Hey,

I'm just curious, is this new forum software GDPR compliant? Are there any docs regarding personal data processing? What if the users decide to exercise their right to be forgotten as per Art. 17 GDPR. Is it easy to deal with such requests?

- Hmm, I have a strange taste in my mouth, how do you say this beer was produced?
- Sorry, sir, it has just been reported there is an ongoing 51% attack on our beer blockchain. It's absolutely impossible to verify what it was made of. Hey, sir, are you okay? Why are you lying on the floor?

Of course, the crypto industry isn't dead. Those who think that everything related to crypto is just another ponzi scheme don't understand how blockchain technology really works. Yes, there are (and will be) scam projects which are based on crypto principles. But, on the other hand, there are a lot of scam projects involving fiat. So what? It's just how any industry functions in this world. Bad people always find new ways to trick trustful users.

Rising and falling share prices is the usual thing of a stock market game. Look how Apple stocks decreased this winter too. Does it mean that Apple is doomed?

After so many investments into crypto from companies around the world I don't believe there is a strong chance the whole industry will be multiplied by zero just because the bitcoin stock price didn't skyrocket to $100k. At this point it's all about speculations, in my opinion.

Hallo zusammen,

Kann mir mal jemand erklären, welche Dienste kann ich nutzen, um die Popularität von Altcoins zu bestimmen? Zum Beispiel, Wissen Sie, welcher Altcoin ist der beliebteste in Deutschland? Gibt es irgendwelche Websites, wo ich Transaktionen nach Ländern sortieren kann?

Vielen Dank im Voraus

There is already an ongoing third world war. It is called an informational war. You just don't realize it.

Every year different branches of science are advanced by leaps and bounds. And I'm not talking only about technology progress. There are other important fields, such psychology, behavioral control, and mind manipulation.

You should understand, that at this stage of human development we are not going to kill each other by the nuclear weapon or the like. Governments still can make dreadful threats, promising to erase their opponents from the surface of Earth. But it is all sophistry - the ability to play with the words like Messi plays with a ball.

Today a large number of people are already under control by the means of mass media. When you are clicking an advertising link, you are losing the battle. When you are voting for corrupted hypocrites, you are losing the war.

P.S. If you are interested in this topic, I can recommend you the following article: Types of information warfare and examples of malicious programs of information warfare.

Guys, it's just my assumption, but, I think, he meant Anonymous group:


More info on Wiki.

In short, Satoshi Nakamoto had sex with the banking system, and then, after nine months, the bitcoin was born.

If you want to read about it in more details, I would recommend the books of Andreas M. Antonopoulos. By the way, you can find a free version of Mastering Bitcoin book in his github repo: https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook


Unfortunately, I doubt there are Nostradamuses here.

Okay, children, here is the conclusion of our today's lesson. There are three types of scammers you will encounter in your life:

• Scammer the Primateus. This is the most primitive, the lowest quality, ranking near the bottom type of scammers. When they want to convince you to pay for a vaporware product they usually say it directly, without trying to rack their arguably small brains even a little bit, something like this: I have a nice logo, a wordpress-powered website, and a whitepaper.doc, so shut up and gimme your money!
• Scammer the Neanderthalis. This type of scammers reportedly has evolved from the primateus group. Usually they use slightly improved techniques, trying to establish a reputation as experts in their field at first. When they decide to send you malicious links to their projects you will be already deceived into thinking they are coming from a legitimate source.
• Scammer the Modernus. The most advanced category of scammers. In most cases they utilize such progressive methods that there is no need to send you any spam-links. You will eagerly search for them through the web yourself. Sometimes people even vote for this type of scammers during elections.

I am a newbie here, but I'll tell you this. My favorite signature so far is the following:     

Yeah, just a blank line. This forum is sooo overloaded with signature ads, sometimes they can be very distracting. At first I even thought that I forgot to enable ad-blocking extension in Chrome. Now when I see a blank signature it's like a breath of fresh air. Maybe it's just me, but I prefer clean design without tons of banners with "BEST CRYPTO CASINO EVER" or "GET FREE BITCOINS NOW!!11" titles thrown at your face.

