apart from the obvious reason of people being stuck at home and having a lot of time at hand, the other reason is that bitcoin is performing well despite the drop that we had weeks ago. other markets are still struggling and dumping, some of them hard, but bitcoin had the drop weeks ago and has been rising ever since. we are even up nearly 80% from the bottom of the price that was reached. that is 80% pure profit for anyone who entered there considering these days there isn't any market to make profit from.

then what in the world are you doing on a bitcoin forum every damn day?
you should spend your time kissing the butt cheeks of Federal Reserve so that they let you use your money by paying them a lot of money to do so.

that doesn't sound right to me at all. according to any sources that i have ever read, OP_IFs can not exist without the closing argument (OP_ENDIF) and although i am not the best at reading core's source but it also confirms that.

every IF pushes a bool value in a vector (vfExec) that OP_ENDIF removes. that means if we have an OP_IF whether it has true or false it will put an item in that vector.
then the last line of evaluation when everything is done and over, will check if that vector is empty and if it weren't it means OP_ENDIF didn't run and fails the script evaluation:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/2b9a4a13324ac3f0adf712d01fb8f2ba914cdc8f/src/script/interpreter.cpp#L1144-L1145

usually whenever there is a very big drop like we had recently there are a lot of people who sell their bitcoins way too late at nearly the maximum possible loss percentage.
these large number of investors also usually don't buy back when the reversal starts. instead they hesitate a lot which is why we saw an initial jump back up and then the uncertainty phase (right now) where nobody buys and instead waits for a miracle to buy back near where they sold at a loss.

in my experience these trends always end up with a massive FOMO!

as far as i can tell from the source code, whenever any of these "ifs" are executed they must end with an OP_ENDIF otherwise the script evaluation will fail hence these output scripts can not be spent with existing consensus rules.

i don't think that is true. even if it were then the part that may have entered bitcoin is a tiny fraction of the whole thing. there is still a lot of people who don't know about bitcoin or don't believe in it due to hearing a ton of FUD every day.

every couple of weeks someone writes up some weak ass arguments such as this one on their website and then publish it on bitcointalk for traffic. the fact is that the number of addresses that hold X amount of bitcoin has been going up and down but remaining on a same path as always. obviously in that past week that bitcoin was being sold at a huge discount of 50% off a lot of people have been buying bitcoin so there is now a lot of accumulators who have finally reached one of their targets: 1 whole BTC.

to be clear the question is not about what we do with them but just about finding them.

since it was mentioned. another problem with pruning such outputs (apart from breaking immutability is that sometimes forks could change the way scripts work and make an unspendable script spendable or vise versa. for example take this output:
this was a perfectly valid script at the time it was spent but it is invalid today.

every node keeps a database of the chain's state that contains the transaction outputs that are not yet spent. but among these outputs there are some that can not be spent unless a fork changes the script rules.
i am wondering whether anyone has ever looked into this to see what percentage of them are unspendable. i am guessing it shouldn't be that high due to standard rules.

edit: here are two examples to understand what i'm talking about:
txid:outindex
result of HASH160 is 20 bytes and it will never be an "empty byte" or OP_0 so this script must always fail.

there is no OP_ENDIF anywhere after OP_IF

i don't think the recent drop could be explained or analyzed by any kind of technical analysis which is why your "desceneding channel" although may seem reasonable doesn't make sense to me.
i believe TA without any kind of logical explanation is just lines on a picture and there is no logical explanation for the sharp drop from the $10k mark down to $3.8k in such a short period of time.

can be expect a bigger push up? right now it looks like we are back to 1-1.5 month ago at the beginning of the push up from $7k.

that is simply not possible without having 90% of the hashrate and the cost of such gigantic hashpower is ridiculously high even if divided among a small group of mining farms. besides even if one pool had that much hasr power it still wouldn't force the 10% to leave because that 10% can still mine 10% of the blocks no matter what. unless that 90% starts performing 51% attacks in which case we will switch to another mining algorithm to brick their billion dollar investment.

the thing about pools is that you may not notice it but their seemingly big hashrate comes from a very large number of miners connecting to them. which means if a pool starts being a little shady, they will all leave.

OP you should focus on explaining "why would anyone choose this method instead of any other existing method of advertising" and include the problems this would solve and the complications it adds. right now you are only focusing on "how".
to me it looks like an unnessary complication, if i want someone to display my ads on their website i pay them normally. i don't see what a smart contract would solve.

first of all bitcoin has been around for 11 years and you can't just pick some arbitrary time in the past (6.6 year ago?) and call that "first price".

secondly your conclusion will come true (a big rise coming) but the reasoning you used is completely wrong because you can't say "just because something performed in a certain way in the past it should perform the same way in the future too".
if that were true, every shitcoin that had gotten pumped once should continue pumping every year instead of dying slowly and disappearing after a while.

a fake investment is when you are investing in something useless. it is like if you were investing in bags of dog shit and kept buying more of it. since it is useless, it is a fake investment. similarly investing in altcoins that are useless fall under the same definition.

but when what you buy has utilities such as bitcoin (a decentralized payment system) then the investment is meaningful.

you argument can NOT be about whether bitcoin is fake investment or polluting environment. your arguments MUST be about why you think bitcoin is useless when it is clearly providing hundreds of thousands of people all around the world a great and unique utility?

the problem is that nobody knows that much about coronavirus yet. all these values are for all previous cases. for instance for Flu virus they say 3-4 distance meters is where the virus can travel when someone sneezes. but for this new virus the distance is unknown, some say it is 8-9 meters as it can travel through air.

i personally tend to increase my investment in bitcoin as much as i can and sometimes end up not diversifying as much as i would love to. but it will come down to your level of risk taking and how much headache you want to experience since diversification comes with a lot of work.
since we are in a big dip right now and i truly believe in the future of bitcoin and its outperformance in near future i would buy more bitcoin now.

you need to first explain how you think you can achieve any of the things you listed here in a "decentralized" way as you claim. as others mentioned, it is not possible to not be centralized when doing any of them. so if you have some solution that you think is helping you achieve that then start discussing about that instead of being vague.

i don't really see any "major boosts" to have been seen in bitcoin. we only saw a very tiny rise to get back a small part of the price that was lost due to panic sells. the major boosts we come later when the panic sellers turn into panic buyers and create a big FOMO and shoot the price up to the moon.

as for the situation in USA, it is still filled with a lot of panic and ignorance and i don't expect to see any change soon. but in the long run we can be sure that all the dollar printings and the inflation is going to be very positive for bitcoin as it has always been.

right now is the time for the whales to accumulate bitcoin and for the panic seller newbies to continue losing money to their own irrational fears. otherwise bitcoin doesn't have a come back because it never went anywhere. it has been going strong with the adoption growing every moment.
remember that you shouldn't confuse price with real value and the comebacks. price is mainly affected by manipulation while the value increases.

Since the year of the gold thing is not the same and the date has nothing specific about it, i say it is most probably just a random date that Satoshi chose to sign up on P2P Foundation site. it is probably something far away from his actual birth date to increase the anonymity that he was seeking.
in any case Satoshi's birthday to me is the same day that genesis block was released which is 03/Jan/2009.

ps. you shouldn't put the name of Craig Scammer Wright in the same page as Satoshi...