes to mine 2016 blocks, the protocol assumes it takes 84 hours and increases the target based on that.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/f1a9fd627b1a669c4dfab797da42825230708f2a/src/pow.cpp#L56-L59

Historically speaking there are times when some miners with a bunch of ASIC miners use their computing power to mine on TestNet. Since the difficulty is low most of the times, their hashrate is more than enough to mine a large number of blocks in a very short time.

To compare, the current difficulty in TestNet is 1024 while on MainNet it is 54,150,142,369,480.
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/testnet
https://blockchair.com/bitcoin

P.S. regarding the worthlessness of tbtc I have to say in the past there have been some scams involving these coins that gave them kind of a value. Some were big and led to migration to the version 3 TestNet (the current chain) and some were smaller like the last time they were swapping shittokens on token platforms like ethereum with tbtc effectively giving them a value.
This may be the reason for a couple of these hashrate spikes we saw in the past.

It's typical of you to only take out a small point in a whole topic and try to change the subject.
You have forgotten that 7 months ago in the topic about "Economic implications of a US-China-Taiwan conflict" all the arguments were China's inability to build any decent microchips and some even suggested that there is to "engineering talent" in China to do so.
Now that China is manufacturing high tech chips, of course you want to focus on Apple...

That's true but the point is that this is not the only case and it is not just China. The economic war between US and China has been going on and China is giving as much as it gets. A lot of other countries are taking actions from dedollarisation to decreasing imports from US that is hurting US economy. For example Iran jut banned the new iPhones in the country too and that's a $6 billion market.

Another point I'd like to make is that the US debt based economy is weaker and a lot more vulnerable than the Chinese production based economy. The only reason why the effects of all these things on US economy hasn't been catastrophic yet is the huge interest rate with constant money printing and exporting inflation.
In simple terms US has turned its economy into a Ponzi scheme where they create debt and sell it to Europe and countries like Japan so that this way they can keep their own economy artificially alive and hope to go back to the Old World Order to revive it for real.

How did you change a letter in a .dat file?
Because if you opened the .dat file in a text editor and then started modifying the text, you may have already broken the "data" in it since .dat file is not a plain-text to be modified this way. Not to mention that depending on the text editor you may have even changed the encoding of the represented "text" that would end up corrupting the file even further.

Another point of having a "recovery" phrase is to be able to import it in other wallets to recover it for example in case the initial wallet you used stopped working. But you have to see which seed phrase algorithm they are using, for example BIP39 is used by more wallets than Electrum algorithm and a lot more than AEZEED which is very unpopular.

Being offline or online doesn't make a difference in this recovery process since it occurs locally on your system. However, you it is discouraged to import the seed generated with one wallet into another because of both security and privacy reasons. For example in Electrum you know that you are connecting to specialized full nodes that are mostly run by individuals and possibility of some spy ones but in some other SPV clients we already know they are relying on a single server run by a centralized entity. So your level of privacy is not the same.

Whether it is fake news or legit doesn't make any difference because it is a random statement by a "random" person not a prediction or even a half decent speculation. Everyone knows that bitcoin price will go on and will surpass a million eventually specially as fiat keeps dumping but the real question that nobody can answer is when.