Bitcoin and Crypto Thread

[chance vought]

@PurpleUrkel
Nothing has been lost. BTC is not stored on the wallet...a copy of the ledger is stored on tens of thousands of nodes, all around the world.

BTC is the only "thing" that it is possible to truly own. All of those tools (truck, generator) can be taken from you. If Biden were to outlaw fossil fuels, police can come take those things from you. Your drug addicted neighbor can shoot you and drive away in your 4x4. Bitcoin cannot be taken. You can take it to the grave and it yet it still cannot be taken by anyone unless you want it to.

If you don't take responsibility and don't secure your Bitcoin properly, yes it can be stolen. But with proper security, it is the most secure property that has ever existed.

Electricity and the internet. Everything in our civilization depends on these things. Everyone is screwed if those go down! This is a nonsense argument. Maybe a coronal mass ejection would do this, but it still doesn't break Bitcoin...it still exists, unless you think we will never have electricity or Internet again...

Something as important as electricity and telecom...essential infrastructure that humans will move heaven and earth to protect and re-establish. Also, the millions of people with $1 trillion in BTC are incentivised to keep it running.

It's never been hacked, and whether it is made illegal or not, is meaningless and hilarious. Making BTC illegal is like trying to outlaw pre-marital sex. Good luck with that, government...

 

[chance vought]

Importing Samurai to Sparrow wallet (desktop)

Steps for importing your Samourai Wallet to Sparrow \ stacker news ~privacy

Step 0 - Put your device in Airplane Mode (for safety sake) In Samourai, tap the Paynym icon at the top left & go to settings. In that settings menu, you'll use two features: Wallet -> View Seed Troubleshoot -> Passphrase/Backup test In Sparrow: Import in the standard way, a 12-word seed + the...

stacker.news

 

[eradicator]

This is new. Biden proposes an increase in long term capital gains taxes, wants to eliminate crypto tax loopholes , this could go in the Biden thread or here

Biden’s 2025 Budget proposal seeks to tax capital gains at 45%, eliminate crypto tax loopholes

The Kitco News Team brings you the latest news, videos, analysis and opinions regarding Precious Metals, Crypto, Mining, World Markets and Global Economy.

www.kitco.com

As for tangem not being safe. It’s cold storage, there’s no seed phrase abd they’ve never been hacked

 

[GoodShepherd]

The only firsthand experience I have is running my own node, which isn't for the novice. To do web payments, you would want to use a Lightning Service Provider, like Open Node https://opennode.com/

They handle all the hard stuff, like channels and liquidity, for a small fee (I think 0.5%-1%, don't quote me though). Still way cheaper than a CC processor.

"Get lightning-fast, low-cost bitcoin payments and payouts
for your business with our powerful API, ecommerce
plugins, or hosted payment pages."

Unless your product is hundreds of dollars, Lightning is the only thing that makes sense. The days of posting a bitcoin address for payment (unless its $1000) are over.

Now if you are just starting out, and aren't sure you will get much of anything, you can create a Lightning Address, that works functionally like having a BTC address, except you need a hosting provider (self hosting is possible, but beyond my reverse proxy networking skills)

The Lightning Address

Like an email address, but for your Bitcoin. An Internet Identifier that allows anyone to send you Bitcoin instantly over the Lightning Network. No scanning QR codes or pasting invoices.

lightningaddress.com

Normally you need to create an invoice to receive a payment, unlike regular Bitcoin, where you can receive without first sending an invoice, but a Lightning Address eliminates the need to first send an invoice to receive payment.

If you want to learn about BTC and why its important, the first book I recommend is The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous

Library Genesis: Saifedean Ammous - The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

Library Genesis is a scientific community targeting collection of books on natural science disciplines and engineering.

libgen.is

If podcasts are your thing, I recommend the 10 hour "Saylor Series" by Robert Breedlove


To learn how Phoenix wallet (lightning) works, BTC Sessions

Thank you very much looks like I have a lot to go through, ok let me start watching and listening to some of this stuff I think its going to help me to grasp some of this, no my digital product will be under $1000 WAY under haha, so lets say I get this lightning thing to receive bitcoin payments, does the person purchasing my product have to jave bitcoin or can they just purchase with an ordinary bank account and then it gets converted into bitcoin? Im just wondering because obviously more people have normal bank accounts, another question, do you perhaps know off the top of your head the country that has the most bitcoin users / accounts?

