Quote from: TheUltraElite on May 26, 2024, 09:00:31 AM

Good day my fellow bitcoin users, this would be my application for becoming a new merit source.

To be somewhat established? I guess I am.

I didnt notice until another fellow member pointed out that it is going to be 8years in the coming month of July.
Total time logged in: 123 days (Woohoo!)
Have seen enough forum "stuff" that has made me mind my own business and usually forces me to run a one man army.

Most of you might not be aware but the Indian section is facing an acute crisis of merit influx. Hence would like take the reins and help out my fellow country users with the rank up they rightfully deserve.

Here is my collection of 10 posts which I believe are worthy of merits but have yet to receive any:

#1 April CPI eased to 3.4 from 3.5 in March, Reply number 12 by @pooya87

Quote from: pooya87 on May 16, 2024, 05:47:58 PM

Quote from: DanWalker on May 16, 2024, 02:30:22 PM

But with news that inflation is showing signs of going down, we can expect inflation to drop below 2% soon and the Fed to lower interest rates soon. In particular, people are more optimistic and believe that the Fed will lower interest rates twice this year as inflation is gradually being controlled.

Inflation has only shown signs of being "sticky" not signs of going down.
For it to go down the chaos in the world has to calm down, energy prices have to come down, the supply chain disruptions have to stop, etc. then we can start seeing inflation start coming down and then we can see them lower the rates. None of it is happening yet though.

Quote from: Die_empty on May 16, 2024, 03:58:42 PM

It is now clear that the Bitcoin market is highly connected to the US economy.

So you are saying that the economy (inflation + recession) in the rest of the world is fine and it is only US economy that is affected by these things?!
Shall we take a look at G7 countries in 2023?

Country	\|	Inflation rate	\|	Interest rate
USA	\|	4.1%	\|	5.33%
Canada	\|	3.8%	\|	7.2%
UK	\|	5.2%	\|	5.25%
France	\|	5.7%	\|	3.5%
Germany	\|	5.9%	\|	3.5%
Italy	\|	5.9%	\|	5.0%
Japan	\|	3.27%	\|	0.1%

The only deviance is Japan and Canadian interest rate but the rest are pretty much the same.
Things are worse in smaller economies. This is why Bitcoin is affected, because the economic crisis is a global event not a local thing limited to US economy.

Whether the market reacts to a news like the US CPI is a different matter that doesn't mean there is a "connection". It's just weak hands panicking/FOMOing after reading something in the news.

#2 Personal Financial Goals vs Government expectations! by @Findingnemo

Quote from: Findingnemo on May 03, 2024, 02:20:12 AM

Have you ever thought about this, what we are trying to achieve in our personal financial life is completely diverge from what the government expects their citizens to do.

We as Individuals always thrive to achieve financial independence in our lives especially someone who is from the average middle person but what the government expects from the middle class is different and is kind of surprising when we give deep thought about it, The Government highly relies on the middle-class tax payers for the money and most of the taxes collected in the form of indirect taxes so that people may not actually aware that they are paying taxes for everything from their salary, fuel, medicine, anything everything has taxes that eat most our earnings.

So as a result we are paying from 10% to over 50% of our earnings just in the form of taxes in one or another way. So one who really wants to achieve financial independence should find a way to reduce their tax pay legally like how the businessmen do.

Or like the bald guy says, we need to find a way to exit the Matrix. Cheesy

#3 Bitcoin forks and ETFs, Reply number 2 by @PrivacyG

Quote from: PrivacyG on May 23, 2024, 02:40:24 PM

Quote from: Bitcoiner317 on May 23, 2024, 02:04:53 PM

With all the hassle it seems to be to get an ETF approved, do you think financial institution would go through the hassle of giving their share holders their owned value of the second chain?

I doubt they would go through this trouble. I do not even know yet. Are ETFs actually legitimately backed by Bitcoin or not?

