Yeah, please do. There are enough of us who can't wait to accummulate more.

Let's remember where it all started from and where we are right now: 14 days to flatten the curve turned into get n vaccines and still isolate yourself/get infected. I personally think that at this point it's all about choosing between risking side effects of vaccines and risking to catch the virus anyway and having its side effects instead. But as I said multiple times, one is a choice while the other is a probability.

The worst part is the Green Pass thing, which clearly discriminates people and is clearly a communist strategy they're easily applying all around the world under the excuse of protecting us. It's the exact same thing they're doing with Bitcoin, Monero and terrorism/crimes. They're using these excuses to try controlling Bitcoin and us. Just think about the rules and laws they've been adding in the past two years. Remember they tried to break Bitcoin LN and Monero.

They want to add backdoors in everything? China already has them. They want to analyze every European citizen's messages ever to determine whether they should be flagged as criminals or not and revoke our right to privacy? China already does that. The world's governments coming up with regulations through which its citizens get denied access to certain services if using crypto the non-surveillance way? China pretty much has a citizen social scoring system that's eerily close to that.. Remember China was the first AFAIK who came up with those "passes" needed for entry in public transport vehicles, restaurants, shops etc. Europe is doing that now.

All the stuff above is happening under two kinds of escuses: terrorism/crime and "our protection". But through them, we're getting very close to how China treats their citizens. I think it's quite clear "protecting us" is not their intention anymore (if it ever even was) and they're seeking completely different goals instead. By the time we'll all accept green passes and whatever else they're willing to be shoving up our arses, there'll be no more going back to what we previously had.

SegWit didn't really fix Bitcoin, it's still struggling to cope with the large amounts of transactions years later and this means even the SW upgrade wasn't enough to fix its scalability problems. Bitcoin definitely still has some issues either a proper solution hasn't been found yet for or BTC supporters are way too strict about upgrades to accept the idea that a change could be more beneficial for its future.

It is FUD because you can't compare centralized to decentralized first of all. Centralization requires only a central entity as the main power, while Bitcoin requires everyone to contribute if they want to earn and keep the system up and running while also decentralizing it more and making it more secure at the same time. Comparing decentralized Bitcoin power consumption with what banks consume is useless because if banks were decentralized and each bank had to store their own ledger from zero and each philiale had to verify each and every detail themselves, they'd have to use way more electricity.

This is as useless as comparing BTC power consumption vs how much power is used to mine gold.. we're all going more and more digital generally, like imagine how much consumption has been lately added in the past few years only by "smart scales", " smart watches" etc which are practically useless vs Bitcoin which truly brings something new, innovative and.. ultimately useful!

Honestly, design is the last thing you should be looking for when it comes to HWs if you truly care about safely storing your coins. Some HWs are really ugly but they do their job better than some fancy ones do. And at the end of the day, it's all that matters.

Any of them are good, but I'd go for Trezor if I were you. Best thing you can do is make sure you check that the HW you buy supports the coins you're about to use it with. For example, Trezor One doesn't support XMR while Ledger Nano S does.

Also, it'd be a good idea to make sure you're ordering these on a fake name, through a PO box or something like that. Ledger had a quite bad database leak recently and personal information has been revealed to potentially bad actors.. so protect your personal info before ordering it.

If you care about the hardware being fully auditable and open-source, go for Trezor.

There's a saying going around: "if you've been given something for free, you're likely the product". Cheap phones aren't that cheap for nothing, I remember even Amazon had some very very cheap smartphone that was only cheap due to the ads it had everythere throughout its system. We're still so far away from creating privacy-focused mobile phones, and we're still so far away from having people care for real about their privacy.. Unfortunately, not even Bitcoin will make people care more. At least not enough people, because most are in just for the gains..

They'll probably conduct some kind of policy that'll make people get away from Bitcoin. The UK already has a very draconic crypto law and worse is possible to happen at any time. Just make it a pain in the ass to calculate your taxes and to declare your gains/losses and enough will sit on the side rather than joining the game.

As o_e_l_e_o said, they're afraid of us because no matter who was the guy/team who released BTC, since its existence the world finally has one way of going off-grid without an authority checking up on you. No matter who you are and what you've done, you ain't discriminated.