 

[RedLagoon]

So what if I had an old truck that works just fine, an old farm my grandpa left me... who's going to come for it? Is it bitcoin?

 

[PurpleUrkel]

Electricity and the internet. Everything in our civilization depends on these things. Everyone is screwed if those go down!

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Amish and many other people in rural Alaska and similar places are already living this way.

Bitcoin is gambling and is a "lifestyle" similar to sportsball. If one wants to spend their life and time glued to technocracy always "learning" to re-open the closed loopholes and checking their wallet everyday to make sure their so-called money is still there then have at it. Bitcoin is just the latest 401K satanic elite jew scam to keep Gen Z gamers and tech-savy boomers plugged into The Matrix and glued to their screens. Just because it works today doesn't mean that it will be working tomorrow. They will be able to confiscate your Bitcoin (which can be done remotely) long before they'll ever be able to put enough boots on the ground to confiscate your well fortified farm.

 

[GoodShepherd]

The only firsthand experience I have is running my own node, which isn't for the novice. To do web payments, you would want to use a Lightning Service Provider, like Open Node https://opennode.com/

They handle all the hard stuff, like channels and liquidity, for a small fee (I think 0.5%-1%, don't quote me though). Still way cheaper than a CC processor.

"Get lightning-fast, low-cost bitcoin payments and payouts
for your business with our powerful API, ecommerce
plugins, or hosted payment pages."

Unless your product is hundreds of dollars, Lightning is the only thing that makes sense. The days of posting a bitcoin address for payment (unless its $1000) are over.

Now if you are just starting out, and aren't sure you will get much of anything, you can create a Lightning Address, that works functionally like having a BTC address, except you need a hosting provider (self hosting is possible, but beyond my reverse proxy networking skills)

The Lightning Address

Like an email address, but for your Bitcoin. An Internet Identifier that allows anyone to send you Bitcoin instantly over the Lightning Network. No scanning QR codes or pasting invoices.

lightningaddress.com

Normally you need to create an invoice to receive a payment, unlike regular Bitcoin, where you can receive without first sending an invoice, but a Lightning Address eliminates the need to first send an invoice to receive payment.

If you want to learn about BTC and why its important, the first book I recommend is The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous

Library Genesis: Saifedean Ammous - The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

Library Genesis is a scientific community targeting collection of books on natural science disciplines and engineering.

libgen.is

If podcasts are your thing, I recommend the 10 hour "Saylor Series" by Robert Breedlove


To learn how Phoenix wallet (lightning) works, BTC Sessions

So Iv just heard the first 2 hours of the saylor podcast, so far Im enjoying it,I like the examples of nature he uses, the unfair fights, the fire, empires etc, just a question I have, who came up with the crypto currency idea, what was their reason for inventing it and do you perhaps know the world views the person has as it would be interesting to know who is the person and the mind behind all this and how they see life. thank you

 

[scary_robot_music]

So Iv just heard the first 2 hours of the saylor podcast, so far Im enjoying it,I like the examples of nature he uses, the unfair fights, the fire, empires etc, just a question I have, who came up with the crypto currency idea, what was their reason for inventing it and do you perhaps know the world views the person has as it would be interesting to know who is the person and the mind behind all this and how they see life. thank you

I don't know for sure why crypto was invented, but I've always assumed the main reason was a desire to return to the gold standard while realizing that actual gold is impractical because you can't transfer it electronically.

 

[chance vought]

Thank you very much looks like I have a lot to go through, ok let me start watching and listening to some of this stuff I think its going to help me to grasp some of this, no my digital product will be under $1000 WAY under haha, so lets say I get this lightning thing to receive bitcoin payments, does the person purchasing my product have to jave bitcoin or can they just purchase with an ordinary bank account and then it gets converted into bitcoin? Im just wondering because obviously more people have normal bank accounts, another question, do you perhaps know off the top of your head the country that has the most bitcoin users / accounts?

