Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 5553. (Read 26607459 times)

Those countries are not socialist.

This lie was started by Bernie Sanders and just won't die among the left extremists in the United States.

Socialism is a dirty cuss word and nobody should be promoting it, least of all our own senators.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/bernie-sanders-wrong-democratic-socialism-sweden-everywhere-else-ncna1158636

Don't tempt us (royal, for sure).


Who's they?

Yes, "they" take advantage of people's dumb whenever possible.. but still, seems like an overall market phenomena - and surely one that is more present in the "crypto" space when normies can enter and exit very easily, as compared with traditional assets - even though Robinhood and services like that are starting to make more trading possibilities more available to normies.

I can shortcut that whole argument by pointing out that countries in Northern Europe have not recently had an executive-branch election stolen with massive ballot fraud.  When you are living in a banana republic run by a socialist who stuffed the ballot, “socialism” versus “not socialism” may turn out to be the least of your problems.

Before you worry about the economy being flushed down the toilet with tax-and-spend policies, you may want to worry about how El Presidente is turning Dubya’s “War on Terror” machinery of global terrorism inwards.  E.g., via Glenn Greenwald:


Whoops!

I think so, a separate thread for them long long posts could serve 

Though JJG is mixing some shorter posts in the mix as well

Pity for the n00bs and more pity for those who already been in the situation and made gaines, though those people before (also some of my friends) "made gaines" but also choked themselves in the altcoin-koolaid and never took the BTC profits always thinking it will go higher it will sustain etc... So the profit they should have taken turned around in what altcoins true meaning is designed for "Not for making BTC, but its to take away peoples BTC" Few understand this. But also friends of me right now... have rallied MAXIMUM profits with like ADA for example, it rallies so good that they now think its a good coin while its a shitcoin which is becoming more and more a bigger shitcoin over time and just rallies on the hype etc ... Some have to burn themselves more as one time I guess ...

Exactly...

1) if bitcoin goes higher then it is closer to going even more higher.

2) surely bitcoin must get past $57k in order to get up and beyond $64,895

 


Just so everyone realizes, the target price to turn this month's candle green is $58,789.96 and it would have to happen before midnight UTC.. which is about 3 days and 6 hours from the time of this post, so it would NOT be an impossible to achieve, but surely is far from a given, in my humble bumble opinion, for whatever that's worth.

No one is buying and using shitcoins to buy a cup of coffee. Just as no one is buying Bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee.

They're using fiat to buy a cup of coffee. Which just further reinforces my point. Theory and reality are two entirely different things.

Also, are you trying to beat out JJG for the 2021 Wordie Man award or what? 

Yes... kind of risky to be screwing around with your cashflows like that (hopefully it was not "kind of" for rent, food, a car payment that might cause you to lose your car or something else that has high costs if your cashflow ends up NOT resolving itself), and hopefully (such gamble) ends up working out for you.

By the way, since we are making confessions (disclosures) here regarding our BTC buys, I will say that in the past 5 days, I had buy orders fill every $1k between about mid-$52ks and mid-$47ks, but that was the more recent series and the earlier series of buy orders filling every $1k were getting filled started from April 17 from mid-$58ks down to mid-$51ks.   And, of course there is a wee bit of cheating going on with me too because my buys are not generally coming from new fiat,. but are still structured in a way that they are striving to stack sats rather than stack dollars.

I mentioned before that based on an upcoming business arrangement that I have that will likely be in the near future, I may well have to shave off a bit extra in BTC on the way up.. but so far, I am tentatively planning sticking to my original system without any extra shavings - and with the passage of time, I will likely be able to confirm whether I might need to shave off some extra BTC.. because of short falls in cash from other sources..

So, yeah none of us are completely immuned from a certain level of gambling with our stash (including yours truly) when we are contemplating spending of value deals that go quite a bit beyond our regular cashflows and any kind of cash that we might have in reserve or any kind of assets that we might want to liquidate or put up as collateral before spending from our bitcoin stash.  I personally do not really mind using my regular BTC shavings, but I will end up either having to move my lowest buy orders up from $10k to perhaps even above $30k.. which surely becomes a greater gamble, and surely there can be a bit of comfort that comes in the event that we were to seem as if we were coincidentally reaching a kind of blow off top (or even a seemingly local top), but not always clear if such blow off or local top is present, and surely, as I type this post, we do not seem to be close to either a local top or a blow off top.

Yes.  It is.


Forget bigblockers.  To stick one’s head n the sand with that type of thinking is to cede the field to altcoins, in the manner of philipma1957’s signature:


Exactly:  If Bitcoin does is not useful as money, then...

I put it in such terms because candor is good and necessary for Bitcoin.  “Rah rah, we’re the best!” is a losing argument at market; and telling people just to “HODL” their money, rather than using it for economic activity, is a foot-shooting way inadvertently to advocate for altcoins.  Whenever I see altcoiners say that “Bitcoin is only a ‘store of value’, not good for transactions”, I call that out as untrue; and when they couch that as a Bitcoiner argument, I call it out as a strawman.  But from you, it is not a strawman; it is your argument for Bitcoin!

