it is funny how many topics like this are popping up these past couple of days that bitcoin price crushed the dreams of those who were waiting for its price to drop

and all of them are in the same theme, someone has put his head in the sand and is screaming it is night while the sun is up.
if you ever bothered to loo how many people are using bitcoin as payment and how merchants there are that have been accepting bitcoin as payment for years and how much money is transferred hand to hand using bitcoin then you would know that the adoption of bitcoin as a currency has been great even though it is still not mass adoption.

a better question is why is a shitcoin that is fully centralized and is riddled with lots of bugs and is called ethereum is still alive if not for the pump and dumps they keep doing.

otherwise a currency such as bitcoin that is used by lots of people to buy lots of things every day is very undervalued at $12k price. literary millions of dollars worth of merchandise is being purchased using bitcoin every day.

you are forcing it!
it makes no sense since a miner is already getting paid in bitcoin for the work they do. why would they also buy bitcoin? if they wanted to make a bigger investment they would buy more ASICs and mine more bitcoin.

it was mostly FUD rather than anybody being worried. it happened during last halving too. besides the hashrate drop was not even significant.

well when you talk about how this is a good time for investment and then also talk about how this is the time hashrate hit the ATH that seems to be the only logical conclusion.

definitely. there are all signs of the bull market starting and there is a good momentum which means it is a good time for invetment.
although better time was when price was below $10k and everyone else were crying about it and were waiting for dumps to $1k and stupid things like that

like always he sees a hype and uses it to advertise his business and make money.
as for the traffic, i would only believe it if i saw it with my own eyes. not to mention that even if it were true such traffic increase had nothing to do with bitcoin. it is all about the huge number of shitcoins they have listed on their platform which are now being dumped as investors pull out to come back to bitcoin that is increasing in value.

you can't predict price or make investment decisions based on bitcoin mining hashrate at all because hashrate changes after the price moved and since it has been rising for a while now breaking $10k first then $11k and now $12k consequently the hashrate had to follow that too.

it is neither good news nor bad, it is how things have been forever. not to mention that there are a large number of other reasons that are affecting hashrate for example a couple of countries that have very low electricity cost have entered the mining scene with huge mining farms over the past couple of months.

some shittoken that is abusing bitcoin name is not even known let alone be popular!!!

using secret sharing in place of encryption is crazy in my opinion. you are basically reducing the security of your key by 50% when you split it into two parts and that is a huge security reduction.
you also don't know what flaws the secret sharing algorithm may have or how optimized it could get in the future to recover such keys that also have 50% less security.

yeah, i have the same conclusion specially since these days i have been searching for a decentralized exchange and i feel like they too suffer from the same chicken and egg problem. people want higher liquidity and better features in DEX so they don't use them but they can only improve if people use these DEXes!

gambling is a good analogy to indicate the chance based nature of the mining but "guess" is not the best word to use here because it entails "randomly selecting something" whereas the reality is that nothing is chosen randomly. instead mining is more like brute forcing where you start from 0 and go up to the max value repeat (after changing something else) until you find the correct result.

i believe LN is not yet that popular because of 2 things, first it doesn't seem to be fully complete and there aren't any major businesses such as exchanges that use it so there isn't that much use case for it.
but with all that, LN is still used quite a lot. the network of LN nodes and the amount that has been trasferred in and out of the channels has been high.

as for SegWit the adoption seems to have capped for some time again because some big businesses are still resisting implementation of SegWit in their wallets. like some exchanges that are still creating legacy addresses, gambling sites that do the same, etc.

although i call LN adoption low but SegWit adoption is nowhere near low.

there are still about 4 months left till the end of this year and the bull market has started with a small momentum and slow rises so the chances of reaching the previous ATH are there but they are small at this point since as i said the momentum is still a small one and it needs to grow more to be able to battle all the sales that take place the closer to ATH we get.

to be honest this seems more similar to an ICO scam rather than a legitimate exchange where people go to trade. if there were no KYC requirement then things wouldn't have been that bad, you could easily go there, get the free money (even if it couldn't be withdrawn) and try their platform. but with all the addendums starting with KYC and buying their token,... i personally wouldn't go near them.

thanks for the excellent list, i have to bookmark it for now and go through each project.
about Bisq, i have already downloaded the installer  and went through the documentation. i have to say it looks like a solid project and i liked it so far. i'll probably use that for trading bitcoin with fiat and look into atomic swaps for altcoin with bitcoin trades.

i want both actually. but mainly i am trying different methods to find what i like best. so far i have always used centralized exchanges and i am sick and tired of their nonsense.

maybe the expectations were wrong. even before the rise or during the hype i never thought $15k is the next target. i said in multiple occasions that $13k can be reached right after $10k is broken and we reached $12100 which is still close.
then it is obvious that market will correct and then rest a little before rising back up again.

i say bitcoin is rising with the realistic expectation so far.

it is all about the stupid US supremacy that Trump thinks can only be achieved by greasing the pole behind you and his whole foreign policy is based on that.
the only "threat" these companies pose is that they have taken the market from their exact US copies.

with that logic companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and lots of other US based companies should be shut down because they pose a similar national security and capture much vaster swaths of information from their users. not to mention the NSA should be shut down too!

bitcoin can easily replace severely flawed payment systems such as Paypal, there is even hints in the paper (charge back scam done in Paypal) about the flaws in these systems that bitcoin solves, specifically for merchants that gain an extreme level of security and protection compared to other options.
so obviously they are scared of it and don't want to see bitcoin adoption grow too fast. but when it is growing whether they want it or not, they would like to get some money out of this which is why i think they will charge bigger fees to let people trade cryptocurrencies.

i don't think we can categorize ASIC boost as using an "exploit" since it is not harmful and from the numbers i saw the effectiveness gain wasn't as high as the reports circulating the social media.

this is not the first time scammers try to bribe others to advertise their shitcoin and practically help them scam others, like all those ICO signature campaigns that ran on bitcointalk for a long time and come back from time to time.
but it is rarely to someone so reputable and with integrity like A.A.! they must be so stupid and desperate to do this.

i believe this recent movement has nothing to do with the economy. instead it was simply because $12k was the next big price resistance. it was either that or $13k which happened to stop at $12k.
if i recall correctly last time we were exactly here before the struggle began and then the pandemic broke out and put extra weight in the sell part and caused the drop.
so now that we are back in the same place, the sam resistance is starting to show itself.

you can't have both with BIP-32 design because it is defined in a way that you either can compute pubkeys from xpub and that means revealing a single child private key reveals xprv or you can not derive pubkeys from xpub which means revealing child private key doesn't reveal xprv.

what if this collector node sent the hash of the message to the node and that node signed the message itself?

you see in ECDSA when you want to create a signature from an arbitrary length message you don't sign the message itself, instead you use a hash algorithm (double SHA256 in bitcoin) then use that result in the signing formula.
so the collector node could hash the message itself (the first step of signing) then send that hash to the node that has the private key locally and can sign it then send the signature back to the collector node.
since hash is a one-way function the receiving node can not know what the message was.

12345 is a non-hardened key (anything below 0x800000, or paths that don't have the hardened indicator like 12345') so now that you also have your master key available alongside a child as achow101 pointed out your master private key can be easily calculated.

when you give your "private" key to someone then it is no longer "on your behalf" because they have full control over that key.

you can use a hardened path which would be 12345' then it is not possible to compute the xprv but it still is very flawed design to send someone the private key.

what purpose does this signed message server? maybe there is a better way to achieve the same thing.