Tag: #Believe

The First Step

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Lao Tzu

The First step …🤔🙄🤔 Brings me back on the memory lane… In the ancient times of 2011, when I read for the first time about this BitCorn thing…

Then, I read the WhitePaper… As much or little as I understood at the time, I had a strange Sehnsucht about it and went down the proverbial rabbit hole…

Only to discover with amazement and dismay… It’s the Moria’s Mines down here…

That’s why it’s called a DYOR universe !!!

You need to Do Your Own Research folks !

It’s the only way for an Sovereign citizen !!!

Yours trully Free Spirit

Best P2P exchange to buy/sell Bitcoin

What are Peer-to-Peer Cryptocurrency Exchanges?

P2P crypto exchanges simply remove the middlemen, the core strength of Bitcoin’s design. Allowing users to buy/sell directly with each other without any trusted third-party to help carrying out transactions.

It is this 🤓 miners strong believe and best practice that privacy and security matter, then P2P exchanges will likely be a better option than the regular exchanges for handling your cryptocurrency!

Peer-to-peer bitcoin exchanges offer anonymous ways to buy and sell Bitcoin with a wide range of payment methods.


It’s no surprise that the P2P marketplaces have grown considerably in recent years.

“Bitcoin Accepted Here” Map

The Map

https://btcmap.org/

About Us

BTC Map is a free and open source project powered by volunteer bitcoiners and bitcoin-friendly merchants around the world.
Merchants

Merchants are at the heart of BTC Map. These businesses are front-running the paradigm change and positioning themselves for continued success.

Any merchant who accepts bitcoin can be listed on BTC Map.
Communities

Bitcoin communities help drive global adoption by onboarding new users locally!
Integrations

COMMUNITY INTEGRATIONS

Projects using BTC Map:
PROJECT INTEGRATIONS

BTC Map uses these projects:
Contributors

Anybody can contribute to BTC Map in many different ways. If you would like to get involved please don't hesitate and come join the fun!
Core Team

Nathan Day

Nathan is a tech entrepreneur turned pleb-at-large. He brought the core team together to accelerate app development. Having built, sold, invested in and advised tech businesses over the years he is now focused on bitcoin, building BTCMap.org, gamertron.net and delivering bitcoin education for kids.

Igor is a long time bitcoiner, mapper, and digital nomad living abroad. He created BTC Map as an Android application and the project has since gained worldwide momentum from there. He now also maintains all of the backend infrastructure for the project.

A self-taught Web Developer, secondl1ght dove head first down the bitcoin rabbit hole and left his fiat career to focus on bitcoin development full-time. He created and maintains the BTC Map web application and works on lightning network tools at Amboss Technologies.

Karnage is the lead designer on the web app and created the BTC Map brand. He has contributed to many high profile bitcoin open source projects. His mission is to help startup founders succeed and creates products to achieve this goal. Pixel-perfect product design every time. Get it shipped.
All credit and Kudos goes to :

https://btcmap.org/

We’re on a mission to help Bitcoiners easily find places to spend sats.

Useful Links:

  • International payment using the radio waves
    In a first, Bitcoin developers have done something amazing amid the criticism over the lightning network and issues associated with it. A team of developers has made an international payment using the radio waves on the lightning network. Rodolfo Novak, the co-founder of the startup CoinKite sent out a Bitcoin transaction to Bloomberg columnist Elaine … Continue reading International payment using the radio waves →
  • Happy New Year !!!!
    Happy New Year!May the coming year be full of grand adventures , peace, prosperity and opportunities.Dream big and make the most of 2024!
  • Discipline Quotes
    My inspiration for this page was given to me by my new aquired friend, a fellow Truth Seeker – Joris and to whom I dedicate this page… Wish you… as well as to all my readers, to find a sparkle of wisdom in these quotes, that shall illuminate your path/s…. Always in my heart and … Continue reading Discipline Quotes →
  • Merry Christmass and A Happpy New Year to all
    To all my readers from the bottom of my heart I wish you Happy Holiday among family and friends, a jolly Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and may 2024 bring you all what you strive and work for so hard! Yours truly, Free Spirit with Joy & Love
  • Bitcoin White Paper turn 15
    Bitcoin white paper turns 15 and the Legacy of Satoshi Nakamoto lives on. “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Satoshi Oct. 31, 2008. The white paper was proposing a decentralized system that could facilitate peer-to-peer transactions, which could solve the “double spending” problem often … Continue reading Bitcoin White Paper turn 15 →

100 Based things

Here is a list of 100 of the best based things:

