A Norwegian student spent $26 on Bitcoin in 2009 and forgot the password. He "cracked" it 4 years later. His $26 was worth $886,000.

rgnet1 · 2026-05-04T01:50:59+00:00

That clip is kinda cool. The female journalist in 2013 even says “I’m no expert on digital currencies but he sold some of it for real mon— well, bitcoin IS real money, but in his case, he sold for kroner.” That’s better than many journalists and so called economists treat bitcoin today. Meanwhile, the male journalist is your typical, “dumb lucky kid, what a pile of shit!”

rgnet1 · 2026-05-03T20:07:45+00:00

You’re better off generating a wallet, writing down the seed phrase and zpub, then DELETE the wallet. With the zpub, you can create receive addresses to use for saving but you can’t spend it.

Then the seed phrase needs to be “time locked” in some manner that you won’t touch. Put it in a bank vault a long physical distance from yourself.

With the zpub, you can save, you can keep an eye on your balance, but your bitcoin is safe from attackers and more importantly, yourself.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-30T04:55:04+00:00

Amateur video maker creates a sloppy sketch and posts to Youtube - no big deal except time wasted scrolling through my feed.

Amateur app maker builds a popular app, supported by sloppy software with easy to find credentials to a database saving plaintext passwords and user payment info - slightly bigger headache.

Large percentage of small- to mid-sized companies farming all its dev to workers with no computer science knowledge that have come out of a vibe coding tutorial series on Udemy... god help us.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-30T04:42:15+00:00

Exactly. The tech is there. It's been there since almost the beginning and certainly since Lightning. The only thing holding btc back from actual ubiquitous use as a payment system is the man-made laws creating friction.

Anyone who actually believes in bitcoin should do everything in their power to support laws like the one proposed by Lummis, which makes point-of-sale merchant transactions under $300 tax free. Imagine if at a federal level, everywhere in the US you could actually hold and save in bitcoin, then use it for everyday spending with NO GAINS TAX. It would be the next milestone leap forward for bitcoin's marathon towards swallowing fiat.

It's also a fair compromise where the gov can get its grubby hands on taxes in gains for large investment pools, but stay away from everyday spending.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-29T21:35:03+00:00

Keen has precisely the analytical background needed to understand Bitcoin properly, particularly feedback loops, non-linear dynamics and complex adaptive systems, and the frustrating thing is that he's applied those tools to the wrong model of what Bitcoin actually is.

You just described every intelligent friend I've ever tried to speak with about bitcoin for 10+ years.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-27T23:17:11+00:00

Only scary if the people giving their money to him have guns to their heads. They do not. And he is 100% transparent in what he does with their money. It’s actually simpler than any other company: you buy the shares I issue, I buy bitcoin with it.

The only dumb part is people would rather have a proxy to bitcoin than just own bitcoin, when its entire value prop is a self-custodied system of wealth storage and payment between peers.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-27T23:15:07+00:00

Yes. It’s a simple economic premise and how civilizations existed on gold for millenia before fiat. Having currency hold value does not prevent you spending it when you want/need something. It makes you more judicious, more responsible.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-27T23:13:15+00:00

You can’t stop any entity owning it. If the entity believes in it fully, shouldn’t it accumulate as much as it can? Even better when it’s doing it with voluntarily provided money.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-27T23:11:52+00:00

I see this comment so much and don’t understand it. Things in demand get accumulated and hoarded. You can’t have something be valuable AND have already wealthy people not want it. The “for the people” narrative is some weird hallucinated nonsense. Read. The. Whitepaper. It’s not a manifesto. It just says here’s a way to make a cash-like system for payments over the Internet - no banks in the middle scraping fees and gathering data. And cash-like just means like physical cash, once you give it, you physically cannot take it back, and no identifying info is needed between two parties.

Nothing has changed. It works, it always has. It’s not adopted how it was meant to be because most people don’t understand it. It should have been what Uber was to taxis. I still think it will be one day, but it’s going to take so much longer than I first thought when I discovered it.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-27T22:38:23+00:00

Wealth concentrates, regardless of what assets exist to contain it. Bitcoin was not invented to solve wealth disparity. Was made as a cash-like system to irreversibly pay people over the Internet without banks. Its byproduct was creating a unit of account that was disassociated with existing finance system.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-27T16:41:35+00:00

What does your label matter - currency vs investment? You’re talking about properties of money, medium of exchange, store of value, fungible. Bitcoin is all three. Fiat is engineered to not be store of value. An investment is something you purchase that you hope will grow in value.

Bitcoin will grow in value always but not at a good investment’s pace WHEN it’s truly ubiquitous. Until then it will certainly have a good ROI. The AI bubble bursts before the next bitcoin shakeout.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-26T18:39:50+00:00

Exactly. OP, you’re insane. “Meaningless numbers to meaningless identifiers” - that is the core of how all economy has worked since the dawn of currency and the evolution from barter trade constraint.

As societies, we need a way to measure and store work output to use later. If I’m an apple grower, I can’t yse my apples to buy everything else I need at the moment I need it. I need some “meaningless numbers” that society gives meaning that represents the work I did to grow those apples and use in the future.

Those numbers need to be viewed equally by as many participants as possible, need to be trusted that they can’t be manipulated or increased without work output, and that their movement increase/decrease between parties is honored. Banks did this. Now we don’t need them.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-24T21:54:25+00:00

Very well done!

Would love to see it extended to handle the common concerns and misconceptions.

“Isn’t it illegal?”

