Glad to hear you're OK and back on WO duty!

From what I know, Rapid (antigen) tests are dependent on viral load. That's why the instructions say that the result is negative only if there is absolutely no positive test line visible. If there is even a very faint positive test line, the result should be considered positive. I guess your viral load may be very low. I've done about 10 Rapid (antigen) tests so far, and the positive lines were all completely clear, even under bright light with a magnifying glass.

Have you had the vaccine yet? If you do have the virus, maybe there's no need to get vaccinated now, but some time after the virus has cleared away. But when the time comes, I suggest you get vaccinated. Don't believe the crazy conspiracy theories about Bill Gates installing chips and nanoparticles in your body to control you via 5G and magnets (yes, there are people that actually believe this shit).

Or ignorant judges, with no Bitcoin defense team to educate them.

Failing to sign a message using Satoshi's addresses should be sufficient proof he's Faketoshi, and thus can overturn the recent court case, no?

Thanks for that info, was not aware of it.

It's just that I get angry at CSW having a free run at the courts and winning cases due to lack of representation of the Bitcoin side.

So, why did Cøbra not show up? And why does he want to hide his identity? Is it because of fear of his life ($5 wrench attacks)?

Regardless, the code will keep running. No matter what any court says, 1 BTC = 1 BTC.

But I would obviously have preferred it if CSW lost that case. Now he has a precedent, and based on his past history, he will be rubbing it in our faces every chance he gets. He has even changed the White Paper author name:

Sorry about the pointless post, but...

GASCONADING (!)

I thought I was good at English. I learned a new word today!

Last time this happened was when Bob was not so busy with his Ranch, and used to post some cool phrases/words.

Oh, the sweet revenge.
When altcoiners crash and burn.
Take no treesoners.

#cryptichaiku

Good to know you're OK and not worse than earlier. In my humble opinion, getting vitamins from pills, and overloading your body with supplements and "healthy" add-on pills is not the best way to go about it. Just eat a balanced diet, and consume the natural stuff that have what you need (Vitamin C or whatever). "Pill" solutions are shortcuts that do not always help.

I've been busy IRL and only skim through WO lately, so I didn't quite get your earlier comment about COVID-19, did you say you've got it, or you may have it? I hope you are clear of it. BTW, a few days ago I had my 2nd dose of the COVID-19 vaccine (the Pfizer variety). All is fine, no side-effects at all, apart from a mild muscle pain at the injection site, lasting less than 2 days.

Hope you get well soon, and that it's not related to COVID-19.

That's what science is all about.

Excellent video, congrats to Derek for getting such a counterintuitive experiment right the first time, and also to Prof. Alexander Kusenko for honouring the bet.

"It's going up forever, Laura!" and the futility of Bitcoin day-trading

[This started as a one-paragraph reply to one of Jay's posts, but it grew uncontrollably, so I decided to post it on its own.]

As with any non-deterministic variable, Bitcoin price is volatile. And volatility means ups and downs. What many people fail to realize is that these short-term ups and downs are actually noise. Maybe not white noise, it's almost always tainted by various events like Elon's tweets, China's bans, futures' expiry dates and a million other things, but it's still essentially noise. And noise is a random process (i.e., a "roll of a dice" case, albeit a loaded dice at times). Would anyone in their right mind bet their Bitcoin stash on the roll of a dice? Would that really be a viable long-term winning strategy?

Short-term Bitcoin price action is noise (i.e., unpredictable in any practical sense), and yet there are day-traders ("daytarders", as I like to call them), who try to predict short-term price movement using all sorts of fancy tools and techniques, hoping to catch the market and make a profit. To me, it all feels like those mad "scientists", usually of poor theoretical scientific background, desperately trying to build a perpetual motion machine by using elaborate, complex contraptions, while the laws of thermodynamics explicitly state that this is not possible. To me, consistently profitable Bitcoin day-trading is almost as futile as trying to build a perpetual motion machine.