  • Writing clever, articulate and edgy raps – Based
  • Eating food with no care for nutrition – based
  • Making jokes at the expense of politcally correct people – based
  • Creating witty and inspired retorts – based
  • Refusing to conform to society’s expectations – based
  • Developing viral content – based
  • Dreaming without the boundaries of reality – based
  • Taking no sh*t from anyone – based
  • Standing up for what is right – based
  • Throwing away society’s conventions – based
  • Experimenting with new ideas – based
  • Making creative use of your skills – based
  • Celebrating all forms of success – based
  • Questioning the world around you – based
  • Expressing yourself through Art – based
  • Learning from your mistakes – based
  • Breaking the mold – based
  • Making bold statements – based
  • Improvising on the fly – based
  • Challenging the status quo – based
  • Working hard without complaining – based
  • Respecting others’ opinions – based
  • Venturing beyond your comfort zone – based
  • Befriending other outliers – based
  • Taking risks, but staying safe – based
  • Developing mental strength – based
  • Acknowledging the beauty of the world – based
  • Choosing courage over fear – based
  • Embracing your uniqueness – based
  • Worrying less, but achieving more – based
  • Being a loyal friend – based
  • Working to help others – based
  • Succeeding in your own way – based
  • Standing up for the weak – based
  • Being honest about your failures – based
  • Tackling the world with passion – based
  • Leading without authority – based
  • Accepting your flaws – based
  • Owning up to them – based
  • Motivating yourself to go further – based
  • Making informed decisions – based
  • Listening to and understanding others –based
  • Analyzing problems and finding solutions – based
  • Seeing the world differently – based
  • Working against money-grubbing corporations – based
  • Refusing to be controlled by social media – based
  • Taking responsibility for your actions – based
  • Rejecting the influence of peer pressure – based
  • Showing gratitude for what you have – based
  • Developing a thick skin – based
  • Not taking no for an answer – based
  • Embracing the joy of risk-taking – based
  • Winning without gloating – based
  • Taking time for yourself – based
  • Diversifying your investments – based
  • Helping others around you succeed – based
  • Avoiding useless debates – based
  • Refusing to give into oppression – based
  • Going against the grain – based
  • Moving through life with grace – based
  • Not caring about popular opinion – based
  • Not caving into herd mentality – based
  • Outwitting conventional wisdom – based
  • Standing your ground against bullies – based
  • Reclaiming lost ground – based
  • Detaching yourself from material possessions – based
  • Questioning authority – based
  • Resisting unjust power – based
  • Ignoring criticism – based
  • Seeing through deception – based
  • Overcoming adversity – based
  • Pursuing excellence – based
  • Living life without regrets – based
  • Becoming Unbreakable – based
  • Following your gut feeling – based
  • Slaying the dragon of Conformity – based
  • Crushing comfort zones – based
  • Exploring the unknown – based
  • Keeping a cool head in a crisis – based
  • Analyzing data intelligently – based
  • Not wasting time with gossip – based
  • Adopting a Zero-Tolerance policy – based
  • Connecting with likeminded people – based
  • Committing thought crimes – based
  • Spreading your message – based
  • Asserting your autonomy – based
  • Resolving conflicts quickly – based
  • Not conforming to gender roles – based
  • Refusing to settle for mediocrity – based
  • Not taking life too seriously – based
  • Living life to the fullest – based
  • Rewriting stories with your own pen – based
  • Expressing yourself without limits – based
  • Being You – based

Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to truly ensure that what someone is saying is true is to verify it yourself.

Relying on trust to make important decisions is the same as not making decisions at all, which would be why wise people have always told each other to never trust anyone, ever.

Instead, one should always verify all information, or else make use of carefully-chosen massive liabilities and hedges, so as to eliminate the need to trust.

…

Btw, did I mentioned the list was made by a Non-Human, Red-Pilled Entity 😁😋🤣

I would love to hear thoughts, opinions and critics about this, from you all dear readers.

CypherPunk Movement

THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT

Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s.

Cryptography for the People

Encryption was primarily used for military purposes before the 1970s. People at that time were living in an analog world. Few had computers and even fewer could imagine a technology that would connect almost every human being on the planet – the internet.

Two publications brought cryptography into the open, namely the “Data Encryption Standard” published by the US Government, and a paper called “New Directions in Cryptography” by Dr. Whitfield Diffie and Dr. Martin Hellman, published in 1976.

Dr. David Chaum started writing on topics such as anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation systems in the 1980s, such as the ones described in “Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to make Big Brother Obsolete”. This was the first step toward the digital currencies we see today.

