Bitcoin Basics - Discussion

So what if I am a VERY rich guy who would profit from bitcoin’s fail, I could actually do what I described by paying millions of dollars of fees and ultimately fulfill my goal of flooding the blockchain for days (and jeopardise the people’s trust in BTC). I know it’s a silly example but what can really stop a billionaire (or a government) from doing this if he really wants?

Nice information by Julian Hosp about messages on hard wallets protecting private keys. Seems impossible to crack since the sign in piece never leaves the wallet itself comfortably securing even large sums :+1:

Is there any chance of another coin outperforming bitcoin functions?

Ihad some misconceptions. Tww issues:

The Merkle tree link info is impossible to understand.

private key->public key->bitcoin address

I have a program that will generate a private key and bitcoin address ypassing the public key
Does the public key have una use besides generating the bitcoin address?

How do we make Bitcoin more private yet avoid intervention from authority is an important balance issue need to be discuss. You do not want BTC turn into XMR yet you do want more privacy protection.

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Greyscale has been purchasing large amounts of newly minted bitcoin.Is it possible and maybe likely that because of bitcoin’s immutability, that Greyscale will sell some of the virgin bitcoin as a collector item, thus commanding a much higher price, depending on particularly whether it was owned previously by a famous person? I remember reading somewhere that two bitcoin segments will eventually emerge- virgin and non-virgin, with virgin bitcoin demanding a higher price. Maybe I was dreaming, but has anyone heard anything like that?

First of all, spamming the bitcoins mempool, is about size not value. 1 utxo of 1000BTC can be mined with super low fee. To spam the network, you need lots of bitcoin in lots of small chunks in order to spam effeciently. Lots of Inputs and lots of outputs. If you own lots of bitcoin (you first need to be able to buy or mine a lot) , and you have lots of skills, and you make super many transactions. You will only be able to spam for a little while wich will cost you a lot of time money and effort.

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Yes, you can also pay to a public key. You also need your public key to unlock your bitcoins (utxo’s) to spend them.

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Nobody knows, but this is so early technology and bitcoin has the most network effect that it’s very unlikely that some other coin will outperform bitcoin in the near future.
And what you mean by outperforming? The price per coin? Market cap? Better technology?
Even if you make a better one, doesn’t mean it will have succes.

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Hey thanks Fabrice.

I was referring to the technology edge outperforming bitcoin. Yes and as we all cant predict the future, we will have to keep a lookout across the crypto network of emerging coins.

OH cool. I never knew it would take 10 days to synch either. My husband runs a node but I dont know anything about it. Hope it goes well!

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Question: From my understanding, there’s high inflation in the beginning when bitcoin is growing fast, then it grows at a decreased rate and then stagnates. Does that mean there’s no inflation at all after the stagnation?

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First, crypto as a whole needs to survive. So Bitcoin needs to keep performing for long long time in order for something else has a chance. Also it depends on the use cases. You basically can’t compare ethereum with bitcoin because ethereum it is not trying to be a better bitcoin. It has a completely different road map and use cases.

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Thanks Fabrice! Helps to sorted out my thoughts.

I want to know more about the wallets which is safer. To me coinbase is very secure and insured.

Thanks for the video link on hardware wallet. It was well-explained!

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Could someone describe two different types of bitcoin transactons that could be constructed by a wallet and that would be allowed by the protocol? I feel like I don’t have as concrete a grasp of what a “transaction” actually is.

There is a saying in this space “Not your keys** , not your coins”, even though coinbase might be highly secure exchange, it can be hacked. so it is always better to save your coins in hard wallet. like ledger nano x.

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You can construct a lot of different transactions, most common ones are Pay-to-PubkeyHash and Pay-to-Script-Hash, but you can construct your own transaction using Bitcoins script language. You can learn more about it in our Bitcoin Programming 101 course :slight_smile:

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There is no inflation after bitcoin reaches the max number, the maximum number of total Bitcoins cannot exceed 21 million.

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