This isn't abuse, it's just an imperfection of the merit system. High rank members get merits for shitposts because they have recognition on this forum, but since they are already high rank, merit becomes purely a vanity stat for them. And despite merit points being a limited resource, it's not like newbies lose something when high ranked members get merited. There's plenty of spare merit in this ecosystem, I personally sit on over 120 sMerit and there's not enough good posts from newbies to give it away.

If none of those coins were lost, the price right now would be lower, but we can't know by how much, because we can't know what would have happened to those coins. Maybe some of them would be sold to hodlers who wouldn't touch them, or maybe some of the owners would still hodl them.

Anyway, massive loss of coins is a thing of the past. Today's coin management solutions are far better than an early days, and people are less careless with their coins, and coins are now less concentrated - in the early days people owned thousands of coins, now people own single coins or a fraction of a coin.

The best thing about the moment when the last coin will be mined is that people would finally stop asking what will happen, when the last coin will be mined.

If you look at Bitcoin's supply chart, most coins will be mined by 2030. So it would be another 110 years for technically all coins mined, but practically the fresh coins will become a tiny part of available supply in the market. We already saw how leavenings affect the price, I expect that to be the case for the next 10-15 years, but with each halvening the effect will be smaller and smaller, so the corresponding cycles will have smaller gap between the top and the bottom. Bitcoin will become less volatile.

Blockchain is just a programming paradigm. If a 10 y.o. never wrote any code, they should learn to program first, which will take a few years, and then they could do something with blockchain, although the question is what? There's nothing cool that you can do with blockchain in real world, unlike fields like AI or game development. The most useful thing for the world a person interested in blockchain can do is contribute to Bitcoin and its ecosystem, but that requires lots and lots of experience and talent.

Past performance alone is not a good argument for anything. Shitcoins and ponzi schemes also have amazing ROI, until they collapse. A better argument is that Bitcoin's fundamentals have not changed, so this bear market is just a period of speculative cooling off. There are no good reasons to think that Bitcoin is in bear market because something is wrong with it.


Buying random "crypto" is a good way to lose money. Altcoins are losing their value in the long run. They are crated to generate hype, get money from investors and market manipulation, and then the devs move on to a new flashy project with the same formula.

You are missing one point - in most countries the Bitcoin ecosystem is such a tiny part of the national GDP, that it's many times smaller than the margin of error of measuring it. So countries that ban Bitcoin don't really feel these negative effects.

Most of the countries that banned Bitcoin are repressive regimes that don't want their people having any financial freedom, because it could potentially undermine the regime, if Bitcoin would get serious traction there.

Of course we can't stop them from engaging with Bitcoin, but we can distance ourselves from them, instead of embracing them and just turning the latest celeb who dabbled in Bitcoin into the latest "Bitcoin Jesus". Especially after the many cases of it immediately backfiring, like with Elon Musk.

Bukele is actually right wing. But we live in times when it's hard to immediately understand if a person is left wing or right wing, because they use a similar populist rhetoric against some abstract "elites", "global establishment" and so on.

And its not nice that Bitcoin gets associated with political fringes, it just adds another reason for preventing Bitcoin from going mainstream.

Those are very weak reason for buying Bitcoin, just your typical "good news". Decision to invest or not should be based on strong long term fundamentals. If you believe that Bitcoin will be more popular, that more people will use it, that people who already use will use it more often, then you should buy it. If you aren't sure about it, than do more research. Because what you are describing is just an impulse buy based on weak news.

I've heard that there's a huge problem with Chinese real estate market - that companies use investors funds to launch new projects rather than finish the existing ones, thus creating a Ponzi scheme, and housing is a huge share of the Chinese GDP, so as this market collapses due to unsustainability, it seriously hurts their whole economy.

Also China loses its status as world's factory, because there are countries with cheaper labor now, so that's another reason why their economy is weaker than their government tries to project.