Objectively, altcoins don’t have so much of an advantage as it may seem to the naïve newbie who just wants to buy a cup of coffee.  Altcoins only seem to offer inexpensive transactions, because:

• Many them simply aren’t used much.  Bitcoin also had negligible fees, when its blocks were empty.  Low demand = low fees.
• Many of them have low security against 51% attacks (or similar attacks in POS-land).  They may be adequate for toy money, but not for your life savings—and not for a trillion dollars (and growing) in total value on the network.
• The few altcoins that can actually support high TPS with some sort of adequate security make trade-offs to achieve that.  The price of reasonably secure high TPS on-chain is that to run a node, you will pretty much need at least an octocore Xeon with 32 GiB of RAM, 100 Mbps dedicated bandwidth, and terabytes of fast SSDs.  Accordingly, the coins must become more centralized, less private, and less censorship-resistant.  Bitcoin still runs just fine on a Raspberry Pi, on the type of home Internet connection which is commonly available in most developed countries.  Because of this, Bitcoin is the money that nobody can control—thus, it is still the most secure cryptocurrency, after all.

As I said before:


It is a problem that cannot be magicked away with hype and handwaving.

Better idea:  Transact off-chain, and use the blockchain as a global, public synchronization layer for what are effectually private local ledgers.  Why does every cup-of-coffee tx need to be permanently archived in the world’s most inefficient database!?


Well, for my part, I thought that the reason for that is that Bitcoin is a good investment even through downturns—and moreover, it’s good for savings.  Inflationary money is detrimental to savers.  HODLing $/€ that slowly loses value is not smart!

IMO, ideal money would retain exactly the same value in perpetuity.  You could set it on a shelf for a thousand years, then find that one unit of it still buys exactly the same amount of (say) milk and eggs.  Bitcoin is definitely not ideal by this standard; but given the choice between inflationary versus deflationary money, I prefer the deflationary money, thank you very much.  (People who never save, and especially those who live a lifestyle of perpetual indebtedness, may actually prefer the inflationary money; now, there is a depressing thought.)

https://twitter.com/sallymayweather/status/1386881393146408960?s=21

Thank you for your lengthy post and excellent input Nullius on the complexity of what on the surface to ordinary people seems a fairly simple task.
Matching seed phrase to random single words from random pages of a random book just seemed a good idea coupled with putting the 5 digit numbers on a 2 of 3 paper backup in different geographical locations also seemed a good idea.
Till now.

Most interesting post and I shall be upping the security of my phrase which I do have a copy in my brain.

I certainly do not want you dead of apoplexy and more selfishly to lose any Bitcoin.

And to others do not follow my advice on storing your seed phrase.

Happy to see mid 50k after Sunday's coordinated dump.

And still the "dump BTC for ETH or XRP" pump trade continues.  

Gosh do they want people in anything *but* Bitcoin so badly...  

I wonder why? Smells like 2017 all over again...

1 month from when?

Maybe better to use a more common parlance?  i.e... "In two weeks^tm"


Oh gawd... 

Real Men sign their data, “Satoshi Nakamoto”, upload it to a website alongside bitcoin.pdf, get sued by Craig Wright, and then have everyone else mirror it and torrent it.

Summary:  Use the free, widely available secure Bitcoin wallet seed phrase methods that have been designed and analysed by cryptographers, or else nullius may die of apoplexy.  Do you want for nullius to die of apoplexy? 

Also, do you want to risk having your money stolen?  Why mess around when the secure way is free and reasonably easy?

Linus Torvalds: “Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.”

Slightly outdated though

I'm not sure anyone here needs it, but just in case (just like renting boats with inexplicable holes in them...): https://dev.to/igor4btc/best-bitcoin-mixers-in-2021-55d0

Yes, they will.  So don’t do it.

No, it is not “good enough protection for regular folk”.  Not when in the real world—not in theory, but in practice—there are blackhats doing a batch offline attacks using any text corpus you can think of.

In a roundabout way, you have reïnvented your own version of the brainwallet.  I snipped the part that you said about number stations, because it’s irrelevant:  You are introduced your scheme by discussing some spy stuff that often relied on secure randomness, then discarded secure randomness.  Don’t do this.


One-time pad = secure randomness, by definition.  (And if it doesn’t use secure randomness, it is not a one-time pad!  Also, by the way, in modern cryptography, “one-time pad” is often a red flag for snakeoil; a one-time pad is itself secure, but the term is so abused by ignorant fools that it has become a mostly reliable marker for a high probability of bad crypto.  A one-time pad and its information-theoretic security proof are altogether totally irrelevant to Bitcoin wallets, so I will further ignore this.)

