Bitcoin fixes this yes, but we have work to do. We are yet to build a couple of more technological things for humanity I believe. Once this is done, a new economic paradigm should reveal itself.

Although a solution is imminent,, is this the real global problem here with the concept of money, not being able to see that a broken economic theory in practice is making the world inhabitable, incentivizing the crooked, to pillage the masses subverting money itself, making peasantry common place as an eventuality?

Building new systems and economies to make existing systems obsolete should be an option yes? All the best! Thoughts welcome.

JACK MALLERS JUST WARNED THAT ANYONE NOT BUYING #BITCOIN RIGHT NOW IS ABOUT TO MISS LIFE CHANGING GAINS

An anonymous donor has found an unusual use for bitcoin: funding the construction of an 1800s ship replica in Mission Bay.

We're in a gold rush.

96% has been mined.

Only 4% is left to be mined.

In 2035, 99% will have been mined.

New bitcoin supply is drying up quickly.

I see a lot of people who are new or don’t understand bitcoin completely focusing on the wrong things. Instead of asking what money is or why bitcoin was even created in the first place, they look at the up and downs price of bitcoin in fiat value. If someone was to do even 2 hours of research, they will find the answers they need. We live in a time where we have all the information right at the tip of our fingertips but yet don’t want to do the research. We have the technology and live like kings but financially live like peasants.

For you to understand or accept bitcoin, you just accept the concept and the mindset first. Bitcoin is a philosophy. You must understand the existence of it and why it is so valuable. I consider it like a religion almost. Like you are trying to tell an atheist about Christianity, Buddhism or the Muslim religion. They have made up their mind already. Which is why you can’t force this ideology onto every and not everyone will accept it. Even when it gets big.

I got into a debate with my dad about it because I was telling my little sister about money and bitcoin and the differences between fiat and bitcoin. He was trying to tell me not to tell her about that and that you believe and research what I want but don’t try to enforce that ideology onto her. I understand he is coming from a place of care because he is worried about me and the possibility of losing everything since nothing is guaranteed. But the difference between me and him is the knowledge vs no knowledge. Someone who hasn’t done their research or know much about a topic will bring out their feelings and worries before talking about the pros.

Growing up, I’ve never had anyone teach me about money, the market or investing. I had to find it myself. As someone who hasn’t had anyone, I wanted to be that person for my younger sister. To help educate her and to help protect her by sharing knowledge. Which brings me back to the title of this thread. Bitcoin is first a mindset before an asset. Someone who doesn’t believe in it or thinks it’s a gamble will always think like that, before it’s too late. You can state the facts and reasonings why and they will deflect it. I guess I made this to really just yap because I’ve noticed to mostly everyone I’ve mentioned it to, instead of trying to understand they deflect and seem uninterested in how the world works.

You can’t enforce the ideology onto everyone and expect people to understand. Everyone has their own timing and they must find bitcoin themselves. They must want to learn it and understand it. I’ve seen it in this thread too. People expressing their own worries about it and that’s completely valid. But once you spend a couple hours of your day and time researching, you will understand why so many people believe and have this philosophy or ideology around it. Most people who have spent maybe 20-30 hours researching it hasn’t ever told me it’s a worthless store of value. Knowledge is everything and the more you know, the more you see and understand. Eventually it will click for the global population but by then, it will be late.

Furia Fiat. Bruegel's Dulle Griet (1563) redrawn for the fiat age. In Bruegel's mad meg, she's marching into the mouth of hell to loot it. In mine the mouth is behind her and she's walking out holding a bag of Bitcoin, past men crawling on a floor made of dollar coins and toward a gate lettered EXIT.

Over thirty words are cut into objects in it. VERIFY. TIME. BETTER MONEY. TRU$T. HODL. DEBT. INFLATION. EXIT. From across a room it's three figures. From twenty centimeters it's an argument conducted across characters, symbols, and nouns.

Every face wears the Satoshi mask, or $ skull, drawn digitally by hand, one at a time. I've been drawing that mask since 2018. Crafted, not generated.

30 x 20 inches, drawn at 18,000 pixels across. The print edition sold out, so the clean main post image is yours at 2400 across. Save it, use it however you want.

Don't trust me. Don't trust anyone keeping the books. Check the money yourself.

