Bitcoin Forum
May 07, 2024, 09:28:51 AM *
News: Latest Bitcoin Core release: 27.0 [Torrent]
 
   Home   Help Search Login Register More  
Poll
Question: What happens first:
New ATH - 43 (69.4%)
<$60,000 - 19 (30.6%)
Total Voters: 62

Pages: « 1 ... 28496 28497 28498 28499 28500 28501 28502 28503 28504 28505 28506 28507 28508 28509 28510 28511 28512 28513 28514 28515 28516 28517 28518 28519 28520 28521 28522 28523 28524 28525 28526 28527 28528 28529 28530 28531 28532 28533 28534 28535 28536 28537 28538 28539 28540 28541 28542 28543 28544 28545 [28546] 28547 28548 28549 28550 28551 28552 28553 28554 28555 28556 28557 28558 28559 28560 28561 28562 28563 28564 28565 28566 28567 28568 28569 28570 28571 28572 28573 28574 28575 28576 28577 28578 28579 28580 28581 28582 28583 28584 28585 28586 28587 28588 28589 28590 28591 28592 28593 28594 28595 28596 ... 33329 »
  Print  
Author Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion  (Read 26373355 times)
This is a self-moderated topic. If you do not want to be moderated by the person who started this topic, create a new topic. (174 posts by 3 users with 9 merit deleted.)
nullius
Copper Member
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 630
Merit: 2610


If you don’t do PGP, you don’t do crypto!


View Profile WWW
April 27, 2021, 02:22:13 PM
Last edit: April 27, 2021, 02:40:03 PM by nullius
Merited by JayJuanGee (1)

Reminder: don't trust password managers...

This is bad security advice.  You hereby win the award for the worst security advice that I have yet seen in 2021; that is quite an achievement, given the popularity of truly horrid security advice by total idiots.  STOP GIVING BAD ADVICE.

One of the most important actions that users can take to secure their online accounts is to use a password manager.  Use a password manager.  Use a password manager.

Backdoored password manager stole data

Quote
As many as 29,000 users of the Passwordstate password manager downloaded a malicious update that extracted data from the app and sent it to an attacker-controlled server. Bad actors compromised its upgrade mechanism and used it to install a malicious file on user computers.

Will you next so fallaciously abuse particularized examples of insecure or malicious wallets, fake Electrum downloads, etc. as generalized evidence that Bitcoin is insecure?  “Reminder: don’t trust Bitcoin.  Bitcoin is hacked.  Bitcoin was hacked through its update system.”  Roll Eyes

Note:  Some people lost their life savings due to the above-referenced hack.  Solution:  Check PGP signatures to verify downloads!

Stop the ill-informed FUD.  See the PTIO list that I advised SwayStar123 to use, and use a password manager so that you can safely use long random passwords that are different for every site (= security), without accidentally losing your passwords and locking yourself out of everything (= availability):

Did you find out why your account was hacked in the first place ? Did you used an easy password or you told your password to any friend etc ?

Keep a strong password and hopefully no one will be able to hack your account.

reused password

Here is a selection (onion) of secure password managers for you.  Bitwarden may be easiest, if you are accustomed to being dependent on cloud stuff like all of the cool kids who obdurately refuse to end sentences with periods.  Bonus:  It is open-source; and if you want, you can run your own server instead of depending on theirs!

If you have reused passwords, then you should register at have I been pwned? (not a typo).  What you thus discover should properly scare you into never, ever reusing passwords again.

<blink>:emoji: Never reuse passwords! :emoji: :emoji: :emoji:</blink>

P.S., protip for blackhats:  Phil_S probably either reuses passwords, or uses weak passwords, or both.  This can be inferred, because without a password manager, it is humanly impossible to use a strong, unique password for each and every site.  Please go find some incompetently run site that Phil_S also uses, steal its password database, use Hashcat to recover his password, and then use the Phil_S account to post porn in the Wall Observer.  Thanks!


Also: antivirus software is useless. What a surprise.