“Simply a book” may have been adequately secure for some uses 50 or 60 years ago.  Not today, when a computer can easily grind through trillions of phrases guessed from a text corpus.

Please do realize that cryptography has changed.  In the WWII era, and for most of the Cold War era, the very best ciphers would be laughably insecure by today’s standards.  Accordingly, cryptanalysis was different.  In real-world use by militaries, the use of cryptography was quite often only to slow down the cryptanalysts for long enough that a message would be irrelevant:  A general doesn’t care if his “ATTACK AT DAWN” message is cracked after the dawn attack has already occurred.

To give you a quick gut-shot feeling for how much cryptography has changed, without getting too technical:  Cryptanalysis departments used to employ teams of experts in (human) languages, to assist with estimation of word frequencies and letter frequencies in the plaintext.  They don’t do that anymore—not the same way as they used to; not nearly—because modern ciphers output ciphertext that is indistinguishable from randomness for a computationally bounded attacker.  If the type of probabilistic cryptanalysis used decades ago could shave even 1 bit off the security margin of a cipher like AES or Chacha20, then the cipher would be declared to be badly broken!  Alan Turing could drawn up his “Eines List”, way back when—nowadays, that type of analysis is generally unhelpful.

Anyway, I hope you get my point:  There was a time when for certain uses, if you understood the threat model very well, then maybe you could use some phrase from a printed book as a secret key.  That is completely inapplicable to Bitcoin wallets.  Using a phrase from a book as a Bitcoin brainwallet is a most excellent way to run a high risk of getting your money stolen; and advising others to do so is a way to make them risk getting their money stolen.  Don’t do that!

P.S., if you still believe in your scheme, then please suggest it in the technical forum where you will be promptly roasted to a crisp.  I don’t have so much time to pick apart insecure brainwallet schemes anymore; I wasted too much time on that, for years.

Glad to hear it.  Good luck keeping your accounts secure, especially now that you have a Platinum account.  You wouldn’t want for anyone to steal Star Platinum!

---

LOL.

Oh, by the way, 10 chars?  Considering only random case-sensitive alphanumerics, since many sites choke on special chars:


A Hashcat guru would need to chime in with some numbers on the cloud-cracking GPU cost to bruteforce it.  Pretty high, I guess—but not high enough for my tastes, especially not with many sites using SHA-256 (or MD5).  It is definitely within the realm of feasibility for hardware that humans are capable of producing, without requiring enough energy to boil the oceans.  Too short.


Wow.  Not being cracked by Hashcat!  I know that at least one of the popular password managers uses 20-char passwords by default.  I won’t name it, because it’s a closed-source cloud thingie, and I recommend avoiding it; but that is a reasonable default, IMO.


The security margin here is basically free, so why not?  Use long passwords on sites that allow that; use max-length passwords on stupid sites that limit you to 12–16 chars, or whatever.

Yes, I am inappropriately misapplying Shannon entropy.  Most people commit this error when estimating password strength.  If we are treating passwords as random strings, what we really want to know here is the min-entropy.  Most people make this mistake from ignorance; I hereby do so from laziness, and because once we get up to a 40-char password, the security margin is so astronomically huge that none of this makes much of a difference.

Also, if your password manager uses a bad algorithm to transform random bits into an alphanumeric string (or whatever), there can be a significant bias; in the wild, I have seen password manager code that will easily let you lop off 30% of the search space, if you know (or can guess) that the target used that particular password manager.  Astronomically huge security margins do help here:  Losing 30% of the search space for a 10-char password could make a real-world practical difference; losing 30% of the search space for a 40-char password is only a theoretical problem.



My brainwallet is “correct horse battery staple”.  I will not forget it!  And it is such a nonsense phrase, nobody will ever guess it.


A .sig I that once saw on—I think it was actually on Usenet, though I don’t recall:  “Real Men don’t do backups.  Real Men cry a lot.”

Anyone old enough to remember the Number Stations broadcasting out of Eastern Europe during the years the Berlin Wall was standing? They were used to communicate with intelligence agents, who needed nothing more than a SW radio to anonymously receive messages.
The Stations used high power short wave transmitters, the broadcast would start with a signature tune often from a worn stretched tape or a Station number ID.
Then a series of numbers would be read out by the announcer or voice synthesizer.
They were always in blocks of 5.

So 2-7-9-0-4 then 9-4-3-6-4 and so on.
Decoding could be by the use of a one-time pad or simply a book.

Where
digits 1 and 2 could be the page number.
digits 3 and 4 could be the line number
digit 5 the position of the word in that line.

The numbers then decoded to reveal the message.

The application of this for Bitcoin could be to code your wallet seed phrase in this way by choosing a book and finding those seed words in the book and converting them to 5 digit numbers.

Then writing down and storing anywhere the series of meaningless 5 digit numbers.

Without knowing from which book and the exact print edition (your key), your seed phrase is reasonably safe.

The cryptographers here will be able to punch holes in this but for good enough protection for regular folk it could work quite well.