What's interesting to point out is that majority of countries that you think are "poor countries" are actually super rich but are kept poor as they are the oppressed. For example look at Africa with different nations that keep making the news these days. They have vast amounts of wealth in form of minerals, energy, precious metals, etc. and at the same time they have the highest level of poverty, illiteracy, etc. simply because their wealth is being stolen by the colonizers!

Movements like BRICS have the potential of changing that.

I strongly disagree because the evidence suggests otherwise. The thing is, these countries have been able to reach a stability over the past couple of decades. In a stable society there is no need for authoritarian rule. But let that stability be disrupted a tiny bit and you'll see their true faces.

Take France for instance. Just recently as soon as the stability was threatened after the French police murdered a child they brought out the military to suppress civilians with martial law where nobody was even allowed to exit their homes! Meanwhile there is a media blackout, social media removes anything remotely related to France and the statistics of how many people the military killed is still not allowed to be made public. And they claim to have freedom of speech.

Besides I always say Democracy is a plague since it is just the modern form of dictatorship. The best example is United States with its primitive constitution and election where the population is only forced to choose between two incompetent men one worse than the other to become the new puppet. While the actual decision are made by the regime which they like to call "deep state" to make it sound like conspiracy theory.
Otherwise a senile old man who doesn't remember who he is half the time is not capable of anything or the previous idiot who was literally stripped of of all his powers according to the chairman of joint chiefs of staff.

Exactly. In decentralized system where every user is responsible for their own security, they must first educate themselves. Of course in such a system without a central authority it is up to us (who know a tiny bit more) to provide them with the best and most accurate information to help guide them in their decision making.

The Ethereum ENS is a silly nonsense that "maps" human readable strings to actual addresses. It does not change the address format or anything under the hood. In other words it is creating an extra step when making payment since you'll have to first convert that string to an actual address then make the payment.
It doesn't need layer 2, it can be built in a side chain very easily.

Actually a lot of them prefer gold and other assets including real estate.

That's stupid in my opinion. If the choice is between a centralized shitcoin called stablecoin and the US dollar, the dollar is always the choice without hesitation.
Because for starters these stablecoins are not guaranteed to be stable, they just are stable for now and can get dumped at any time. Additionally they are always centralized or have centralized attributes which makes them terrible. For example Tether can easily be frozen!
That's not true about dollar specially in cash form.

Gold. I personally prefer standard government/bank issued coins. It is independent of bitcoin and also it is speculated to shoot up in 2024.

Time flies. We're already in September.

We are back to $25k and it is June all over again. There will be dump attempts to break this strong resistance and there is a good chance that they will fail similar to June then we see the breakout back above $30k again.
With the fact that the recent attempt to go up (the failed $28k rise) could mean my theory above is correct so far since with fake dump attempts there will be also these sudden jumps upward as the dump fails.

P.S. What does everyone think about the similarities of bitcoin price with gold in the recent months?
Gold rose in July, stayed up in August and dump started on 8th bottom was 18th.
Bitcoin rose in last week of June and continued in July and stayed up until August 16 and bottom was basically on 18th.

SEC is still a government agency not an independent entity, so it should technically follow the same attitude US government has towards companies such as BlackRock. My argument is that this fact will affect their decision regarding approval of the ETF.

That makes no sense
Whoever came up with this joke had no idea how cryptocurrencies work. There is no such law in Iran and it wouldn't even be possible to enforce it since that would require ridiculously centralized exchanges that store a massive database with a complex blockchain analysis algorithm that can follow the coins that were mined domestically to prevent anything else from being traded LOL

Mining cryptocurrencies in Iran is legal and regulated, you'd need a cheap and easy to get license for mining farms. Trading cryptocurrencies is not really regulated but it is not banned either; there are multiple Iranian exchanges that have been working fine with banks to accept deposit/withdrawals.

I'm curious about what method you have in mind, although I have to say that you are missing one important fact. The fact that there is no such thing as "taint", it is just a fake concept created by those who wanted to regulate centralized services like exchanges and then put pressure on them to regain their full surveillance control.
In other words it doesn't matter what we do to "remove taint", they can just call something else like the block reward tainted!

