This is dangerous thinking. All the positive sentiment notwithstanding, don't ever discount that bitcoin price is actually governed by the value that common users attach to it and the amount of usage or use-cases it can have. There is no need for someone to put their savings on the deck for them to be a crypto enthusiast.

I too ponder on this. Some of these institutions are visibly bullish about bitcoin on their twitter and such but the reasoning that you will hear is little more than "Bitcoin is it". I don't think institutions make their decisions like that. It can only be a very conscious decision because of these companies planning to launch or sponsor financial products backed by bitcoin. They can range for simple buying and lending to cross-border investment and transfers.

"The Great Reset" is something I feel is conspiracy theories arising from the precarious conditions post-pandemic, particularly in the USA, and Trump's loss.

Ripple is exactly what the name suggest. A RIP-OFF!!

Its not even a cryptocurrency. They have pre-mined 100 billion of them and allotted it to themselves. There is 45 billion in circulation and they will keep selling an additional 55 billion over the next 4-5 years. It has made the founders rich but there is literally nothing underlying it than marketing and a few connections.

People who market buy ripple are basically stupid who fall for the "under 1 dollar price". It is non-mineable, the foundation only sells it to its own customers. All this they accomplish by bragging about the price of XRP which is maintained by the idiotic small retailers buying and selling it on exchanges thinking it has got some value. One must though marvel at the way the founder's have pulled off this scam and given it a place in common lingo and media.

DeFi will head somewhere when the nexus between scam devs and toxic twitter shillers will break. Till then, it is just a bunch of HYIP schemes where you will lose money if you are not within the first 50 or 100 people depending on the size of the project.
Very few of these are actually trying to build value. While looking through some of these experiments, it also becomes doubtful whether there is any scope for creating value or not. Much of the "stablecoin" and "lending-borrowing" market is saturated. Both of these are under the threat of regulation right now. The current run of DeFi had a lot to do with anonymous hodlers of insane amounts of BTC and ETH (Those we call whales), looking to just have some fun after a long year of depressed sentiment. Its just a game for them while for the newbies, its real money they put in.

Right now, all that they have done is a sort of "vote" for a PoS system. If there are enough people with 31 ETH each to pool a total of over 600K, they assume that there is support to launch the PoS version. In reality, it would obviously not be individuals with 31 ETH but singular entities who use multiple addresses for this. Use some cloud service and you don't even have to worry about keeping it online.

The "plan" is to deploy further improvements like "sharding" to support sub-networks. Do not accept any change to fees this soon. I am still not convinced on why they are moving to PoS at all. I have asked around but find no suitable answers.

Could someone please provide an explanation on the steps for this?

Also, what is the opinion about potential attack vectors on wallet softwares like Electrum even though these are open source. For example, there was a malware attack which had led to users funds being compromised in an earlier version of electrum. The forum had warning about it.

Considering that Bitcoin core is the safest, how should one go about using Bitcoin Core for a wallet.

One final question, signing offline and broadcasting later so as not to expose your private key to the memory of internet, what wallets support this apart from Bitcoin core?

The one thing you need to carry your bitcoin securely is a set of twelve words which is called your seed. That seed has a bunch of addresses connected to it which you will always have access to if you keep those 12 words securely. (Not so secure that you fail to retrieve them when you want).

There are different options to generate those words. The most user-friendly and straightforward method is to buy a hardware wallet (from a reputable source, not from ebay resellers).

The next simpler method is to install Electrum wallet from a verified link on your PC and let it make a SegWit wallet for you. That will give you a set of words as well as a file called "wallet.dat" (or whatever you choose to name your wallet). This will have a password associated with it. Generate it on a PC without any malware and use the addresses to receive your funds.

Doing wallets is a bitch in the beginning but as you get practiced, it becomes a breeze and enjoyable. With bitcoin, you are your own bank. That comes with the responsibility to learn and secure yourself.

This is all great positive sentiment that has been going on for some time now. The only few hurdles remaining are:

1. How do US regulators treat it with the change in administration. There has already been a talk about regulations to ensure that "Wallet providers" don't treat people differently like traditional banks have when it comes to access to credit. Just looks like an excuse to get KYC from wallet software providers. Running your own node may become essential for those who desist KYC.

2. IF bitcoin gains such prominence, it remains to be seen that what political actors want to do about the mining dominance of Chinese ASIC hardware.