Quote
First-stage payloads uploaded to VirusTotal here and here showed that at the time this post was going live, none of the 68 tracked endpoint protection programs detected the malware. Researchers so far have been unable to obtain samples of the follow-on payload.

Antivirus software has always been a scam.  No wonder McAfee got rich off of it.

Solution:  Don’t run executable code from unknown sources.  This means, among other things:  Disable Javascript!


Reminder: don't trust password managers...
A txt file, in a vera(true-)crypt archive is probably more secure, especially if it only contains a cryptic description or hint of the passwords. (still wouldn't use it for btc stuff)

That is such bad advice that I honestly can’t tell if you are trolling.  Stop it before someone gets hurt.  Do you also generate an ad hoc Bitcoin keypool with dice rolls and store the private key WIFs in a text file, so that you can avoid installing wallet software that may be backdoored?  Rube Goldberg wants his security systems back.
1715074131
Hero Member
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 1715074131

View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
1715074131
Reply with quote  #2

1715074131
Report to moderator
1715074131
Hero Member
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 1715074131

View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
1715074131
Reply with quote  #2

1715074131
Report to moderator
The Bitcoin software, network, and concept is called "Bitcoin" with a capitalized "B". Bitcoin currency units are called "bitcoins" with a lowercase "b" -- this is often abbreviated BTC.
Advertised sites are not endorsed by the Bitcoin Forum. They may be unsafe, untrustworthy, or illegal in your jurisdiction.
1715074131
Hero Member
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 1715074131

View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
1715074131
Reply with quote  #2

1715074131
Report to moderator
1715074131
Hero Member
*
Offline Offline

Posts: 1715074131

View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
1715074131
Reply with quote  #2

1715074131
Report to moderator
psycodad
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 1604
Merit: 1564


精神分析的爸


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 03:03:29 PM
Merited by LoyceV (2), JayJuanGee (1), nullius (1)

Password managers are only for the dumb and demented geezers who can't properly memorize a few hundred of unique, secure passwords (say >10 chars, including upper/lower, numeric and special chars and no known words). That's the same sort of pussy dimwits that needs to write down their seed phrase. *shaking head in disbelief*
Real men have a photographic memory and don't need crap like password managers, paper wallets or backups. Or do you really think Chuck Norris would use a password manager or backup data?

* psycodad ducks, runs and goes backuping his passwordsafe database files..
Sayeds56
Copper Member
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 1288
Merit: 708


Eloncoin.org - Mars, here we come!


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 03:07:35 PM

Good day  Grin

So i see BTC at $55k, out of shallow waters, where the bears satisfy their thirst.
I'd like to see the price a lil higher today, above $55.5k, just to make sure we left the dump behind.
Expecting fights at well known levels like $58, $60k and $62k, so $70k by may (which rhymes beautifully) may become very real.
#hodltight

Good day

This time our TA worked out very well. If Bitcoin break resistance at 57K then we might see new ATH. Cool Cool Cool


BitcoinBunny
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 1456
Merit: 2494



View Profile
April 27, 2021, 03:26:04 PM

Password managers are only for the dumb and demented geezers who can't properly memorize a few hundred of unique, secure passwords (say >10 chars, including upper/lower, numeric and special chars and no known words). That's the same sort of pussy dimwits that needs to write down their seed phrase. *shaking head in disbelief*
Real men have a photographic memory and don't need crap like password managers, paper wallets or backups. Or do you really think Chuck Norris would use a password manager or backup data?

* psycodad ducks, runs and goes backuping his passwordsafe database files..

