I had Bitcoin Core 23.0 if I remember correctly. After months of it running I realized it had stopped working.

It turned out Snap had updated it to 27.0.0. I downgraded it to 25.2 using Ubuntu Software package manager in the hope it would be less broken, but it's equally broken.

I don't have `bitcoind` or `bitcoin-cli` like I used to. The symlinks point to non-existent files.
However, I do have `bitcoin-core.daemon` and `bitcoin-core.cli`. I created symlinks to them as follows:


but when I run `bitcoind`, it gives me output from Snap and not from `bitcoin-core.daemon`.

This is not the main issue, as I can replace `bitcoind` with `bitcoin-core.daemon` in the systemd config file (but it would be handy to fix).

What I'm struggling with is passing the config file to it. When I run:
I get:

The file is readable:

 

Thanks guys, finally it connected! And I didn't change anything.
I've also successfully connected from another PC on the same LAN to my electrs via SSL.

It wasn't about the ports, and Bitcoin Core was indeed fully synced.
I think the issue was electrs still compacting the DB.

When electrs indexed, the DB took 60 GB of space, then it started compacting and the DB kept shrinking. Last night it was 44 GB and I still couldn't connect. Now it's 42 GB and I can connect.
The `starting txid compaction` message in electrs logs was the telltale sign, but it could have been clearer as there was no indication of progress and it took longer than expected to complete. My Bitcoin Core synced in under 72 hours, I was expecting electrs to be done within hours, and that most of it would be the indexing and not the compacting.

I do have a firewall running, it allows connections to port 50002, which I had set up for SSL access within the LAN.
Disabling the firewall doesn't help.
But in any case I can't even connect to 127.0.0.1:50001 on the same PC.

`sudo netstat -tunlp` returns the line:

I believe it is fully synchronized, I've been running it for a few days. I've tried connecting via port 50001 with no luck.

I'm not running it using systemd; I start it manually. It writes logs to the console, which presumably is the same I'd get with journalctl.
When I start it, the last few lines look like this:

and then nothing more is logged until I try to connect.

Hello,

I can't connect to my electrs, not even from the machine it's running on.

My HW/SW:
Intel NUC, 1TB SDD, 8GB RAM
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Bitcoin Core 25.0.0
Electrs 0.10.0

I've tried connecting with both Electrum wallet (SSL only) and Sparrow (directly and via SSL).
Electrum says nothing, the bullet just stays red. Sparrow says "Connecting to tcp://127.0.0.1:50001..." and won't connect.

In electrs I have logging set to DEBUG and get these lines, respectively:
and

Logs from Electrum client:

In Sparrow logs there is nothing.

Any idea what's going on?

That would make sense if you knew BTC was going to range between $16k - $24k.

But without the ability to predict the market it's risky. What if it never drops below $24k (or whatever level you set), you'll never buy BTC again and, unable to save the fruits of your labour, you'll end up being poor.

Don't try and convince anyone. Stack sats and enjoy their incredibly low price suppressed by human ignorance.

They will all jump on the bandwagon eventually. Some will do that at $100k, some at $1m, some at $10m. But they all will.

And they'll say you got lucky. But you know everyone buys BTC at the price they deserve.

Sorry, but that's so very wrong in so many ways.

No volatility doesn't mean no volatility against a f**t poocoin. The f**t poocoin is volatile itself; namely its value is going to zero.

If Bitcoin had no volatility (in however reasonable way you define it), its USD price would still go to infinity, because the value of USD is going to zero.

Letting the central bankers and governments define a benchmark for value is like bending over and saying "Hey, screw me as much as you please."

What do you mean by "stable in value"?

That it can buy the same quantity of eggs? (In what country?) The same amount of real estate? (What location?) The same number of iPhones? (The same model or the model computed by some kind of hedonic adjustment function?)
Or, God forbid, the same amount of US dollars, Argentine pesos or some other f**t poocoin?

Whichever you choose, it's impossible to peg its price to that of another asset while keeping it decentralized at the same time, because you'd need a redeeming counterparty. You could approximate a peg by setting the block subsidy to debase it as much as economic growth taken from some consensus-driven, decentralized oracle, e.g. if the economy grew by 5%, let's agree to print 5% more. Or the same for eggs, if you want to peg it to eggs. E.g. if the supply of eggs grew by 5% and the demand for eggs grew by 7%, then eggs are roughly worth 2% more, so you need to make Bitcoin worth 2% more by burning some.
But that doesn't take into account the increasing adoption. After all, we started at 0% and are heading towards 100%, and that alone is causing appreciation.

I DCA daily.

DCA-ing depending on the price could be more profitable, but there is no guarantee.
For example you could DCA with a higher f**t amount when it's below some MA or when the RSI is low, and a lower amount otherwise.

It may be worth running some simulations on historical data, but my guess is you wouldn't find any patterns that would work over a different period.

1. The government is not needed for Bitcoin adoption.
2. It doesn't matter what they allow. You do your thing. If you want to pay with BTC to someone who is happy to accept it, there is nothing to get in the way. That's what Bitcoin was created for; to allow you to transact without the mafia's permission.

