The momentum is definitely there for higher prices including $80k and based on previous movements over the past decade we know that whenever major resistances SPECIALLY previous ATH prices are broken (ie. $70k) the momentum grows even bigger in a short time after.

For example in the previous full cycle (ie. 2017) the previous ATH of that time used to be $1200 ish, when it was broken on March 2017, there was a panic sell that didn't last that long. In less than 2 months price had gone up 100% to $2400 (early May).

We are in March 2024 now! If we see the previous ATH broken at $70k and the same pattern repeats price should be $140k by May

Every country needs a military but the problem is when that military is used for "adventures" overseas. One of the reasons why there are conflicts in the places you mentioned like Korean peninsula, Taiwan, West Asia, Africa, Ukraine, ... is US presence! not the other way around. And this large number of presence abroad is the main reason for the massive expenditure and the $35 trillion national debt.

The nature of different coins leads to decisions such as choosing the algorithm, supporting merge mining, etc. Altcoins that want to be different and investigate different algorithms choose a different algorithm (like Litecoin using scrypt), altcoins that don't want to make major differences and want to live under the shadow of another project choose the same algorithm and use merge mining.

Shitcoins like BCH/BSV that planned to scam people specifically newbies telling them "this is the real bitcoin" while attacking bitcoin use the same algorithm and not even implement replay protection!

That's a good point. The mining is growing so it is best if it grows using more efficient hardware that consumes less energy compared to the computing power it provides. But it only increases the efficiency while the power consumption still grows.

I don't think you needed to provide any witness at all (the part I separated) to spend this output. Which is what anyone-can-spend means.

That's the non-standard error I mentioned above. Mempool rejects it but if you can bypass standard tests (like if it is already in a block) it is considered valid.

You could spend some time trying to mine a block yourself if you want to have a record of it on a public blockchain.
Otherwise you could test all of this on RegTest.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but Taproot is always active on RegTest. So just mine a 100 blocks in a second (100 because coinbase needs to mature to be spendable), send the output of your first coinbase to your bc1p address and mine another block. Then create this final tx spending that non-standard output and mine that block too.

Read some sources on how to work on RegTest like this one for more information: https://gist.github.com/System-Glitch/cb4e87bf1ae3fec9925725bb3ebe223a

Such outputs are actually spendable by anyone until there is a consensus rule added to handle these things, then it would depend on whether you can provide the correct script to spend them.

The decision to accept the address may be because of having forward-compatibility (if some day a new version would be added, the old clients are still easy to use) although I'd say they should show a big warning that to this version of software you run and at that time the destination address you entered is non-standard and your funds could be lost.

The only way through the code and from developers standpoint.

That's the non-developers way and the better way that is being used.

Well, the development has to continue and we should be open to changes, but also vigilant about the principles.

Stuff like Rootstock are not layer 2, they are counted as side-chains. Also they are not new, they've been around for a long time and they have not attracted that much attention because they are not hype-based projects and token creation is a scheme that requires hype to survive which means shitplatforms such as ethereum are the choice for token creators to create their useless junk.

This is also not new. For years, centralized systems have been trying to take people's bitcoins and promise giving them profit on the coins they gather. Sometimes it is called "stake" and usually they are scams and almost always they turn into a Ponzi scheme.

There is NO such thing as DeFi on Bitcoin. There are altcoins that try to stick themselves to Bitcoin but have nothing to do with it and there are also side-chains that are not Bitcoin.

Obvious: not your keys, not your coins.

No. The way these "tokens" are defined, they offer nothing new and have no utility in the real world.

No. If I see something pump and dumping on an exchange, I may try to take a quick profit during the pump and sell before the dump begins but that's the only thing I'm interested in.

People don't "invest" in something that has a fixed value, they use it for convenience and because they have no other option. For example when they want to transfer funds between exchanges without losing much Tether is a good option compared to others (fiat costs a ton of fees and has a lot of limitations; cryptocurrencies have medium fees but trading them on different exchanges would lose you a lot of money due to spread and price differences; Tether on the other hand has fixed value) or when there is a bear season specially when altcoins are dumping hard they can use Tether as an escape.

This is why despite all these serious risks, people still continue using this centralized shitcoin.

It's good for burning your precious coins! .... or at least make it extremely difficult to be spent but spendable by anyone!!!

They should not since the address (the data part) is short and non-standard (20 byte instead of expected 32).

No because their IsStandardTx[1] check will recognize[2] such transactions as non-standard so they'll not propagate it.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/dfc35c99340da3236e2841b348580f0e881762ce/src/policy/policy.cpp#L94
[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/dfc35c99340da3236e2841b348580f0e881762ce/src/script/solver.cpp#L164

Technically anybody should be able to spend any coins sent to such output. The reason is that witness program of any size other than 32 is valid but not-defined (also non-standard hence the burned coins as I said at first) so the node ignores verification of it expecting it to be a future change/soft-fork.

It falls into this branch: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/dfc35c99340da3236e2841b348580f0e881762ce/src/script/interpreter.cpp#L1946-L1952
which will return true.

No because there is nothing like it defined in the consensus rules so the protocol sees it as an arbitrary hash not pubkey hash.

From a developing standpoint the only solution to energy consumption (regardless of it being "immense" or not as it is claimed) is to find an alternative mining algorithm that doesn't consume the same amount of energy but at the same time keeps the principles of Bitcoin such as decentralization intact.

So far the attempts made in the past with alternative algorithms (such as Proof of Stake) are introducing serious flaws into the system by changing the algorithm.