Chuck Norris tried to use a password manager once. He logged into the app and all it said was:
"Hi Chuck, I'm not even going to pretend that I can suggest a password that is stronger than you can come up with or pretend I can store any passwords as well as you can. Thank you. Please click here to exit the program."
Wekkel
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 3108
Merit: 1531


yes


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 03:38:01 PM
Merited by JayJuanGee (1), OutOfMemory (1)

Good day  Grin

So i see BTC at $55k, out of shallow waters, where the bears satisfy their thirst.
I'd like to see the price a lil higher today, above $55.5k, just to make sure we left the dump behind.
Expecting fights at well known levels like $58, $60k and $62k, so $70k by may (which rhymes beautifully) may become very real.
#hodltight

Good day

This time our TA worked out very well. If Bitcoin break resistance at 57K goes higher then we might see new ATH. Cool Cool Cool


Trader quotes at it again  Roll Eyes
JimboToronto
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 4004
Merit: 4480


You're never too old to think young.


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 03:43:43 PM
Merited by JayJuanGee (1), HI-TEC99 (1)

Good morning Bitcoinland.

Back up over $55k... currently $55037USD/$68270CAD (Bitcoinaverage).

We still have a couple of days to turn April's candle green.

Go Bitcoin go.

Lol, my only question is why is proudhon aka llama in the drawing

Proudhon is an alpaca, not a guanaco, llama or vicuna.

Alpaca socks were one of the first (legal) products available to be bought with Bitcoin.

Thx for the info, didn’t know that

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alpaca

https://medium.com/tech-tales/alpacas-are-masters-of-bitcoin-522a1c3f5546

https://www.coindesk.com/alpacas-the-unofficial-mascot-of-bitcoin

Quote: "Forster began charging 75 Bitcoins for each pair in February and has since had to lower the price to 5 due to extreme appreciation in the currency’s value."  Grin

Even a song (2011):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYqqS7aTBVQ

Farmer Bill
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 297
Merit: 416


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 03:45:49 PM
Merited by JayJuanGee (1)

Anyone old enough to remember the Number Stations broadcasting out of Eastern Europe during the years the Berlin Wall was standing? They were used to communicate with intelligence agents, who needed nothing more than a SW radio to anonymously receive messages.
The Stations used high power short wave transmitters, the broadcast would start with a signature tune often from a worn stretched tape or a Station number ID.
Then a series of numbers would be read out by the announcer or voice synthesizer.
They were always in blocks of 5.

So 2-7-9-0-4 then 9-4-3-6-4 and so on.
Decoding could be by the use of a one-time pad or simply a book.

Where
digits 1 and 2 could be the page number.
digits 3 and 4 could be the line number
digit 5 the position of the word in that line.

The numbers then decoded to reveal the message.

The application of this for Bitcoin could be to code your wallet seed phrase in this way by choosing a book and finding those seed words in the book and converting them to 5 digit numbers.

Then writing down and storing anywhere the series of meaningless 5 digit numbers.

Without knowing from which book and the exact print edition (your key), your seed phrase is reasonably safe.

The cryptographers here will be able to punch holes in this but for good enough protection for regular folk it could work quite well.




nullius
Copper Member
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 630
Merit: 2610


If you don’t do PGP, you don’t do crypto!


View Profile WWW
April 27, 2021, 03:48:38 PM

I had been using a password manager for a while, But my Bitcointalk account outdated my password manager usage, so I never generated a password for it, was too lazy, learned my lesson the hard way.

Glad to hear it.  Good luck keeping your accounts secure, especially now that you have a Platinum account.  You wouldn’t want for anyone to steal Star Platinum!


Password managers are only for the dumb and demented geezers who can't properly memorize a few hundred of unique, secure passwords (say >10 chars, including upper/lower, numeric and special chars and no known words).

LOL.

Oh, by the way, 10 chars?  Considering only random case-sensitive alphanumerics, since many sites choke on special chars:

Code:
$ bc
l(62^10)/l(2)
59.54196310386875208867

A Hashcat guru would need to chime in with some numbers on the cloud-cracking GPU cost to bruteforce it.  Pretty high, I guess—but not high enough for my tastes, especially not with many sites using SHA-256 (or MD5).  It is definitely within the realm of feasibility for hardware that humans are capable of producing, without requiring enough energy to boil the oceans.  Too short.

