I don't see any evidence today that Bitcoin is the most important thing ever, that it is going to change the world and shape human history. What we have now is that after over 10 years Bitcoin is still almost never used for payments, its volatility makes it a risky investment rather than a store of value, it doesn't react to inflation and economic uncertainty like bitcoiners have hoped it would.

It's important to keep your head cool and analyze the facts, instead of just believing in the future.

People should have learned from the lesson of Mt Gox and newbies should start their Bitcoin journey with learning Bitcoin history. Smart people learn from mistakes of others, the rest learn from their own mistakes.


You are right that Bitcoin is not directly affected, but unfortunately it is affected indirectly. If crypto ecosystem has such a negative reputation, then Bitcoin also suffers, because to outsiders Bitcoin and crypto are the same.

Windows' own anti-virus is practically as good as any commercial one. Malware often gets into your system because you click that "allow" button while installing a pirated game or other software. Or when the malware is brand new and no antivirus can detect it yet.

So first things first you should use cold storage to reduce the chance of malware stealing your wallet to zero, if you do everything correctly. And second, always avoid any interaction that can result in infection. Don't watch pirated content from streaming, download it from torrents from trusted accounts instead. Don't pirate software, use free and open source alternatives, and always download free software from the official source with a correct digital signature of the authors.

This isn't a hard law of nature. It's just an observation that humanity makes progress. I'm sure at some point in history Bitcoin would fade away, maybe the network will even effectively stop. But it might not be described as a direct replacement. Bitcoin could be used less and multiple other things could be used more.

If we think about narrower terms, like another coin replacing Bitcoin, that's highly unlikely. Historically Bitcoin always remained number 1 because it's a project that at its core is honest and doesn't have any hidden motivations. Unlikely altcoins, which are created for profit. So, anyone who truly wants to make a decentralized currency would rather work on Bitcoin then try to invent a wheel by forking Bitcoin for no reason.

But at the same time you became dependent on cryptocurrency, which is a very volatile and speculative field with unclear fundamentals. We can't know if in 10 years crypto would still be a thing or not. Maybe traders will lose interest and move on to something new, and the opportunities will become virtually non-existent. And there are other downsides, like the fact that there's less opportunities during a bear market. This can be very bad in certain situations, when you suddenly need a lot of money, but it's a bear market, so you might have to sell at a loss.

There certainly an argument to be made that after the FTX effect wears off, Bitcoin would return to where it was before the crash, which would roughly be 22-23k. But Bitcoin does not always behave like that, and it can easily stay at this level for quite some time. Or maybe it will even go lower if some more negative events happen. Could anyone predict that FTX would collapse at this exact time?

But in general I wouldn't expect any major bullishness before the next halvening, which is in 2024.

I'm curious if merchants would actually use their right to demand cash only from their customers? I think a business that tries to do that would quickly realize that they are losing customers, because many people already barely carry any banknotes and don't want to withdraw money from ATMs, since it costs them additional fees. Plus they need to count the change from every payment to make sure that the cashier didn't make a mistake.

Bitcoin and stablecoins are very different things. The key difference is that stablecoins are sem-centralized, their addresses and transactions can be frozen by the entity that controls the coin, just like with banks. So it's better to report their use separately.

And may I ask, what is the percentage of Bitcoin payments among all payments that your business has received in that month? Because we have no idea if 13 is a lot for your business or not.

All questions about security should start with a question "what's your security model". There's no single method for storing Bitcoin keys that suits all needs. If you store your wallet file on a USB in the same place that you store your seed, then the risk of losing coins to some natural disaster like fire or flooding remains almost the same. If you store your backups in different places, you raise your chances that they will fall in wrong hands. If you don't encrypt your backups, they can be easily stolen. If you do, you risk forgetting your password and losing your coins. You have to decide for yourself which threats are the most likely for you - theft, misplacement, natural disaster, etc.

First things first, in your title you said "crypto newbies" and in the OP you talk about Bitcoin. Crypto in general is a scam, they use Bitcoin's reputation to create worthless coins with the sole purpose of dumping them to investors.