One thing you can do to help adoption is only allow BTC payments. If someone wants to pay you with fiat, you can say "Keep that poo to yourself, I only accept BTC."

People have the ability to learn. On average, their ignorance decreases over time.

Any BTC price is low. 15k was low, 69k was low; 1m which we haven't seen yet, is low too. And so is 100m.

Those who bought BTC when it was $1 and have held it until now, have probably done much better than anyone trying to time the market.
There are, however, not many such people. Those who bought at $1 sold it at $10, those who bought at $10 sold at $100. Meanwhile, those who have held have made a 20000x. It's much easier and less stressful to stop watching the charts and keep holding until you stop DCAing in (a.k.a. retirement), because the ultimate value of BTC is infinity.

Selling and spending are not the same.

What I mean by selling is when you buy BTC as an investment, to sell at a higher price. Nothing wrong with that, but selling for fiat means you're part of the system. You're using their fiat money, on their terms.

When spending, you're circumventing fiat. You're participating in a circular, Bitcoin economy. KYC-free and without taxation if you so choose. That's a big difference.

Selling is bad, because when you sell BTC, you have less BTC and your ability to fuck the state diminishes.
It makes you more of a slave, it makes you weak and powerless.

I love it when governments ban crypto, they make clowns of themselves and that can only be a good thing, because it makes people respect them less.

People will transact outside of the system, pay less taxes and the nation states will get skinny.

The EU is not Nigeria or India. Their banking system is better connected to the rest of the world, so I don't think massive market inefficiencies will emerge as people will be able to buy it outside of the EU by sending their fiat caca to a seller on Bisq, RoboSats or similar.

How is it banning staking on CEXes against decentralization? It's against centralized exchanges.
The ban doesn't even target crypto, but crypto IOUs.

Benefits become apparent as the markets becomes more efficient.
There is a lot of ignorance in the space, which creates market inefficiencies.

Once people realize what a scam shitcoins are, they will flock to Bitcoin.
BTC dropped from 23 to 21.5. That's the noise of the aforementioned ignorance. Zoom out and you'll see the signal. Check back in 2030.

It depends on the market conditions. If you can put $1m in BTC and rent a place for a year, and the BTC price double in that time and your rent is less than $1m over that period, then renting was a good decision, because the BTC investment turned out better than the potential real estate investment.

Interest rates are important too.

One thing people often miss is when you own, the mortgage payments are not your housing cost, because they consist of principal and interest payments and only the latter component is your cost. Principal repayments add to your equity; you're just moving money from one pocket to another.
E.g. if your monthly mortgage payments are $1000, $700 of which is principal and $300 of which is interest, you're only paying $300 to live. You're unlikely to find a place to rent for that little. The remaining $700, however, is a commitment to move money from one pocket to another, and you have to have it or you'll get in trouble.

Low interest rate environments favor owning your home, but they also lead to property price bubbles, because when it makes more sense to own, more people do it and prices go up. An arbitrage opportunity arises and gets arbed out. So if you bought a year ago, your house may be worth less now that the interest rates are higher.

But then again, when interest rates are high and you're tempted to rent, the higher mortgage costs are passed onto tenants. So it may be a good time to buy, especially if you don't have to commit to the current high rates for long.

All in all, owning is good and it tends to be a safe investment with less volatility than many other investments. If you can afford it, it puts you ahead of many who can't, even if otherwise the conditions favor it. This creates a market inefficiency which you can exploit.

We can choose to stay out of the compliant economy, with registration, regulations and taxation, and build our own circular economy whereby we interact with friends, or interact anonymously and privately with a larger community of like-minded individuals. That way we won't have to worry about whether the forms of payment we accept are legal or not.
I believe that's the future. Not in changing the law, but in circumventing it by mastering and leveraging the technology that is at our disposal.

It won't be long before people have so much individual power (thanks to Bitcoin, cryptography, Nostr, Tor etc.) that our muppet governments will be a laughing stock at best.

Bitcoin was designed not to be able to be regulated. Bitcoin IOUs can be regulated, but Bitcoin doesn't give a hoot.
Bitcoin IOUs are fake BTC, which many people are not educated enough to understand. But ignorance can only decrease.

However, if a government finds a way to regulate Bitcoin, it will prove Bitcoin is garbage and not worth adopting or caring for, because it will defeat the very purpose it was created for.

It's about EV. The favorable condition in the coin flipping game is when you pay $10 if you lose and earn more than $10 when you win, which is the game proposed later in the video and gives you a positive EV.

In terms of asymptotics there are only two possible outcomes for the BTC price, regardless of the factors that may drive it - it's either going to infinity or to zero.
By going to infinity I mean there is no positive real number x such that BTCUSD will never exceed x.

If it's neither going to infinity nor to zero, that means its USD price is going to range between some x and y forever, which would effectively be a peg against the USD. How could a finite supply asset be pegged against a fiat shipcoin forever? The USD would have to have a finite supply too, because the convertibility would have to work in both directions (otherwise there would be no market and therefore no valuation). The USD would have to be backed by Bitcoin. Not something I see happening in my wildest dreams, but even in that case, the purchasing power of BTC (but not its USD price) would go to infinity.