You may want to change your wallet and discard your seed since you seem to have entered it into so many online websites so far. When you do things like this, there is a chance that you leak your keys!

As for the website you shared, it doesn't seem to be using a deterministic algorithm to generate the ephemeral key needed for creating an ECDSA signature which could be a source of some possible vulnerabilities. For example if it uses a weak key, after you share the signed message + signature your private key could be leaked.
This is why you should always try to stick to popular wallets that are well tested and reviewed not any random tool you find on the internet.

It seems like topics like this keep coming up every now and then where someone is arguing that a particular method is not suitable, not ideal or outright insecure just because people that are using it may not do it correctly.
For example we've had this argument with regarding paper wallets and the bitcoin wiki is still calling them "obsolete and unsafe" which is wrong.

Everything in Bitcoin has pros and cons, from bitcoin itself with its volatile price to the wallet types we use. For example you can't say "bitcoin core is not an ideal solution for individuals because it takes a long time to sync" just as you can't say "multi-sig is not suitable because it is hard to setup and backup correctly".

Multi-sig wallets have their benefits even for individuals but they obviously require more effort to setup, backup and use. The important thing is for people to learn how to choose the most suitable tool for them and understand how to take advantage of what it offers. If the benefits of multi-sig wallet is what an individual looks for, they will also accept the extra effort that it demands.

Actually Iran's presence is in a way much higher and more serious than US, Russia and China but it is of a different nature in comparison.
US presence in different places is either by force (invasion and genocide) or by colonizing, China's presence is always from the economy perspective (with investments, loans, etc), and Russia's presence is usually from resources and military presence to fight their battles abroad (like Wagner in Africa).

Iran's presence on the other hand is first and foremost revival of the ancient relations some of which dates back a thousand years. It is sometimes ideological bonds which Iran seeks to expand and solidify across the globe, sometimes it is just mutual interest like elimination of extremism and terrorism, to build infrastructure, etc. But in all cases it is kept out of the news for many reasons which would be off-topic here.

It is everywhere too. For example Iran has an active and large scale presence in USA background, ie. Latin America specially since Iran is a successful and kind of the leader of Anti-Imperialism in the world.
Same in Africa, as the successful case of Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Extremism and Anti-Terrorism there is a lot of mutual interests between Iran and Africa as a whole not to mention the decades of experience that Iran is relaying to them. This is why for the past couple of decades Iran has been helping many African nations deal with US backed terrorist organizations like Da'esh.
And of course in Asia from West which is where Iran is located itself and has the most dominance and allies to the East and South. For example one thing you won't find in the news is how Sri Lanka got rid of its decade long fight with insurgencies of the separatist militia with the help of Iran.

The problem is that you can never be sure about that, in fact the whole point of using an air-gap computer is to effectively eliminate a large number of potential vulnerabilities that may not even be known to us. So by taking that simple step we try to significantly improve our security.
The real question is why would you want to take that risk and connect to the internet?

Something interesting to ponder is that dedollarisation can be a bigger threat to Europe than to United States. As the dedollarisation grows, all these printed dollars in global circulation would have to go back to their origin (USA) but that would cause hyper ultra inflation in United States. However, there's is this law that would be enforced to prevent those dollars from coming back to keep the US inflation "exported". In a world where Europe is left dollarised, EU will have to bear that inflation.

This is exactly why a lot of politicians in Europe have been warning about staying "close" to US as the sinking ship. Macron is only one of them.
This reminds of a quote assigned to Henry Kissinger: "To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal."

Well, yes and no.
- No because economy alone is not what makes a country "super power". There are a lot of different factors involving geopolitical presence and effect, geography, infrastructures, resources, military, "reach", international allies, population, etc. and even when it comes to economy you can't just analyze it based on one factor like inflation or GDP growth. Even each of these factors alone can not be analyzed based on raw numbers and one-liner twitter like comments.
- Yes because if we only focus on economy, the past year is an excellent indication of the massive potential of growth Iran's economy has and the extremely ready infrastructure like ready to use factories and production lines that used to work at a tiny portion of their capacity, top quality products in many fields including high tech that can easily eliminate their foreign counterparts and most importantly ultra cheap production cost which helps that elimination in the competitive global scene. This past year Iran has been heavily dedollarising by the way.