Code:
l(62^20)/l(2)
119.08392620773750417735

Wow.  Not being cracked by Hashcat!  I know that at least one of the popular password managers uses 20-char passwords by default.  I won’t name it, because it’s a closed-source cloud thingie, and I recommend avoiding it; but that is a reasonable default, IMO.

Code:
l(62^40)/l(2)
238.16785241547500835472

The security margin here is basically free, so why not?  Use long passwords on sites that allow that; use max-length passwords on stupid sites that limit you to 12–16 chars, or whatever.

Yes, I am inappropriately misapplying Shannon entropy.  Most people commit this error when estimating password strength.  If we are treating passwords as random strings, what we really want to know here is the min-entropy.  Most people make this mistake from ignorance; I hereby do so from laziness, and because once we get up to a 40-char password, the security margin is so astronomically huge that none of this makes much of a difference.

Also, if your password manager uses a bad algorithm to transform random bits into an alphanumeric string (or whatever), there can be a significant bias; in the wild, I have seen password manager code that will easily let you lop off 30% of the search space, if you know (or can guess) that the target used that particular password manager.  Astronomically huge security margins do help here:  Losing 30% of the search space for a 10-char password could make a real-world practical difference; losing 30% of the search space for a 40-char password is only a theoretical problem.

* nullius 8> security margins (within reason).

That's the same sort of pussy dimwits that needs to write down their seed phrase. *shaking head in disbelief*

My brainwallet is “correct horse battery staple”.  I will not forget it!  And it is such a nonsense phrase, nobody will ever guess it.

Real men have a photographic memory and don't need crap like password managers, paper wallets or backups. Or do you really think Chuck Norris would use a password manager or backup data?

* psycodad ducks, runs and goes backuping his passwordsafe database files..

A .sig I that once saw on—I think it was actually on Usenet, though I don’t recall:  “Real Men don’t do backups.  Real Men cry a lot.”

* nullius programs his custom password manager by punching hex opcodes into the front panel, because Real Men don’t use compilers or assemblers or pussy hand-holding n00b stuff like that.
nullius
Copper Member
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 630
Merit: 2610


If you don’t do PGP, you don’t do crypto!


View Profile WWW
April 27, 2021, 03:54:30 PM
Last edit: April 27, 2021, 04:35:01 PM by nullius
Merited by vapourminer (1)

The application of this for Bitcoin could be to code your wallet seed phrase in this way by choosing a book and finding those seed words in the book and converting them to 5 digit numbers.

Without knowing from which book and the exact print edition (your key), your seed phrase is reasonably safe.

The cryptographers here will be able to punch holes in this but for good enough protection for regular folk it could work quite well.

Yes, they will.  So don’t do it.

No, it is not “good enough protection for regular folk”.  Not when in the real world—not in theory, but in practice—there are blackhats doing a batch offline attacks using any text corpus you can think of.

In a roundabout way, you have reïnvented your own version of the brainwallet.  I snipped the part that you said about number stations, because it’s irrelevant:  You are introduced your scheme by discussing some spy stuff that often relied on secure randomness, then discarded secure randomness.  Don’t do this.

Decoding could be by the use of a one-time pad or simply a book.

One-time pad = secure randomness, by definition.  (And if it doesn’t use secure randomness, it is not a one-time pad!  Also, by the way, in modern cryptography, “one-time pad” is often a red flag for snakeoil; a one-time pad is itself secure, but the term is so abused by ignorant fools that it has become a mostly reliable marker for a high probability of bad crypto.  A one-time pad and its information-theoretic security proof are altogether totally irrelevant to Bitcoin wallets, so I will further ignore this.)

“Simply a book” may have been adequately secure for some uses 50 or 60 years ago.  Not today, when a computer can easily grind through trillions of phrases guessed from a text corpus.

Please do realize that cryptography has changed.  In the WWII era, and for most of the Cold War era, the very best ciphers would be laughably insecure by today’s standards.  Accordingly, cryptanalysis was different.  In real-world use by militaries, the use of cryptography was quite often only to slow down the cryptanalysts for long enough that a message would be irrelevant:  A general doesn’t care if his “ATTACK AT DAWN” message is cracked after the dawn attack has already occurred.