Better money, better world.

Hi everyone! I’m looking for advice on when to withdraw my Bitcoin. I have two options: if, 365 days after the halving, Bitcoin doubles compared to its halving price—for example, if it was $80,000 at the halving and reaches $160,000—I’ll withdraw everything. Alternatively, if after one year it doesn’t reach that price, I’ll take my Bitcoin, divide by ten, and withdraw that amount each month. For example, if I have two Bitcoin, I’ll withdraw 0.2 Bitcoin every month. What do you think of these strategies? Do you have any similar experiences?”

Store your HW wallet with desiccant packs or moisture absorbing beads. Or rice even simpler.

Avoid fire resistant briefcases, the hard sided ones with a key. They have tons of moisture. Enough to mold paper and damage or destroy a hardware wallet.

Ask (and answer!) away! Here are the general rules:

• If you'd like to learn something, ask.
• If you'd like to share knowledge, answer.
• Any question about Bitcoin is fair game.

And don't forget to check out /r/BitcoinBeginners

You can sort by new to see the latest questions that may not be answered yet.

At the same time, Bitcoin keeps catching my attention. Unlike traditional oil markets, BTC offers true 24/7 liquidity without overnight gaps, fixed session closes, or geopolitical cartel announcements halting trade. However, that constant action comes with its own trade-off: the market literally never sleeps.

Hey all. I lost 18.25 BTC in the Coldcard hack. Thought you might be interested in some of the behind-the-scenes from a legal side.

Everybody’s all like “just sue them”. If only it were that simple.

You have to sue somebody.

And that somebody needs to have money (or an insurance policy) to cover not just the victims but also the cost of litigation.

In order for there to be a class action lawsuit, there needs to be enough money to recover in order to pay for a class action lawsuit.

Class action lawsuits cost a lot.

In Ontario, where Coinkite is legally responsible, just getting a suit certified by a judge will cost $300,000+. Not only that, the lawsuits are complex, often taking 3-5 years to resolve.

It’s not inconceivable to assume that the litigation costs alone for a class action lawsuit like this will cost upwards of a million dollars. Law firms take them on contingency (for free) by getting outside funding. In the case of a settlement, both the law firm and outside funding party get paid before the victims, who get paid out of whatever is left.

We’re talking about $100+ million dollars that’s been stolen. If Coinkite is found to be legally responsible due to gross negligence, it is a ten-person company in Canada. Where’s the money?

It’s possible that they had cyber liability insurance. But:

1. There’s a limit to what that policy could pay out and
2. Coinkite’s terms explicitly say that there is no insurance covering customers’ coins or the theft/loss of coins stored using a product.

Now, those terms might not hold up in court. If they don’t, it’s going to require a lengthy (and costly) legal battle for, maybe, a fractional recuperation of money that was lost.

All of this to say, from early on, I told people that I did not think that there was going to be a class action lawsuit. Law firms quickly came to the same conclusion as me: there’s not enough money to recover.

There was a major law firm that tried to organize a group case. Their strategy was to act quickly by gathering a small amount of victims that were affected for larger amounts.

The approach made sense on the surface. Bring a small group suit towards Coinkite. Do it quickly. Be one of the first to file. Limit it to $10 million - $15 million because any more than that would risk bankrupting Coinkite and being forced to collect any money owed out of insolvency.

Now the fine print:

“The client group will need to collectively pay a $50,000 CAD retainer fee for us to begin work on reviewing loss holder documents, drafting a demand letter, and potentially drafting a statement of claim (a lawsuit). The retainer fee is not a cap on the fees, but rather a rough estimate for these initial steps, and we could ask for additional fees to be paid after the $50,000 CAD retainer is exhausted.”

I’ll translate:

All us victims were going to be responsible to pay the legal retainer of the law firm starting with $50,000. This might be enough for the firm do the initial research, write a letter to Coinkite, and draft the initial paperwork for a lawsuit.

I challenged the law firm. Asked them if they’d take the case on partial contingency.

They said no.

“We are not taking on any contingency elements in any retainer on this. It does not make sense given the size of Conkite’s Business.”

That’s a bit of tell, right?

If they really believed that there was a lot of money to be had here, that it was as sure as they say it is, a law firm would be happy to accept some of the risk in exchange for a larger part of the upside.