But the big question is this: why worry about the short-term volatility, when we can predict the long-term trend with pretty good accuracy? Long-term price action is much less noise and much more math and science, as has been repeatedly pointed out by Bitcoin advocates such as Andreas Antonopoulos, and as can be clearly seen by studying the protocol itself. Saylor has been screaming about it for some time now, I wonder how many understand him. Money is energy. Monetary energy. The laws of thermodynamics state that energy is conserved. You cannot have a working system when you have an energy leak. And what do banks of the fiat system do? They introduce leaks into their own monetary system "by design" (they call it inflation), and subsequently dilute their monetary units (fiat currencies) by having their money printers go brrrrrrrrrr... That's some "perpetual money machine" to the untrained eye, except that there's nothing perpetual about it. It's actually dissipative, repeatedly diluting and dissipating our wealth into piles of fiat paper money that are worth less and less each day goes by. This is the laws of thermodynamics in action, proving once more that "there is no free lunch" in the universe.

Bitcoin is the one and only monetary network in the history of mankind, which respects the laws of thermodynamics, as they pertain to monetary energy. But wait! Has this all become too complex? Is there too much math & science involved? Is there some complex equation we should all learn and understand? How about 1 BTC = 1 BTC? Is this simple enough? This, and the fact that there will only be at most 21,000,000 BTC in existence, ever. An equation and an upper bound -- these are the only two things necessary to predict the future behavior of this system. This is possible because it is a thermodynamically closed system. This has nothing to do with volatility, but with the long-term trend. It's like filtering out the noise and observing the resulting smooth, clean, upward curve. This is what the moving-average indicators do, which I consider about the only meaningful metrics when it comes to Bitcoin trend analysis.

As Saylor puts it: "It's a gift. Once in a thousand years do you actually see the invention of a fundamentally new thing, this is our once in a thousand years opportunity. You get to buy into it early, what would it be like if you owned 10% of all the electricity that's ever going to be pumped, or what if you could buy 1% of all the running water that's ever going to be pumped? That's what this is, it's 1% of all the fire that's ever going to be lit. You have a chance to buy a percentage of the future. Seems like a no-brainer to me."

"It's going up forever, Laura!" That's the only thing anyone really needs to know about Bitcoin.

Just imagine how it will feel when Bitcoin breaks $100k. And then $200k. And then $500k. And then $1M. And then...

Don't sell your corn, fools.
Don't go against the new law:
Bitcoindynamics!

#engineerscornhaiku

That's exactly the recipe for losing your BTC! I've seen many HoDLers become nocoiners and/or Bitcoin haters because of this. It's easy to say "sell high, then buy low", until one time you sell high and realize your high was the new low.

Buy whenever you can.
Sell only when you must.
HoDL.

Simple, works every time.

Why you shouldn't sell your Bitcoin for the next 100 years | Interview with Michael Saylor

Saylor, in his usual educational & entertaining style, talking about thermodynamics and Bitcoin. A good watch, especially for the engineers among us. The link to (and importance of) thermodynamics and conservation of energy in Bitcoin's design may be rather obvious to many of us, but many common people fail to recognize it. It was precisely that link, which prompted me to research further about Bitcoin, and eventually buy my first 0.5 BTC for $120 in 2015.

It's like having (and acting on) inside information about a stock, except that, in Bitcoin's case, the "inside information" is out there in the open, for everyone to access, understand, and make use of. It's sad that so few people do.

I'm taking Box 257 ($79,545.20 - $81,136.09)
My prediction is exactly $80,000

Reasoning: $80,000 is just a gut feeling amount -- no specific reasoning, other than a SOMA guess (and I'm being bearish here, I would normally expect a much higher amount, but with the recent Elon/China events, I just had to be more conservative). I'm basically following the S2F model, but SOMA-adjusted for Elon/China. Still a fine number to reach, nearly triple the current amount ($31k). This will pave the way for the $100k milestone, which could be reached in New Year's Day of 2022, or thereabouts.

As always, BIG thanks to The Dude for another great game!

I'm a total newbie compared to you guys. Not much drama for me, as I joined the club much later.

The only thing I regret, out of my experience in this space, is not going all-in in 2015. I would now be at least a Dolphin in Jay's chart. Other than that, it's been the best thing I've ever done in my life.

Yeah, smart people buy, idiots sell. The great digital wealth transfer at play.

OT movie recommendation:

Hunter Hunter (2020)

A well-acted, slow-burning, intense thriller, with a gruesome but righteous ending that will stay with you for a while. Not flawless, but well worth watching.

