How to make crypto sound like a cult in one simple step


Why should we teach young people about a payment method at best, ponzi scheme at worst? Do we teach kids in school how to use PayPal? How to open a bank account? Why should crypto be treated differently?


This is actually not a bad idea, it can be incorporated into some economics lessons or computer science lessons.

In some way, there is no difference between a tulip and Bitcoin. Both have their prices formed purely by supply and demand on an open market. Tulips had one huge bubble and they didn't recover from the crash. Bitcoin has many bubbles and it recovers from them. But there's no guarantee that Bitcoin will continue recovering, it could stabilize or even decline. Tulips utility was overestimated, same can happen to Bitcoin or any other asset.

We all know that Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency, censorship-resistant payment method and so on, but how much such solution should cost? 100 billions? 1 trillion? 10 trillion? No one can make a good argument here, it's pure guess, pure speculation.

I doubt that this failure alone could become Facebook's undoing, but it could be a step towards it. Facebook is still too big to fail, but if it continues to be mismanaged and competition would provide better alternatives to online socializing, it could decline significantly in 10-15 years.


Maybe 15 billion is not a massive sum for a company like Meta, but the fact that it's spent on overly-ambitious project with low chance of success and in an untransparent way, that's certainly a bad sign for investors.

Meta has burned $15 billion trying to build the metaverse — and nobody's saying exactly where the money went



I always thought that Metaverse is a stupid idea, it can only succeed when VR is massively popular, which it is not right now. Zuck is trying to put a cart before the horse.

Food shortage is still unlikely. The productivity of modern agriculture is very high. In the US 30-40% of food gets thrown away. Also the US pays certain farmers to not grow anything on their land for environmental reasons - this also shows that we are very far from food insecurity.  GMO, better equipment, better fertilizers and pesticides dramatically increase food production.

Hashrate increase has no reason to drive the price up. People don't really care how much hashrate Bitcoin has as long as its enough to deter attacks. Adding more and more security has diminishing returns past certain point, and security is just one of the factors that influence Bitcoin's value. So, I don't see any way how can a hashrate increase trigger anything that can count as a bull run.

People use the term "backed" wrong. If an asset can be exchanged for another asset at a fixed rate at any time, then it means it is backed. But when people say that an asset is backed by something because that something gives it value, that's incorrect use of the term.

Bitcoin's and most altcoin's price is formed by supply and demand. The exception are stablecoins - their value is the same as the value of a currency that they represent, although in some cases it's not guaranteed, especially with algorithmic stablecoins.

Having a large ecosystem with many active users generates a lot of demand for a coin, which results in higher price. But altcoins don't really have big ecosystems, they merely pretend to have it. They hire shills by offering bounties, they do airdrops to generate some blockchain activity. Even Ethereum's ecosystem is largely fake, because it is not related to real world economy, it's just the most popular way to create and swap useless tokens.

No one is going to allow them to sell dual-use goods in a breach of sanctions, that would be suicidal for them, the US and EU would respond very harshly to such action.

Also, bombing someone to make them sell goods to you never worked. This was simply an attack on Ukraine's economy, and it's pretty futile, because the US and EU already agreed to provide 1.5B per month each to Ukraine.

No it was not, Elon jumped on the hype train when Bitcoin was in the early phase of the bull run. And he also quit early when he began spreading FUD about Bitcoin, and despite of that the price reached ATH.

If you're looking for correlation, it seems like bull-bear cycles are tied to halvenings. Shortly after the halvening the market turns bullish for a long time and reaches new highs, and then crashes and drops to a new floor, that is higher than the previous floor. This has been happening even before the billionaires got involved.

A beginner can't do that, because you need a deep knowledge of cryptography, distributed systems, blockchain, and lots of other fields where the projects are applied - like supply chains, finance, filesharing networks and so on. If you don't understand these things, then any whitepaper is just a bunch of cool-sounding words to you, and your mind will focus on phrases like "revolutionary solution", "banking 4.0", "new paradigm" and so on.

