A lot of "assumptions" about bitcoin that this article seems to want to break have been wrongly assumed. Most bitcoiners would agree that:

1. Hyperbitcoinization is just an imaginary construct, a utopia. It won't happen.

2. Bitcoin mining will not continue to need infinite energy. It will stabilize with how the fee-market looks.

3. There are no guarantees that Bitcoin will survive the deprecation in block subsidy and miners will continue to direct hashpower. Though, it seems highly likely due to the importance of economy on top of bitcoin that would have been built by that time.

I think when such "studies" question the value of Bitcoin, it is best to go to the bottom of your own values as to why Bitcoin holds value to you.

Personally, I find Bitcoin valuable because I can actually store it without trusting a third party, I know that a whole economic system will agree to that value without having a war-machine to back it. It feels good because I don't really love wars and I think Governments and Banks have exploited Democracies to benefit the top few. I think Bitcoin is one of the things that will diversify the evolution of democracies and economic policies solely because it allow people to coordinate without having to go through diplomatic channels imposed on us in the name of National security.

For these reasons, I feel that Bitcoin is important and will always hold it as much as my financial condition allows. I believe that a lot of people feel this way, despite the greed and scams and blatant manipulations, people still have a choice with Bitcoin. If I continue to hold it and if many people feel the same way, Bitcoin will continue to have value.

If you need more reasons than this, then Bitcoin really is not for you.

Questions like these mean we still have new people coming in. The price action is interesting to the traders always trying to find a correlation.

For the newbies, you should look for what they call the Alt-season. The Alt-season is when BTC has had its pump and interest gets renewed in crypto. This brings people into looking for alternates and a buying spree of Alts ensues. This is the time when most of the money is made in this market. We are in the Alt-season for the time being. The cycle will now keeps repeating albeit with lower amplitudes.

For anyone following these seasons, you have to know that when it does go down, every thing goes down. All the fiat goes back to fiat and all the ALT/ BTC goes back to BTC. So if you are actually trading, it is always the best decision to earn back your principal and leave most in BTC. Don't dabble too much into Alts as they can go to -90% within hours.

The decentralized exchanges are as easy to manipulate as the central markets. The only difference is that central exchanges are in a position of manipulating any and all the tokens. In cases of DEX, the manipulator varies from token to token. It generally works like this. Some anonymous developer announces a project and a token generation date. Those tokens are listed on a DEX with much fanfare and are priced way higher than the utility. People FOMO because of all the good noise and then end up losing to the whales. Would you consider sharing any personal experience about the manipulation? Losing money in the market is not necessarily manipulation though and just the way investments work sometimes. The odds are almost always stacked against the small players.

Thats an interesting name. Are we going with amphibians these days rather than food. What do you think about them and who are the developers? Hope they are not anonymous.

I have no love lost for the our current rulers. Least of all for their no-dissent-allowed governance. They have trained a huge section of the population to get offended about cultural identity and can get anything done with the help of that troll army and pliant media, for the time being. What i mean is as crypto community, we should pick our battles carefully. This one is about the financial benefits and benefits to the startup culture that crypto brings.

Eality buddy, I only care about what happens with crypto and not about Modi's politics. The farmer protests in Delhi will go to their conclusion which essentially depends on how much support they can garner. Internet connection has been restored in J&K in a phased manner. Those are all different issues though. What i am concerned with is that I should be able to stay where I am and still work and earn in crypto.
Also, I may have given the wrong impression as I am not into business. I do think positively about it and am aware of what GST did to small businesses. It is what i have to unemotionally call growing pains or collateral damage in some cases.

I snipped the rest of the discussion so that we can get back on the topic of Cryptocurrency.

The political ambitions and machinations of BJP are a different beast altogether and it is not our job to do anything about this juggernaut.

Crypto is for the young, tech-savvy population. It is also useful for those who are just beginning to see the benefits of Digital India. (Checkout TikTok stars making money on DOGE in west). It fits perfectly with the Digital India initiative. All crypto exchanges in India are KYC'd so there can be no ML issues with them. Those exchanges are also supporting several ERC-20 tokens which allow the quite, little programmers to contribute and earn from those projects. If those exchanges or holding such tokens is criminalized, it will be a big setback for all those people working on these new opportunities.

Repeat after me,
"Modiji does not want that"
"Modiji wants Digital India"
"Modiji wants to help the youth"


"Modiji loves youth"
"Youth love crypto"
Hence,
 
"Modiji Loves Crypto" #Modijilovescrypto
Tweet it, Trend it.