This is something that should make all of us very happy. $30k will not be here for very much longer, so we'd better make good use of it while we still can. I'm talking mostly about noobs, but it applies to anyone with some fiat to spare.

The way I see it is this:

1. Bitcoin is practically guaranteed (math, science and all) to reach 6 digits and beyond. $1M/BTC is a perfectly normal and expected (actually inevitable) price level. Bitcoin has to reach $1M/BTC, or else it won't be able to take the position and role it's been designed to take (i.e., as the primary store of value of the world).

2. Many big players (Saylor et al.) are accumulating BTC like crazy. And it's not just Saylor. There must be other big players that don't want to advertise their actions. Saylor is not only a HoDLer, but has risen to be a major Bitcoin evangelist, a more pragmatic, less scientific, more digestible version of the charismatic Andreas Antonopoulos. The latter is the scientist, the former is the engineer. Both are needed, both are right. Not many people want (or can) take that role, but they can buy BTC, and they do.

3. Given (1), dips shouldn't worry us at all. Given (2), we should be buying any amount of BTC we can afford. Bob's degenerate buying spree of $500 a pop when he's already a multi-millionaire may seem illogical (it does/did seem like that to me too), but he knows what he's doing. It will be fun to see those $500 grow to $10k each, and beyond.

tl;dr: We are going through what could be the last deep 5-digit BTFD in Bitcoin's history. Worried? See (1) above. What to do? Apply (3), sit back, relax, and enjoy your wealth growing in your sleep (good one, Warren Buffett). Wanna buy 75" TVs and shit? Go ahead, but don't cry like a little girl later on -- I'm sure those pepperonis were really tasty. Damn, that's some fucked up tl;dr as I'm referring to the main text...

Fortunately, that cousin is not BeerHoDL! BeerHoDL has so far proven to be a true HoDLer! He hasn't sold a single sat. BeerHoDL's recap: he has invested $12k in total. Half of that ($6k) was used to buy BTC quite high (before the Elon dip), and the remaining was again split in half, of which the first one ($3k) was used to BTFD. the remaining fiat ($3k) is still locked in an order to buy BTC @ $30,500. Not sure if it's a wise choice to leave that order there and not buy now, but he wants it done that way, and it's his money, so I won't insist. More on his story here, here and here.

The other cousin (the one who ordered the 75" TV) is a great guy, but he's a shitcoiner, who has played with the market since 2017, and overall has managed to only triple his fiat investment. I'm using the word "only", because if he had listened to me he could now have an order of magnitude more gains than he currently has. Eventually, he put everything in BTC, as I had always advised him. But now he decided to sell 2/3 of his BTC for some "home repairs", and keep the 1/3 in BTC, although I suspect they won't stay in BTC for long, I'm pretty sure he will "play" with shitcoins again... Out of the 2/3 he liquidated, he ordered the 75" TV, which will be the most expensive TV set (or any item really) he has ever bought in his entire life. BTW, this guy is not my cousin by blood, but my female cousin's husband, so I'm referring to him as a "friend" in this post I made a while back. Another post of his story can be found here.

Anyway, apologies to all WOers for burdening you with my cousins'/friends' corn affairs... But we all like a little bit of gossip, don't we?

Edit: Fixed typos.

Yeah, my cousin just ordered a 75-inch TV with the money he got by selling corn a week ago.

I've warned him that this will soon be the most expensive TV set he has ever bought in his life. He didn't listen to me.

Intriguing!

I read the letter that they include in the package. It starts off in perfect English (probably copy-pasted from Ledger's site), and then the second half of the letter is a mess... It's screaming "phish hook" and, frankly, anyone who falls for it must be a total internet noob.

One thing that has always puzzled me is the fact that all phishing attacks I've received or seen (mostly emails, but also the one above), contain mistakes (spelling, grammatical, syntactical) in the text they use. I just wonder why this is the case. Can't the scammers find someone who knows how to write, and have him write, or at least proofread, the text they use? It's almost as if the scammers want to include mistakes, in an attempt to morally justify their actions (i.e., "it's so obvious it's a scam, so if you fall for it you deserve it because you're stupid").

Are there no educated scammers out there?

Strange world...