Hey @supertestnet. It would be a huge loss for SN if you left. You are one of the few people I follow here. Your contributions and energy that you bring to the wider development effort is not to be understated. My account has accumulated both CCs (somehow) and sats, and I am not clear if I have a choice which to zap, so in this case, I supported you directly and I would like to continue participating (real time or not) in your workshops. I know value when I see it, let me know where you land, and I will be there.

This is very helpful! I really enjoy these OP code puzzles that solve established use cases. Cheers!

Thanks for the reference. WIll take a look.

You are right. Thank you. Keys don't move. Sometimes exchanges allow you to move their bitcoin, the ones you paid for, to an address for which you alone have the private keys. Only at that point does the Bitcoin become truly yours.

Thanks for sharing the thought provoking summary of the world's largest man made networks. One possible inclusion would be the SWIFT network which includes 11,000 financial institutions. source

Thanks for sharing this thought provoking post along with the Mandarin idioms. The vast majority of people, the wage earners and blue collar working class, have little hope of saving their way to a higher standard of living. After years of saving fiat, they see that the house or flat they want is rising faster than their ability to save. At a certain point, saving becomes pointless and in a greater context, life becomes hopeless. This conclusion justifies immediate gratification, gambling, lottery prayers, alcohol and drug abuse, and other short term gratifications because there is no point thinking long term any longer. That being said, we should cherish the present moment, but not at the expense of the future. Sound money changes all this. Now the working class can save for that house or flat. Bitcoin brings back hope and purpose and something to look forward to. Saving essentially gives your energy and work today to society with the expectation that you we will be able store that work-energy and redeem the same value in the future. That is the purpose of money. What fiat destroys, Bitcoin restores.

Part of the problem is that people think that their physical hardware wallet contains their bitcoin. People talk about moving their bitcoin off of exchanges. Which wallet should I store my bitcoin, etc. Bitcoin is always on the blockchain and never moves off it, Bitcoin is never in a "wallet". More precisely, UTXOs are on the blockchain. Your keys are encrypted and stored securely in a hardware wallet. The keys are what needs to be moved off exchanges and protected. Not so much the hardware wallet itself. People mistakenly think that if they protect their physical hardware wallet, then they have it all covered because they think their bitcoin are in the wallet itself. I encourage we communicate these terms accurately to help newbies build a better mental model of how Bitcoin works. Knowledge is the key.

Storing your single seed phrase on a piece of paper with tape a 3-hour train ride away is frankly not the best advice. Stamping your 2 of 4 multi-sig seed phrases on steel and storing each of them in four separate secure locations is a better plan. You want your high value HODL wallet that you plan to save for years to be difficult to reach but extremely secure to everyone including yourself. You can secure the 4 seeds in different cities, different countries, even different continents.

Thanks for sharing. Looks amazing. I see Homer's Odyssey theme here. A man stripped of everything seeking his way home with 12 major tests including seduction and danger along the way.

Same era. Missile Command. Yes, I remember. Maybe there is a black hole that asteroids enter if you they are on the path. As the count builds up and gets critical, you have to enter it which brings you to a new gameplay mode that shows you the asteroids raining down on the planet that you defend much closer to home (missile command). So the story line is, intercept the asteroids in deep space, but if they get too close, defend the planet as the last resort. Clear the asteroids and re-enter the portal to go back into deep space to defend from further away.

Brought back memories. Well done.

Thank you for the detailed etymology. You are a modern day cunning linguist.

Bitcoin hit 100. Why do I feel...nothing.

If we factor micro-transactions into the equation, like zapping here on SN, and we start seeing tens of millions of transactions per block, and block size scales, then nodes will explode in size limiting node operators to the largest datacenter operators in the world. This centralizes the network and cedes consensus to a few big well funded corporations. This is definitely not Satoshi's vision. Layer 2s are inevitable at some point. And if they are inevitable, then small blocks make sense. Bitcoin Core wins. Based on hash rate and energy use, it's not even close. BCH is dying a slow death. And yes...tired of this debate. The market has chosen. Let's move on.

If you get more excited about a difficulty adjustment than a new ATH, then you might be a Bitcoiner.

This was pretty awesome. Did you make this?

Saving in a currency that cannot be debased brings hope for a better future. On the flip side, saving in fiat and seeing the cost of everything rise faster than your ability to save brings nothing but hopelessness and desparation.

It is true that every block has a significant amount of dust UTXOs. I have not measured or defined what is economically unspendable, but I do wonder why hundreds of these tiny transactions always appear on-chain in every single block:

Money has been transacted with for far longer than Gov't issued money. In almost all cases, it was initially used as a store of value. Exchanged in ceremonial events like weddings, births, battle victories, or deaths. The money would change to something else when technology came along and disrupted it. E.g., Glass beads in Africa were massively debased when Europeans brought them in by the crate and loaded up their cargo boats with ivory, gold, and slaves which they were able to trade for the beads. It took decades before the locals understood what had happened. In this pessimistic regard, not much has changed.

Very relatable. One of the tactics that I bring up when talking to people about Bitcoin or money more generally, include the "properties of money". Money is frequently described as the most saleable good. The history of money, as I have learned reading several books on the subject, experimented with many different goods: Salt, Yap stones, cowry shells, tobacco, grain, cattle, glass beads, silver, gold, gold backed IOUs, fiat, Bitcoin, and so on. Each of these mediums of exchange and stores of value have properties that can be weighed.

If someone dismisses Bitcoin as a collector's item like baseball cards or Beanie Babies (yes, I have heard these comparisons), I try to engage that person by testing these collectibles for their properties, and of course these collector's items do not look good in comparison to other forms of money.

One counter argument that I have frequently heard against Bitcoin is that it is not "backed by anything". Whereas fiat (USD) is backed by the U.S. Government. This weighs the sovereignty property above all else. We know that Bitcoin is secured by one of the world's largest networks, so it is "backed" by energy and unbreakable cryptography. Additionally, government sovereignty of money does not apply to gold which is still used today as a settlement layer among the largest global financial institutions.

One of the major challenges is that we have all been so deeply indoctrinated on the fiat standard that considering other standards challenges and disrupts our world view. Bitcoin, and the study of hard money, exposes the fraud we have all been economically and mentally bound by. I, for one, would rather exist with uncomfortable truth than be enslaved by comfortable lies.