Even Exchanges barely go through the trouble of sharing Forked Coins with the customers. Besides the known Bitcoin Forks, I imagine there are hundreds if not thousands more that we did not care about. If they take this route, they would need to do the same for every single Fork that pops up. Right?

By investing in an ETF you do not get a Bitcoin Address of yours. An On Chain Transaction never happens. It is close to what PayPal used to do back when they added Bitcoin to their Service for the first time. You buy or sell Bitcoin, but only on paper. I would be in fact surprised if they announce ETF share holders will be eligible for claiming Forked rewards.

But. Expect something like this to become the new trend of Scams all over the internet some day.

#4 Bitcoin forks and ETFs, Reply number 16 by @tbct_mt2

Quote from: tbct_mt2 on May 26, 2024, 04:04:59 AM

Quote from: yhiaali3 on May 25, 2024, 08:02:51 PM

ETF companies are primarily for-profit companies so they will most likely choose the network that they believe will give them the greatest profits in the event of a hard fork.

As big capital management companies, they will think of safety for capital they are managed, not profit first. Because profit can be gained later when chaos ends and risk is smaller, they can find new opportunities to get profit. If they lose capital of their customers, they will go bankrupted and go into jails.

ETF companies don't own private keys and they will have to depend on their partners, the custodians like Coinbase, to claim forked coins. If Coinbase support, I believe they will do, fork claims, ETF companies will not lose anything.

The 2017 hard fork create Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, but we see the main chain, Bitcoin continues to grow, higher and higher in hash rate and price. Bitcoin Cash, the forked coin is like a bonus.

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This means that they will most likely choose the network in which the price is higher or the number of investors is greater. As for ETF investors, they do not have the right to object or choose the network that suits them because in reality they do not own Bitcoin, but rather own shares in these companies, and therefore they are forced to accept the choice of networks that the companies choose.

ETF investors depend on ETF companies which in turn depend on their third-party partners, custodians for example Coinbase. It is like chain of risk from customers to ETF companies to Custodian service providers.

#5 Is Rodarmor Rarity Index a big thing? Reply number 6 by @odolvlobo

Quote from: odolvlobo on May 21, 2024, 10:04:48 PM

Quote from: GreatArkansas on May 21, 2024, 01:06:26 AM

This is my first time to hear about the Rodarmor Rarity Index where every satoshi in Bitcoin is unique and they came up with this rarity tier and categorized each satoshi.

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Rodarmor's rarity index initially described six rarity categories — common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, and mythic. - What Are Rare Sats? (The Ultimate Guide to Rare Satoshis)

Can we relate this to Bitcoin Ordinals or Runes?
Because for my basic understanding, it's kinda of you turning your satoshi into an NFT and that satoshi has a different rarity, how rare it is.

Rodarmor is the inventor of Ordinals.

Ordinals is a protocol for enumerating satoshis and maintaining that enumeration while accounting for transactions and fee payment. The enumeration is arbitrary. Anyone can come up with an enumeration. However, Ordinals will always dominate because it was first and it works well.

Enumerating the satoshis makes each one distinguishable from all of the others. Thus, using the Ordinals protocol, a satoshi can be treated as a non-fungible token (NFT).

With Ordinals, all satoshis are equally rare -- there is only one of each. However, they can be classified according to Rodarmor' classification system, as well as others, in order to introduce ways to establish rarity. These classifications are arbitrary. It's up to you to consider whether some satoshis are more valuable than others according to the classifications you subscribe to.

In my opinion, Ordinals is harmless as long as there is no significant number of people who take it seriously. Otherwise, the fungibility of Bitcoin could become an issue.

Rodarmor also developed a related protocol called Inscriptions that associates data (such as text or an image) embedded in the block chain with an Ordinals satoshi.

I am not as familiar with Runes. If I understand it correctly, it is not related to Ordinals. Instead, it is a token protocol that stores data in Bitcoin transactions via OP_RETURN. It might be interesting to compare it to CounterParty and Omni.