One thing that people who argue against mixers with the logic involving "money laundering" always forget is that it is not enough to obfuscate the coin's origin, when laundering money one has to be able to explain how they got the excess money not particularly from where.

For example someone who is barely living hand to mouth on a £2k salary in UK can not suddenly come to a million dollar worth of bitcoin out of nowhere! It doesn't matter even if they swap their "dirty" coins with "virgin" coins (fresh block reward) as long as they are not capable of explaining where they got that million bucks from.

In real money laundering, the criminal would come up with a contract with an actual business (like a laundromat!) to launder their money through their business by "cooking the books". For example the business that in reality has barely £500 income would report its income as £3k, £2.5k of which being the dirty money hence "cleaning" it every month.

This means even if a criminal wanted to launder their cryptocurrency, they'd use exchanges not mixers (ignoring the KYC issues in exchanges) so that they can fake it as their "profit" whereas mixers are useless for laundering.

The situation I was referring to is not bitcoin related. It is the battle this investment management company has with the US government over their "freedom of investment".
To put simply BlackRock wants to take their money (about $15 trillion if we count msci) to more solid economies such as China and US regime doesn't want to allow that because that would be the end of dollar hegemony and US economy.
The battle is that whenever BlackRock talks to any Chinese company, US government immediately and out of nowhere places that company in their terrorist list to prevent BlackRock from taking their money out of US!

So much for Economic Liberalism

That's true.

It is in no way an alliance. It is more like a mutual interest that has gotten Iran and Saudi Arabia (UAE is similar) closer same with the rest, otherwise this particular conflict dates back to one or two thousand years ago.

Basically after WWII countries came together to give power to the regime in Washington. Now that the regime has proven to be abusive of that power, once again the world is coming together to take that power away. That's the mutual interest.

It is both, meaning all these countries did in fact request to join and also the original members want them to join.

Take Saudi Arabia for example. Obviously BRICS wants an oil rich country that is literary THE definition of petrodollar to join a dedollarisation movement and on the other hand the Saudi regime wants to join BRICS to gain more independence and be able to start investing in Arabia's infrastructure and industry (instead of handing over all their money to US weapons factories to purchase garbage), something United States never allowed to happen (eg. building its first nuclear power plant).

This is why Saudi has been lobbying behind the scenes with both Russia and China to get the invitation.

With the battle Blackrock has with the US government these days, SEC may reject theirs specifically and approve anything else if they were to approve any bitcoin spot ETF.

In any case, the only thing I wonder is the effect that the approval of an ETF in USA could have on the bitcoin price, otherwise it is ETF after all and that is not the way we want bitcoin to be adopted... so it isn't really something we want to be excited about.

First your choose a wallet then you install that and follow the on-screen instructions. I suggest Electrum.

You don't need to know any of that to use bitcoin, the wallet takes care of it under the hood.

If you want to gain extra knowledge; bitcoin transactions contain smart contracts that act similar to locks and keys. Each transaction contains outputs that contain the "locking script" also known as scriptpub to spend these outputs you need to provide the "unlocking script" that for legacy transactions is placed in "scriptsig" and for SegWit transactions it is placed in "witness" part of the transaction.
Execution of these two parts together will automatically determine if you can spend those coins or not.

The coin selection in Electrum is both deterministic and random but with some conditions.
You have to look at the source code for the details but generally speaking Electrum creates "buckets" from your UTXOs from each address and tries to deterministically choose a "bucket" that can produce the best transaction that has the amount you want to pay and produces less blockchain bloat.

LOL majority of resources are now in the hands of BRICS countries. In energy alone, now 80% belongs to BRICS countries, if you think that's "poor people's club" then review the 70's and how the crazy Arabs sanctioned the West and burnt Europe's economy to the ground.

That's the same exact thing! How do you think US sanctions other countries, with sticks and stones?

In the Old World Order where countries used to use US dollar for all their trades, when US wanted to sanction a country they simply stole all their dollars by blocking them in the SWIFT system and in their banks. In the New World Order where dollar is used less and less every day, US has decreasing capability to sanction others and is only isolating itself.