You are not guaranteed to make money trading crypto or any other asset, no matter how much experience and knowledge you have. No one knows for sure where the market is going, at best you can be right more often than wrong. Viewing trading as some sort of craft that you can learn and live off is a mistake, lots of people try to do that and very few manage to succeed, don't think that you are special.

The best thing you can do with crypto is buy Bitcoin, hold it for 2-4 years and sell during a bull market if you need money or continue holding. That's way more profitable and less risky than engaging with altcoins.

Does this "anti-touting provision" concern only securities or other assets too?


I view it as similar to disclosing the ingredients on food products - the people should know this to make an informed decision.


It's not like you need to obtain a license to become a social media influencer, and I doubt that officials would bother with going after every single influencer that didn't disclose payments for promotions, they'd go only after the biggest ones.

I don't see how Bitcoin would start offering services other than simple money transfers. DeFi is an attempt to to that, and as we can see it's centralized and unsafe, and it fails to provide any solutions that would be useful for the masses, like loans without a collateral. It's limited to just trading altcoins for altcoins, which is not useful for real world economy.

Yes it can, someone can publish a source code of a custodial online wallet to allow different people run the servers, the architecture would still be centralized. Or a wallet can feature multisig, like Electrum's 2FA wallet does, and if you don't have an option to access your fund without the server's key, you would depend on them and your funds could be frozen.

Bitcoin is an electronic peer-to-peer payment system, and it's not correct to compare it with the whole banking and fiat money system. As the paper shows, a large portion of energy is spent on maintaining banknotes and coins, and it may seem that Bitcoin is winning here, but it's essentially like asking "what's better - a car or a ship?". The world needs both electronic and physical money, our civilization won't be able to function without physical money, and it's foolish to try to fully get rid of physical money, because it makes society vulnerable to disruptions of electronic payment methods, Internet, energy grid.

Second, the paper shows how banks consume a lot of energy because they employ millions of people, but that's because banks provide services other than simply transferring money, like approving loans, helping people invest and so on - Bitcoin has none of it. Also the human in the loop has features that Bitcoin doesn't have - it can save you from scammers by asking for additional verification, it can help you undo theft or transactions done by mistake, it can recover access to your account if you lost your password and so on. It also comes with negative sides like unjust fund seizures or account freezes, but overall it makes banks very different from Bitcoin, so again it's not correct to say "both systems transfer money, so we compare their total energy use".

If Bitcoin was offering EVERYTHING that banks offer, it would be possible to compare its energy use with full energy use of banks.

If your house will get crushed by big flood, you might lose even a seed stamped on on steel sheets, because it would be carried by water. Worst case, someone else will find it take all your coins. Similarly, if your house burns down, you might be able unable to find a steel plate, because there will be too much debris. Again, worst case - you won't be the first person to discover your seed. So in some way the ease of destruction is a feature. Or if your house is about to be raided by armed people - you can eat or burn a piece of paper, but you can't do anything to a steel plate.

Stop doing short-term trading, stop checking the price many times per day. Try to ride the waves of a full cycle - buy during bear market, sell during bull market, instead of frequently buying and selling regardless of trend - that's a good way to lose money, because that's just a pure guess.

Yes, it's another big flaw. But even if we for the sake of argument imagine that they are decentralized, they are still useless, because they don't solve any real world problems. In 2016-2017 Vitalik was promising that companies would be selling electricity through decentralized smart contracts, and now in year 2022 the only thing being sold on Ethereum smart contract network is useless scam tokens.

There is no, web3 is Ethereum's ecosystem, and Bitcoin is Bitcoin. There are some projects that try to bring Bitcoin to Ethereum, but they are dangerous and pointless. Bitcoin is a currency, and it always had everything it needs to be a currency, it does not need smart contracts, because it's not trying to be a platform for decentralized applications.

Also, decentralized applications are overrated, they don't have much use in real world. Almost all of them are just manipulations with tokens for the sake of speculation and pointless investing. They don't make lives better or easier.