To give you a quick gut-shot feeling for how much cryptography has changed, without getting too technical:  Cryptanalysis departments used to employ teams of experts in (human) languages, to assist with estimation of word frequencies and letter frequencies in the plaintext.  They don’t do that anymore—not the same way as they used to; not nearly—because modern ciphers output ciphertext that is indistinguishable from randomness for a computationally bounded attacker.  If the type of probabilistic cryptanalysis used decades ago could shave even 1 bit off the security margin of a cipher like AES or Chacha20, then the cipher would be declared to be badly broken!  Alan Turing could drawn up his “Eines List”, way back when—nowadays, that type of analysis is generally unhelpful.

Anyway, I hope you get my point:  There was a time when for certain uses, if you understood the threat model very well, then maybe you could use some phrase from a printed book as a secret key.  That is completely inapplicable to Bitcoin wallets.  Using a phrase from a book as a Bitcoin brainwallet is a most excellent way to run a high risk of getting your money stolen; and advising others to do so is a way to make them risk getting their money stolen.  Don’t do that!

P.S., if you still believe in your scheme, then please suggest it in the technical forum where you will be promptly roasted to a crisp.  I don’t have so much time to pick apart insecure brainwallet schemes anymore; I wasted too much time on that, for years.
Wekkel
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 3108
Merit: 1531


yes


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 04:13:51 PM
Merited by JayJuanGee (1)

I'm not sure anyone here needs it, but just in case (just like renting boats with inexplicable holes in them...): https://dev.to/igor4btc/best-bitcoin-mixers-in-2021-55d0
LoyceV
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 3304
Merit: 16614


Thick-Skinned Gang Leader and Golden Feather 2021


View Profile WWW
April 27, 2021, 04:16:04 PM

A .sig I that once saw on—I think it was actually on Usenet, though I don’t recall:  “Real Men don’t do backups.  Real Men cry a lot.”
Linus Torvalds: “Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.”

Slightly outdated though Wink
nullius
Copper Member
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 630
Merit: 2610


If you don’t do PGP, you don’t do crypto!


View Profile WWW
April 27, 2021, 04:54:42 PM

Summary:  Use the free, widely available secure Bitcoin wallet seed phrase methods that have been designed and analysed by cryptographers, or else nullius may die of apoplexy.  Do you want for nullius to die of apoplexy?  Sad

Also, do you want to risk having your money stolen?  Why mess around when the secure way is free and reasonably easy?
nullius
Copper Member
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 630
Merit: 2610


If you don’t do PGP, you don’t do crypto!


View Profile WWW
April 27, 2021, 04:57:50 PM

A .sig I that once saw on—I think it was actually on Usenet, though I don’t recall:  “Real Men don’t do backups.  Real Men cry a lot.”
Linus Torvalds: “Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.”

Slightly outdated though Wink

Real Men sign their data, “Satoshi Nakamoto”, upload it to a website alongside bitcoin.pdf, get sued by Craig Wright, and then have everyone else mirror it and torrent it.
JayJuanGee
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 3710
Merit: 10220


Self-Custody is a right. Say no to"Non-custodial"


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 04:59:52 PM

So the 70k heslo in 1 month guess is back on the map....

1 month from when?

Maybe better to use a more common parlance?  i.e... "In two weekstm"

So the 70k heslo in 1 month guess is back on the map....

70k by may 1 for sure Grin

Oh gawd...  Roll Eyes Roll Eyes
Torque
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 3556
Merit: 5041



View Profile
April 27, 2021, 05:12:22 PM

And still the "dump BTC for ETH or XRP" pump trade continues.  Roll Eyes Roll Eyes

Gosh do they want people in anything *but* Bitcoin so badly...  Roll Eyes

I wonder why? Smells like 2017 all over again... Wink
Farmer Bill
Sr. Member
****
Offline Offline

Activity: 297
Merit: 416


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 05:18:39 PM
Merited by vapourminer (1), nullius (1)

The application of this for Bitcoin could be to code your wallet seed phrase in this way by choosing a book and finding those seed words in the book and converting them to 5 digit numbers.