Bitcoin wealth - United States. Not surprising because the ethos of Bitcoin is freedom, and there are more libertarians and anarchists in the US than anywhere else.
Bitcoin users…hard to say but there are many in Japan, China, Latin America, Nigeria, Germany, UK, and UAE.

Stablecoin users: “stablecoins” are tokens ostensibly backed by Fiat currency . These used to run on Etherium (ETH) but the fees got too high, and now the standard seems to be the Tron (TRX) network. (I recently ordered some watches from Russia using the Tether stablecoin on Tron.). Tether coins on Tron is the standard now, for the moment.

There are probably 10x or more stablecoin users than Bitcoin users. Why? Because if you don’t have savings and only want to transact (most of the 3rd world), Bitcoin is seen as too volatile and risky. The USD (all stablecoins are pegged to) looks really good compared to the Bolivar or Rand or Zimabwe dollar, so even the fact that the USD depreciates is hidden, because it is appreciating in local currency.

The risk with stablecoins is trusted 3rd parties. You are trusting one company to do the right thing and fully back its currency, and right now that is probably making Tether the most profitable company in history (you don’t make interest on your tokens, but Tether buys US bonds with them, then uses the interest payments to buy BTC.). There will come a point where either fiat collapses, or the stablecoin company does something. That’s why if you have savings, Bitcoin is better. There is no counterparty risk.

 

[chance vought]

So Iv just heard the first 2 hours of the saylor podcast, so far Im enjoying it,I like the examples of nature he uses, the unfair fights, the fire, empires etc, just a question I have, who came up with the crypto currency idea, what was their reason for inventing it and do you perhaps know the world views the person has as it would be interesting to know who is the person and the mind behind all this and how they see life. thank you

Bitcoin wasn’t the first…it was the first one that worked. Very little is known about the inventor, other than his BBS posts. Cypherpunks in the 1980s - 1990s were increasingly worried about government encroachments on privacy and freedom. They knew that online speech would eventually be targeted, and the biggest lever of power was the increasingly surveiled banking system.

Many breakthroughs in computer science had to be made in order to make the dream of perfect money a reality.
There were many milestones and currencies that were almost there, but didn’t have all the components necessary to become money.

David Chaum, Ecash

Ecash - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Bit Gold, Nick Szabo

Bit Gold: Meaning, Overview, and Differences From Bitcoin

Bit Gold was one of the earliest attempts at creating a decentralized virtual currency, proposed by blockchain pioneer Nick Szabo in 1998.

www.investopedia.com

proof of work

Proof of work - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The genius of Satoshi Nakamoto in Bitcoin is the combination of the cryptography, proof of work, a fixed supply, the difficulty adjustment, and solving the Byzantine Generals Problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

However…the dream of independent, non-physical money is almost 100 years old!!! Henry Ford envisaged an “energy money”, almost exactly what Bitcoin is, around 1920.

 

[chance vought]

In the end, it doesn’t matter who invented it, even though many who use it believe it is one of the greatest gifts to mankind.

Who invented the television, or the internal combustion engine.

Who invented the number 0? without which calculus and modern computers couldn’t exist.

Who invented written language, gunpowder, steel?

In the end, it doesn’t matter if the inventor was a murdering psychopath on weekends, and a pedophile Monday-Friday. It is the tool that matters.

You can choose to use the tool for your benefit, or not.
The Byzantines decided they couldn’t be bothered to spend the money on cannons or gunpowder, but the Ottomans did, and breached the once thought impenetrable Constantinople in 1453.

You don’t need to trust me or the inventor of Bitcoin. You need to evaluate it for yourself. Is it a tool that will help you?

If you have seen The Matrix, that is the best analogy I can give. “No one can be told what ‘the Matrix’ is, you have to see it for yourself.”

 

[budoslavic]

I don't like the looks of this one bit.