In some cases Bitcoin can help with that. I was listening a podcast of a Ukrainian volunteer foundation that officially and semi-officially buys weapons and equipment for the war, and they do use crypto for some of their contracts, and they say sometimes it allows them to fulfill contracts faster than with using fiat, because they bypass certain bureaucratic procedures.

In the future we might see resistance group relying on crypto for crowdfunding their effort and purchasing equipment as their main financial tool. Or at least it would play a big role.

Every altcoin is heavily overpriced, because their objective value based on utility is $0. The previous bear markets failed to open the eyes of investors, new shitcoins simply replaced the old ones. Who knows how long will this delusion keep going on? Maybe the myth of "good project" and "blockchain revolution" will endure for many more years.

And how would that work? Governments wouldn't want to switch to switch to a currency that they can't control. And if an independent one like Bitcoin would start getting traction, they would shut down its use.

And what about volatility? When it is big, it's worse than inflation, because it ruins all short-term planning and makes it very hard to run a business. And any currency that isn't backed by a government or a similar powerful entity is bound to be volatile, because there's nothing to stabilize it.

If respected people in Bitcoin community - Core devs, a few forum members, would trust that the person is Satoshi, I would trust them too. As for evidence, I think it all should come together and form a convincing picture. If someone would have access to coins that are believed to be Satoshi's, but would behave in a very different manner, I would be inclined to believe that the coins were stolen or something like that.

People say Do you own research to wave any responsibility for their words, and to add some sophistication to their advice. On practice it's a meaningless phrase, because newbies don't know how to do their own research, and if someone were to teach them, it would no longer be a newbies own research. Trading is the only sphere were people are told to do their own research, and it's not a coincidence - this phrase is just a waver of responsibility. No one tells people to do their own research in language studying or farming or mathematics.

That's not how probability works. Just because there's two possible outcomes doesn't mean that the chances are 50/50. Investing in Bitcoin higher chance of success than investing in an altcoin. And your success also depends on your actions. Even if you buy Bitcoin and it will go up, you need to have patience to hold it and not sell at a loss. And you need to avoid losing it to malware, scams, hacks.

Investing with borrowed money is never a good idea. Investing should only ever be done with your own spare funds that you can lose. Because if you are risking your last money, you're achieving the opposite thing - making yourself poorer.

Altcoins follow Bitcoin when it moves, but that's not everything that they do. They also have their own price movements, which can happen together with Bitcoin's price movements. If it was only like you described, they today's top 10 coins would look the same as top 10 coins of 5 years ago, which is not the case.

Regardless if Bitcoin is stable or not, shitcoins will still be shitcoins, because they have no real world utility, they are only backed by bigger fool theory.

CWS and his shitcoin and his cult are a part of this so-called "Scaling Debate" that is still ongoing, and the "Scaling Debate" stopped being a technical debate a very long time ago, probably around 2015. When the big block camp started saying that the debate is "political" and that it was about who controls Bitcoin, they stopped arguing in good faith and started using populism and propaganda in what was meant to be a technical debate.

It could also be that your wife's device where she entered the seed had malware. Does she use crypto regularly on that device? Did she create any wallet or enter any seeds on that device previously, especially recently?

But regardless of what happened, it's still a good advice to be wary of your surroundings when you do operation with seeds. Maybe in the future there will even be cases of crypto heists where people would get robbed in their own homes as attackers would install hidden cameras into victims rooms to take a picture of their private keys.

"Flawed democracy" is not a typical political regime of a developing countries, they usually have a full-fledged dictatorship. Inequality itself is not indicative of anything - there are countries with high inequality where people live far better than in countries with low inequality.

Just ask people from actual developing countries if they would prefer to live there or in the US, and then ask people from the US if they would want to live in a developing country.

People don't want freedom, they want their government to solve problems, real or imaginary. Also, a libertarian country won't survive for long because non-libertarian countries could mobilize more resources against it and win a war or change the regime through political or economic interference.

You should stop thinking that freedom is the only thing that matters, because freedom is not worth much if you don't have money, food, home, health.