Good day everyone and compliments of the season to you wherever you are from;
Merry christmas, Joyeux noél, Buon Natale, Feliz Navidad...
In the spirit of giving, I am officially submitting my application to become a merit source on the forum.
I am regularly always low or completely out of smerits to distribute and having an extra stash to dip into would really be a bonus.
I have delayed this application for so long, for a time when I will have enough time to devote to the (volunteered) task of finding merit worthy posts and distributing, and I am positive now is the right time.
Hopefully, whenever theymos considers this application would also be a right time.
I have no specific board in mind, but I regularly visit, Bitcoin discussion, Meta, Beginners' & Help and Economics, so these would be my focus, in addition to some others.
My List of merit worthy posts;1.
Therefore, I would not recommend using it even as a means of payment, for example, paying them for food or some goods, such as a computer or a VPN-subscription, otherwise FOMO will overtake you. When another 10 years have passed and you will calculate how much your payment for the same computer or VPN-subscription now cost. It will be like that story about pizza. Bitcoin is about accumulation, the more you accumulate, the more profit you get.
I have to disagree with you here. Bitcoin is about being a currency. Yes, everyone wants the price gains and everyone wants to accumulate more, but bitcoin is first and foremost a currency. If no one ever used it as a currency, then we wouldn't be where we are today. Sure, if I had never spent a single satoshi then my bitcoin stack would be bigger than it is now, but I'm happy that every satoshi I've spent has helped to grow the bitcoin ecosystem and lead to further adoption, and I'm happy that I've had several years of financial autonomy, holding my own money securely, and not requiring any approval from any third party to spend my own money where I want and when I want. Even Laszlo Hanyecz has said he has no regrets spending 10,000 bitcoin on two pizzas.
And storing all your funds in bitcoin is not feasible as it is not universally accepted and transactions are not instant.
The only transaction which is instant is physical cash traded face to face. Every other fiat method is slower than bitcoin.
But as they say we should not put all our eggs in one basket. While bitcoin is the best coin we should also explore other projects and hold some potential altcoins.
Diversification is a good strategy and we cannot really be sure if bitcoin can keep growing like this forever.
Diversification means putting money in to different sectors, such as stocks, bonds, commodities, property, etc., that aren't intrinsically linked to one another. It does not mean buying a bunch of shitcoins which if bitcoin dumps, they all dump even harder. That does absolutely nothing to reduce the risk of your portfolio.
2.
Have you ever thought about Bitcoin becoming centralized someday?
Not the way you imagine, but pause for a moment and think, isn't Bitcoin somewhat centralized even today? I do not mean exclusively where most crypto miners are located (which is difficult to determine precisely), but the fact that several globally positioned crypto exchanges hold several million BTC in their possession. Governments can always reach for a measure to seize all that BTC, for some reason they can invent at any given time.
Of course, the only way governments worldwide will be able to control 51% of Bitcoin's hashrate is if they unanimously agree on using Bitcoin is a "One World Currency". This may all sound crazy, but we cannot ignore it from happening in the future.
As others have already said, it is a little too late for anyone to play with these things, because not only about 90% of the BTC is mined, but in less than 10 years that percentage will reach 99%. In addition, it is inconceivable to me that the US, China, UK, India, or Russia will one day declare a common currency - all these countries are very fierce in defending their national interests, and among those interests is the domestic currency.
The EU has a common currency, but some countries that have been members for a long time do not want to give up their currencies (Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic), so even though we are very pro-Bitcoin here, it is more than it is foolish to expect that such a scenario would materialize even in the distant future. I tend to believe that in some 150 to 200 years, money as such will cease to exist - but again, I may be watching too much science fiction (Star Trek)
They can if Chinese government, example takes over all the hashrate from miners in China. I don't think it will happen. They can not do such thing in dark ways and don't let the world know about that. They will slap on their faces by doing this.
But didn’t China ban all crypto miners a few months ago, and most of them left the country? Maybe they just want us to be convinced of it, and at the same time, they are planning a 51% attack?
