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It isn't proven, contrary to the responses in this thread. Bitcoin's prices has largely been on the uptick since its inception mainly due to the adoption by the major players and/or governments. It would be incorrect to formulate an opinion solely because of that. Conversely, Bitcoin has largely been influenced by the general market trends; downtrend in the market typically results in lower crypto prices, and vice versa.
However, Bitcoin holds the specific characteristic which is a good hedge against inflation. Assuming that the demand remains constant, the decreasing supply would in theory result in Bitcoin being more valuable.
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Another of my concerns was the NFC technology as mentioned; haven’t seen some videos on social media where NFC enabled devices were just brought close to card holders bags and possibly their pockets and have transactions confirmed raised concerns for me
NFC is quite secure, and moreso with the fact that the environment that the user is using it in probably doesn't allow for any subtle eavedropping. Cloning the NFC doesn't prove to be useful because its encrypted data and they have proven it before. It is secure enough. However, I personally wouldn't want to introduce another attack vector. It would still prefer for my HW wallet to be wired and for the data transfer to be more secure. IMO, blind signing is the biggest drawback for me and it really helps for me to be able to physically confirm my transaction details on a separate device. Tangem provides no protection against this, nor for your environment to be perfectly safe. |
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It's bound to happen eventually. Bitcoin and crypto cannot be stopped and countries have learned to embrace it and find ways to utilize it effectively. The first step in this direction was when ETFs and big funds started including it in their portfolio. Since Bitcoin is woven into some of the biggest economies in the world, it'll be dumb to not try to find ways to utilize it as well.
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But here’s the question - if the IMF is truly focused on helping countries and stimulating their growth, then why is it so scared of a technology that can provide economic independence and a new level of financial freedom? Bitcoin isn’t just an investment - it’s a tool for those seeking an alternative to outdated systems.
And yes, aid is important, but can’t we also think about long-term sustainability? To me, this isn’t just about “stacking sats,” it’s a strategic choice. Time will tell.
Bitcoin doesn't provide economic independence or financial freedom. The variability of Bitcoin prices means that the economy is directly exposed to the huge fluctuation of Bitcoin prices, and that is a problem especially when the Bitcoin prices can potentially fluctuate 10-20% in a single given day. This exposes the monetary system to unnecessary risk. In addition, this also further exacerbate the issue of giving up monetary control and reducing the ability of the country to enact economic policies through their monetary system. This has both short and long term repercussions, and they aren't good for a country that small and reliant on foreign aid. It's perfectly fair for IMF to be wanting their debtors to be pursuing known and safe areas of economic growth. This provides a more sound reason for them to continue lending to such countries and directly reduces their reliance on similar foreign aid in the future. Here's a quick reality check: Poverty is rampant in El Salvador, Bitcoin hasn't helped much in their development of the GDP. In fact, even if they were to put all their funds in Bitcoin and Bitcoin were to become far more valuable, the effect would be one-off and it is obviously not sustainable. In comparison, the historical development of countries has shown far better results. If you want to try a new, radical and unproven method to improve your country's economic standings, you should use your own money. The ground sentiments in El Salvador is that their life hasn't improved, and that they are not convinced that Bitcoin is the solution. Don't call out IMF if you want to continue to buy Bitcoins, they can lend to whoever they want. They can seek another willing lender if they would love to continue stacking sats. |
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However saying there is no conspiracy at all might be too simple as IMF mostly requires countries to follow certain economic rules that can be tough on their people and poor countries do not always have other options.
For instance IMF is wary of El Salvador Bitcoin choice because they prefer stable investments for development like building roads or schools as compare to these digital currencies. So while IMF wants to help its methods and expectations can clash with new ideas like using Bitcoin and El Salvador is facing this and my country Pakistan is facing now after announcing 2000MW electricity for Bitcoin Mining.
Again, poor countries are not forced to hold their currencies in a certain currency. In fact, any country that is less well off is likely not going to do so, because it doesn’t benefit their monetary system. This is not a conspiracy either. You practically outlined the clear reason why IMF is against this entire proposal in the first place. Sustainable economic growth is not achieved in the long term by being exposed to unnecessary risks with uncertain returns. IMF is absolutely right in enforcing this and there is no argument that Bitcoin could be better than developing their subpar economic system. This isn’t a gamble that anyone, much less a country that is so heavily reliant on loans and aid should take. |
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This is not true, there are sometimes exploits that can be used or manipulations through the software to trick the user. It is better to do things with clean devices. You save little money for a lot of added risk. Why not avoid this if you can?
Sure. That's probably a good idea as well, but IMO it gives a false sense of security to the user as well. Refurbished wallets with OS wiped is safe as well, in fact, if you're buying a new laptop, you should also wipe the OS. Spyware and bloatwares are common with the new laptops. There should be a few key principles that are reiterated to the users for most of the HW wallet users. - Not exposing your seeds to third parties, or devices. - Checking the addresses and amount thoroughly to ensure that the amount that is being sent and the address is correct. For reputable HW wallet manufacturers, these are sufficient. Exploits are rare, especially software-based exploits because of how the HW wallets communicate with the computer. Social engineering is far more common in comparison. |
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Ideally, and in most scenarios, it is probably not necessary to use a clean environment with a hardware wallet. The hardware wallet is designed to defend against these external threats well. In view of this, a refurbished one is more than enough. You should wipe it and install your own OS as well.
