There are many centralized alts that can serve as a permissioned cryptocurrency if you so wish. I'd rather not have Bitcoin regress to the control levels of PayPal and credit cards, thank you very much.

Seeing the price on Bitcoincharts in the morning I honestly had to double check to make sure that it wasn't just a belated April Fools. Crypto is so weird sometimes.

I'm afraid you'll have to hope for 1) admin returning and 2) admin honoring SafeDice's account balances if they return.



Presumably SafeDice has a cold and hot wallet set up, meaning that any amount that is available in the hot wallet is withdrawable instantly, with the hot wallet being refilled out of cold storage manually. So with the SafeDice admin AWOL there's no one to refill the hot wallet (apart possibly from coins being freshly deposited from unsuspecting users).

IIRC Monero had an upgrade hard fork a couple of months back, so to make matters worse SafeDice's Monero node / hot wallet is likely outdated and not available to properly handle transactions either way.

Short of having stakes in these tokens my guess is that they simply wanted to take the easiest route of adding as many currencies / tokens as possible with minimal effort. With this goal in mind Ethereum is a rather sane choice. Especially since they already went for Enjin and Cosmo Coin -- presumably due to their dev teams also residing in South Korea -- it makes sense to go for other, more popular tokens as well.

At this point I'd usually dismiss Samsung as half-heartedly jumping the bandwagon, however their earlier plans of getting involved in the production of Bitcoin ASIC miners (whatever the current state may be) makes me think that they might be actually serious about crypto and are still in the process of getting their feet weet.

"LoyceV's Legendary 10 Day 10 Person 10 Altcoin Investment Roller Coaster" doesn't sound quite as legendary though

Is it worth it to buy a USD 2,000,- Apple laptop for Facebook and Instagram?

Either way it should be fairly obvious by now that while one could run a full node on a smartphone it's probably not a good idea. Especially given that there are much cheaper options out there that can do the job just as well, if not better.

Well ain't that the truth.

I always found it funny how Bitcoin @ USD 19,000,- seemed like a better investment to many people than Bitcoin at its current price point.



Bitmain also heavily bet on Bitcoin Cash so I'm not sure I'd trust their judgement (from a business point of view, regardless of what your stance on blocksize is).

Why shouldn't it? Apart from the question of whether it's wise to have a smartphone work 24/7, modern smartphones are pretty capable these days as pointed out by Farul.

That's what makes me a bit less optimistic though, namely that Bitcoin's market may already have reached a size where these cycles become either even longer or less pronounced. I wouldn't be surprised if the upcoming halving is already priced in, with the next ATH not occurring until the halving of 2024. Crypto never fails to catch one off guard though.

Maybe the hardware is faulty and its internal storage is corrupted. Have you bought the wallet from SatoshiLabs (trezor.io) directly or did you purchase via a 3rd party reseller?

Either way worst case you should be able to retrieve your funds either via (a) a new Trezor or (b) Electrum. With (a) likely leaving a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth while (b) will expose your private keys to an online device.

Should you want to give (b) a try, look at the instructions here ("Recovering funds without Trezor device"):
https://wiki.trezor.io/Apps:Electrum

To reduce the risk from exposing your private key to an online device, consider booting from a tails disk, which comes with Electrum preinstalled:
https://tails.boum.org/install/

If you have a second device at hand that you could use for cold storage (ie. kept offline at all times), consider wiping this secondary device clean and setting up cold storage using Electrum:
http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html

Come to think of it, you could also go with option (c), restoring your Trezor wallet to a Ledger Nano S:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/7tdm1y/can_i_restore_a_trezor_on_to_a_ledger_nano_s/

Bitcoin's current private key space is 2^256 (ie. 10^76) with Bitcoin's legacy address space being 2^160 (ie. 10^47) due to its use of RipeMD160. (I have no idea about Bech32's address space though)

That's the theoretical limit of how many addresses you could generate with a HD seed. Literally millions of millions of millions of millions of millions of millions of addresses. To be fair it might well be that every seed is capable of generating only a subset of available private keys but even then you'll run into physical hardware limits before you reach mathematical limits.