 

[budoslavic]

Below is a press release from the corrupted US Attorney's Office SDNY website.

Founders And CEO Of Cryptocurrency Mixing Service Arrested And Charged With Money Laundering And Unlicensed Money Transmitting Offenses

Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York; Thomas Fattorusso, the Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”); and James Smith, the Assistant Director in Charge of the New York...

www.justice.gov

Edit. US SDNY is getting ratioed on their twitter/x page.

 

[budoslavic]

Thread continued...

2/ Indeed, it concedes that Samourai employees didn’t have access to user private keys, and without that, Samourai can’t control user funds, and by extension, be a money transmitter

3/ Instead of alleging control of user funds, somewhat similar to Tornado Cash, the DOJ alleges other actions taken by the team to operate the service.

In Tornado Cash, it was operating the relayer.

4/ Here, the DOJ alleges that the Samourai team (1) created transactions for users; and (2) broadcasted said transactions for users as the basis for being a money transmitter.

Does that sound like your favorite crypto project?

It should.

5/ If I’m right and this is the DOJ’s theory of how Samourai was a money transmitter—and courts end up siding with the DOJ—the entire crypto industry—in particularly onchain apps—are in major trouble.

 

[GoodShepherd]

In the end, it doesn’t matter who invented it, even though many who use it believe it is one of the greatest gifts to mankind.

Who invented the television, or the internal combustion engine.

Who invented the number 0? without which calculus and modern computers couldn’t exist.

Who invented written language, gunpowder, steel?

In the end, it doesn’t matter if the inventor was a murdering psychopath on weekends, and a pedophile Monday-Friday. It is the tool that matters.

You can choose to use the tool for your benefit, or not.
The Byzantines decided they couldn’t be bothered to spend the money on cannons or gunpowder, but the Ottomans did, and breached the once thought impenetrable Constantinople in 1453.

You don’t need to trust me or the inventor of Bitcoin. You need to evaluate it for yourself. Is it a tool that will help you?

If you have seen The Matrix, that is the best analogy I can give. “No one can be told what ‘the Matrix’ is, you have to see it for yourself.”

Regarding the Ottomans and the canon, If Im not mistaken it was a hungerian guy who approached them with his canon not the other way around. I get your point that its just a tool etc and it can be used, just wanted to kind of get to know what was the philosophy of the person behind it, like who is behind the transgender thing or the transhuman thing, it kind of matters so we can understand what their goals and intentions are, maybe their intentions are not the same as Christianities, but I like the idea of the freedom from fiat currencies and the banks, I basically just want to transact with it, understand it, im in one of those 3rd countries and just like the guys explains about there has never been a fair fight in history,why must i sell my product here in South Africa in rands when I can maybe get 10-20 times the amount if I sell it overseas but without having to be there in person but still living here in South Africa because $1 can go a longer way here in South Africa than what you guys in USA can do with that same dollar, I can buy more of the exact same products you have there in the US here in South Africa but the $1 converted into Rands is now worth x20 times more for me in South Africa, make sense? For example I know people who left South Africa and got a very low entery job in the UK, they cant do much with that money in the UK but if that exact same low level salary is converted into rands and spent in South Africa a person could live a VERY comfortable life in South Africa

 

[GoodShepherd]

I don't know for sure why crypto was invented, but I've always assumed the main reason was a desire to return to the gold standard while realizing that actual gold is impractical because you can't transfer it electronically.

The way I see physical gold at the moment is that its just good to have as an emergency, but either than that its pretty useless you can buy anything with it nobody will accept it and if they do they will rip you off, the only people who are prepared to trade in Gold are pawn shops and the will give you 10% of what its worth, nobosy will pay you what its reallt worth,anyway Im still learning about crypto and lets see how it goes

 

[chance vought]