Lets follow the simple formula and leave the politics out of it.

My "hope" is basically to get a peek into the minds of this fraudster and not really about him asking for an apology. He is anonymous. He could easily write a short memoir and it'll be a hit.
Yeah it wouldn't and it shouldn't. Third worlder newbie accounts have been negged and shamed for much less. The forum is filled with lots of stories and the pure disdain shown by the elite lot including CM participants equivocating on this. I cannot check all his post history but i guess "Ass" and his alts never engaged in the shaming as they were doing the same.

Okay so they do not have the capability to investigate. Got it.

It doesn't sound ludicrous at all. Ass broke campaign rules to hog the spots which could as well have gone to someone else. Considering that 100+ applicants apply for the spots and only 1-2 get in, it is unfair to those who could have been selected.

Then there is the whole issue of decency and conduct. As Staff, it is understood that you cannot make enforceable "rules" about conduct and cannot define decency.  This is subjective but its importance shouldn't be diluted, least of all by staff; by refusing to take a stand on the ethical debate over such actions.

Those talking about CM campaign getting its moneys worth, well, you will find multiple comments on the forum about how CM members are some of the best members of the forum. All of that is up in the air now. Who knows, there could be more of such things within the forum. Maybe there actually is this kind of nexus between a select few and the forum/ campaign has been milked by them while at the same time proselytizing about "Spam" and "ICO scams".

Ass may well be reading and smiling right now. I think the lesson to be drawn from this is that decentralized and anonymous systems will never really be able to implement even a semblance of fair business practices. There will always be the need for a way to track participant actions that affect the business. While this forum and bitcoiners proselytize about the benefits of "decentralization", they accept wrongdoing, fraud and plain corruption as "sleight of hand". We all accept this "He did it because he could, lets forget about it" mentality over such things. This is one of the biggest hurdles for the concept of decentralization to truly become useful. Because if you are going to be vulnerable to the same scheming and collusion, why really bother to change the present system. Lets just keep morals, ethics aside and everybody go mooooooon.

Banning cryptocurrency would mean throwing baby out with the bath water. For successive governments in India, the priority almost always is to be seen as pro-poor. The poor in this case hardly care or know about cryptocurrencies, leave alone the complex interaction of crony capitalism and politics.

The people who stand to suffer are a growing crop of young software apprentices, a lot of click-to-earn little guys, traders and a few thousand or so "community managers" types. Other than that, the money flow of bitcoin isn't really well understood or explored in India. There is just that easy connection with tax evasion, black money and loan app scams. This perception is what is driving the legislative action, as it does in most countries. Or that is what we all should hope. Right now all hopes are pinned on whether the policymakers will consult the existing stakeholders to hear their side of the argument.

The problem is not about how widely or how many people use these decentralized financial services. The current problem is of maturity of the space itself.

This forum brought bitcoin where it is because of the quality of discussion and the people it brought in. Apart from the technically bent, the early people were equally aware of the gains to be made. I think DeFi as a concept is pretty much at that stage. Most of the good guys out there aren't even on this forum as most DeFi platforms have forums of there own. If those people were here, i think the quality of discussion would have been a lot better.

Wow. Another bunch of skeletons in the closet. @eddie13 asked a lot of good questions and that is what the community should be discussing.

Against hop hopen, I hope he comes back and uses this anonymity to come clean with the story of how he feels about doing this  and shares his thought process about the "ethics" of it all.

I don't think an apology means anything. Down the apology route, he can probably as easily exploit the anonymity and attempt a convincing backstory about the pooling of funds.

This is important to know. It'll be great if the mods can clarify this.. Whether they actually scrutinize IP logs for wrongdoing?? The least the mods can do is look at the IP logs of those accounts and see for themselves whether it was possible to identify them? This would probably bring some form of closure to those who feel cheated that the most aspirational Sig campaign on the forum was exploited for so long.

Any community needs to set standards as to what is called wrongdoing; what is an exploit and what is ethically wrong. The crypto community has a way to equivocate on a lot of issues concerning ethics as and when it serves them right. All the righteous rage that plenty of newbies and the not-so-articulate here suffer means little to nothing when this sort of a thing happens right under our collective noses.
@nutildah of course deserves all the kudos and merits (and a CM seat) for seeing the pattern.