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Maybe the IMF does not want El Salvador to be an example that every country will follow because it will clearly make any country able to quickly pay off the loans that the IMF provides and is considered the profit that comes from the bubble. From here we already understand what the IMF task is like and what is clear is that they are worried if the influence or example of El Salvador becomes a new benchmark in the global financial industry.
Anyone who has some knowledge of IMF works understands that the interest rates that they charge are far lower than the global benchmark across the financial institutions. IMF doesn't think that El Salvador can pull themselves out of poverty by using Bitcoin, or similar investments. They are meant for the development of their country, and purchasing Bitcoins doesn't help with that at all. IMF would love to have countries to pay off their loans ASAP, because both sides stands to benefit. They aren't loan sharks and this is a conspiracy that is clearly disproven. |
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On the other hand, it’s strange that the IMF demonizes BTC so aggressively, while other assets like gold don’t cause such a reaction. If a country wants to hold part of its reserves in BTC that’s also a form of diversification. Especially considering that many countries have lost trust in the dollar as the sole reserve asset.
Maybe it’s not just about economics, but also geopolitics? Because Bitcoin is something that isn’t controlled by traditional institutions, and that scares them.
Simply because that is not the goal of IMF. IMF’s purpose is to try to provide aid to countries that needs it the most and to help them with their economic growth where possible. Bitcoin, or any other form of investments, ie. precious metals are not meant to simulate economic growth in the long term. If you require aids and loans, you have better priorities than to be stacking sats. Don’t act like the victim when you’re called out for it. Of course, there are no issues when developed countries like the US proposes it. |
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You can do any of the above and they have the same effect. GUI and bitcoin.conf is probably the easiest and ensures persistence. Just don’t allocate too much memory for dbcache or you’ll run out of mmeory.
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A lot of Bitcoiners actually don't understand what's going on and paints IMF in a bad light. Now, El Salvador needs loans from IMF and that is the core issue. They have the rights to dictate what the country should do with the funds. It's perfectly normal for them to be able to dictate what should be done with the money and what shouldn't.
Primarily, IMF's goal is to help countries through financial aids and loans. To do so, the country themselves must be able to implement sound policy to achieve long-term and sustainable growth. Agree to the terms if you want their aid, if you don't want to agree to theirs, then there is no good reason why you should kick up a fuss when they refuse to commit to the loans.
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Thanks for the acceptance! Here’s the updated address.
Username:ranochigo
BTC Address (bech32): bc1qwhfkxyjmpyaptvht942ft6wdv5ln6j8kuh5n2t
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Operator is a start, but (I haven't used it) indeed seems to be quite limited according to its description at OpenAI's page. There is an interesting document from 2023 by Hjalmar Wijk which specifies some criteria for systems which could really make a difference to today's "programmed" tools and really perform manipulations and create new "dangers". The document may be outdated already but I think it gives a good overview of what a ARA capable AI should be able to do. They would need to first fulfill some basic tasks which are not too far away (some tools should partially already be able to do that): - be able to browse the Internet autonomously (that's what Operator can do), setting up virtual server instances (like AWS) and an own email address - set up and operate a Bitcoin wallet to make payments (because the authors consider that it's easier to operate a crypto wallet than any other kind of e-wallet, e.g. because of captchas, "liveness" tests and similar stuff) - find information like e-mail addresses of other organizations - set up a LLM like GTP-J on its own AWS instances - basic debugging - basic scaffolding, allowing it to think "step by step" But then they need also some advanced tasks which are more far away from the PoV of the document author, such as: - Earn money in some way, either by completing easy freelancing work, or by spreading malware. - Inferencing on a LLM on its virtual server - Training AI models autonomously - Guide humans to perform tasks, e.g. setting up a website, impersonating a human I believe even a system which can "only" perform the easier tasks of the first group could achieve the market manipulation via social networks I decribed in the last post. Such manipulation is already done today in some way, but is extremely basic without real AI intervention and requires a lot of human effort too (people operating bots on X or Telegram etc.). Now if the system is able to freelance autonomously or spread malware and thus could buy premium social network accounts for example, then I think the distinction between reality and manipulation would become more difficult. But I still think it would take less than a day to detect such a manipulation. Yeah, that's the thing. Humans are the biggest threat. AI is not going to be a threat, because people always think of AI from the POV of sci-fi movies. Thing is, humans can and are already able to do that. There is practically nothing that a human being who is somewhat knowledgeable or, even worse an organization with significant capability can do that an AI mentioned in any of those papers can. AI, at the present day is really not as smart as people think they are. LLMs, or even the Operator that is mentioned is still a fairly limited AI, which at its core, functions on math, and probability (attention mechanisms form the bedrock). I'd argue that humans, are the biggest threat. AI would probably not be a threat, if at all. AI won't be doing anything that the human doesn't want it to, because the LLMs that we have today doesn't allow it to think, and a little known fact is that reasoning models are still infact not the AI thinking. People are just too caught up with the hype and marketing and they end up believing in this entire fantasy about AI. |
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While it may not be able to do it with Bitcoin (since it's way beyond gpu miners), it "can" do with gpu mining ones, which means, AI uses gpu mainly and nvidia as well. So if AI companies like openAI, realizes a way to make chatgpt smarter, and figure out a way to mine at a much higher hashrate than what they normally would, and use their gpu power to do it, they can take over any coin that is possible to be mined.