#6 Foolhardy bets. Reply number 13 by @Hewlet

Quote from: Hewlet on May 23, 2024, 10:43:47 AM

Quote from: satscraper on May 23, 2024, 07:01:36 AM

Internet is full of reassuring stories on big gambling wins like ten/hundred -thousand-dollar, or even more, while in most cases the gamblers are losing because they are either not the experts in on gambling they try or have not relevant skills and make foolhardy bets.

I'm sure everyone here involved into gambling has made such reckless bet at least once in life.

Did such bet/s change your gambling styles?

Have you become to be more eager in gambling or , on the contrary it has put a chill on you?

I had earlier made a similar thread as this regarding the effect of stories of huge wins and and jackpot have had on gambling habit and from what I read in the replies, it's clear that people ar easily influenced by these kinds of stories which to some extent affect thier gambling style and course an increase in the allocation that they would normally assign to gambling since they would in most cases want to win big. Here is the link to the main thread if you want to go through it and possibly learn from the replies.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5497144.msg64102378#msg64102378

But let me now talk from a first person point of view. A friend once sent me a sport betting code and instructed me to play it but I was just reluctant to doing so, fast forward to the end of the day when the game finally played out as he predicted and he won his bet, I was a bit uneasy and felt disappointed that I didn't play the game and the fact that he has won, th next weekend I had to go on to playing a game I would have nit stacked on a normal day. The truth is that you can't really control yourself that much when you're seeing others winning big or when you've read stories of people that are doing what you're doing and have currently hit it big. You will get tempted to try your luck and maybe increase your bet and before you know it, you've gone into irresponsible Gambling.

Apart from getting motivation from stories of some one that I know, i can't rely on what I see on the Internet as a motivation to increasing my gambling style or going too aggressive in my gambling. Not on this internet sphare were the more you look at things, the less you see the real truth and anyone can easily design a slip that shows they've won big even when in reality they haven't won anything that's close to that.

#7 What’s with all these Ponzi type APR on Stablecoins? Reply number 2 by @FinneysTrueVision

Quote from: FinneysTrueVision on May 26, 2024, 05:35:07 AM

The APR usually comes from trading fees and also the DEX that is trying to attract liquidity will incentivize users by offering their native token as a reward for staking in certain pools. Trading fees are usually not that high, unless the price is really volatile you will see a higher APR for a few days but it is misleading because you won’t earn that percentage in a year, you will only earn it if volatility, demand, and liquidity remain exactly the same.

As for token rewards, the exchanges are basically printing their own money. When they first launch their token, emissions will be high to make their APR look attractive, but this has the side effect of causing hyperinflation so the token’s value will go down and the APR will go down along with it. To combat this, the developers will come up with different mechanisms to make their token deflationary and pump the price back up.

The printing their own money aspect does look like a scam, but to be fair, some newer DEXs have tried to create governance models which give their token lasting value rather than being just a get rich quick shitcoin.

#8 High Fees on Electrum? Normal? Reply number 12 by @Cookdata

Quote from: Cookdata on May 12, 2024, 01:06:50 PM

Quote from: Asuspawer09 on May 12, 2024, 09:56:02 AM

Is the number of coin control inputs going to matter?

Yes, every input in a transaction matters. The more the number of inputs you add to your transaction, the more the size becomes bigger. Let me make an illustration for you:
Let's say our basis for inputs and output are native segwit(version 0) since you received your coins from signature, the transaction input is 68 vbyte and 31 vbytes for output.

If you are spending:
1 input and 1 output will give you 109.5 vbytes transaction.
2 inputs and 1 output will give you 177.25 vbytes transaction.
5 inputs and 1 output will give you 380.5 vbytes transaction.
More input and 1 input will give you bigger vbytes transaction consequently.

Now, imagine having 10 or even 15 inputs for a single transaction, you will have to pay more fees for every vbytes for that transaction. More inputs, more fees.

You can check this thread by Charles-Tim for more understanding.