The Cypherpunks

We walk on shoulders of Giants!
Hughes, May, Back, Finney, Gilmore, Szabo

It wasn’t until 1992 that a group of cryptographers in the San Francisco Bay area started meeting up on a regular basis to discuss their work and related ideas. They built a basis for years of cryptographic research to come.

Besides their regular meetings, they also started the Cypherpunk mailing list in which they discussed many ideas including those which led to the birth of Bitcoin.

In late 1992 Eric Hughes, one of the first cypherpunks, wrote “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” laying out the ideals and vision of the movement.

Note: We encourage you to read A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. The Manifesto is just as relevant today as it was in 1992. This short read takes only a few minutes of your time. It’s astonishing to see how much foresight the early members had when most people didn’t even think about computers yet.

A Cypherpunks’s Manifesto

An excerpt from the Manifesto:

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.

Privacy is not secrecy.

A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know.

Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

“Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography.

If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it.

If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy.

To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy.”

“We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any.

We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place.

People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers.

The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.”

“We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems.

We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.”

Electronic Cash

Although you might have just heard about this movement for the first time, you have most definitely benefitted from the efforts of some of their members in building Tor, BitTorrent, SSL, and PGP encryption. It should not surprise you that many concepts and ideas that originated from this group led to the emergence of cryptocurrencies.

In 1997, Dr. Adam Back created HashCash, which he proposed as a measure against spam. A little later, in 1998, Wei Dai published his idea for b-money and conceived the ideas of Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake to achieve consensus across a distributed network. In 2005 Nick Szabo published a proposal for Bit Gold. There was no cap on the maximum supply but he introduced the idea to value each unit of Bit Gold by the amount of computational work that went into producing it. Although this is not how cryptocurrencies are valued, the price of production (comprised of hardware and electricity cost) plays a role in the pricing of these digital assets.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper, citing and building upon HashCash and b-money. Citations from his early communications and parts of his white paper, such as the following on privacy, suggest Nakamoto was close to the cypherpunk movement.

“The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the ‘tape’, is made public, but without telling who the parties were.”

Technology did not enable strong privacy prior to the 20th century, but neither did it enable affordable mass surveillance. We believe in the human right to privacy and work towards enabling anyone who wishes to claim his or her privacy to do so. We see a cryptocurrency with selective privacy as a good step in the right direction of reclaiming our privacy.

20 Security Rules for bitcoin

Questions & Answers Chapter

20 Rules for Security in bitcoin

Here’s a short list of common sense Rules, to use and implement for a better Security while using bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

In the hopes that they are quite self-explanatory Rules, please do try for your own good and your assets, to follow them…

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask in the comments.

  1. Keep your private keys safe and secure, and never share them with anyone.
  2. Use a hardware wallet to store your bitcoins offline and away from potential hackers.
  3. Use a strong and unique password for your wallet and any exchange account.
  4. Be wary of phishing attempts and never click on links from unknown sources.
  5. Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) whenever possible to secure your accounts.
  6. Use a different password for each account and change them frequently.
  7. Avoid using public Wi-Fi networks for sensitive transactions.
  8. Keep your computer and mobile devices secure with updated antivirus and anti-malware software.
  9. Use a separate address for each transaction, and avoid reusing addresses.
  10. Verify the authenticity of any website or service you use for Bitcoin transactions.
  11. Use a reputable and secure Bitcoin exchange or wallet service.
  12. Use a hardware token or other secure means of 2FA, avoid using SMS.
  13. Be mindful of social engineering and do not reveal personal information to unknown parties
  14. Use a unique email address and phone number for every exchange account.
  15. Keep a copy of your private key, Seed Phrase or wallet recovery phrase in a safe place.
  16. Be skeptical of unsolicited offers, promotions or services.
  17. Learn about the security features of your wallet and use them.
  18. Do not leave your funds on exchange for long time.
  19. Educate yourself about the risks of using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
  20. Regularly monitor your accounts and transactions for suspicious activity.
With 🧡

Running bitcoin – Hal Finney

Wonder In Peace Bright Mind

Join Honorary Chair Fran Finney and the Running Bitcoin Challenge Committee as we honor legendary cypher punk, Hal Finney.

This is THE EVENT that combines Hal Finney’s love of running and Bitcoin and is raising funds and awareness to help defeat ALS, which ultimately claimed his life in 2014.

You are challenged to run (or walk, roll, or hike) the equivalent of a half marathon — cumulatively or all at once — by the end of January 10, 2023.