Came to know about it just around 4 years ago. The first thing that got my attention in crypto was the crazy Ethereum website. Back then it was quite novel and had all these exciting ideas about a world computer, DAPP etc. That took me to some freelancing project which was distributing its tokens. This brought me to the forum.

I would say i am a slow learner and I never really accumulated bitcoin as i put most of the initial capital into buying a a set of PCs and assembling a GPU rig (so i cud have my own source of bitcoin). This turned out to be a bad idea but i am okay with it. I just cost average now and have been in my first long running Sig campaign. So i managed to scrape some fractions and keep them close.

I'll continue to buy bitcoin as long as my pocket permits. The whole space is exciting to be in and pushes you to read and gain knowledge all the time.

I agree that the time has passed when bitcoin made millionaires. Wealth is a privilege commensurate to control. The person/group that has control over resources will command wealth over time. It has nothing to do with the entrepreneurial capacity of the individual as much of the capitalist world portrays it to be. The most important key to realize the potential of an individual's entrepreneurship is access to capital. I do believe that in a world where bitcoin gains huge value and it has patrons in an anonymous community of well-meaning individuals, this access to capital could open up investment avenues for people and parts of world which have been either historically ignored or plain exploited.

I have held this thought process since the time ICOs came to scene (and of course disappointed all of us). Unfortunately, we are constantly moving towards more regulation and transaction tracing. This is important for the current elites so the flow of capital can continue to be controlled. Bitcoin has the potential to change this. Or I should say, had.

He is quite persistent in his denial akin to Warren Buffett when it comes to Bitcoin. Both of them are old men who simply don't want to accept that something out of the blue like Bitcoin can challenge the status quo of their beliefs, or even threaten the established order of things by making millionaires out of curious teenagers prowling Github from their basements.

Him and people like him view that wealth should be synonymous with privilege. That is a view they hold very dear because that is the anchor of their self-image and existence. Bitcoin does not recognize privilege and treats the privileged as well as a first generation coder equally. While that time has long passed when bitcoin made millionaires, bitcoin's mere existence as an alternative for a tech-savvy generation is a threat to their worldview, hence, the nastiness.

The investor sentiment notwithstanding, I don't understand the interviewer discussing bitcoin in the same breath as Ripple. It has pumped and has been in the game for sometime, yet, how is ripple anything more than a centralized settlement layer with its validators and server architecture?

What kind of a world are we moving to if media continues to look at XRP as an alternate of bitcoin? With the advent of so many chains and developer communities, why is XRP still being discussed with its premine and non-existent community in terms of development?

I doubt that there are any serious gamers who would spend cryptocurrencies on a game but will be too much of a noob to have a decent GPU. GPU's aren't really so hard to get despite the mining scenario. Your idea doesn't seem to offer anything new. Its also confusing to hear about both a gaming parlor as well as a website. I don't think that gaming submits itself to the Arcade gaming scene of the early 80s/90s. Most serious gamers now pride themselves on building a gaming rig from whatever they can afford.

When it comes to the crossroads of gaming and blockchain, there already is a lot of competition in that area. The recent NFT craze was first inspired from gaming itself. Now NFTs are becoming part of the pumpamentals even though they could easily have good usage without being positioned for that.

I do have an idea to share though. Just make a detailed catalogue of all possible games and tokens involved in this space, partner with them to sponsor your actual brick and mortar store. Use that sponsorship to offer gamers all kind of NFTs and tokens that these communities keep bringing. They gain real gamers as users in their communities and you get one exciting thing to offer your patrons.

South America is really a mixed bag when it comes to the potential of bitcoin in that part of the world. It is the motherland to almost every kind of ill that bitcoin is blamed for concealing. Drugs, trafficking, extortion and such. Then there is the situation where multiple countries have namesake governments with local cartels and millitia having power over the lives of people. It must be terribly hard to secure an honest living in these conditions. I recently watched on Netflix that how the Avocado farms ended up becoming cartel controlled in countries like Chile and Mexico. That kind of sums up the pitfalls in earning an honest living in these countries.

If bitcoin allows these people to have some control over their own personal lives and wealth, i don't think governments will be too unhappy about it. There is particularly nothing to worry about for the chain owners like Pizza hut and others because governments already get their share via indirect taxes when people spend money.