The problem with CSW is that some people just like to have "alternative" point of view, they like going against the mainstream just for the sake of it, it makes them feel smart and special. So they support CWS and his crusade against Bitcoin Core, similar to how people believe in conspiracy theories. No amount of evidence is going to convince them otherwise. All CWS has to do is to keep lying, doesn't matter if he's doing well or not.

Why would there be a rally right now? The halvening will happen in early 2024. What would drive the Bitcoin price up before that? The only thing that can happen is some random small uptrends, +10-15%, and eventual similar downtrend.

It's been less than 1 year from ATH, how can anyone seriously expect a new rally to new ATH right now?

There a lot of different rainbow charts and other models, many of them are very inaccurate, especially those that were released many years ago. There's no way to know which chart will be closer to reality, because Bitcoin is not really following any mathematical model. The price is the result of millions of subjective perceptions of traders, and we don't even have a good idea of what influences them. The only pattern that so far has been true is that there are big bear and bull markets that happen around the halvenings, but their precise magnitude can't be determined by any models.

What is your goal exactly? It sounds like you are treating this forum as a career, like getting a high rank and then joining a campaign. Because otherwise there's no responsibilities here, you don't need a high rank to use all the valuable features of this forum, it's simply a place to discuss Bitcoin.

If you want to earn a lot of merit, then it's better to specialize in something as a beginner - the inner workings of Bitcoin, trading, economics, altcoins and so on. Because generally you need to show some good insight to earn merit, and as a beginner it's simply not possible to learn everything about all topics in short time.

Bitcoin doesn't have double-charging, but any mistake in Bitcoin is nearly guaranteed to be final. Two biggest problems with using Bitcoin are hacks and accidnetal loss. Hacks happen with fiat too, but at least with fiat there's some chance to return your money, plus banks are trying to take precautions, like calling your number if someone tries to withdraw your money. But permanently losing access to account simply does not exist with fiat, you can just go to your bank with your id and have it restored, or even do it online. With Bitcoin if you lost your wallet file and backup, you won't see your coins ever again.

Does it even matter? Everything changes its value. With the recent inflation, some goods went up by 20%, some by 50% and some even became cheaper. It's also very different from country to country. And Bitcoin market recently reacted negatively to inflation, rather than being a hedge against it, probably because Bitcoin is more of an asset for "good" times rather than "bad" times.

Regulating Bitcoin requires resources, and not everyone in the government thinks that it's worth it to allocate them to tighten the grip on Bitcoin. They are trying to make it the responsibility of centralized exchanges and banks, expand the existing financial monitoring rules to cover transactions linked to crypto. This is easier than creating government-owned departments of crypto monitoring and trying to go after the decentralized use of crypto, which they understand is not feasible.

People often compare certain markets to gambling when they disapprove of them, but strictly speaking, it's not correct. Gambling is a game of known and truly random probability. The market movements are not random, it's just that they can't be well predicted when the market is purely speculative. This is what makes crypto market look like gambling - you can't predict the outcome, just like with random chance, even though the outcome is not random. That's why investors like stocks, bonds and other traditional assets - you can predict their value with mathematical models.

Yes, without exchanges Bitcoin would have a fraction of today's adoption and price - exchanges make buying and selling Bitcoin easier and cheaper. Few people want to buy Bitcoin through p2p trading, because of the risks of getting scammed and sometimes higher fees compared to centralized exchanges. And without centralized exchanges there wouldn't be traders and big investors, so the price would be much lower than it is now.

EU is not a major mining region, so a hypothetical mining ban there would be of little consequence for Bitcoin network. Bitcoin very gracefully took China's mining ban, so you shouldn't be too scared about such things. I would be more worried if EU tried to ban trading and other uses of Bitcoin - that would actually be very bad, because EU is among the largest economies in the world, if that happens, a lot trading volume and adoption potential will be lost. But I doubt EU would take such a dramatic step - they are not China.