Salutare! Te intereseaza sa vinzi pentru RON sau pentru alte monede?

I wrote my statement assuming nothing about OP besides being a crypto newbie as he said himself. Even if you are familiar with computer hardware, from that to entering the world of mining is a long way to go.

Purchasing hardware and plugging it in isn't something I'd recommend, if I'm being honest. You can't just purchase a random GPU off Craigslist and plug it into your PC hoping to make money. That's not how it works. You have to calculate whether the investment is worth it. You have to know that once in a while, you'll have to replenish your mining rigs or add more power to them. That means you might lose more money in the long run by investing in mining rigs, which is honestly useless if you're only seeking profit. You need more space, some knowledge about mining and components, math, making sure the room doesn't get overheated etc.

Well, if as a newbie you put all your life savings into a new coin then no offense but you pretty much should stay away from crypto at all until you get to know more about it. Someone who has some knowledge about hardware components has to be quite silly to put their money in something unknown or too new. It's mostly common sense.. When you hear about crypto, you hear about Bitcoin. That's what everyone should start off with imo. As long as you get how BTC works, you can go on and keep researching to expand your knowledge range.

Short term or not, investing is as simple as finding a local ATM, scanning a QR code and entering some banknotes in the machine. At least investing gives you the opportunity to invest for the short term too - mining doesn't. I think there is nothing easier than purchasing a coin and waiting..

I disagree. Mining is a way more complicated process than investing is. Mining isn't as simple as purchasing equipment and launching a software. Sometimes you don't even get to earn a profit from mining, especially as a new miner.

I've tried both, and it depends on what your beliefs are. For example, to some people it's worth it to mine since it's one of the best ways to earn coins with high privacy. It also helps the security of the blockchain. But for me, it's too much of a hassle and even if I earn BTC through mining, at one point the government might wonder why the hell my electricity bill suddenly went up multiple times.

Investing =/= trading. You can invest without trading. You could simply purchase and hold.. and I think it's much, much easier for a newbie than starting to mine.

The more institutional investors join, the more likely it'll be that a path between stocks and commodities will be chosen. I suppose institutional investors will use BTC as a replacement of physical gold, since it can be yours, under your own custody with a paper as a minimum requirement to hold it all - even billions.

I don't think there is any way to escape this. The closest thing is altcoins - but since they usually mostly follow BTC, anything BTC will be connected to directly affects alts as well and indirectly connects them to the stock market too.

Do they help if the RPi is in a constant bottleneck though? There was a time when portable RPi Zero full nodes were being sold around, and these certainly don't meet the requirements for running a full node and incoming connections might only make things worse. The lowest possible version of it that could handle full nodes decently are probably from RPi 3 and up; otherwise, it's all just a struggle for both the RPi owner and those connecting to it

I don't think anyone is fond of the idea of losing their money. You still paid basically for the amounts you've received: paid with time for signatures and paid electricity for mining. The idea is, as long as you spend your time and resources to accumulate coins, you should have already acknowledged and agreed that all of that money is and investment and you are at a risk of loss. If you can't accept the risk of loss, then the best thing you can do is get a job since that's the only method of earning a buck posing the least risks.

If you think the prices are going to dump even further for now, then either sell everything and wait for the dump or keep purchasing as the dump happens. I would personally choose the second variant, since selling everything is imo a bigger risk: what if it goes back up and I have zero coins left?.

But again, just follow your gut feelings and keep reading. Create your own view, your own opinion and follow it. The more you read, the better and closer to the truth your gut feelings will be. Going emotional during dumps (or pumps) has devastating results most of the time.

I have a low-to-mid range gaming laptop from ~2012 and I wanted to use it as a full node for my BTC activity. I thought old PCs were not going to be an issue in holding full nodes on them, but I recently gave up the idea.

Having to wait 2-3 weeks for the blockchain to fully sync is annoying, so is having to catch up with the latest blocks. I usually have to leave my laptop running overnight to catch up with all blocks if the laptop has been turned off for a few days.

The fact that you cannot simply take an older PC to use it with your Bitcoin activity (or a RPi) sucks tbh. Unless nodes become more portable and require less computing power and storage space, full nodes will slowly become less and less affordable for the average person.

When you get your first BTC, if you're in it for the tech, you're likely going to look for the safest way to store it.. but if the safest one is too expensive or takes awfully long, you're going to rather use an SPV wallet or a custodial one. The problem is that I'm not very sure that HDDs and SSDs will become cheaper fast enough. If the block size gets to 500-750GB before 1TB storage components become as cheap as 500GB ones are today, then running full nodes will become less and less affordable so it'll still be the richer who'll afford it..