3.
The first one is how easy it is to create a fake transaction and transmit it to the whole blockchain without it being instantly detected as fake.
There is one widely used scheme but it's not using a fake transaction (
can be used in that "every day spending" scenario).
It's done by utilizing "
replace-by-fee" flag which makes a transaction replaceable as long as it's not included in the blockchain yet (
0 confirmation).
However, such transactions can be easily identified so merchants that accept 0-confirmation txns (
eg. some Casinos) don't grant the "
instant deposit" benefit if it has an 'rbf' flag.
It goes like this: The transmitted "
unconfirmed" rbf flagged transaction will be seen by most clients and the victim,
but when the scammer received what he paid for and wants to "
cancel" it, he just have to send another transaction transaction that spends the same input(s) and replace the output with his own address. That essentially boots out the old transaction from most mempools.
Bitcoin Core with default setting are setup to replace the older transaction with rbf flag as long as the new transaction follow some specific rules.
BIP-0125:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0125.mediawiki#Implementation_Details4.
Understanding US Debt is one of my aspirations.
When you talk about your usual run-of-the-mill, third world country defaulting on its debt, the meaning is pretty much straight-forward. Countries have debt from International institutions or other countries on which they need to make regular interest payments. Failing to pay up amounts to default.
Now, who does the US owe fund to? To its own public, it seems.
This makes it pretty difficult to figure out what exactly does this mean. Some of the biggest creditors are the retirement and social security funds. This is because common people keep funding these by putting apart of their continous savings into it. These "Pension funds" are essentially cash cows. Thus, they buy up bonds from the government in return of the cash.
Now if the US govt defaults, guess who loses? These funds. Because then the debt held by them will lose its value and it'll be a situation of their funds having made a "bad investment" by investing in US Bonds.
Isn't that neat? The Govt gets to fund itself from people's savings. If it defaults, its the people's savings that gets hit.
On further reading, this gets funnier. Apparently the US can only default on its debt, if it breaks its debt ceiling. The Congress votes to increase this ceiling. If it can't do it with bipartisan agreement, that will mean a debt default. This is supposed to spook the markets and lead to a financial crisis. The only threat is the "sentiment". Nothing else. This essentially means that as long as USD is surmount, nothing bad can happen.
The situation this time around is a little bit different with China starting to gain ground. Even then, I don't think any of the major financial institutions, pension funds and banks that hold US debt are ever going to get spooked and move their investments elsewhere. So, these headlines are little more than click-bait; AND a trick to make you learn about this crazy system.
5.
I understand that it might be a bit of a struggle for some people to get up to $100 per week in terms of their investment into bitcoin, and I am glad that you got up to that number for this past month.. even though for sure it might seem like a random target, but it does seem a bit better on the aggressiveness threshold.. and sure it might take you 10 years or more to get to something approaching fuck you status... but you will likely be much better off in terms of having a more aggressive ongoing BTC buying strategy.. so long as you are not over extending your own budget.
At the initial phase when i started investing through this DCA method i also thought it will be very hard to cross $100 weekly investment limits but later on with time i found it interesting and profitable at the same time.Although my postion is not too good that i can spend enormous amounts only on Bitcoin as you know we need fiat also for our daily life but i have said it earlier also that we need to break our comfort zone if we need to safeguard our future from any other financial catastrophic events like hyperinflation could easily put you from rich to rags so it's better to tighten your expenses and plan for future ahead.
Obviously we can't get same amount of Bitcoin at even higher rates which we could get 10 years back because there is huge price variation but it doesn't mean we still waste time and like others i can't say i was not having sufficient funds to invest at that time.So trying my best to stack as many sats possible with me for long term and will see what my financial situation would be at that time.But one thing is for sure it would be far better than today and those who are spending vaguely will regret later on.This is life circle and we should utilise it in best possible manner.