However, with coin control, if you have much inputs and you want to spend only few Bitcoin, let's say you have $300 worth in total balance and you want to spend $100, you can just add few inputs that can give you equivalent $100 or more to spend and get back a change if there is from your transaction.

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is it going to affect the transaction speed or its just a matter of privacy?

Speed of transactions has nothing to do with your inputs, if you want a faster transactions, you have to pay an optimal fee to get your transaction included in the next block.

Privacy comes when you spend inputs together.

#9 Bitcoin wallet vs pendrive or Memory card. Reply number 16 by @m2017

Quote from: m2017 on May 25, 2024, 07:23:14 AM

Quote from: dkbit98 on May 22, 2024, 06:07:30 PM

There is one interesting new drive Blaustahl USB, that is based on FRAM (Ferroelectric RAM) that could last up to 200 years, but it can only store 8kb of data, that means only text files.
It is expected that future firmware updates are going to include encryption for better security.

The memory is characterized by high write speed and extremely high write retention, capable of withstanding one million billion read/write cycles. It seems to me that with a full flash drive capacity of 8kb, ultra-high write speeds will not be needed at all.

And also, you won’t rewrite the seed phrase one million billion times (x10²¹).

Blaustahl USB really looks very interesting for storing seed phrases, considering that the device has a built-in text editor, accessible via PuTTY и Tera Term, the memory capacity is enough for this, and the device has a long resource for reliability and durability.

I am confused by the stated service life of the device of 200 years. About CD also claimed that data on them could be stored for up to 60 years, but as practice has shown, after a couple of years the data became unreadable. Even if the creators of Blaustahl USB made a 10-fold mistake, the device’s service life will still be an impressive 20 years. By then, technology will surely advance and more advanced devices will appear.

Not the cheapest alternative to flash drives for ~€30, but the declared reliability is captivating (together with encryption).

Quote from: NotATether on May 23, 2024, 10:11:05 AM

I'm not sure why the OP isn't considering USB external hard drives for backup purposes, because HDDs have a much better lifespan than the flash that you can find in a USB pen drive.

I know it may sound overkill based on the storage size, but you can easily bring the price down by buying like a 128GB drive. Or maybe even 64GB drives. They seem to be available on Amazon when I checked it.

This will also fit a Tails installation easily as well.

3.5 "HDDs have low write / read speeds, which is reflected in their “slowness”. And also, HDDs are inferior in overall dimensions, in other words, it bulky compared to flash drives. And don’t forget about the HDD’s sensitivity to shaking (due to the small gap between the physical disk and the read head), not to mention shocks and falls.

#10 Running a Bitcoin Nodes; My curiosity Reply number 11 by @tranthidung

Quote from: tranthidung on May 21, 2024, 10:32:10 AM

Quote from: Africolo on May 20, 2024, 05:14:37 PM

I've read a lot about the Bitcoin nodes and about running one myself but it's nearly impossible to download almost 500 GB of the entire Blockchain with the speed of the Internet I'm currently using.

There are Bitcoin full nodes and pruned nodes. What you are talking about is Bitcoin full node that will download and store the whole blockchain data on your computer. Fortunately, there are Bitcoin pruned nodes which can be customized personally with any storage size you want depends on your available free data space on your computer disk.

Pros and Cons of Bitcoin Node types (Full node and Prune node)
Node types and roles
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/networking/node/

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I know nodes are just simple computers running on the Bitcoin network operated by individuals and I've also learned that there are approximately 75k active nodes ( both listening and non-listening nodes) my curiosity is what would happen to Bitcoin if these 75k node operators decided to shut down.

If you are curious, check the live map for Bitcoin nodes.

https://bitnodes.io/

Bitcoin has a decentralized network from geolocation decentralization of miners and nodes. It's nearly impossible that all miners and all node operators will shut down their operations.

If you have read this far, thanks for bearing with me. The forum is not going to die, we will work to keep it active and fun! The first step in that is getting the local sections up and running and that is why I am willing to take on this responsibility! Cool

Thanks and peace to all!

I support this and I gave you 34 merits.