Username: amishmanish
Post Count: 1685 + 1
BTC Address (must be SegWit): bc1q4u8fvk7pn2z9uxlzrn0w0qw62gvpstw8d4fmxs

Looks like DarkStar's hope to have less number of applications to judge wasn't fulfilled..

Great responses in this thread guys.. It is necessary that we ask questions beyond just speculating about our own projects. My aim in starting this thread was to get such interactions and concerns about the space discussed. The discussion till now has been really good.

Good questions. Right now most people are using the DeFi lending platforms to take loans or to lend their crypto-wealth to earn returns on it. The satisfaction with relation to TradFi cannot be measured because TradFi doesn't give this level of control or returns to anonymous individuals.

This is a difficult and tricky part. This has no easy answers but this much is sure, the solutions have to come from within the community. It is clear that the hundreds and thousands of individuals in this space aren't criminals or tax evaders. Yet, it is highly unlikely that the Govt will allow them to function without getting some sort of share.
The industry has to come up with its own standards and self-regulations.

Totally true. The starting post is more of an invitation towards thinking in DeFi terms vs TradFi terms and not pitting each other. It can be seen as an opportunity for more people to become part of the "game" where only a very few had access or, more importantly, interest earlier. There is a flurry of activity and it will continue to remain significant.
How does that play against the goal of privacy is something that the community is divided over?

Love your view on this. It is indeed a cultural and a empowerment thing.

Good point. The TradFi or Big Money may have to evolve and in a best case scenario, will become more transparent and not as easily manipulated and corrupt as it is at present.

---

From the above, we can agree that quite a few people are ready for the DeFi vs TradFi argument. So as for the discussion to not get repetitive, I'll summarize a few points on which opinions would be appreciated from your experience:

1. How should DeFi balance the need for Privacy as well as conformance?
2. Will you continue to invest if it becomes linked to KYC like the exchanges?
3. Would you like to see a consolidation or continued proliferation of projects?
4. What is your style?? You jump around or get involved deeply.

Positive or negative depends on the way you spin it. Here is the NDTV report with the Q&A between MoS(Finance) and a Shiv Sena MP.

You are right that Bitcoin is not a private cryptocurrency. The ambiguity is whether the Govt is talking about Public crypto as sort of "Publicly owned"/ Govt owned while calling everything else Private. Colloquially, in India, thats the usage. I don't think our colonial hungover overlords would like anything other than pure Govt power to be called Public Service. The IAS cadre officers love to call themselves "Public servants". So, take a hint.

Yeah I suppose the politicians don't want to kill their cash cow that the informal loan sector comprising of thousands of these local "co-operative credit societies" are for them. With their control over such semi-formal groups, the chance to obtain money must be far easier than if those people start turning to cryptocurrencies for loan requirements. Its a win-win situation for the common trader but the politician doesn't get his cut.
The more i look at it this way, the more i am sure that the community will have to fight tooth and nail in the courts.

Very well said @SirLancelot. Cool name. You should join us in the BarnBridge Discord and the thread I have made about it. Please chip in with what you think about it. If you are into yield platforms, you'd know that BarnBridge has had a lot of attention the past few weeks.

We need people to have informed discussion on the DeFi phenomena. Like you said, it gives you the ability to use money in ways that only privileged bankers could till now. This is quite the double edged sword though. It is hard to tell if it will turn out to be really beneficial or just another fad.

While i wouldn't say that it'll overthrow traditional finance, it definitely has the potential to become an alternative. How it gets used depends a lot on whether people understand and build on it to have enough of a stake or whether it'll quickly get corporatized. As an example, how do we ensure that the decentralized governance doesn't end up as big money buying votes to effect outcomes in ways that benefit just them?

ENJ has been around for a long time. I played a few of their games and have some of the tokens they airdropped in the beginning. The problem is that despite the vibrant community, they haven't been able to return the sort of value that they could have, especially with being one of the oldest players in the NFT market.

The promised Efinity blockchain never materialized. They have also not been able to push ERC-1155 standard (which they came up with) into the current NFT market. The Gitcoin grants and Kudos are all ERC-721. They could have been a great use case. Even then, being the first game token to be approved in Japan should mean plenty. There have been plenty of misses and a few hits but they are here for the long run, that we can agree.

I wouldn't advice anybody to buy the token for speculation though. Its not for you if you aren't an artist, a game dev or a gamer trying to form a community and showcase your skills.

Just the fact that DOGE and its community has been around so long is good to know.