They're now attracted by Bitcoin as much as flies are by poop. They can't defeat us, so they just have to join us all.

In the past few years at least, Google has shown us how much they despise us. They've intentionally allowed scams on their platforms so that people are deceived and scammed by crypto. They've made various statements and bans against cryptocurrencies and censored us from speaking out loud.

Unless this is a smart trap coming from them, the fact that they've started to add crypto-related info on their own platforms speaks out loud by itself. They've been defeated, so all they can do left is try to grab as much attention and money as possible from potential crypto-interested customers of theirs..

Hard fork cel mai probabil, prin care algoritmii si implicit echipamentele folosite de mineri sa fie invalidate. Spre exemplu, Monero a adaugat posibilitatea ca inclusiv CPU-urile sa fie folosite in scopul minarii. Si Bitcoin dadea voie initial ca acestea sa fie folosite in scopul minatului.. Chiar asa spunea Satoshi: 1 CPU = 1 vot.

Cam toti minerii in ziua de azi folosesc echipamente ASIC din ce stiu. Daca cineva ar reusi sa acumuleze 51% sau mai mult si ar incerca sa atace reteaua, am trece probabil printr-un hard fork care ar elimina ASIC-urile din mining. Ar insemna ca aproape toti minerii sa nu mai poata minaz insa este un sacrificiu in numele decentralizarii si libertatii.

Worst thing you can do is take a choice based on the "predictions" coming from complete strangers off the Internet.

You can right now take this three ways:
 1. The market is about to dump brutally. Possibly for a short timespan, or maybe for a longer one. Maybe a 2015 kind of crash. Best action to take here? Dump everything and wait for a better opportunity to purchase.
 2. The market will recover and pump back upwards in a short time. Best action to take? Purchase now..
 3. Whatever happens, you can take advantage of this dump to lower down your average purchase price.

Is the money you've invested.. money you can afford to lose? If so (and it should be, if you want your investments not to ruin your life, then it might be best to follow your gut feeling rather than following a stranger's prediction.

Crypto markets are known for brutal price drops every now and then. The more years you stay & play in the markets, the more used you get to it. Yeah, dumps happen. But how much were all those coins an year ago (or 2, or 3) and how much are they today? Most people who purchase during these dumps and hodl for the next few years get to earn a good profit, although you have to resist not to be a weak hand during all this time.

I know the feeling a less experienced crypto user gets when markets go wild and then parabolically drop. I have an honest feeling that BTC and a few other coins are here to stay (ETH included; although I don't support it, I think there are many, many others who do), so I'll act based on this feeling of certainty. Don't let emotions control you. That's the worst thing you can do

This came through my mind so many times before, yet all I could think of was the factors you've mentioned. Besides the growing number of full nodes (which is probably going to keep lowering down in years until storage goes cheaper due to the quickly increasing blockchain size), hashrate etc.. do we have anything else that makes it more decentralized?

Something we may not be thinking about is development and products that could help with the decentralization. For example, doesn't goTenna help with it by taking the Bitcoin network into a mesh network rather than an internet service provided data? Does that count? To me, I think it does..

On the other hand though, we have exchanges and custodial wallets (or wallets that aren't even truly wallets such as PayPal or Revolut) that will likely have a growing mass of customers coming in and preferring custodial wallets over non-custodial ones for convenience. Doesn't that basically decrease decentralization since we put our trust into a single entity?

Bitcoin Core development-wise, I'm not sure we've truly had any improvement in the past few years at least. I think we've reached the current peak of decentralization as we know it, considering the current technology and knowledge we and experts have. The best thing we can do next is probably just moving on and trying to go even more off-grid by taking BTC off the centralized internet.

It's still up more than 4x since 2020. Even if it does drop at one point, it's still gonna be hard to go back to $10k and under again.

I do agree that some celebrities had a role in the latest pump, but while in the short term the price will probably be negatively affected, over the short term they bring in new waves of users. Bitcoin has proven all the skeptics wrong over time, and I suppose it will continue to. Bookmark this and check the price again within 5 years, because it's likely gonna be quite high..

Mixers are pretty much considered coin tainters by the authorities, so are decentralized txs. But usually, when they find out you've mixed or tried to obfuscate the history of a coin, they go all out on you.

