It's not the same concept though. OP_CHECKSIG handles ECDSA that is a fixed formula and on fixed integer types. What OP has in mind is arbitrary arithmetic being performed on arbitrary integers.

The final result doesn't need to be split into chunks, you can push a 64-bit integer result to the stack. It is only invalid when you pop it and want to interpret a >4 byte data as integer in arithmetic OPs.

So far Starbucks seems to have taken the biggest hit from the boycotts since the company is also struggling with other issues. According to newsweek[1] the company got dumped $11 billion in value ever since the boycott started. Although I personally don't consider stock price as the best indication but the important thing here is that the company is also reporting lower sales and decreased foot traffic as they are losing customers which means the boycotts is one of the main reasons contributing to their losses.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/starbucks-market-loss-boycotts-strikes-red-cup-day-1849713

I'd bet the lack of increase in the interest rates has played a role in this rise though. The bonds market, even though profitable, is losing its bling and FED is not about to rise the rates until July which would make it 11 months of stability (last rise was in August) so we may see a continued rise all through the first quarter of 2024 at least.

Now if energy prices start soaring again (due to OPEC newest supply cut that will start next year in first quarter of 2024) we could see increased inflation and if they keep the interest rates at this level as promised, we could see an even bigger rise for bitcoin in the same period.

P.S. having a halving! is going to be a big contribution to that rise too.

I'm very disappointed in people who still insist on using the misleading term "censorship" to describe "preventing an exploit in the protocol".

It is even more odd when you realize that for the past decade that we have been limiting a wide variety of things in Bitcoin including transaction and script sizes, nobody complained nor called it "censorship". And yet they have a double standard when it comes to the Ordinals Attack that is exploiting the new changes in the protocol to inject arbitrary data into the blockchain.

I'm honestly very surprised and disappointed.

We have a saying in Farsi that goes "کافر همه را به کیش خود پندارد" which I guess is best translated to "every madman thinks all other men mad". It's the case with Dimon! The bank he works for, JPMorgan, has been caught in all kinds of criminal activities from spoofing and security and mortgage abuses where their trader was actually imprisoned to bigger crimes including money laundering and arms dealing. Not to mention their fines due to criminal activities exceeded $2 billion last I checked!

So it is natural that he thinks that just because they are all crooks and criminals in JPMorgan, everyone else must be too

With that aside, why is this idiot being discussed now that bitcoin price is rising up again?!

In other words it is nothing like keeping your money in a bank!!!
And your question is the biggest problem with exchanges. All those regulations the governments apply to exchanges is to only monitor user activities, not to provide them with any kind of security. Of course the exchanges give all kinds of empty promises to attract customers but in the end if they want to run away or if they get hacked, it is users that would lose money.

There has never been any indication of Muslims supporting Russia or even liking Russia for that matter. So you need to provide better reasons for your claims here.

You won't get any kind of freedom by using centralized coins such as USDT and majority of altcoins. Only bitcoin is the viable option.

There is an economic crisis but it is nowhere near the levels that would lead people to abandon the centralized monetary system and move to cryptocurrencies. Something like 2008 crisis has to happen first. Besides, cryptocurrencies have their own issues too.
We have centralized altcoins that are worse than centralized fiat.
We have loads of shitcoins that are useless.
We have bitcoin that is too volatile for people to do a full migration from fiat to bitcoin now.

Just because some others like Russia benefit from certain actions in another region (anywhere not just West Asia) that doesn't mean they always have a hand in it. For example in case of Palestine, the 75 years of nonstop genocide led to many conflicts between Palestinians and those who want to kill them all, that includes the current ongoing conflict.
Same with Yemen, 9 years of being bombed and having whatever they have destroyed which caused the biggest humanitarian crisis (even worse than Gaza) has led to the current conflict they have with United States.

And I appreciate that.

I prefer to have the topic open and the discussion ongoing (hopefully about the topic) because the situation in Red Sea is changing and the tensions are still very high.
For example over the past 2 days we had another news regarding the USS Carney being attacked for the second time and 2 or 3 more Israeli vessels seized or attacked. Unfortunately the details are being censored by both sides for different reasons and they don't release much for me to post anything reliable about the situation and its possible effects.

For now it seems like US is desperately trying to avoid direct confrontation and instead start a proxy war. For example since US military could not do anything, instead the American organization called the UN World Food Program halted food aid to the war torn Yemen.
- On one hand this proxy war could be beneficial for US regime that wants to redirect its focus on continuation of genocide of Palestinians, fight a proxy war with Russia, counter expansion of China and of course the new war that is starting in South America.
- On the other hand if the regime succeeds in convincing its proxies to fight Yemen, it would be more devastating for energy prices and international trade. Because the proxies US regime is choosing is Saudi Arabia (oil rich) and Egypt (Suez Canal) and a couple of others in the region. These proxies are all illegitimate dictatorships that could fall if they cross certain red lines such as attacking Yemen since people of all these countries (despite the dictators) are standing with Palestine and those supporting Palestinians.

This is how complex the situation is right now and we still don't know which way the Red Sea region is going to go.

That's true but then again experience comes in handy here too. One needs to have built connections and know "people" to be able to choose their advisors wisely and not end up with malicious behind the scene actors giving them malicious advice for personal gains.