Without knowing from which book and the exact print edition (your key), your seed phrase is reasonably safe.

The cryptographers here will be able to punch holes in this but for good enough protection for regular folk it could work quite well.

Yes, they will.  So don’t do it.

No, it is not “good enough protection for regular folk”.  Not when in the real world—not in theory, but in practice—there are blackhats doing a batch offline attacks using any text corpus you can think of.

In a roundabout way, you have reïnvented your own version of the brainwallet.  I snipped the part that you said about number stations, because it’s irrelevant:  You are introduced your scheme by discussing some spy stuff that often relied on secure randomness, then discarded secure randomness.  Don’t do this.

Decoding could be by the use of a one-time pad or simply a book.

One-time pad = secure randomness, by definition.  (And if it doesn’t use secure randomness, it is not a one-time pad!  Also, by the way, in modern cryptography, “one-time pad” is often a red flag for snakeoil; a one-time pad is itself secure, but the term is so abused by ignorant fools that it has become a mostly reliable marker for a high probability of bad crypto.  A one-time pad and its information-theoretic security proof are altogether totally irrelevant to Bitcoin wallets, so I will further ignore this.)

“Simply a book” may have been adequately secure for some uses 50 or 60 years ago.  Not today, when a computer can easily grind through trillions of phrases guessed from a text corpus.

Please do realize that cryptography has changed.  In the WWII era, and for most of the Cold War era, the very best ciphers would be laughably insecure by today’s standards.  Accordingly, cryptanalysis was different.  In real-world use by militaries, the use of cryptography was quite often only to slow down the cryptanalysts for long enough that a message would be irrelevant:  A general doesn’t care if his “ATTACK AT DAWN” message is cracked after the dawn attack has already occurred.

To give you a quick gut-shot feeling for how much cryptography has changed, without getting too technical:  Cryptanalysis departments used to employ teams of experts in (human) languages, to assist with estimation of word frequencies and letter frequencies in the plaintext.  They don’t do that anymore—not the same way as they used to; not nearly—because modern ciphers output ciphertext that is indistinguishable from randomness for a computationally bounded attacker.  If the type of probabilistic cryptanalysis used decades ago could shave even 1 bit off the security margin of a cipher like AES or Chacha20, then the cipher would be declared to be badly broken!  Alan Turing could drawn up his “Eines List”, way back when—nowadays, that type of analysis is generally unhelpful.

Anyway, I hope you get my point:  There was a time when for certain uses, if you understood the threat model very well, then maybe you could use some phrase from a printed book as a secret key.  That is completely inapplicable to Bitcoin wallets.  Using a phrase from a book as a Bitcoin brainwallet is a most excellent way to run a high risk of getting your money stolen; and advising others to do so is a way to make them risk getting their money stolen.  Don’t do that!

P.S., if you still believe in your scheme, then please suggest it in the technical forum where you will be promptly roasted to a crisp.  I don’t have so much time to pick apart insecure brainwallet schemes anymore; I wasted too much time on that, for years.

Thank you for your lengthy post and excellent input Nullius on the complexity of what on the surface to ordinary people seems a fairly simple task.
Matching seed phrase to random single words from random pages of a random book just seemed a good idea coupled with putting the 5 digit numbers on a 2 of 3 paper backup in different geographical locations also seemed a good idea.
Till now.

Most interesting post and I shall be upping the security of my phrase which I do have a copy in my brain.

I certainly do not want you dead of apoplexy and more selfishly to lose any Bitcoin.

And to others do not follow my advice on storing your seed phrase.

Happy to see mid 50k after Sunday's coordinated dump.
El duderino_
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 2506
Merit: 12055


BTC + Crossfit, living life.


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 05:26:47 PM


https://twitter.com/sallymayweather/status/1386881393146408960?s=21
nullius
Copper Member
Hero Member
*****
Offline Offline

Activity: 630
Merit: 2610


If you don’t do PGP, you don’t do crypto!