Bitcoin is only a currency, it can't solve anything that is not related to money.


There's a good argument that Bitcoin will have some value because it has utility and adoption, but there's unfortunately no good mathematical model for estimating this value. We have no idea if todays price is objective overpriced, underpriced or just right.

How many people in this world are able to fully review an open source project the size of Bitcoin Core and be certain that there's no backdoors? A backdoor can be as small as a few characters, and it can even be hidden outside of the project itself, in some dependency of the project.

I trust Bitcoin because I trust that the community reviews the code. It's still better than trusting closed-source systems, hoping that the developers are moral people and won't do anything malicious.

If the scammer is dumb enough to not use mixing or similar tools, and then send the coins to a centralized exchange that does KYC, and this exchange would cooperate with police, the scammer could get caught. Otherwise there's very low chance of this happening. Though you should still remember that Bitcoin transaction is not the only activity - a scammer could use their name, adddress, their photo to establish trust, and this could help police catch them.

If by Hypnosis you mean mind control, then it's just a myth, it doesn't work like that. You can't be hypnotized if you don't want to be hypnotized and is not making effort for it to happen. All those stories about hypnotizers robbing people are just excuses of people who fell victims of a scam.

What you should be worried is kidnapping or torture or home invasion. So keep a low profile and have some home security, like good locks, an alarm system, a weapon, etc.

Why not? It's a correct observation that by using Bitcoin in a centralized manner, like storing it on exchange, you lose a lot of the benefits of Bitcoin and introduce the same old risks of the traditional finance systems. Just because you are free to do something, it doesn't mean that it's a good idea or others shouldn't be able to dissuade you from doing so.

yes


yes


Nothing surprising if you have spent a long time observing crypto markets



Do not equate Bitcoin with dexes. Dexes got hacked in the past. Perhaps some of the hacks were inside jobs. It's not enough to be decentralized and open source to be safe. A scam can be open source too. What makes Bitcoin different from "crypto" is that Bitcoin was reviewed by lots of professionals who didn't find anything malicious in its code. And it is being developed very carefully so most bugs get caught early. And still Bitcoin had some incidents in the past. But "crypto" is being developed very hastily, no one bothers reviewing it, so there's a big incentive for hackers to find exploits on live networks and steal millions.

I'm not following any crypto-related accounts, and yet after the FTX collapse the accounts that I follow made a lot of posts about FTX, SBF and crypto in general. And the general mood among non-crypto people seem to be that crypto was finally exposed as a scam and will be done for good.

How can Bitcoin realistically distance itself from crypto? Should Bitcoiners join those who criticize crypto or should they be saying "Bitcoin is a good crypto". Or should Bitcoiners say that Bitcoin is not crypto?

Or maybe it all means that they hype around so-called blockchain technology and decentralization just inflated Bitcoin's value, and now the bubble has popped and Bitcoin returned to a more realistic levels?

People, governments, organizations plan things all the time, doesn't mean all of those plans will materialize. When China or anyone really would start actually building a moon base, that would be significant news. Until that happens, it's pointless to discuss the implications of moon bases, potential new space race and so on.

And I'm skeptical about any big moon bases in this decade, the cost/benefit of such endeavor seems to be rather poor. Better focus on improving the rocket technology first.

People don't realize that bear markets tend to end very abruptly, a bull run comes out of nowhere and before you blink, the price went up by 50%. Good investors don't make some 200 IQ trades with maximized profits, they simply make profitable trades consistently. And it's also important to sell in the bull market, because otherwise you will have to wait for a long time till the next cycle if you'll want a good opportunity to sell. People who wait for absolute bottom or absolute top miss a ton of opportunities for making profitable trades.

And from where do you know that in Q2 2023 there will be a boom of remote jobs for software developers? What would cause this?

And why do you conclude that they will use Bitcoin? We already have the precedent of covid-19, which forced people to work from home, and it didn't increase Bitcoin's adoption significantly. That's because there's a wide variety of fiat payment methods, and people see no reasons to use it instead of them.