On your first point regarding growing into higher levels of aggressiveness, that does not seem unusual for people who learn about bitcoin while they are investing and then at some point along the way start to consider that they might need to be a bit more aggressive in their investment approach. Surely, the learning about the asset does not always resonate in the same way with people, and the subsequent market performance can make a difference too. Some people feel more confidence when the asset goes up in price, and maybe they might start to feel dejected if the BTC price goes down in price and then they fail to buy at the most important times.. such as during a long period of down or stagnation..
This year has not really been stagnant, even though we had a 56% dip and a 39% dip.. Now if the dip continues from here, then maybe we can reassess, but one thing that I am referring to is something like a 1-2 year period of down and even if there might be some UP that comes after the first year or two, the amount of UP does not put you above the starting point... So those kinds of stagnant or negative periods can challenge the sentiments and even the buying aggressiveness of BTC accumulators.
Regarding your second point about the amount of BTC that you can get. Of course, I believe that it is a NOT too helpful of an exercise to get caught up upon the fact that you cannot get as many BTC as you would have been able to get 4-10 years earlier, even though there can be some fruitfulness in considering past performance in those kinds of terms.. So, yeah in recent times we had talked about newbies with investment projection values of $10k to $20k having goals to get to 100 BTC and then with the passage of time those newbie goals came down because it became less reasonable for newbies to have those kinds of entry-level goals, so maybe the goal would be 21 BTC or 10 BTC or 5 BTC or 1 BTC, so maybe in recent times we have been talking about newbie entry level goals as 0.21BTC... So the amount of BTC that can be accumulated goes down... and at the same times, we likely have to bring down our projection of likely reasonable terms.. Surely there are ways to see that with a longer projection of BTC values, you can see quite lucrative returns that might easily average around 50% to 100% per year (aka CAGR - Compound Annual Growth Rate).
So in that regard if you have an investment timeline of 4-10 years, maybe you want to be conservative in your expectations of what bitcoin's CAGR will be during that future time.. because the past CAGR may not exactly end up playing out, and as I already mentioned there is a bit of an expectation that it is going to come down to some extent as bitcoin's market cap continues to grow.. and we have likely come to agree that the projected CAGR of BTC is likely higher than most other assets even if if you might not be able to achieve 50% to 100% per year on a 4 to 10-year time horizon into the future.
By the way, I had already asserted several times and in several threads (not sure if I did it here) that when I got into bitcoin, I had hoped for at least a 6% CAGR in the long term - but I did not necessarily expect to get such 6% CAGR in the first few years of my investing into BTC. These days I use the 208-week moving average to project my BTC value (and the 208-week moving average is only at $18,500 currently), and I project an expectation that the 208-week moving average will move up at least 12% per year, and since the 208-week moving average is a lagging indicator, spot price tends to be higher than it, and the 208-week moving average tends to slope up - as well if BTC spot price starts to come close to the 208-week moving average (such as less than 12% distance) then from that information, I may well be able to project that in the future I might end up getting lower than 12% appreciation of that lagging indicator.
While I was typing this post, I did create a spreadsheet for my own information to attempt to project out DCA investing at $100 per week and with a variety of CAGR scenarios in order to attempt to project out values.. and with an anticipated 12% or to be able to customize such CAGR or amount invested. The overall structure for the spreadsheet with rows in 6-month increments for 4 years looked like this:
Start $ StartDate % gain /time Time Price/BTC #BTC$0 7/1/21 6.00% 182.6 $40,000.00 0.00000000
DCA-$100/Wk DCA/wk>>>> $100.00
Date $Value DCA-Add Price/BTC #BTC 12/30/21 $2,756 $2,756 $42,400 0.06500000
7/1/22 $5,677 $2,756 $44,944 0.12632075
12/30/22 $8,774 $2,756 $47,641 0.18417052
7/1/23 $12,056 $2,756 $50,499 0.23874578
12/31/23 $15,536 $2,756 $53,529 0.29023186
6/30/24 $19,224 $2,756 $56,741 0.33880365
12/30/24 $23,133 $2,756 $60,145 0.38462608
6/30/25 $27,277 $2,756 $63,754 0.42785479
6.
