Totally. It's double weird, because it's not a petitionable issue, it's a form where you make your case and a committee decides, *and* they already have the symbol and they just seem to want it to be usable like 💲, which isn't a thing.

Thanks for the explanation

If whoever invented Bitcoin is still on this earth, they have a bit of a conundrum. Since we can track all transactions, and we know roughly how long Satoshi was mining the first bitcoins before other people got involved, those early accounts are sitting on over 1 million BTC. Even after today's dump, that's still over $50 billion. And for reference, the Koch family is 25th on Forbe's infamous list, estimated to be worth about $56B. So that person is one of the richest people on the planet.

However, those coins continue to remain unspent. And once they are moved in any transaction, the entire world will know. That leads to an inherent assumption that those 1M coins (out of 21M that can ever exist) must be irretrievably lost (due to their private keys being deleted), so most have taken that out of the active supply when estimating BTC value. Once they are moved, the price will probably crash -- at least 5%, but more likely much more than that. He is among the richest people in the world on paper, but if he moves any of it his wealth will collapse.

However, one doesn't have to move coins to prove they own them. Anyone with the private keys could cryptographically sign a message saying "I am Satoshi" with one of the early keys and immediately have 100% credibility. The fact that this hasn't happened means that those keys likely not longer exist. (I, personally, think Hal Finney took those keys to the grave with him, and Craig Wright is a big fat liar.)

if you can't present evidence, then you're just spreading uncertainty and doubt.

Wait it is a coin! What the what!

Hah, poop coin! For me it's like realistic moon without face, just like Samsung quality moon photo.

If criminals only used cars from brand X and nobody else used brand X, it would be viewed the same.

There are plenty of currencies out there, which normal people use. Cryptocurrencies are mainly used by criminals though.

Other special symbols are a different thing. For APL language or others.

They are useful, provided you have them on your keyboard or you have configurable extra keys.

Symbols specifically for emoji - I mean, people can do what they want with code space, even if I'd rather see another obscure alphabet standardized there. Medieval Armenian or Russian musical notation, for example. Something real .

For me it looks like this:

So the text one appears the same for both of us but the emoji one appears differently which could possibly change its meaning if they were different enough

The red and white stripes are the generic 50's era diner fries. Flat red was introduced by McDonald's in the 1980s extra-large and super-size cartons. (Before that McDonald's fries were sold in white waxed-paper envelopes.

That's fair. I had forgotten KFC made their own version of fries and boxed them in red.

How so?

What I don't understand is whether it is like "Taler is obtained and cashed out only in a bank, but the link between two events is unknown" or if Taler can change hands during said "link".

If the former - I really hope it gets implemented as a card replacement, but it would need to coexist with something like Monero (which is what I use now) that is more akin to cash. But I really hope that somehow non-blockchain full-on "digital cash" could one day be invented, so wonder if this could be it :)

It will never be ready. It doesn't even make sense. To transact with real fiat like the US dollar, you'll have to go through an official on-ramp and an off-ramp of the respective government. And to do an international transaction you'll have to use one of the widely accepted systems like SWIFT. GNU Taler doesn't appear to address anything like that. Anyhow, my comment was made with the premise of this whole thread in mind, i.e. "Bitcoin is stupid" or "snake oil". Yet there's no alternatives to what crypto provides. So is it that stupid after all?

Unbacked tokens. You mean like Tether?

Exactly like Tether. USDT was never backed 1:1 by USD. They don't even try to deny it anymore. They admit it's backed by "various assets, including BTC", which smells like a market manipulation.

How does Taler promote taxation?

"Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering."

• https://taler.net/en/features.html

Thank you! This may come in handy later!

I rushed to just grab that codeblock from Wikipedia. But the selection of which characters are considered emoji is not arbitrary. The Unicode Consortium (their Unicode Emoji Standard and Research Working Group to be exact) publishes those list and guidelines on how they should be rendered. I believe the most recent version of the standard is Emoji 15.1.