Even if you see someone putting up some products for sale in BTC prices without any sign of fiat value, they still priced their products based on something, and it's most likely the USD equivalent of that product's average market price. It's like bullion websites updating their prices every 5 min based on the moving spot gold/silver rate. Without fiat at all, Bitcoin would be what fiat is today. And it doesn't seem very hard to find out how much 1 USD is worth

They'll move towards privacy as soon as people start realizing it's more important than the value gains of BTC investments. We're missing privacy and things will start looking bad when govs will want to deeply analyze blockchains and find out who did what and for what reason. At that point, most users will seek a way out.

That's funny, lol. a government who puts backdoors and Big Brother-kind of surveillance everywhere protecting us from backdoors. Sounds more like a war over surveillance & control rather than a "protection". Backdoors currently exist in most of the devices and/or hardware components we purchase today. Best thing the gov can do is just try to block the Chinese backdoors from spreading like wildfire because they'd then lose the surveillance coverage. Other than that, fuck them.. they're all in for control themselves!

Dust is what remains in your personal wallet if you had say 1 BTC and spent 0.99999521 of it, which leaves you with a practically useless amount of 0.00000479 BTC called "dust". What remains on exchanges isn't really the dust we usually talk about on the forum, because trading happens off-chain. So when you "leave dust" on an exchange, it's only "dust" on the exchange, not on the blockhain itself.

It's sadly the path the crypto world seems to be following though. Bitcoin might become one of the few, if not the only, blockchains that don't follow this trend. Centralization of blockchains like ETH is going to happen and people won't care about how centralized it is but will instead care much more about how fast/cheap it is to transact with it and how much price could increase because of this..

Personal opinion: let's keep stuff simple. There are already dozens of thousands of coins out there and it's already confusing for so many people. By adding a new symbol to Bitcoin, we're gonna make things even more difficult and confusing..

I think we should simply use the word itself and "sats" as the short form of the word, but no different symbol. We need to make things simpler than they already are, not harder!

I wouldn't bet on it. People like Wright would pay a ton of money for access to those privkeys. Imagine a bad actor gets their hand onto this address and offers access to it to Wright and other Faketoshis for a few million bucks. It's no "strong" evidence of anything. Satoshi remains a piece of history and at the same time a mystery. Whoever claims to be Satoshi today has other kind of interests that are non-Bitcoin development related. If Satoshi was to create something better than Bitcoin or point out flaws, I'd imagine he'd do it the same way he initiated BTC..

Not only lately. It's been an issue for a long time, people have lost dozens or even hundreds of millions because of them. It's mind blowing how a "SIM swap" can happen simply over a phone call..

I think even the proof that one is/was the owner of those private keys is not enough anymore. The more time passes, the higher the chances are for someone's privkey to collide with an already used one. While this is not a very likely scenario and the chances of colliding specifically with the genesis/Satoshi's privkeys are about zero, it's not practically impossible especially as tech evolves.. So if someone "finds out" 50 years from now who owned those private keys, chances are this is just a random coincidence and collision that proves nothing.

No. Any such company would get absolutely destroyed by governments, corporations and so on. The only project like this that might succeed would be only possible to exist once we have enough components and open-source firmware/software to create them ourselves, something like Trezor, but we're still a little far away from that point. Governments are looking forward to enforcing backdoors in everything and we're wondering about fully FOSS hardware? Hell no, unless you create it in your own garage or some random guy from BitcoinTalk builds such things from scratch and sells them to us.

Not sure if we can do something about this situation in combination with Blockchain. But I have zero hopes for a REAL privacy-focused device.

Between cash, gold, Bitcoin and Monero I think the first two are always going to be their currency of choice due to their physical existence. No matter how private one blockchain or another is, there is always the risk that the chain will be analyzed and privacy will dissolve through some flaws nobody has any idea about yet. I think it's time to finally understand that Bitcoin/Monero/cryptos in general aren't equal to terrorism or financial crimes.

Bitcoin's transparency is great in this case where bad actors are being revealed and tracked down, but the worst part is that if someone who tries to hide their tracks can be tracked down then almost any of us can be as well.

Satoshi would have had his life destroyed today even if he would've been discovered 7 years ago. Governments HATE him, and if they were Satoshi themselves, releasing Bitcoin to the public is probably their biggest regret ever.. next to the release of internet to the citizens.

It would indeed be a very bad idea to identify him. Moreover, we would have no benefits anyway. Satoshi has no more influence over Bitcoin or over us, except over those who consider him their idol. Besides destroying his life, there is nothing to be "gained".