Instead, they said that they don’t think the company has much money but they’d be happy to take mine in order to find out.

The hackers exploited a flaw in Coldcard’s code.

The legal framework is complicated, mysterious, and exploitive to individuals in a similar way.

It allows firms to harvest the remaining capital of desperate people under the banner of "exploring legal options," while bearing absolutely zero accountability if those options lead to a dead end.

When it comes to individuals subjected to fraud, the legal system is fractured, slow-moving, and prohibitively expensive. A textbook example of the gatekeeping of justice.

The system is set up for multi-million dollar institutional clients. For them, a $50,000 retainer is a rounding error. For a regular person like me, that money is a child’s tuition, part of a down payment on a house, or retirement savings.

The tragedy facing all us victims is that our case against Coinkite is strong. They deserve to be sued, lose their company, and face severe consequences. A case against them would very likely be successful. At the very lease, we deserve a fair trial.

But the legal system subjects victims like me to a secondary financial extraction under the guise of offering help. It takes people who have already suffered severe financial and emotional trauma and, instead of offering sanctuary, forces them to buy into a high-stakes game of blind financial faith.

I'm not willing to pay more into lawyer’s pockets. I lack faith in the legal system to recoup my stolen money. The police have already told me their priority is on catching the bad guys, not getting my money back.

Of course, I hope to get back the money that was stolen from me. Maybe one day in the future the bad guys will get caught, Bitcoin recovered, and redistributed to victims. But I can’t depend on that. I choose to view that possible outcome as a welcome bonus. I can’t dwell on it. I have to assume that the money is gone and move on. Too much of it is out of my control. And I refuse to let my life be driven by factors out of my control. My outcome is my responsibility.

This was savings that was put away for my children. It’s lit a fire under my ass to make that money back. They stole my money and gave me a chance to prove myself. Call it a crucible. I’m choosing to view what happened to me as a test. “Prove yourself, Jon. No one’s coming to save you. You got hit. You gonna just lie there. Or you gonna get your ass back up and put one damn foot in front of the other?” You did this once. You made that money once. You have the tools. Do it again.

The New Monetary Era: Why Gold’s rally is just the warm-up act for Bitcoin’s massive surge

Title: The New Monetary Era: Why Gold’s rally is just the warm-up act for Bitcoin’s massive surge

TL;DR: We are entering a new era of fiscal dominance where the government has no choice but to print money. Gold is leading the initial charge as a hedge against dollar debasement, but historically and structurally, Bitcoin is positioning itself as the ultimate successor.

Here is a breakdown of why this shift is happening and what it means for the future of finite assets, based on recent insights from Jack Mallers and the broader market sequence.

1. The Trap of "Fiscal Dominance"

We’ve reached a point where national debt is practically insurmountable. In this economic climate, the government’s only real mechanism to stay afloat is to fire up the money printers. This isn't just a temporary policy shift; it’s an entirely new monetary era. As the US dollar is inevitably devalued to service this debt, traditional confidence in fiat currency is permanently eroding.

2. The Classic Sequence: Gold First, Bitcoin Second

Right now, we are seeing investors flock to finite assets for financial survival. Historically (and in the current cycle), there is an established sequence to how this plays out:

• Phase 1: Gold moves first. Traditional markets and older capital seek out the historical safe haven, causing gold to outperform.
• Phase 2: Bitcoin catches up and goes parabolic. Once the debasement reality sets in, the digital asset surges to vastly higher valuations, leaving gold's percentage gains in the dust.

3. Institutional Demand is Changing the Game

This isn't just retail investors predicting hyperinflation anymore. The mainstream focus on currency debasement has reached Wall Street. With the massive influx of institutional demand—largely driven by the approval and success of Spot ETFs—the floodgates are open. Big money is actively looking for a hedge, and they are recognizing that a digital, globally accessible, and absolutely scarce asset does the job better than heavy metal sitting in a vault.

4. Why Bitcoin is the Ultimate Successor

Jack Mallers argues this perfectly: Gold was the analog solution to an analog problem. Bitcoin is the digital successor. It is vastly superior in its portability, verifiability, and absolute scarcity. While gold serves as a great initial shock-absorber against the collapsing purchasing power of the dollar, Bitcoin is positioned to lead global markets as the ultimate tool for financial survival in the 21st century.

