every day i become more sure that a new economical disaster is coming whereas before i wasn't. now with the stock market booming, i am more suspicious that it is indeed a pump. some users already mentioned that it is not average Joe's money but the whales, but such pump is going to attract the average Joe too and then as whales pumped it well and attracted enough newbies they dump to make the most profit while exiting and letting the economy crash while they move to safer assets that rise during the crash (food industry, pharmaceuticals since we are in a pandemic, gold and of course bitcoin).

- the new daily cases is not near the ATH (which was 78k) but it is still very high at 44k not to mention that it has been rising over the past week from the lowest at 32k constantly rising. not to mention there is a horrible jump in the number of deatsh from only 430 to 1300 per day!
- it wasn't significant enough to cause this kind of pump in stock market. keep in mind that the economy is still strained.
- haven't been following this but things don't seem to be looking up on that front. both countries are bleeding badly still.

after reading the first post and the way OP describes this dude and his book i though maybe this time could be different even though this looks exactly like all the rest of the copy coins. but after doing a little search on this dude it is clear that he is just another person exploiting a buzzword called "blockchain" alongside other hot topics such as the COVOD-19 pandemic to make profit and fill his pockets.
don't get me wrong, i would be happy to proven wrong but i have seen too many of the same damn thing to believe otherwise.

any standard multisig redeem-script that is created by any wallet only contains the public keys and the m and n values. the OP_0 is always part of the signature that will be included after the signatures were produced and the transaction is ready to be included in a block and it is placed all the way at the beginning of the scriptsig like this:
after such a hard fork the above simply becomes the following spending the same P2SH or P2WSH output:

it is highly unlikely that an un-revealed redeem script has both the signature and the OP_0 inside in which case such redeem script can be spent by anyone as soon as it is revealed. and it will become unspendable after such hard fork.

that is why i never liked technical analysis. there are too many errors in the result of this so called "analysis" that makes it very unreliable. that is also why traders who use TA aren't all rich!
but at the same time i think it is not as bad as being random. there is still some good conclusions to be made from it. combining that with fundamental analysis and years of experience is the only way one can succeed in trading.

no, never.
the problem with cryptocurrency market is the high level of manipulation. this goes as far as some coins being complete pump and dumps which means there is never any way of predicting their price unless you are the one pump and dumping it and even then it is hard to predict it with 100% accuracy because someone else may dump while you pump or vice versa.

you will most probably end up losing a lot more money doing this instead of directly using bitcoin itself. there are other fees than withdrawal fees involved.
- the fee you pay to turn bitcoin into ripple and since this fee is percentage based, if the amount is high then you'll end up paying a lot of fee here.
- the same fee but on the other exchange to turn ripple back to bitcoin which is another percentage based fee.
- the withdrawal fee of ripple that you mentioned too.
- and last loss is in the spread. for example if you buy 1BTC worth of an altcoin at 1000 satoshi and sell it on the other exchange at 999 satoshi you will lose 100,000 and that is for only 1 satoshi difference in price. if it were bigger or if the price was lower the loss is bigger.

when a movement in a market doesn't make any sense at all that always means there is manipulation going on. fake movements always look weird and make no sense.
granted the economy has recovered a little bit and the life resumed but things are far from being normal and certainly not fully recovered with all the money that all these companies in stock market lost in the past couple of months and continue to lose.
there is also another factor that could be the main reason for manipulation. and that is the coming US elections. a recovered stock market, even if fake and in a bubble, looks so much better in campaigns

i don't think the numbers are that high because even though mistakes like these happen but they are not common and whenever they happen there is always a simple way to recover the coins specially if the user has access to the private key. and if not the exchanges do recover these coins if the total value of it is high enough.

it seems like some people have different meanings for "going mainstream". in most cases they think if the centralized entities such as banks start talking about cryptocurrencies then it must mean "going mainstream" but the reality is that even if they are talking about the subject they are only showing interest in the technology so that they can create a centralized altcoin for themselves.

it is funny how all the stuff news sites print these days has taken a 180 degree turn as if they weren't printing the exact opposite of this not so long ago saying "the uncertain economy is giving people reason to sell bitcoin"!

there are far more fundamental issues with ethereum as an investment but the main thing is its unlimited  supply. which means no sane person would ever consider it a good investment.

i don't think their number is that big, maybe it looks this way because they are more noticeable. for example we can never count how many P2P trades are taking place but we can always know how much volume a centralized exchange has.