View Profile WWW
April 27, 2021, 05:29:12 PM

Increasing base-layer capacity to, what, maybe 30–40 tps tops would be a sick joke at a cost that would surprise people.  It would not solve any problems, and it would create many.  We need technologies supporting tens of thousands of TPS or more; a doubling (or whatever) of the current blocksize is insufficient by orders of magnitude, too much and not enough all at once.

Do we though? I keep seeing people, big blockers and some OG's alike, banging on this proverbial drum, year after year after year, as if it such a dire, imminent need.

Yes.  It is.

But if most bitcoiners see Bitcoin as 99% SOV and and 1% or less as a transaction medium, then no, it's not. And we don't. The current TPS limit will continue to serve just fine.

Forget bigblockers.  To stick one’s head n the sand with that type of thinking is to cede the field to altcoins, in the manner of philipma1957’s signature:

Quote from: philipma1957
I see BTC as the super highway and alt coins as taxis and trucks needed to move transactions.

In the long term, that devolves to an altcoin replacing Bitcoin altogether:  Why use one currency as a store of value, and another as a medium of exchange?  It’s better to use the medium of exchange as the store of value, too.  The money that can be used for both will be the most valuable money.  Whence does Bitcoin derive its value, after all?

And Gresham's Law will continue to prove that out.

Exactly:  If Bitcoin does is not useful as money, then...

I put it in such terms because candor is good and necessary for Bitcoin.  “Rah rah, we’re the best!” is a losing argument at market; and telling people just to “HODL” their money, rather than using it for economic activity, is a foot-shooting way inadvertently to advocate for altcoins.  Whenever I see altcoiners say that “Bitcoin is only a ‘store of value’, not good for transactions”, I call that out as untrue; and when they couch that as a Bitcoiner argument, I call it out as a strawman.  But from you, it is not a strawman; it is your argument for Bitcoin!

Objectively, altcoins don’t have so much of an advantage as it may seem to the naïve newbie who just wants to buy a cup of coffee.  Altcoins only seem to offer inexpensive transactions, because:

  • Many them simply aren’t used much.  Bitcoin also had negligible fees, when its blocks were empty.  Low demand = low fees.
  • Many of them have low security against 51% attacks (or similar attacks in POS-land).  They may be adequate for toy money, but not for your life savings—and not for a trillion dollars (and growing) in total value on the network.
  • The few altcoins that can actually support high TPS with some sort of adequate security make trade-offs to achieve that.  The price of reasonably secure high TPS on-chain is that to run a node, you will pretty much need at least an octocore Xeon with 32 GiB of RAM, 100 Mbps dedicated bandwidth, and terabytes of fast SSDs.  Accordingly, the coins must become more centralized, less private, and less censorship-resistant.  Bitcoin still runs just fine on a Raspberry Pi, on the type of home Internet connection which is commonly available in most developed countries.  Because of this, Bitcoin is the money that nobody can control—thus, it is still the most secure cryptocurrency, after all.

As I said before:

Never forget that the blockchain with the Nakamoto Consensus is the world’s most inefficient database.  That is the cost of decentralization.

It is a problem that cannot be magicked away with hype and handwaving.

Better idea:  Transact off-chain, and use the blockchain as a global, public synchronization layer for what are effectually private local ledgers.  Why does every cup-of-coffee tx need to be permanently archived in the world’s most inefficient database!?

There is a reason why the acronym "HODL" is so identified with Bitcoin, but certainly not with fiat.

Well, for my part, I thought that the reason for that is that Bitcoin is a good investment even through downturns—and moreover, it’s good for savings.  Inflationary money is detrimental to savers.  HODLing $/€ that slowly loses value is not smart!