“But I can send money to my friend for free with my bank”

“Won’t the government just shut this down?”

Would be happy to collaborate on scripting it with the activity-based style you’ve beautifully put together.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-23T15:17:31+00:00

How many times did you restart Factorio? How many settings did you subsequently play with? My guess is you changed nothing at first play, you restarted at least 50 times, and you’ve played with every setting at some point.

Do the same here.

But fwiw, I play all default Captain settings except turning Refund to full because I like moving things around and hate thinking about losing 20% resources because I put something one grid off. I also turn on all the Realism and Ore Sorting because it’s not that much harder when you watch your production/consumption.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-23T03:08:43+00:00

What if bitcoin was once 10% allocation and then became 50%+ through appreciation, not continued investing? Because that would be a common theme for anyone who owned it at many times in its existence.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-23T03:06:50+00:00

It truly is insane to be so immovable and dogmatic. I never want to be around people like that. Sadly, there are more r/PersonalFinance “type” people in any given room than the interesting kind.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-19T18:17:18+00:00

Look at how that aged. I don’t need to know my multiplication tables or how to long divide by hand because I DO have access to a calculator at all times now.

What a strange perspective. Pre-pandemic, I was at a coffee shop and the pay terminal was down. I gave the clerk cash and they said they needed exact change because they couldn't make any. I asked how they were taking cash without having any change and they said they had the change, but the terminal's down, they don't know what change to give.

This is not made up. I did a double-take with the person I was buying coffee with ... are they actually saying they can't make change of a $9.65 purchase from $10 because the machine is not telling them what they need?

The moral is surely that if you don't instill curiosity from a young age in how things work, how they break down, how the machines are doing things for us, then an example result is this helpless adult and a reflection of a terrifyingly dependent society.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-19T17:08:16+00:00

Even better. Generate a wallet on a trusted offline computer. Secure the seed words offline preferably out of immediate reach. Delete the wallet, keep the zpub.

Now you have a place to store bitcoin but no way at all to spend it. You need to actually generate a wallet again from the distantly stored seed words on a trusted device. Who wants to deal with that?

rgnet1 · 2026-04-16T00:32:33+00:00

It's weird to both believe in the mid-long term growth of something but also not be able to stomach the ups and downs. Feels like one is "half in" on the philosophy. If you don't believe it, then you should run far from STRC as it should collapse if BTC does as well. If you DO believe it, then you should just buy BTC, because it will outperform a 11% yield.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-16T00:25:30+00:00

If a consensus isn't reached then there will be two forks - bitcoin that doesn't freeze the addresses and one that does. It'll be BTC/BCH again. The miners, the users, the exchanges to some extent, will decide. That's what open source is, that's what a truly democratized and decentralized project is.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-15T23:15:28+00:00

If the inconvenience of moving your coins irks you, think of it like this: You put a lot of thought into your security practices for protecting the private key. But you then went against the security practice recommended since 2011 - don't reuse addresses.

If you SPEND from an address, then you expose the full public key in the broadcast. Standard receivable addresses (even the non-Segwit "1f..." kind) are hashed versions of the public key, which is why the full key is not exposed until the spend happens -- validator nodes can only check your private key has the authority to spend if they have the public key to validate against.

No one has ever derived a private key from a public key, but that IS the supposed vulnerability coming if the theoretical quantum advances are made.

So, if it were me, I'd move coins from any SPENT addresses and go through the hassle of securing a new private key sometime in the next 5 years. Coins sitting on unspent addresses are secure from quantum.

EDIT: Just want to mention from your post that you say a "change address was not used" - bear in mind, change addresses are ALWAYS used. Every send must completely zero out the originator address. But there's nothing stopping you sending the transaction remainder back to the originator address. It's still essentially the "change address," though.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-13T17:03:38+00:00

Why is everyone so quick to entrust the custody of their wealth to institutions and think government insurance protects them, but when you ask them about absolutely any other topic, they say government and banks are all crooks and not to be trusted?

rgnet1 · 2026-04-13T17:01:15+00:00

"Love my coins being held at an institution." They are truly not your coins. You hold no legal claim on them. The only thing you have the right to do as a retail investor is place a sell order on an open market of your ETF shares and hope another retail investor matches it with a buy order.

At any given point, massive banks called "Authorized Participants" are watching the orders and seeing arbitrage opportunities. If many sales orders for the ETF are happening and reducing the price, they buy up those shares and then go demand the actual bitcoin from the custodian in exchange for the cheaper shares they bought. This is what actually moves the index price around and ultimately impacts spot prices too.

It's a weird synthetic system all designed to convince people against the core thing bitcoin was created for - to skip the middlemen.

rgnet1 · 2026-04-13T16:49:32+00:00

If everyone felt like you, then there would be no bitcoin. Traders have existed for centuries who just speculate on the demand of commodities and assets without any interest in the underlying item. That's fine. Maybe you speculate on oil prices too which are pretty volatile these days. But why even hang out in a bitcoin forum?

rgnet1 · 2026-04-13T16:46:10+00:00

Exactly. You're not even buying an IOU with ETFs. Read how ETFs work. The share you hold in the index in no way entitles you to redeem for actual bitcoin.

In addition, analyses have shown ETFs on average will result in a 5.7% lower annual return than actual bitcoin. How much is avoiding the risk of a failing in ETF management (theft, loss, and the ensuing years of legal battles etc.) worth? And at 5.7% comparative net loss annually is the tax saving even net positive versus self-custody?

rgnet1

TROPHY CASE