There are many reasons why Bitcoin remains "the king of crypto":

• It has the most proven and reviewed technology stack under its belt. As you might know, cryptography is very very complicated domain. It takes an enormous amount of resources (time and money) to develop a single algorithm, let along implementing the whole infrastructure based on it. People like to invest into proven and safe projects. And when you see how many new coin-related startups turns out to be vaporware, it becomes obvious why bitcoin is still the head of the train.
• Network effect. The more companies incorporate bitcoin, the more improved bitcoin ecosystem becomes. New users help in finding new bugs, providing valuable feedbacks, and spreading the word around the world.
• Tons of learning materials. There is no doubt that science the cryptocurrencies are based on is hard. For newcomers it's really important to get started from something very basic and understandable. And in case of Bitcoin there are more than enough guides and tutorials around the web which are sometimes available even for free.
• Brand awareness. It's often an underestimated factor, but brand awareness plays one of the most important roles in product success. It was thoroughly researched and discussed for many years, and, as a result, key metrics which influence consumer decisions were determined. It's not even about the brand name, it's about human psychology and mind manipulation.

I can recommend this article - https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~moorman/Marketing-Strategy-Seminar-2015/Session%203/Keller.pdf. It's not related to bitcoin per se, however, you will find some other interesting marketing techniques used to define the consumers response to the brand.

Here are the disadvantages which are based on my studying of cryptosystems:

• High hardware requirements

         It seems, the world is moving towards cloud-based systems. For example, let's take a look at what Apple is currently selling: MacMini and Macbook Pro are still have the base configuration with only 128 gb SSD, iMacs are still being offered with hard drives (pretty ancient technology at this point). For basic usage that's okay. But if you need to be involved in crypto, you should have a much more capable machine.
        Even if you don't intend to mine coins, just to be able to make transactions you are supposed to run a full node. Yeah, there are some workarounds, such as using third-party master nodes or whatever they call them, however, almost all of the available approches are not recommended by security experts. When you don't have your own full node you are relying on someone else's fairness. And, as you may know, humans are not the creatures we can blindly trust.

• Low protection against criminals

        In a fully centralised system we know who is responsible for all the good and evil things. If somethings goes wrong (e.g., your money was stolen), you will still have a chance to resolve the issue successfully, because you are protected by the law, and you know the entity you should press charges against.
        In a decentralised system you are on your own. If somethings goes wrong and your money's gone, nobody will help you. It's sad, but (at least in current implementations) the only thing you can do in this case is...to move on.

• High complexity

        In a centralised system the most important security decisions (e.g., 2FA, MFA, Oauth etc.) were already made for you. In a decentralised world you should invest the time to ensure that your savings are protected taking into account all recent advancement in cryptocurrency infrastructure.

• Possibility of 51% attack

        Basically, there is no way to prevent someone from controlling more than 50% of the network's mining hashrate, or computing power. And if this happens, all your coins value will be dropped down to zero because you are no longer protected by the blockchain.

• Hard to implement refund policies

        It's hard to image a shop that successfully operates without providing clear refund policies. If you are not 100% satisfied with your purchase, you should have a right to return the product and get a full refund. With constantly increasing complexity of cryptocurrency systems it's getting more and more difficult to incorporate refund features into the shopping flow.

That's what I can tell you regarding disadvantages right off the bat. Personally, I believe that all or almost all of the aforementioned points will be resolved in the future by some talented people who always come up with unpredictable and bright ideas.

There are a lot of small shops which accept crypto payments around the world. However, in my opinion, what will really push the cryptocurrencies forward is the adoption of Bitcoin by some big player in the trading industry, such as Amazon.

What do you think, will Amazon start to accept Bitcoin as a payment method if its price rises to new-record values again (like in 2017)? Could it be that they are not adopting it because they treat crypto as a hostile technology for their business? Or they just don't take Bitcoin seriously, like thinking it will despair in the near future?