IMO, ideal money would retain exactly the same value in perpetuity.  You could set it on a shelf for a thousand years, then find that one unit of it still buys exactly the same amount of (say) milk and eggs.  Bitcoin is definitely not ideal by this standard; but given the choice between inflationary versus deflationary money, I prefer the deflationary money, thank you very much.  (People who never save, and especially those who live a lifestyle of perpetual indebtedness, may actually prefer the inflationary money; now, there is a depressing thought.)
JayJuanGee
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 3710
Merit: 10220


Self-Custody is a right. Say no to"Non-custodial"


View Profile
April 27, 2021, 05:35:01 PM

I bought in the first dip between 53,9 and 54,4
The last dip I got a bunch more between 47,9 and 48,1

I’m back to about even on my first drippings now and up on the 2nd..

Figure I’ll be pretty happy with all of it once we are back over 60..
That money was kinda supposed to be for something else, like responsible adulting, but I couldn’t resist..

Yes... kind of risky to be screwing around with your cashflows like that (hopefully it was not "kind of" for rent, food, a car payment that might cause you to lose your car or something else that has high costs if your cashflow ends up NOT resolving itself), and hopefully (such gamble) ends up working out for you.

By the way, since we are making confessions (disclosures) here regarding our BTC buys, I will say that in the past 5 days, I had buy orders fill every $1k between about mid-$52ks and mid-$47ks, but that was the more recent series and the earlier series of buy orders filling every $1k were getting filled started from April 17 from mid-$58ks down to mid-$51ks.   And, of course there is a wee bit of cheating going on with me too because my buys are not generally coming from new fiat,. but are still structured in a way that they are striving to stack sats rather than stack dollars.

I mentioned before that based on an upcoming business arrangement that I have that will likely be in the near future, I may well have to shave off a bit extra in BTC on the way up.. but so far, I am tentatively planning sticking to my original system without any extra shavings - and with the passage of time, I will likely be able to confirm whether I might need to shave off some extra BTC.. because of short falls in cash from other sources..

So, yeah none of us are completely immuned from a certain level of gambling with our stash (including yours truly) when we are contemplating spending of value deals that go quite a bit beyond our regular cashflows and any kind of cash that we might have in reserve or any kind of assets that we might want to liquidate or put up as collateral before spending from our bitcoin stash.  I personally do not really mind using my regular BTC shavings, but I will end up either having to move my lowest buy orders up from $10k to perhaps even above $30k.. which surely becomes a greater gamble, and surely there can be a bit of comfort that comes in the event that we were to seem as if we were coincidentally reaching a kind of blow off top (or even a seemingly local top), but not always clear if such blow off or local top is present, and surely, as I type this post, we do not seem to be close to either a local top or a blow off top.
Torque
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 3556
Merit: 5041



View Profile
April 27, 2021, 05:52:21 PM

Objectively, altcoins don’t have so much of an advantage as it may seem to the naïve newbie who just wants to buy a cup of coffee.  Altcoins only seem to offer inexpensive transactions, because:

No one is buying and using shitcoins to buy a cup of coffee. Just as no one is buying Bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee.

They're using fiat to buy a cup of coffee. Which just further reinforces my point. Theory and reality are two entirely different things.

Also, are you trying to beat out JJG for the 2021 Wordie Man award or what?  Wink
Pages: « 1 ... 28496 28497 28498 28499 28500 28501 28502 28503 28504 28505 28506 28507 28508 28509 28510 28511 28512 28513 28514 28515 28516 28517 28518 28519 28520 28521 28522 28523 28524 28525 28526 28527 28528 28529 28530 28531 28532 28533 28534 28535 28536 28537 28538 28539 28540 28541 28542 28543 28544 28545 [28546] 28547 28548 28549 28550 28551 28552 28553 28554 28555 28556 28557 28558 28559 28560 28561 28562 28563 28564 28565 28566 28567 28568 28569 28570 28571 28572 28573 28574 28575 28576 28577 28578 28579 28580 28581 28582 28583 28584 28585 28586 28587 28588 28589 28590 28591 28592 28593 28594 28595 28596 ... 33329 »
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.19 | SMF © 2006-2009, Simple Machines Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!