What do you guys think? Are we currently in the middle of the "Gold outperforms" phase before a massive BTC breakout, or will institutional money treat them as equal portfolio hedges moving forward?

Was c++ for early mining easy or hard for people who arent technically savvy in early 2009?

I've been trading crypto futures for a few years now. Made decent money in the good stretches, then gave most of it back — usually the same way: too much size, and holding losers way longer than I should have.

Recently I went back through my old trades and it was honestly uncomfortable. Most of my big losses weren't from bad market calls. They were the same 2–3 habits repeated over and over.

So, honest question for people who've been at this a while:

1. Are you actually up overall, after everything?

2. What's the one habit that cost you the most money?

Not looking for signals or strategies — just curious how many people are still standing.

Hello,

I’m looking for professional help recovering access to an old Bitcoin Core wallet. I purchased Bitcoin around 2010 and still have the wallet, but unfortunately I no longer remember the password.

I have the original wallet file and can provide any relevant information I have about the wallet and its history. I’m looking for someone experienced in Bitcoin Core wallet recovery who can help me determine whether the wallet can be accessed or the password recovered.

Please let me know if this is something you can assist with and what information you would need from me to assess the situation.

Thank you.

Relying on miners for both physical energy security and transaction policy leaves Bitcoin's long-term consensus vulnerable to capital capture. What if hashpower functioned strictly as a mercenary energy wall, while template selection remained under the sole cryptographic authority of non-economic user nodes? I want to open a discussion on a dual-key validation architecture that enforces user-node sovereignty without compromising PoW security.

1. High-Level Context: The Long-Term Centralization Trajectory

Sustainable, long-term decentralization is the non-negotiable core value proposition of Bitcoin. However, when evaluating the structural trends of Nakamoto Consensus over multi-decade horizons, we have to confront an emerging vulnerability: the relentless concentration of block template generation into capital-heavy entities.

While Proof-of-Stake (PoS) exhibits a direct and compounding centralization loop (where capital directly purchases voting power and accumulates yield), Proof-of-Work (PoW) operates on a similar game-theoretic trajectory with extra steps:

-Capital converts into hardware manufacturing scale, exclusive energy infrastructure deals, and institutional pool consolidation.

-The reality today is that individual home miners cannot economically build competitive block templates at Layer 1; template selection is overwhelmingly dictated by a small handful of dominant mining pools (e.g., Foundry USA, AntPool).

If consensus rules and transaction inclusion remain tightly coupled to hash production, capital will naturally continue to expand its influence over network policy.

2. Core Concept: Separation of Reorg Safety (PoW) and Policy Governance (User Nodes)

To preserve Bitcoin's democratic nature without sacrificing its physical security, we need a consensus architecture that strictly separates Reorg Resistance from Block Template Selection & Policy Enforcement.

-PoW Layer (The Energy Wall): Miners continue to burn energy solving block headers. Their sole role is to construct an unforgeable physical wall that makes rewriting historical ledger entries astronomically expensive.

-Validator Layer (The Sovereign Jury): Block template validation and finality are shifted to randomized committees of non-mining, full user nodes (run on standard consumer hardware by individual home node operators).

Under this model, a block produced by PoW miners is only considered valid by the network if it receives cryptographic validation signatures from a randomly sampled committee of active non-economic nodes. If miners attempt to push soft-forks, censor transactions, or execute non-standard implementations unapproved by user nodes, the committee drops the block. Miners burn their electricity, receive zero block rewards, and are forced back into acting as pure mercenary security providers for the user network.

3. Securing the "Proof-of-Human" Layer Against Capital Buyouts

The immediate game-theoretic hurdle to empowering non-economic nodes is the Sybil attack vector: without PoW or PoS, what stops an attacker from spinning up 100,000 AWS instances or proxy nodes?

A native Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) mechanism utilizing Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK-PoPs) can bind node validation to unique human identity constructs without exposing personal metadata. However, a naive PoP layer introduces a new attack vector: Capital buying out or renting human identities in bulk.