The most probable answer is already given in the quoted StackOverflow thread, namely that most Scrypt mining back in the day was done using GPUs that are big-endian (ie. the way that the GPUs in question worked favored even numbers over odd numbers) [1]. So in theory one should be able to find a correlation between the shift from GPUs to ASICs and an increased equilibrium of odd and even nonces.

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/24893

I guess given a proper mangling of the input even a single nonce should be sufficient for most purposes (eg. the SHA256 of a predetermined public server seed + nonce should be unpredictable enough for a single random outcome. A much slower cryptographic hash would likely be preferable though). I'm not sure whether including multiple nonces would up the security level that much (ie. since an attacker would know the other nonces, they could adjust their nonce-"space" accordingly). But like I said, I'm not sure whether such an attack would be viable to begin with.

While you can't predict which nonce is going to be the correct one (ie. a valid nonce for successfully mining a block) a miner could in theory only search for the correct nonce within a given subset of nonces and not necessarily lessen their chance for finding the correct one (eg. the chance to find a valid nonce within the subset of even numbers is as high as the chance of finding a valid nonce within the subset of odd numbers). So at least in theory a miner can manipulate which nonces hit the blockchain. Not sure how viable such an attack would be in practice though.

On-chain transactions are transactions that get recorded on the blockchain (ie. the distributed ledger storing all transactions of Bitcoin or the cryptocurrency of your choice). The opposite of these are off-chain transactions, which refer to either (a) the internal transactions as handled by exchanges and custodial wallets (ie. you send an on-chain transaction to an exchange, when you sell your coins to another person the exchange creates an internal off-chain transaction which is essentially a simple database entry subtracting the sold coins from your exchange account and crediting it to the account of your counterparty) or (b) decentralized 2nd layer solutions (eg. akin to telecommunication protocol layers) that handle transactions on a higher level protocol layer while using the blockchain and its on-chain transactions for settlement only (eg. akin to how credit cards will debit your bank account at the end of the month, but not for every single transaction). A typical example for (b) being Lightning Network [1].

Sidechains are usually smaller blockchains that rely on more established blockchains for their security via merge mining or similar means (which would in this case be the mainchain). Not all coins that are merge mined are necessarily sidechains though (eg. Namecoin [2] is merged mined with Bitcoin but not a sidechain) and to be honest I'm not sure whether all sidechains are actually merge mined either; but the gist is that a sidechain's security is handled by its corresponding mainchain. Tokens as issued by the sidechain are then usually pegged to the mainchain's native currency in one way or another, with the sidechain usually serving a purpose that goes beyond what the mainchain can provide. An example for such a sidechain would be RSK [3], which intends to provide Ethereum-style smart contracts for Bitcoin by going beyond Bitcoin's native scripting capabilities.

Using sidechains has also been proposed as a possible scaling approach by moving certain types of transactions off the mainchain and onto a sidechain (or federated sidechains) and I'm sure other use cases have been suggested as well; however I haven't looked into sidechains all that deeply.

[1] https://lightning.network/
[2] https://namecoin.org/
[3] https://www.rsk.co/

While I wouldn't run a full node on a mobile device, running a full node generally doesn't require much power (eg. if your desktop computer is always on either way or if you run a node on a small dedicated device such as a raspberry pi you most likely won't notice much of a difference in your electricity bill).

They do implicitly. While nodes don't check the mempool for ongoing double-spend attempts they won't accept blocks that have double-spends in them (ie. blocks that try to spend inputs that have already been spent are invalid).

Private blockchains and immutability are exclusive, you can't have both. Ethereum's DAO debacle is a prime example of what happens to immutability when certain parties have too much power within an ecosystem.

AFAIK there's no fork planned in the foreseeable future, so also here the block and transaction format will remain unchanged.

Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying but... I don't think that this is how any of this works. You can't just graft one blockchain onto another to get the best of both worlds. Especially not in the way described.

If you're really interested in how to get separate blockchains to benefit from one another look into atomic cross chain swaps of what the future of cryptocurrency may entail.