Technically what is suggested or at least should be suggested is to not-panic-sell instead of jut holding at all times and at all costs. This is addressing a problem with newcomers who have not yet experienced the famous bitcoin downtrends like what we had in 2014 and 2018 where price keeps going down 10% 20% 50% 80%!
At some point they panic and sell thinking it's over but little do they know, the dump to $150 back in 2014-15 was a golden opportunity to buy not to sell, again the $3000 days in 2018-19 were similar golden opportunities and again the latest $20k days last year.

So yeah, they should HODL instead of panic selling.

As others have already said, it can't happen. There are many different people who own bitcoin for different reasons. Some will always have to liquidate their coins. It could be a merchant who received bitcoin and wants fiat for their costs, it could be an investors wanting some profit out, it could be a weak hand panic selling, a miner paying bills, etc.

The thing they aren't telling us is how they're going to supply the needed electricity for all this demand. Considering how a major part of their arguments for this replacement is "environmental related". Many electricity production methods are not as clean as they're advertised. For example the nuclear power plants create a lot of pollution and create "nuclear garbage" that hurts the environment more than fossil fuels specially if they're used at large like what they're planning on doing (replacing everything with electrical versions).

As for fossil fuels, they are running out but not as fast as some reports say (like the usual 50 years). We still have a century or two of fossil fuels left. One of the main reasons why some countries (specially in the West) are desperately trying to abandon or reduce their need of fossil fuels is political since they are a net importer of it from the Eastern bloc!

I also would like to point out that fossil fuels like oil and gas are used in a lot more things that can be replaced. For example the tires used in an EV is still considered a petro product thing! So the need for fossil fuel is not going away in our lifetime.

I disagree.
In a world where a lot of things happen every day, approving ETF that happened last month in January is considered ancient news not "recent" anymore.
This means any effect it could have had on price, has already happened 2 months ago (February is already over too!).

I disagree with this too.
Because unlike other stuff that have an ETF, it is not hard at all to buy, trade and own bitcoin. Take gold for example. It is difficult to purchase large amounts of gold (it is physical) it is extremely difficult to trade it (physically) and store it safely. This is not true about bitcoin. All you need is a digital wallet (or even a hardware wallet).

So ETF is NOT an "easier way" to gain exposure to Bitcoin, it is a terrible way that can only be useful for those who don't want to leave the centralized world and instead of buying bitcoin they want to buy a garbage that is promised to be linked to bitcoin!

You keep saying "share" but bitcoin is a currency not a stock. Imagine if you had dollar and exchanged it for euro. You have another currency and can go up or down but it will continue to have a value.
Granted Bitcoin is the only decentralized money in existence and has a capped supply but the part about its value is similar.

Unfortunately with all the money these centralized exchanges have been making all these years, they still don't have strong enough servers to be able to handle the increased traffic during big market movements where price either goes up high a lot and quick or drops down a lot and quick. This is why we always see complains similar to this one where their accounts stop working and it is only going to get worse as the price keeps rising up faster and bigger.

The only solution is to use alternative methods of trading such as using decentralized exchanges or try to see if you can find another decent CEX that doesn't go down like Coinbase although most of them are similar.

OK now things are getting interesting. In less than a day after I wrote this the $60k resistance was broken.
This is good news because it shows this momentum is not only very strong but also is getting stronger. Since now all the massive amount of money that has been waiting on the sidelines watching the market and waiting for a signal to jump in, is starting to jump in.
$100k at this point is not far at all...

You are bringing up a handful of topics, each of which could be discussed separately since they are all special cases that could have unpredictable effects on the economy as a whole and consequently on bitcoin price. For example WW3, collapse of US, hyperinflation of dollar, military expenditure, etc. each of these topics could have unexpected effects that create chain reactions in the world including recession that has negative impact on bitcoin.

- For the time being and under normal circumstances, US will keep creating more debt slowly devaluing dollar hence creating slow inflation that will also help bitcoin price grow.
- As dedollarisation continues, there will be less destinations for US to export that inflation that were decreasing the devaluation of dollar so the devaluation remains domestic and dollar dumps more creating bigger inflation hence helping price of everything including bitcoin go up.
- In case of a bigger dedollarisation and a dollar hyperinflation, the US regime's expenditure will have to decrease meaning the military industrial complex will be the first to fall and we can experience a short term period of peace in the world.

It is too soon to talk about bigger rises and FOMO style jumps because for the time being we only have a slow but solid rise. If you look at the charts you can see that we tested $50k resistance on Jan 11 and failed to break it and it broke on Feb 12 which is about a month showing this slow rise. Then after $50k reaching the current $57k which is a 12% rise took more than 2 weeks and considering we haven't broken any kind of major resistance (like $60k) yet, this is not a big enough momentum to discuss much bigger resistances such as $100k.

The potential is definitely there and all the signals are positive (like the 2 consecutive big green bars in past 2 days).

Yeah but the better time to buy bitcoin was when others were crying their hearts out about bitcoin being dead and dumping more like when price was in $20k and $30k.

Sure. Take it if they want to give it away, as long as you are not putting your valuable bitcoins at risk by depositing them somewhere and your system at risk by installing some shady software.

As for the value, I can't predict what price it will have after launch but I can predict with certainty that it won't last because the model is flawed. You can't just pay people real money just because they own bitcoin. These things either turn into Ponzi schemes or a short lived pump and dump.

No there isn't any way to do that. Both chains and their coins have no value so there is no mechanism to "trade" them and there is no reason for it either. There are 3 or 4 faucets listed in https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Signet#Get_some_coins that could give out these value-less coins. Other than that, like testnet coins someone has to donate them to you.

That is weird if not shady.
It seems like they want you to end up "locking" your bitcoins somewhere (mechanism isn't mentioned) then possibly give you some shittoken in return and call that "staking". This is not new either. Such tokens will not have a value for long.