Why XRP though? People saying here that XRP has a different use case. What use case is that?? What i see is that it claims partnerships with banks. Why would banks rely on a centralized, third party to hold and transact value for them when they themselves are centralized, third parties making billions from the same hustle?
And if XRP is to be used for cheap payments, why not just Stellar Lumens (who gave it that name by the way) or any of the other 1000 coins claiming 10,000 TPS with their non-secure and easily manipulated versions of PoS?

When will people understand that billionaire banks and millionaire individuals maybe the most badass, evil sons of bitches but they are not dumb. They fully understand the difference between the security and finality provided by a 140 ExaHash monster compared to a private ledger living on AWS and private servers.

I wouldn't like anything better than the US to recover and get out of this train of debt. The comparison with post WWII world may not be apt though. USA was one of the few world economies with untapped potential and a largely unscathed home turf (compared to Europe). The world wasn't open enough to think of any other alternatives than the powerhouses like USSR and USA. Much of the industrial development which led to enormous prosperity was yet to be made.

In the present scenario, its mostly about who has the most factories and the most consumption in a global market. Several countries have emerged as alternatives to the US. China being the most prominent. Already, investors are banking on a Chinese resurgence and investments are flowing into China. The shitshow in USA in terms of sheer divisiveness, stupidity and Trumpism is a pale marker of its former glory. If the debt condition was to worsen, I wouldn't bank on the US economy to show a miracle turnaround.

DeFi is going to be here for a while no matter what anybody says. It has no relation to the success of failures of respective products being scams or not. Every hype cycle in blockchain technology gives easy opportunity to scammy devs who can hide behind anonymous facades. Team this up with the inability of most people to actually read and decipher code to test for backdoors. Whenever you invest in such projects, know that it is always going to be a risk.

Hence, never put in more money than you can afford to lose. Make sure to break even and don't get greedy about collecting bags. Any project that makes you collect bags or lock liquidity without the option to redeem it, is generally a scam.

Its not BTC that will die because of this. It is people who are stupid and are unable to take decisions regarding how they transfer value to others. Bitcoin fees can be managed. It scales really well as the value of your transaction increases unlike the current system where transaction fees will increase with value of transaction. People who can manage the risk and find proper use case will end up making more money than those that don't want to learn.

Its quite simple, isn't it? Businesses sell their products to the customer, take profit and then pay wages. People go and buy goods with these wages again. After pandemic, the companies cannot pay people because they are not selling anything anymore. So, economy cannot continue because people aren't buying anything. SO, As a solution, they print trillions of dollars and give them to the "corporates". The "corporates" in-turn can then say that they are not out of money and are thus able to stay on feet.

Why is it so hard to see here that its not the printing that is wrong, its the premise that you need to "fund" the corporates and give them access to easy money for the economy to function. You could very well have a system where corporates are actually responsible for their expenses in a transparent way. Right now, the only way to maintian accountability for the trillions that flow into corporates are internal audits. The auditing companies in turn, themselves are some of the biggest beneficiaries of this system, hence, instead of actually doing their job, they only act to keep things running with falsified information.

It is pretty easy to see that this whole system of milking the wage earning general public to fund as well as provide a market to the corporates is little more than slavery.

Solution: Just put it all on a transparent blockchain open to scrutiny and keep track of every bit of "profit" that the corporates claim and the millions in "bonuses" that the executives claim for keeping the facade running. If everyone were to do their jobs honestly, you wouldn't need a money printing machine.

I'll take the liberty to answer this. AFAIK, it has never happened that lower ranking members were accepted for higher ranks, no matter what the quality.  Managers generally accept Hero/ Legendaries for lower positions, if they consent. This too has changed as the demand for campaigns is overwhelmingly more than the supply as it doesn't feel right to deprive the lower positions from their spots.

The price seems good to take 15-20% of holdings and have some cash as a reward for holding through. Yet, I am not doing it because I lost a portion of my already fractional BTC to stupidity. So, no selling for me. I am not even excited about the bull run as such. When it comes to bitcoin, all we have to do is hold.

You can never be sure about Alts but I have bought some of the old ones that I have seen revive a few times. I bought like 0.005BTC worth of ENJ and BAT. I'll take the deal if that BTC becomes worth 0.0075 or so. I have heard of people trading alts to stack BTC and am trying that for myself. I suck at making a profit though and think that BTC will keep going up.