Regarding the Ottomans and the canon, If Im not mistaken it was a hungerian guy who approached them with his canon not the other way around. I get your point that its just a tool etc and it can be used, just wanted to kind of get to know what was the philosophy of the person behind it, like who is behind the transgender thing or the transhuman thing, it kind of matters so we can understand what their goals and intentions are, maybe their intentions are not the same as Christianities, but I like the idea of the freedom from fiat currencies and the banks, I basically just want to transact with it, understand it, im in one of those 3rd countries and just like the guys explains about there has never been a fair fight in history,why must i sell my product here in South Africa in rands when I can maybe get 10-20 times the amount if I sell it overseas but without having to be there in person but still living here in South Africa because $1 can go a longer way here in South Africa than what you guys in USA can do with that same dollar, I can buy more of the exact same products you have there in the US here in South Africa but the $1 converted into Rands is now worth x20 times more for me in South Africa, make sense? For example I know people who left South Africa and got a very low entery job in the UK, they cant do much with that money in the UK but if that exact same low level salary is converted into rands and spent in South Africa a person could live a VERY comfortable life in South Africa

It is interesting to explore the "why", and maybe it helps you understand how things work, to a point. The intent of a things creation, however, gives you little useful information as to what it can be used for.

The internet was created by DARPA to be a decentralized communications network, in the event of a nuclear exchange with the USSR. Now the internet is in the process of dismantling the very nation state that created it. Censorship and arrests will continue to increase, but this is only prolonging the inevitable. Once everyone is free to communicate, the days of centralized power and control are numbered.

It doesn't matter if Bitcoin was created by the CIA or NSA. Its code is open source and can be audited by anyone. If by some chance there was ever a "backdoor" discovered, the code could simply be re-written without a backdoor. Everyone would switch to the good version of Bitcoin, because it is to everyone's self interest to do so.

The first ever writing was used to keep track of credit and debt owed to kings, using numbers. The intent was to keep a ledger, but it eventually became writing down language, which allowed ideas to be spread across space, and also time. Important ideas were never forgotten, they were built upon. Humanity advanced exponentially. The guy that figured out that writing on a tablet to keep track of the wheat harvest of different people never intended that.

 

[Blade Runner]

Don't use an altcoin cold storage wallet, if you have a significant amount of BTC (10+) Use a Bitcoin only wallet that supports Taproot and native multisig, like a ColdCard. It is much more secure.

What's your opinion on ngrave?

 

[chance vought]

The way I see physical gold at the moment is that its just good to have as an emergency, but either than that its pretty useless you can buy anything with it nobody will accept it and if they do they will rip you off, the only people who are prepared to trade in Gold are pawn shops and the will give you 10% of what its worth, nobosy will pay you what its reallt worth,anyway Im still learning about crypto and lets see how it goes

Gold is expensive to transact with because it is expensive to audit. Unless you x-ray it or melt it down, there is no way to be 100% sure that you are getting gold.

Bitcoin is almost free to audit. A $50 raspberry pi and a network connection can audit it instantly. $10 worth or $1 Billion. If you trust someone else's node, you can audit it by connecting to their node with your phone that you already own.

Gold is also expensive to move across space. Bitcoin is exponentially cheaper to move. Transaction fees are the highest they've ever been, but you can still move $1 Billion in BTC for about $30, in about 10 minutes. That amount of gold would cost hundreds of thousands to move, if not millions, and it would take days or weeks.

 

[Blade Runner]

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Amish and many other people in rural Alaska and similar places are already living this way.

Bitcoin is gambling and is a "lifestyle" similar to sportsball. If one wants to spend their life and time glued to technocracy always "learning" to re-open the closed loopholes and checking their wallet everyday to make sure their so-called money is still there then have at it. Bitcoin is just the latest 401K satanic elite jew scam to keep Gen Z gamers and tech-savy boomers plugged into The Matrix and glued to their screens. Just because it works today doesn't mean that it will be working tomorrow. They will be able to confiscate your Bitcoin (which can be done remotely) long before they'll ever be able to put enough boots on the ground to confiscate your well fortified farm.

Implicit in your response is a risk assessment that is poor. In gambling terms, no pun intended, the expected value of your proposition is awful. That is, you are assigning high probabilities to unlikely events and to scenarios which drastically erode life, freedom, and future prosperity. That's where you argument fails, and it fails big time.