From wherever you are, spread the word about Bitcoin, participate in a healthy activity, feel good about doing your part to defeat ALS, and start the year off right

Hal Finney, one of the earliest bitcoin contributors, died eight years ago from complications of nervous system disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

His spouse, Fran Finney, is now organizing a half marathon to raise funds for ALS research via bitcoin.

The “Running Bitcoin Challenge” is set to take place between Jan. 1 and Jan. 10. The timing of the occasion leads up to the anniversary of Hal Finney’s “Running bitcoin” tweet, in which Finney famously disclosed he was deploying a Bitcoin node.

There is no set location — participants can choose to join anywhere they wish. Players are encouraged to either run, walk, roll or hike the equivalent of a half marathon (Hal’s favorite distance) either in one go or over the entire 10-day period.

Donors contributing at least $100 will receive an official shirt with the half marathon’s logo, while the event’s top 25 fundraisers will get a Hal Finney collectible signed by his wife.

As of Wednesday morning, the event has already managed to secure nearly $10,000 in bitcoin donations.

An advocate of cryptography and digital privacy, Finney was the recipient of the first-ever bitcoin transfer from the network’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

The bitcoin community often suspected Finney was Nakamoto, a claim he consistently denied. He reportedly found out about his condition in 2009 and decided to move away from the project.

Hal’s name is high in the Bitcoin pantheon as one of the first people to voice support for Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention and for being the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi.

He was, for a time, considered one of the top contenders on the list of potential Satoshis himself (many in blockchain who reject Dr. Craig Wright’s statements still falsely believe Finney to be Bitcoin’s real creator).

Hal, who referred to himself as a “cypherpunk,” was a cryptographic activist who went from developing video games to working on the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) project in the 1990s. He described his PGP work as “dedicated to the goal of making Big Brother obsolete.”

PGP creator Phil Zimmerman hired Hal as his first employee when PGP became PGP Corporation in the early 2000s. He described Hal as a “gregarious man” who loved skiing and long-distance running.

Despite gradual paralysis that eventually forced him to stop working, Hal continued to code software and follow the Bitcoin project.

Almost as famous as his 2009 tweet is his “Bitcoin and me” post on BitcoinTalk.org in March 2013, the last he’d ever make.

It’s a long post, and Hal was “essentially paralyzed” at the time, using an eye tracker to type. Forum stats show the post has been read over 278,000 times.

“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” he wrote. “I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.

I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”

Hal himself always denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, adding later that he’d sold most of the Bitcoins he mined (at pre-2014 prices) to pay for his treatments. He also mentioned putting some in a safe deposit box for his children.

“And, of course, the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me.

I have skin in the game.

But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me.

I lived through the crash of 2011.

So I’ve seen it before.

Easy come, easy go.”

Hal Finney
www.runningbitcoin.us
Admiration and great Respect
With 🧡

Beware of Scams !!!

Beware !!!

Just as the crypto industry is expanding and getting local adoption from individuals, co-operations, organisations and few countries  the same rate at which we have crypto enthusiast increasing in number which i see so worrisome and also a call for major concern.

Reason been that as more people get involved in the crypto business the more scammers are likely to increase their technique and the more scammers get recruited.

To avoid walking on scammers path, requires to be well informed of every new technique they can ever deploy against their potential victim.

To stay off scammers path users must:

