it depends on how much interest was shown, I've definitely posted things and then they get posted again less than 24 hours later and it is that second post that takes off.
Suppose I make a paper wallet on an offline PC, write down the address and discard both keys. If I now send some BTC to this address, how does the client figure out the public key?
> all you need to change it is a majority of hashpower
Or rather the majority of actual users. Hard forks occur because people install and use the updated clients. If 90% of the miners decide to mine on the “bad” chain, but 90% of users switch to the “good” one instead, the “good” would likely still win out in terms of market cap and recognition (and the miners would naturally have to follow).
Because difficulty does not adapt dynamically, if the miners do not move then the fork will be defunct because it will take literally days to weeks to mine a block, and to mine the 216 blocks that would trigger a difficulty adjustment would also take proportionately longer. So transactions would sit in the mempool and the currency would be mostly useless.
Agree. Bitcoin is more of a social concept / weighted democracy than an algorithm. If the participants decide that a new / incompatible hashing algo is needed (e.g. post quantum), it will be forked and everyone will use that.
The odd part is, the governance model is not defined. At the end of the day, some person or group has to decide what the new "real" Bitcoin is and the average holder just has to go along with it.
I think for most bitcoin users, the main usability concern wrt forks is being on the most secure chain; i.e. hashpower. If you're willing to trade being on the most secure, most historic chain for specific technical features then you're probably on an altchain already. In practice every hard fork in history the chain with the most hashpower has retained the ticker, meanwhile the users are never organized enough to do anything but follow that decision.
> every hard fork in history the chain with the most hashpower has retained the ticker
The opposite is also true – most miners have stayed on the “official” chain :-) I do agree that having more hashpower helps, but ultimately all users (including miners) determine the price on the market.
I did some funny software porting on one of those dongles. At one point, I had it connected to a battery pack for power, joined onto my home WiFi for LAN/WAN access... and had the stick running the Open5GS cellular core stack, allowing my CBRS LTE base station to serve users on an in-home private LTE network by connecting to the cellstick over WiFi for management. (No, the stick's own cellular modem wasn't being used here at all. Just scavenged compute for the tiniest LTE core!)
Postmarketos works well on those and they have lots of info and links. [1]
My biggest tip is to carefully back up every partition of the original firmware - there are many many seemingly identical variants and if you hose your particular baseband components you will lose your cellular functionality.
This probably depends on your particular dongle model. Back in 3G era, some carriers offered USB modems with SMS locked out in the firmware, but you could flash a firmware from a different operator (also install their variant of software, the only difference being the added SMS tab and a different skin) and then you can text and even use USSD! (No calls, though.)