Q. - Why did the OP put Bitcoin (BTC) as the number 1 option?
A. - Because its the #1 crypto for beginners everybody
It would have been nice maybe if he OP gave some thoughts of their own
as to why they compiled the list in the poll.
To all newbies looking for quick help - stay away from cheap Sh1tcoins in
order to follow that "When Lambo" thinking. Just because Bitcoin isnt priced
at $0.01 doesnt mean you have to try an own 1BTC and doesnt mean its
an unachievable investment.
DYOR on coins like: TRON, IOTA and NEO to name a few, they all were once
part of newbies "TOP 5" lists but they are slipping down the rankings and will
eventually slipout of the top 100 in market cap.
Everything bar Bitcoin is pretty much a flash in the pan
7.
Ok, now I'm more confused than before.
NeuroticFish, you say you use your address, not your public key, but
cygan says both are the same?
BTW, I haven't started yet, I have downloaded Exodus, and I'm now trying to download EToro, as it's said to be safer. Far as I know, both are non custodian wallets, right?
The bitcoin address is generated from the public key by using an one-way hashing function and by adding a checksum that helps preventing typing errors.
If you have patience, you can read here:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mastering-bitcoin-2nd/9781491954379/ch04.htmlThere's an nice image there too:
If you do the reading, keep in mind that it's an older version of the book and Bitcoin has evolved since, for example there are more types of addresses, not only starting with 1.
Exodus is not open source, hence it's better to avoid it.
I use Electrum and I'm very happy with it. It's the most mature light wallet for bitcoin. (just if you use it, make sure you get it from
https://electrum.org/ and verify it
https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-verify-your-electrum-download/)
8.
It is very convenient to use the QR code, but I don’t know how to check whether the QR code is correct.
There is no easy way to confirm a QR code itself is correct, and indeed, there exists malware which can change QR codes and display malicious ones with different encoded addresses. If you do use a QR code to scan an address (or transaction, or anything else), it is good practice to manually check the address which is then displayed in your wallet as discussed above before hitting sign/broadcast/confirm/whatever.
but most mistake newbies make is trying to type a bitcoin wallet address
I very much doubt any newbies are typing addresses by hand, and especially not "most" newbies. As nc50lc has explained, typing an address by hand is very unlikely to lead to loss of funds due to the checksum built in to bitcoin addresses. Base58Check addresses have a 4 byte checksum, meaning that a typo only has a 1 in 4,294,967,296 chance of creating an incorrect but still valid address. Bech32 checksums are slightly different, since they are designed to identify the errors rather than just throw an invalid address error, but they also guarantee a failure rate of less than 1 in a billion.
9.
There's a friend about Bitcoin last 2 years who have no interest in it but I was surprised when he came to me last week to tell me what he need to know about Bitcoin. I asked him why the sudden change of heart, he told me about the testimony he hear from someone and how he would have made enough profit effortlessly.
He's still a newbie. My question is, is there a way or link for to explain Bitcoin to newbies?
Apart from the forum rules and regulations is there a thread on this forum that explains in detail the whole concept of crypto currency on this forum?
1. Explain the basics.
2. Show them the whitepaper on what Bitcoin is all about (p2p transactions without 3rd party involved)
3. Tell them about the risk (Scam,frauds,human error on losing wallet etc.)
4. Talk about adoption
5. Talk about the con's of it in terms of investment
6. Tell them about security of their assets
Just tell and stick with the basics and it wont really be that much hard for them to understand.
10.
is the formula to calculate tx size still this(for legacy addresses):
in*180 + out*34 + 10 plus or minus 'in'
That
seems about right. I don't think that
can change, unless you use a compressed address, in that case it's a bit less.
Coinb.in is convenient to get a quick estimate.
- This is my
personal list of unmerited or undermerited posts,
- I majorly considered post's relevance, to highly technical members (to the extent my technical skills could verify), newbies and all members in between,
- The list is subject to change with time.