All methods have weak points. Face to face is good since you don't really leave much information about you, your partner or your transaction - but on the other hand, you risk being scammed or robbed. Trading through p2p exchanges is good since you cannot be physically attacked or robbed, but on the other hand it's risky to get that much cash into your bank since you are going to likely be interrogated about the sum/source of funds. If you want to trade without compromising privacy, you will always have a quite strong weak point to be afraid of (if that makes sense). Privacy has a cost, and these are the ones you have to go accept for p2p txs.

There is also cash by mail - but I'm not sure how that would work when you have 1.5/10 of a million to send?

Well, maybe it was just Craig's lawyers getting sick of him and willing to screw him all over. Has any of Craig's moves been rational..? All he's ever done was only redeem his stupidity over and over.

Say his action succeeds and he legally gets to basically enforce a change in Bitcoin Core. Don't the rest of us just all fork off the chain, redeeming his coins worthless? Even if something happens to any of us, he forgets that we're in a decentralized environment where every attempt of manipulation and control can be forked off into a worthless garbage blockchain.

I think it's wrong to say that Bitcoin generates electricity. The Bitcoin mining process uses electricity, and any renewable source of electricity miners use is mostly strictly used for the mining. So BTC consumes electricity, but as o_e_l_e_o pointed out, a significant part of miners use renewable sources.

As for the mining part, it's going to be extremely hard to change the algorithm that has been only used and strengthened ever since Bitcoin started to exist. The core functions and principles of Bitcoin are the hardest to change at the moment, especially when Bitcoin's decentralization and security is in a better spot than ever before. Even if a better algorithm is found, it needs testing and so we would probably need an altcoin as a long-term testing ground.

Thanks for the discussion this curiosity started from a discussion on the Romanian board where someone wanted to purchase coins worth €150k in cash.

As far as I can tell from the answers here, the second option is way more dangerous than the first and in order to accomplish such an attack, you need some pretty heavy resources. Since the sum was quite large, I thought it might not be that far-fetched for someone to attempt a manipulation.

A MITM attack is probably way less likely to succeed today since 4G and 5G are more likely to be used than the local Wi-Fi nowadays. So in order to set up such an attack and succeed it, you would need to meet up with a multitude of potential victims until you find one who fits your setup and uses the local Internet connection.

So without RBF I guess I can still use Electrum to manually delete the transaction and re-broadcast it with a higher fee and differenr outputs? Is that because miners take higher fees with priority? I thought a non-RBF tx automatically means a re-broadcasted one will be invalid.

Coins that have a recent (5-10 txs behind) CoinJoin history are quite easy to be detected. You just look into its history and if there is any CoinJoin transaction, then they will probably confiscate your coins. CoinJoins have lots of inputs and the majority of outputs have the same amount sent (and if it's done through Wasabi, the amount will be around 0.1). 

For example, you can see this transaction. There are many different inputs, but almost all outputs have a value of exactly 0.10370144 BTC.

Mixers I believe are harder to be detected, so the best thing you can do is bouncing the BTC from address to address for a few days at a random time of the day so that whatever "taint" there is, it'll be pushed back depeer into the history.

This "tainted" term is fishy and pretty deceivable. It's used by governments to install their rules and weapons for control.

Usually, if you purchase from an exchange using KYC then your coins are considered clean automatically. They know your identity now, so they don't give a damn where your coins came from no more. But if you purchase the same coins through a non-verified account, they will most likely do anything possible to find a recent "taint" in your coin's history in order to spy on you and consider you a suspect.

I'm afraid this analysis is only done for them to create a web of identities and linked transactions. The reason they use for analyzing and confiscating coins, illicit activity, is just one pathetic excuse.

He already has a lost case - the man is clearly desperate to "legally" steal coins from anyone he possibly could, but I only see his cases and defense getting worse as time passes. At this point, it's literally impossible to check his lawsuits without noticing how desperate of a thief he is.

Whatever happens, I do not think there is any way he could truly prove anything of substance so in the end, the only bad thing that possibly happens is.. He only gets more BSV fans to back him up. That's it. In the history books, he will be noted but under the name of Craingelord (see what I did there?) and the worst pretender in the crypto world.

All in all, he's a douche and nothing will go as planned. I mean, I still have a little hope that someone will crack his imbecile plans one day...

Worst case is, their manipulation succeeds tremendously and people trade based on memes the same way Doge did this year. The result? Lots of people will get screwed up while true hodlers will still make money since we all know how badly "meme pumps" end up. I honestly prefer this to the other "criminal's currency" variant.