I think, these are great news. Not because everyone needed this functionality. It's just a very good indication for the whole crypto industry. When such big fish as Samsung invests time and money into creating a new feature for its high-end product it means they did a thorough analysis of the market. So we can be sure that analysis showed high awareness of cryptocurrencies around the world.

This can cause a network effect. If other manufactures start integrating crypto-features into their products we may witness new limits of Bitcoin price very quickly.

It's really hard to keep up with the cryptocurrency development even for a programmer. Every coin is trying to introduce a lot of new terms to show you how innovative it is. But in many cases it turns out to be just another vaporware. And at the end of the day you see that you've waisted your time for nothing.

How many books did you read / how many courses did you complete before you started investing in Bitcoin? Can you honestly say: do you really have the time to keep up with the crypto world or at some point you just started to believe in tech instead of trying to grasp every single crypto feature?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to spread FUD. But this table reminded me of human life stages:

2009 - $0.00 - Prebirth:  Potential – The child who has not yet been born could become anything.

2010 - $0.125 - Birth:  Hope – When a child is born, it instills in its parents and other caregivers a sense of optimism; a sense that this new life may bring something new and special into the world.

2011 - $2.00 - Infancy: Vitality – The infant is a vibrant and seemingly unlimited source of energy. 

2012 - $13.00 - Early Childhood: Playfulness – When young children play, they recreate the world anew.

2013 - $600–$1,000 - Middle Childhood: Imagination – In middle childhoood, the sense of an inner subjective self develops for the first time, and this self is alive with images taken in from the outer world.

2014 - $440–$630 - Late Childhood: Ingenuity – Older children have acquired a wide range of social and technical skills that enable them to come up with marvelous strategies and inventive solutions for dealing with the increasing pressures that society places on them.

2015 - $395–$504 - Adolescence: Passion –  The biological event of puberty unleashes a powerful set of changes in the adolescent body.

2016 - $600–$780 - Early Adulthood: Enterprise –  It takes enterprise for young adults to accomplish their many responsibilities.

2017 - $19,783 (All-Time Highest) - Midlife: Contemplation – After many years in young adulthood of following society’s scripts for creating a life, people in midlife often take a break from worldly responsibilities to reflect upon the deeper meaning of their lives, the better to forge ahead with new understanding.

2018 - $6,300 - Mature Adulthood: Benevolence – Those in mature adulthood have raised families, established themselves in their work life, and become contributors to the betterment of society through volunteerism, mentorships, and other forms of philanthropy. 

2019 - $3,622 - Late Adulthood: Wisdom – Those with long lives have acquired a rich repository of experiences that they can use to help guide others.

I really hope the next Bitcoin life stage won't be Death & Dying.

Sorry for the naïve question, but I'm just really curious. What would happen to Bitcoin price if, for example, Trump declared all cryptocurrencies forbidden?

Can Bitcoin survive because of decentralization or some other underlying tech concepts, or will it simply drop down into oblivion if the government decides to fight it for real?

I see a lot of news regarding criminals who use the cryptocurrencies to hide their identities from authorities. There is also a ton of other evil things connected with crypto, such as hidden miners, fake exchanges etc.

Personally, I am very excited about the underlying bitcoin technology (science and tech are my favorite domains). However, what do you think, will Bitcoin (or other coins) do more good than harm for humanity in the future?

Are there any new alt coins that could bring some profit from CPU-only mining? My GPU is ancient and I cannot afford a new one right now.

Okay, got you 

Just thought since the phones can be unlocked with faceid this technology would be safe enough for wallets. Now I see this idea has many edge cases. Nevertheless, I still think they will solve the mentioned issues someday...in the future...with enough funding...


New startup idea: mobile magnetic shields which would protect from such "armed robbers" 

Hi everyone,

Face Id feature is a new trend in the smartphone world. I was thinking is there a mobile wallet that can use face id instead of 12 words seed?

Basically, I would like to have something like this:

• The wallet app scans the face and extracts its id
• Then it uses this id to generate an appropriate seed
• Finally the wallet derives the keys from the seed as usual

So, as you can see, it would be very convenient to restore the bitcoin wallet just by using your face.

Hope all this makes sense.