DOGE and LTC are mostly merge mined these days so the two of them are kindda connected. In an ideal world, The only cryptocurrencies would be BTC, LTC and DOGE. The rest of the blockchain should be using them as money with 2-way pegs, custodial wrapping or whatever else they could come up with. We would have no predatory forking and all shall be well.

The distribution of $BOND is happening in waves just like you say. But i understand what you are talking about. Even with this gradual unlocking, with almost all projects a stage comes when speculators are holding a lot of coins and just waiting to sell the news. The team cannot avoid speculators holding it or trying to take profit. This is unfortunately the case with most of DeFi right now and the first priority is 100X returns and not the project.

The strength of any project is thus a community of people that actually understands and cares for the product and not just for the return. The BarnBridge team is looking to launch products which will actually democratize risk management which has been the niche for established players till now. That is a humungous but worthy target. Most people are too short-sighted to see opportunities in front of them. This is why that despite the efforts to democratize, you only end up with a very few enthusiasts at the top.

I think that is just the natural course of thing. Most projects try but they cannot do much about it. The other problem is the "Rich getting richer" syndrome. Finding a solution to this is pretty much the "holy grail" of democratization.

Cryptocurrencies are hardly used as tender in India. Its mostly about convertibility to INR and they have already tried to stop that once through the banking ban. If they are still considering the draft bill, it is clear they have something else in mind.

That is the hope. That they can leave the private use of cryptocurrency to the user and not come up with something that criminalizes holding.

We are mature but the Govt is far from that. They view everything politically. I really hope Congress doesn't come out in support of it or try to make it an issue. The troll army will bury them with their talking points. The only good strategy is to make them realize that cryptocurrency is employing tens of thousands of Indian developers, finance minds as well as the click-to-earn freelancers. They cannot kill off the whole ecosystem as its not a prudent decision. Though if it gets political, get ready to be decimated.

If this report is anything to go by, we are already in trouble if a Shiv Sena MP asks a question and the reply comes in the negative. If Sanjay Raut wants it, BJP will do everything in its power to paint them anti-national too. Just quoting the written answer provided by MoS (Finance):

On a question about "Does the Govt know many businesses use it?", the MoS for Finance is like, "Well, No bitch!!" In my opinion, the bigger exchanges and businesses should be ready to hire the good lawyers and pay them well to take this through the courts on its technical merits like the last time. Pinning hopes on this Govt (Sorry Modi Lovers) is like having a hard-on for the black widow spider. I am all for not panicking and hoping for the best but till someone from inside the ruling party mumbles support, the crypto community should be prepared for the worst.

If you look closely, most traditional finance is open to use blockchain as a technology but only for replacing things like notary services. They won't adopt public cryptocurrencies except as commodities. They are already doing it.

What is Big Finance in your opinion? Why would normal people won't want anything to do with it. If the recent example of the showdown between retailers and Hedge funds over GME is considered, I am pretty sure that people want to have everything to do with big finance.

Bot..Bot..Go Away!!

That is just CMC's way of letting millions of crypto users know about the GME squeeze. This is essentially a fight between retail investors and the hedge funds who had bet on the company GameStop going bankrupt. A lot of people on the reddit channel of the same name have decided to hold on to GME shares and cause a supply shortage for hedge funds (who need those shares at ever increasing prices to close their shorts).

It has exposed a lot of the criminal madness in the way financial institutions are functioning. Democratization of finance and DeFi is going to be pretty bloody.

The idea of criminalizing holding any sort of cryptocurrencies was the mad brainchild of Subhash Garg when he came up with that first draft. I don't think they will go to this extent.
Unfortunately, everything at present is being decided by a regressive government aided by a media truly gone mad. They are always fanning the flames of chauvinism because the thing that gets the most TRP in today's India is a fake display of nationality and making everything about it.

Farmers protest become secessionist movements; A murder becomes a case of snatching civilization from Bollywood; An investigation into a manipulative journalist becomes "foreign powers" trying to suppress Indians through Congress.

If this becomes political, Bitcoiners WILL lose. So while you concern is legitimate and we all need to rally, I would advice against making this about elections or anything political.

The best option is to follow the route of law and basic human right to choose. The Supreme Court has enough knowledge to judge this. As Civil society, we have to support the nascent industry and make it about financial freedom. Making it about Modi's politics or crony capitalism of the ruling party will only lead to a quick suppression using media sensationalization.

UPDATE:
LOL, I think we posted at almost the same time. If it goes this way, then God save our Sats. If the ruling party's "nationalists" are onto it, this will be difficult.