No, I wouldn't categorize Bukele as inexperienced. He has studied Law and became Mayor in 2012 and remained in politics until his election as president in 2019. That's at least 7 years of good experience in office with an important position (ie. mayor) doing actual work.

In comparison Milei studied economics and the only involvement he had in politics has been insulting others in interviews and creating controversies, and finally joining a right-wing political coalition (radicals) that led to his election. That is zero actual experience.

I agree that only time would tell but right now we are only speculating based on the data we have.

Well that is bad news but for altcoin market not for bitcoin or even bitcoin market because at the end of the day Binance is still a major altcoin trading platform and is mainly used for that. So if anything the news should affect the altcoin market, which it probably won't because altcoins are only pump and dumping and not really reacting to news like this.

On top of that, the community has gotten more ignorant of issues that centralized exchanges face. It may not be a 100% ignoring their shenanigans but for the biggest part it just goes ignored...

FWIW you don't need to push data smaller than 76 bytes using OP_PUSHDATA1 since it is wasteful. All you need to do is to use the size itself, which means using 0x02 and 0x14 instead of 0x4c02 and 0x4c14 respectively for the two data pushes which saves 2 bytes.

The reason why we chose bitcoin was because we wanted to have control over our own money without needing a third party. Otherwise we would stick to banks and never bother with a volatile money that has very little adoption.

To have that full control you need to know what the tool you use to create your keys, store your secrets, create transactions and sign them, sync your wallet, etc. actually does. That requires the tool/wallet to be 100% open source, transparent and popular enough so that it is reviewed and bug free.
You can't say that for Samsung Blockchain Wallet because it is closed source and relies on the centralized company that creates it and the centralized servers it uses to sync up. So not only you may not be completely secure but also you don't know how much access the company has to YOUR money!

Others are suggesting something like Electrum because it fits what I explained above. It is 100% open source so you can verify the code yourself and if you can't do that, you still know that because it is popular and has been around for about a decade it is reviewed by enough people to be considered safe.

I'm curious to know what your "guess" is based on because you are too specific about the altcoins and the amount of investment! Generally speaking it is hard to know these things unless you run a centralized exchange that people visit so that you can have a solid statistics and CEXes don't release such statistic for the public to know these things.

In any case, another possibility (assuming your stats are correct) is that you are looking at "traders" not "investors". When it comes to trading, altcoins are better than bitcoin although not the altcoins you listed here but altcoins that are getting pumped in that particular day so that you can buy them during the pump and sell them before their dump begins to make a decent profit in a short time.
Of course a lot of people trade using their bitcoins (not fiat) so that they can make profit on the amount of bitcoin they have. So your concern about people not having bitcoin is not correct in this scenario even though they are seemingly trading altcoins only.

NATO is purely an American tool which I wouldn't even call an alliance and its purpose is only one thing: a military proxy to counter Russia. It is not to protect NATO members, it is only to protect US.

The "biggest" member of NATO is being attacked every day. USS carney is back to Djibouti port for repairs again after yesterday's attack

Exactly. This is why United States has only attacked disarmed and extremely weak countries like the disarmed Iraq, the cavemen controlled Afghanistan, etc.

You say that and yet you are still off-topic
That's because you are still reading the title (not the topic content) and responding to the title. This is not about energy prices, this topic is about the effects of the conflict in Red Sea on energy prices! Since the topic is already derailed I won't bother with deleting anymore...

BTW the big supply cut by OPEC is going to start in first quarter of next year which means it won't affect the price until then.

Someone who has spent a large portion of their lives in politics has the most important thing: experience. Even if a large number of existing politicians have been incompetent and have messed up, that still doesn't mean we should look outside and bring people in who have zero experience in politics and in leading a country!

It's like if developers of a project weren't coding well and the project had bugs, and to solve it we decide to kick them out and bring in people who have never written a single line of code in their lives!

The point is that there is a third option between choosing among the existing incompetent politicians and new inexperienced and volatile people. Unfortunately a lot of countries are choosing the later these days because these "celebrities" are proficient in gaining "followers" by advertising themselves.

There are a couple of concepts you should not confuse with each other:
1. Mnemonic or seed phrase
this is the only thing you need to recover your keys and regain access to your coins on any device at any time.

2. Passphrase (extension words)
There is an option to "extend" the mnemonic the wallet produced for you at the start with some extra words known as the passphrase. It is optional to use this but if you do then you will need to have that too when recovering your keys later.

3. Password (encrypting wallet file)
This is only needed if you want to recover the "file" itself because it is encrypted and if you have the digital backup and want to use it on another device you have to also enter the password you used to encrypt it.

Fork is the technical term for a copy. If you check the source codes you can see how they have and still are simply copy pasting everything from their parent project (everything except the small parts they'd changed).
https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/compare/master...litecoin-project:litecoin:master

If you want to develop something that is actually useful for Bitcoin (not for your personal profit) then look into the concept of CoinJoin and the existing implementation of it and see if you have any idea that could improve upon the existing ones, maybe even introduce a new more decentralized one!

Otherwise if you want to create yet another centralized mixer, you'll probably get shut down and possibly arrested soon after your "service" picks up a certain amount of traffic.