that is a wrong definition and in my opinion it is what the newbies think. which is why we have so many weak hands who bag hold and then panic sell.

HODL means making a wise investment decision and putting your money in something you think has a long term potential and then not worrying about its short term fluctuations. additionally you enter during the time where price is in a dip so that you are guaranteed to see profit.
this means buying bitcoin this year and not even thinking about the times where price came down. if you did that, then even with the drops you still are in more than 100% profit!

specially because of this case, you can have solid proof that Hal Finney is NOT Satoshi Nakamoto. because it would be the weirdest thing to do at a time where there were others he could have send the bitcoin to if he were Satoshi and send it to himself!
when you want to show how the system works and get others involved you want to send coins to "OTHERS".

it is the same exact process with only one difference the "script" part. you have to build a P2W{X}H script where {X} is pubkey or script.
if your bech32 address is a P2WPKH equivalent address then your  script is going to be this:
where hash is the result of RIPEMD160(SHA256(pubkey))

and if your bech32 address is a P2WSH then your script is:
where hash is the SHA256(script)

now that you have your script, hash it using SHA256 just like the example in docs, reverse it and send that to server. i believe this should work.

there is also a fair amount of technical knowledge required to use a hardware wallet correctly. for example the user could simply have one of the most common malwares called "clipboard hijacker" that simply changes the address he copies, in which case it doesn't matter if he uses hardware wallet, he still is going to lose money.
or he could be using a malicious software to communicate with the hardware wallet, like a malicious electrum that shows one thing in GUI but signs something else and sends bitcoins to the attackers wallet as soon as user confirms it. to mitigate that he has to know PGP and verify signature,...

"technical knowledge" is always needed and there is always a lot of ways that naive users could lose funds no matter what type of wallet they use. these were just some examples off the top of my head.

it depends on your definition of popularity!
for example Tether is already very popular if you believe the daily trading volume of it and define popularity by how much people are using it. or for example Libra is something that has a big name (Facebook) behind it and it automatically is being advertised and is ahead in popularity.

but it is important to know that you can not compare things that are not in the same category! for example all these centralized coins should be compared with banks, paypal,... not with bitcoin.

it is probably because they are SELLING an alternative to paper wallets and if they tell people that you can store your bitcoins in a paper wallet in a way that could be just as safe as their product, nobody would buy it anymore!

the fact is, if you create the paper wallet correctly (offline and encrypted) then it is a lot more secure than a hardware wallet since the hardware wallet can still contain bugs that could be exploited whereas to break the encryption of your paper wallet they have to break something like AES256

the only bizarre thing that i see here is your being about 1 week late to talk about the "crash" that has already happened and ended and we are already in the recovery mode.
not to mention that there are dozens of topics already talking about the crash starting when it actually happened.

this is not a question that you can ever answer without actually computing all hashes and count the collisions to see how evenly they are distributed. because of pseudo-randomness of the result you may get more collisions on one value and less on another and so on.

since 2^256 is too big you can test it with a smaller value. for example i tested with 2^16 and 2^8 or in other words take 2 bytes and hash them to and put it inside 1 byte (truncate the hash digest). it is not the same as using the whole space but it should give you the idea. here is a couple of collisions:
0x00 is repeated 231 times
0x01 is repeated 261 times
0x02 is repeated 248 times
0x03 is repeated 267 times
0x04 is repeated 243 times
...
as the space becomes bigger (<2^256 to 2^80) these collisions distribute more evenly so the numbers should become closer but there still is no guarantee for them to be equal.

so the only answer you can come up with is that there is a chance that when you convert each private keys to address using the 160 bit hash you get an uneven distribution.

at this day and age you have to be seriously blind not to see the big potential that something like bitcoin has. it is innovative, one of a kind and it is offering something new and well needed which is a decentralized payment system that we had the need for many years.
with that said everyone should buy at least a small amount of bitcoin while we are still in adoption stage. even if it is $20 worth of it, it is still a good idea to get in at the ground floor.

it is not a good idea because letting low rank accounts like newbies that anybody can create increases the chances of the vote result being manipulated.
if you want to create a poll that anybody can participate in then you can use sites that let you create such things and include the link in the topic.

funny thing about stable coins is that they are created mainly for exchanges convenience not the users! it may sound odd but if you think about it the only one that is benefitting here is exchanges.
if a trader is presented with two options, fiat and an stable coin and if both have the same options (same fee, volume, price and KYC requirement) they will never choose the stable coin over fiat!
so why do exchanges don't add fiat markets? it is simply because they don't want the risk of using a bank (the bank may close their account, block their funds,...) and want to have more flexibility when it comes to KYC. so they are benefiting from this not users.

whenever bitcoin price is dropping, everyone says it is manipulation but at the same time they don't believe it themselves which is why they panic sell instead of happily buying at that discount they are getting out of pure luck.
there probably are people who see past the manipulation, like OP maybe, but when we look at the market we can see that panic sellers at this point are dominating in numbers and they don't want to see past the manipulation until it is too late and price has recovered.

cryptocurrencies are just currencies and like any other form of money they only can be used as a medium of exchange so the world can't run on them. all we can hope for is more adoption so that you can see it accepted in enough places so that you can have the choice to freely spend your bitcoin anywhere you go. this would specifically be beneficial for when you travel like for tourism to another country. in that case you won't have to exchange your money to their local currency, you simply use bitcoin aka the global currency.

exactly! people usually don't hear about it unless some drama starts (mostly involving price) and hear about it in news sites. otherwise big transfers aren't as rare as some people may think.
you can always use a block explorer like blockchair.com that allows you to sort transactions based on value to see all the gigantic transfers!

the fees nowadays are low so it shouldn't take that long to confirm and most 1 satoshi/byte transactions are being confirmed in the next block (so right away). and most of these big transfers are from big services consolidating inputs so they don't care about how long it could take.

the moment people stop worrying about earning merit and just post normally is the moment they start actually earning merit.
=> 1 easy step: don't worry too much about it!

one of the problems with these other stable coins is their lack of liquidity and sometimes adoption by exchanges. since one of the usages of the stable coins is for moving funds between exchanges, using Tether is the only option in most cases since the other exchange may not even have anything else. so eventually everyone sticks with the shady option.

with that logic orderbook data is also equally untrustworthy since exchanges can easily fake that too. you can check out Yobit exchange for a live manipulation of literary everything. their orderbooks are also filled with orders that you can never fill even if you succeed in reaching them!

the thing is when it comes to analysis, you should use all these data together and also analyze the changes. then in the end know that your analysis is only a guideline to the most possible outcome not a prediction of future.

you can't test what achow said by "broadcasting" the transaction because when you broadcast it, your transaction is subjected to standard rules and as he explained this is a non-standard tx and will be rejected.

to test whether it was right or not, you have to "mine" the transaction and see if the block that contains the tx is rejected or not.
you can probably do it in testnet or regtest.

there were at least a dozen other exchanges before coinbase. in fact Coinbase didn't even exist back in 2010, it was created 2 years later in 2012.
by the way the first bitcoin exchange was called bitcoinmarket.com which is no longer around.


it wasn't expensive since back then 10k bitcoin was worth around the same value as Pizzas. it is like saying 0.002BTC is too expensive today because bitcoin will some day be worth $1 million.

it actually is more like a mountain climber that people cheer on as long as it is climbing the mountain but as soon as he stops to catch his breath everyone starts posting obituaries about how he died under an avalanche...