Edit: I realized I'm going off track here by just reacting to comments and forgetting my initial point. The difference I was initially alluding to is in selection criteria. The emoji. for assigning a character a Unicode codepoint is very different from the criteria for creating a new emoji. Bitcoin has a unique symbol and there is a real need to use that symbol in written material. Having a unicode character for it solves that problem, and indeed one was added. The Emoji working group has other selection criteria (which is why you have emoji for eggplant and flying money, and other things that are not otherwise characters. So the fact that a certain character exists, despite its very limited use, has no bearing on whether something else should have an emoji to represent it.

IMO, you shouldn't be investing in cryptocurrencies or any currencies for that matter. Currencies should be
used, not hoarded with the expectation of gain. If you're buying cryptocurrencies as an investment, you've already lost.

Cryptocurrencies literally cannot function without speculative investment. Even in the absence of formal investors, *someone* has to be the first person to accept the tokens in exchange for something of value, in hopes that they will have value of their own in the future. Until then, the tokens are unusable.

Further, the market cap and liquidity of a cryptocurrency impose practical limits on what it can be used for. You can't very well conduct a billion dollar transaction through a cryptocurrency that has a market cap in the millions. Investment raises the market cap, "unlocking" these higher-value use cases. Conversely, loss of investor confidence will reduce the market cap, and effectively reduce the utility of the coin.

This is why ability to scale is so important. The current market values of Bitcoin and the various alts are based far more on speculative investment than they are on usage. Those investors believe that the coins will see far more usage (and have far more natural demand) in the future than they do today. If that turns out not to be the case due to an inability to scale, investors will start to flee, and the vicious cycle will start.

Scalability isn't quite as simple as "how much data can a well-off enthusiast from a developed country store". You need to consider the behavior of your lowest common denominator users.

You want as many users as possible to run fully-verifying nodes, rather than SPV ("simplified payment verification") nodes that can be tricked by a malicious miner. The more transactions are being done through SPV nodes, the more potential payoff there is for an attacker, and the more resources they can dedicate to an attack.

Further, if your number of full nodes gets low enough, it becomes feasible for state actors to track down and compromise the remaining node operators. At that point, you may as well just be using a centralized, government approved payment system instead.

No, because the rest of us have to deal with the environmental destruction wrought by your virtual paperclip maximizer. it affects everyone.

When i pick up a loaf of bread its 0.012, and when i check out its 0.012. Currentsies are going to shift against each other. The exact same thing would occur if you walked into a store in, say, Germany and handed them dollars. Also, do you mind telling me how much energy the banking system uses to run their equipment, build their buildings, have their employees come to their branches, move armored trucks full of cash, etc. Like, I can understand the power use thing being an issue. But if you want to go after something that would make more of a difference, how about figuring out thermal bricks or something for industries making glass? Which produces a hell of a lot more greenhouse gases than crypto mining does. Industrial processes are a huge polluter. Or how about the global transportation system?

I didn’t check out any of your posts. I was making a point about the “safe and stable” stockmarket vs the “volatile and dangerous” cryptomarket.

We're talking about currencies, not stocks, but I'm not surprised that crypto bros think their imaginary coins an somehow both appreciate in value like an investment while also being stable enough to use as a currency.

Monero is triple encrypted. You crack one and you got no time left before the next chain flips the whole shebang.

If monero is using sane, modern encryption algorithms, "triple encryption" doesn't really get you meaningfully more security.

It already takes an insane amount of time to brute force good encryption algorithms, so if people are cracking your encryption, they're doing it via some vulnerability/flaw/exploit in the algorithm which allows then to crack things much faster than brute forcing. If you use the same encryption algorithm for all three layers, you just have to exploit it three times instead of one, which isn't really adding any difficulty to a competent attacker.

What if you use three *different* encryption algorithms, you may ask? Well, that's even worse because you've now tripled the attack surface of your encryption scheme.

It's not close to the same thing, but definitely not trackable 100%, and comparable levels of privacy. Having less elegant code doesn't change that. If you'd like, we can perform a test in which I make a lightning payment and you track it.

I don't think it's likely that an attacker can crack even your first layer of encryption in the time it takes for a transaction to propagate and settle.