But like others here have noted, scams can be very elaborate, they can present an idea that sounds good to anybody who isn't a high-tier crypto expert (and not the safe-proclaimed gurus, but rather somebody like a Core developer). That's how scams like Terra Luna get so much traction - few people understand what is wrong with them, until it's too late.

The problem is that by default nodes are configured to not propagate transactions that spend the same input as a transaction that they already keep in their mempool. So you could try to cancel unconfirmed transaction by making a new one to your own address, but it's unlikely to reach miners, unless the first transaction is marked to be replaceable. What could work is submitting the new transaction directly to miners and hoping that your miner would be the one to find the next block. But this could only realistically work if miners run such services, otherwise nobody would do it manually for you.

Some people view market fluctuations as an opportunity to make money in a few clicks. Who doesn't dream of simply buying low and selling high instead of going to a 9-5 job? And there's a widespread perception that with some "skill" you can do just that. These people tolerate the stress of losing their money, because they believe that they are making the right move.

But generally it's smarter to ride the long trend, have your positions last for years and make a trade after some fundamental shift.

This is not investing, this is gambling on ponzi schemes. You can get lucky a few times and make a profit, but if you do it a lot of times, you will go broke, because the odds are stacked against you. All these "new projects" have zero utility and zero potential, they are nothing more than scams - some scams pull the rug in a few weeks, others go on for years, the end is always the same.

Performs better than fiat currency in terms of price, but not in terms of adoption, price stability, utility. This make Bitcoin closer to assets like gold than a currency for regular use.


It may be nice to have you currency also act as an investment, but the best way to store your wealth is in a diversified portoflio of different asset types - stocks, bonds, gold, bitcoin, real estate, foreign currency and so on. It's not a great idea to have a million dollars in your bank account and just watch it getting eaten by inflation, but it's also not a smart move to put it all in Bitcoin and risk losing a big portion of it. Don't put all your eggs into one basket.

It's a fallacy to think that unrealized losses don't matter, regardless if you talk about Bitcoin or altcoins. There's absolutely no guarantee that if you wait long enough, you will break even. You are right that altcoins have way worse chances of recovering than Bitcoin. But nobody should put all their money into Bitcoin and think that it's a risk-free strategy to get rich.

I think you're jumping to conclusions a bit too fast, first that California is the backbone of the US economy - it's certainly is a significant part of it, but it's not like it has 50% of country's GDP, like some other regions in other countries. And second, you think that if half of people don't like living there, it means that it's doomed. But what if people will keep living there despite the problems, because something keeps them there - like high salaries that they get by working at tech companies?

Not really. The smallest possible network is just one node doining the mining and storing blockchain. This node can even send transactions between their own addresses. This node doesn't need other nodes to make Bitcoin more secure, everything is secured by cryptography. Of course on practice its better to have a large network, but still Bitcoin was designed in a way that you don't need to depend on anybody else.


Yes, it benefits you to publicly promote your investment, but that's work, so the optimal thing is to let someone else do it for free.

So we have no explain something to you, but you can just postulate your opinions without any argumentation? Lol

But anyway, Bitcoin's price is formed by supply and demand on open market. For Bitcoin drop to zero, everybody in the world have to suddenly agree that it's worth zero. This is the realm of pure fantasy.

Bitcoin's price could drop dramatically is something really bad happened, like the underlying cryptography getting hacked. But even then there would be a possibility that it could be fixed and Bitcoin would still be worth something.

And Bitcoin is not a stable currency, it tends to have these long bear market or just drop down by 5-10% in a minute without a clear reason why it should do it. People don't want to risk that, and they do have options for storing their wealth in something better than their domestic currency - they use US dollar, Euro, gold, stocks, bonds. Bitcoin is high risk, high reward - and high risk is not what you want to use to store all your wealth in.

The whole crypto ecosystem is profiting from centralized coins, shitcoins, ICO scams, NFTs and all other useless products. Those market data sites get paid by dev teams to list and promote their coins, exchanges get paid for listing coins, and they also don't care what is being traded, they collect fees anyway, they only interested in more trades. Social media influencers will promote anything, as long as they get paid.

There's simply less incentive to be honest and refuse to cooperate with shitcoin projects, because it would be hard to make money in crypto sphere while doing so.