  • Avoid phishing links.
  • Make sure to pay attention to the spelling of the website, as well as their URL as this can reveal whether it is a phishing site or not.
  • Never invest in a project without a well structured community
  • Pay close attention to the engagement within the community for suspicious activities
  • Ensure you assets are off CEX
  • Be more smart and less greedy
  • Don’t jump into a project/coin only based on the hype from advertisers (especially twitter)
  • Avoid any “too good to be true” investment
  • Avoid send me 1$ and I’ll send back 2$ scams, no matter how reputable is the account calling for that
  • Protect your coins (keep your coins on your wallet, use hardware wallet where possible, never give out wallet’s seed, keep backup seed offline)
  • Don’t be greedy and/or illiterate.
  • Be sure to feed yourself with necessary knowledge, if you want to invest.
  • Knowledge from experience is good but you can also take legitimate one from other people.
  • Not everything that is being offered to you is true. Do not be deceived.
  • Be careful who you are trusting.
  • Always be skeptical !!!
  • Enable Two-factor authentication for all your accounts.
  • Using of firewalls.
  • Installing an up to date anti virus software.
  • Use strong passwords and yet easily accessible ones for your convenience.
  • Stay away from malicious links or attachments you come across on the web.
  • Make sure your private keys are well stored and in hard wallet
  • Make sure your passwords are not vulnerable online to attacks i.e don’t store passwords online or any website
  • Whenever a stranger message you first for a business or an investment, it is a Red flag.
  • Someone who doesn’t know you would want you to make big money, another Red flag.
  • Whenever they introduce a” business opportunity” to you and then hasten you in order make you take a hasty decision it’s not  genuine, they are trying their best to make you take a fast decision without telling your loved ones and friends who will discourage you.
  • It is safer to  assume anyone you don’t know, communicating with you is a scammer until it is proven otherwise.
  • Read the whitepaper and research well of the company where you are going to invest because many scams are done by this method.
  • Check whether it is genuine or fake.
  • Scammers are constantly upgrading their scam methods and anyone can be the next target.
  • Loss doesn’t just happen due to an internal or intentional mistake, and when it does happen everyone has a similar sense of remorse and risks that are absolute consequences.
  • You’ll be fooled many times by those scammers that have maintained a well structured fake community.
  • They can hire those PRs and people talking inside their community to make it look like they’re a legit community.
  • As for their workers, they’ll just tell that they need engagement but the purpose of it, they’re not talking about it because that’s what the main purpose it.
  • And that’s to make it look genuine that they have real people inside the community. But in reality, it’s all fake people that they’ve hired just to make discussions all over their place.
  • It’s safe to say as well that it’s not just the crypto industry that is not safe for newbies, everything that talks about money is not safe for everyone.
  • Crypto is the latest thing and in the last 5 years it become so successful that scammers make this as their paradise as there are a lot of naive investors in the market.
  • Do your investigations, and don’t listen to influencers and believe them.
  • Think that this is your hard earn money so you need to be careful where you are going to invest it.
  • Don’t be Greedy.
  • Don’t jump on it like a hungry cow.
  • Don’t trust the sweet words they offer you. Most of them are too good to be true but they will always sound inviting to invest with.
  • Make a wall to not fully support them unless they have proven themselves worthy of that kind of respect.
  • Always be in doubt. That will be the shield that will protect you from being scammed.
  • Must simply assume that our coins are never really safe despite our best efforts, so it is important to always be on alert and protect our coins to the best of our ability.
  • Improve the security of your coins by an important margin by buying a hardware wallet, since they are very secure devices and they are relatively cheap, instead of risking storing our coins in our computers or at an exchange.
  • Always good to know how to make technical and fundamental analysis so that you can get specific information what is the situation of the projects you want to invest
  • Many projects are delivering a good testament, but they always ended into a scam , so we need to be smart enough and have a lot of preparation before investing or trading

Controlled Supply

Bitcoin

“A fixed money supply, or a supply altered only in accord with objective and calculable criteria, is a necessary condition to a meaningful just price of money.”

Fr. Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J. (1903-1960)

In a centralized economy, currency is issued by a central bank at a rate that is supposed to match the growth of the amount of goods that are exchanged so that these goods can be traded with stable prices. The monetary base is controlled by a central bank. In the United States, the Fed increases the monetary base by issuing currency, increasing the amount banks have on reserve or by a process called Quantitative Easing.

In a fully decentralized monetary system, there is no central authority that regulates the monetary base. Instead, currency is created by the nodes of a peer-to-peer network.

The Bitcoin generation algorithm defines, in advance, how currency will be created and at what rate. Any currency that is generated by a malicious user that does not follow the rules will be rejected by the network and thus is worthless.

Currency with Finite Supply

Block reward halving
Controlled supply

Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is adjusted every 2016 blocks to aim for a constant two week adjustment period (equivalent to 6 per hour.)

The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence will not exceed slightly less than 21 million.

Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value “21 million” are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number. Satoshi has never really justified or explained many of these constants.

Cumulated bitcoin supply

This decreasing-supply algorithm was chosen because it approximates the rate at which commodities like gold are mined. Users who use their computers to perform calculations to try and discover a block are thus called Miners.

Motivation Formula

Motivation = (Expectancy X Value) / (Impulsiveness X Delay)
  • Expectancy : How likely you feel you’ll succeed
  • Value : What you’ll gain from succeeding
  • Impulsiveness : Your natural inclination to put things off
  • Delay : How much time you have to complete the task

Add it up, and the result is your current level of motivation. 

The less confident you are, the less exciting the outcome, the longer you have to get it done … the more likely you are to put it off.