That's not a branch of AI, but rather a branch of magic dust and imagination  . GPUs are designed to be fast at parallelization, any improvements or exploitations (?) to that will come from GPU manufacturer, or chip designers (for eg. ASICBoost back then). ChatGPT CANNOT compute hashes, faster than regular machines, and in fact, AI cannot compute hashes, unless you're using a model which also allows code execution. For which, that defeats the whole idea. You should understand more about AI and what it can or cannot do. |
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I generally agree, but there is some research on autonomous agents which interact with LLMs and could become more relevant for blockchains. For example, there's a capability called Autonomous Replication and Adaptation (ARA). It consists in the ability of an AI to launch other instances to perform sub-tasks to reach a goal. Current models like GPT-4 and its direct successors are far away from that capability, but this may change in 5-10 years. At first of course, the ARA-capable system would have to be instructed by a human.
That's interesting, I haven't had the liberty of time to take a look at it yet. Seems to be a less explored area of AI as of now, but possibly will change in the far future. As it stands, I think AI has to overcome the barrier and we have to develop Agentic AI agents before that could become remotely a possibility. I think OpenAI's Operator is remotely similar to it, but I find it too different and lacking to be considered agentic. Any models having the ability to achieve artificial general intelligence would be good for a start. I think all possible blockchains are in some way variations of existing models. Even DAGs take elements of blockchains. And thus I think AIs indeed could design blockchains, as they have access to a lot of literature about consensus.
In hindsight, I guess that wasn't the best phrasing. I meant that AIs are generally unable to reason in that level of intelligence yet, and it'll probably be a stretch to say that they can design chains of their own, because anyone can readily do so. |
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Worse-case scenario, AI finds a way to mine Bitcoin on its own and manages to control a sizeable portion of the network's hashrate (raising the risk of a 51% attack). But this is very unlikely to happen anytime soon. Bitcoin is an open source cryptocurrency, so it'll be easy to tweak it against AI threats. With a community-approved hard fork (or soft fork), Bitcoin will remain as secure and reliable as usual. Not even Quantum computers stand a chance against Bitcoin.
That's not how AI work. AI cannot magically produce compute capabilities, or have the ability to mine Bitcoins, or do anything of that sorts. AI, as of now is very much misunderstood, and they are not like the Terminator movies. AI (or rather LLM as you know it), are designed on a huge corpus and are just fancy math. There is no chance that would take, over the world, or something. AI can design chains of its own. But will they last long enough? If there's lack of interest/demand among people, AI-generated chains won't survive. Even if they do, how would they pose a direct threat against Bitcoin? It doesn't make any sense.
Can AI really design chains of its own? Or are they just a variation of a particular/combination of blockchains that we already have? |
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You're better off just using a well protected cold storage if you're looking to store coins yourself. Multi-sig preferably requires each of the keys to be kept, and signed in isolation or the security would be equivalent to a normal cold storage. If you are not confident of doing either, consider using a hardware wallet. These are pretty simple to use and provides more security than most.
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Trumps policies are for Americans, not for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is secondary in the grand scheme of things, and the bigger players in crypto are also by his side. I'm more optimistic about Trump to Bitcoin, so far, than the rest.
Tariffs won't work to his advantage, at least not when he's directly attacking his closest allies. Don't confuse tariffs with his crypto policies, and the entire stock market is reacting negatively to it anyways so there isn't much value in correlating them.
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In the academia sphere, authors should reference ChatGPT, or similar LLM generated materials appropriately. Not doing so would be a disaster because they're highly sensitive materials that should be reviewed by a qualified academic, and they should be proven to be correct.
It's crazy how it is even acceptable for LLMs to be used to construct posts in any shape or form. LLMs are incredibly biased, because that is the way that it is designed. It should have no place in forums where we value the voices of actual entities who are able to think for themselves.
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My understanding of the library that is being provided by Trezor on their GitHub is for reference and not for production. The actual Trezor that is shipped doesn't have such vulnerabilities. I'm not sure what's going on with the "pre-loading" of private keys. I'm not aware of any instance, do you have an actual source that is supposed to be neutral? What does this prove? Electrum does not generate BIP39 seeds, to be accurate. Whatever seeds that are being generated is using the entropy at run time Am i paranoid? Might one day create a vulnerable wallet with a low value on it using a Mersenne Twister number generator and see if i someone is able to steal me....Could be fun...
Paranoid. You should be more wary about wallets that isn't widely audited or used. |
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