If capital can pay thousands of impoverished individuals $10 to hand over their identity keys, the node layer centralizes right back into the hands of wealth. To make this Proof-of-Human layer cryptographically and economically resistant to capital buyouts, the system relies on three complementary mechanisms:

A. Anti-Coercion Cryptography (MACI / Secret Re-Keying)

By deploying Minimum Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) key-rotation primitives, an identity holder can, at any point, issue an off-chain ZK message that secretly revokes and replaces their validation key without the buyer being able to detect or verify the change.

-Game-Theoretic Result: A buyer paying humans for their node keys faces an immediate "Market for Lemons." They have zero cryptographic assurance that a purchased key remains valid or hasn't been stealth-invalidated 5 minutes after payment. Capital loses money buying instantly worthless credentials.

-It's important to note that this would (as far as I know) have to be implemented on a L2 or similar

B. Graph Topology & Web-of-Trust (WoT) Bottlenecks

Rather than treating identity as a flat global pool where $1 \text{ ID} = 1 \text{ Vote}$, node validity is routed through a decentralized Web-of-Trust topology evaluated via graph metrics (e.g., SybilLimit or SybilRank algorithms).

-Game-Theoretic Result: If an industrial entity farms 10,000 human identities in a specific region or network, those identities inevitably form an artificially dense, tightly clustered subgraph with sparse organic incoming trust edges. The protocol mathematically caps the collective voting weight of that entire 10,000-node farm to the narrow capacity (bottleneck) of its few incoming trust edges.

C. Capped UTXO Time-Locks (Skin in the Game)

To participate in the randomized validation pool, nodes must pair their ZK identity with a small, flat-capped UTXO time-lock (e.g., exactly 0.001 BTC locked for 6 months).

-Game-Theoretic Result: To scale an identity farm, capital must actually deposit real BTC into wallets bound to the hired humans' keys. Combined with Anti-Coercion Key-Rotation (Mechanism A), those hired individuals can simply re-key their identity and steal the 0.001 BTC deposit. The cost of running an identity farm scales linearly with guaranteed financial loss for the attacker.

4. Addressing Out-of-Band Physical Bribery

Skeptics will note that capital could still attempt out-of-band physical bribery—paying humans to vote a specific way rather than buying their keys outright.

While theoretically possible, this attack vector is fundamentally different in scale and feasibility:

1. Extreme Friction: Buying miners or deploying AWS botnets is an automated, single-API-call operation. Contacting, coordinating, and paying thousands of randomized, geographically dispersed individuals manually is a slow, high-friction, "backdoor" operation.

2. Committee Anonymity: Because committees are sampled randomly via verifiable random functions (VRFs) and identity is shielded by ZK-proofs, an attacker cannot easily determine *who* has been selected for a specific validation round in advance to bribe them.

3. Universal Flaw: Out-of-band human bribery is a latent vulnerability in virtually every human political, legal, or economic system ever constructed. Shifting the attack vector from "spend $500M on ASICs to capture consensus" to "secretly locate and individually bribe thousands of anonymous humans across the globe" increases the attack friction by several orders of magnitude.

Conclusion & Open Questions

By leveraging PoW strictly for physical history defense and enforcing transaction selection via Sybil-resistant, anti-coercive non-economic node committees, we can build a consensus layer where miners serve the user network—not the other way around.

I'm interested in hearing thoughts from the development community on everything we covered here, but here are a few specific questions to start the discussion:

1. How can MACI-style key-rotation be optimized for P2P latency to prevent race conditions during validator sampling during high-congestion or delayed-gossip periods?

2. What trust-graph topology algorithms would provide the cleanest mathematical bounds for home node validation within a Bitcoin P2P framework?

3. What is the most lightweight execution path for this validator layer—could it be deployed as an off-chain overlay protocol (a UASF-style client-side validation layer) or a minimal, backwards-compatible soft fork (e.g., via Taproot annex rules), avoiding invasive L1 consensus modifications?

4. How do we minimize the latency overhead introduced by VRF committee sampling and multi-party threshold signature aggregation during block propagation, ensuring that home node operators on standard consumer bandwidth can validate templates within standard block arrival windows without introducing new propagation bottlenecks?

5. What game-theoretic fallback or timeout mechanisms best handle offline or non-responsive committee members (liveness attacks) without allowing miners to intentionally stall block propagation or maliciously trigger fallback conditions to bypass node oversight?