a good question. but it is hard to answer.
different governments have had different view of cryptocurrencies. some government like Russian care a lot about traceability, the more blockchain analyzers pop up the more friendly they got. they don't seem to care that much about control.
governments in some other countries like Japan, Switzerland,... don't seem to be so strict about either control or tracing. they respect privacy more.
governments like US want full control of everything and invade privacy of everyone.
this means if what your scenario happened, it would divide the world more.

another thing to consider is the stage of adoption. if bitcoin had reached a good adoption percentage (a lot more than it is now) then there isn't much any government could do in that scenario. they would have to accept the reality that they have lost control. but at lower levels we might see hostile behavior. like those 7 countries that have banned bitcoin in early days when nobody in their country even knew about bitcoin.

there are a couple of problems here which if clarified it may address the subject here too.
bitcoin didn't cut itself off from source of power, it instead transferred the power to its rightful owner meaning the people. note that bitcoin did that not crypto in general. the fact is that many of the cryptos are centralized and lack everything that bitcoin started but instead are like banks. which brings us to the fact that some people chose to not care about any of that. naturally not everyone thinks their privacy is important! and not everyone has had any bad experience with the banking cartel. so it is kind of understandable to see this attitude in the market but it is only a small portion not all of it.

just so that you have some idea of the money that is earned through mining you should know that when a miner finds a block they are earning between about $73000 to $88000 for that block depending on the total fees and using the current bitcoin price.
every day there are around 144 bitcoin blocks found. which means this total is about $10 to $12 million earned by all miners per day.

the problem is that most things that look to be locally made are either importing parts from China or are made in China but under a local license so they have a different "made in xxx" written on them.
the fact is that most industries already rely on China and other similar countries. that is why everything in most big countries like US destabilized the day Chinese boarders were closed!

will there even be any "great reset"?
i think not.

there has been multiple times where there was room for such reset and rebuilding of the economy and society free of corruption but the world didn't go that route. instead they stuck to the same corruption, bailed the worst of them out and let them continue scamming people and people don't seem to mind or even remember all this.

so no, there won't be any great reset for bitcoin to play any role in it. and bitcoin will remain the exit option that only the enlighten will take.

the node count has reached 100k again and the number of nodes with accepting connection is nearly 11k.

there are more than 13k lightning nodes more than 2k of them are over TOR with 37k channels and total capacity of $12 million.

the hashrate just hit a new ATH which shows the growth of the mining operation while the distribution of this hashrate shows a spread of it around the world.

there are a total of nearly 400k transactions being made every day on bitcoin network transferring about $2 billion in total.

number of merchants accepting bitcoin as payment has shown a steady growth over the past 2 years with payment processors such as bitpay showing a steady growth of the number of transactions they process of about 3% per month.

bitcoin clients have been improved a lot, may of them have introduced LN wallets such as Electrum.

bitcoin development has also been hot. we got the Schnorr signatures published as a BIP a couple of months back with lots of other proposals for improving privacy of bitcoin transactions. and we are close to version 1 witness.

for starters the term "Bitcoin maximalists" is both created and used by altcoin pumpers who have been trying to scam people into buying their premined coin so that they could make money by selling the created out of thin air coins to them and make millions.

you might have misunderstood what most people say.
there is a difference between saying there can never be anything better than bitcoin or saying there hasn't been anything better than bitcoin. the former is just stupid and the later is a reality.

i strongly disagree.
innovation dies when developers start wanting to make the most amount of money instead of wanting to improve on what bitcoin innovation introduced.
that is why there has been so many tokens (ie. the easiest way to make money by doing nothing).

advantages should be measured as a whole not individually. for example there are altcoins that have "bigger" blocks than bitcoin and individually this seems like an advantage but it is not an advantage as a whole, instead it is a severe flaw.
or the most popular better privacy coins (that are actually privacy coins not just pretending) have serious scaling issues that are caused by that privacy feature.

this is nowhere near the biggest shitcoin

it has to be worth a billion+ to drop a billion. this shitcoin was worth 0.0016 and is now worth 0.0014. a typical shitcoin pump and dump has been going on where they pump it then unload on idiot newbies.

is this your first day looking at the altcoin market bro?

but there is nothing that we can do about it! this is a merchant related decision based on their business model. whether they want to give interesting offers depends on how much of their revenue they want to be in form of bitcoin.
besides people who use bitcoin are doing it because they want what the decentralization offers them without a middle man to snoop around in their pockets or blocks them from using their money.

yes it has been happening for the past 24 hours that i have seen. it keeps showing an empty page with 429 Too Many Requests text on it and sometimes shows the cloudflare page but then goes to the 429... thing again.