While it is true that people might be afraid of Bitcoin because of its volatility, is has also been a major reason that drove people to Bitcoin. We are still far away from using it on a daily basis so why would they buy it if not for speculative reasons? Bitcoin is just so expensive now that a lot of people are afraid there investment might lose 50% in value.

Governments can do a lot of things to devalue Bitcoin and if they wanted to. They don't even need to forbid it. They can just make it totally impractical to buy it let alone use it. That is still a risk and once Bitcoin becomes a real threat and the incentive is high enough we will find out what governments will really do about it.

I guess you are fully right who you say that ignorance is fulls bliss. They don't know what they are dealing with, yet want to have some influence over this "something" that they don't understand. That doesn't work hand in hand, and it is shameful that we are now considering groups or people who should choose someone who is supposed to take care.

Yes but maybe they bet on the fact that nobody is going to ask a question? I mean Steve Wozniak alone could ask so many critical questions, but he doesn't. Does he not do it because he wants to not acknowledge all the things that happened without his input? Is that a personal issue?

Government controlled investments have made several people billionaires? I am not sure I have the slightest idea which type of government controlled investments you are talking about, but if you are talking about bonds, the only way to become a billionaire is if you put $990 million into a bond and wait at least 1.5 years or so. Other than that what do you understand under the term government controlled?

We are moving just fine, why move faster? You are only relating your talk to Bitcoin's price, but there is so much more that has to be in place in order for Bitcoin to really take the next step. More and better infrastructure, more favorable regulation and much more. Bitcoin's price may help speculators in the short-term but it will drop as quickly as it rose when the rest doesn't sufficiently support the price. If you can use Bitcoin at ease and Bitcoin's price rises, that is the perfect combination for everyone involved.

Aren't second layer solutions mainly meant to solve micro transaction problems? Who is going to try a double spend attack for a couple of dollars? I am not quite sure if I understand all of the second layer solutions, but would someone who is willing to double spend attack a second layer transaction also have to have the majority of the hash power?

That is what differentiates Steve Wozniak from people like Buffet. Wozniak is a tech guy, he understands the transformational power of technology and also the economic and social implications. You could ask him about the newest technology in 20 years from now and he would still be able to see the potential in it and he would be a proponent anyway.

It is good to see he didn't retire yet. I am curious to see what he may still be able to achieve with his tech company.

Wasn't Puerto Rico also called the home of Bitcoin a while ago?

I think it is good to see these smaller states now make first moves towards full integration of Bitcoin. It's comparable to ships. If you have a small ship you can more quickly adapt to or even initiate change. There is less to lose for these states. I wouldn't say they are braver than other, stronger nations. The bigger nations just have trouble to transition. Making Bitcoin legal tender doesn't sound to me as if it were to have any severe impact, but we will see and it will be interesting to observe if it does have any impact on El Salvador at all.

I don't think it will devalue Bitcoin. Maybe very slightly as those advocating the fork may not be ok with what's happening around BTC. But they also know that not having BTC in your portfolio is quite naive. Even Roger Ver I guarantee still holds a lot of BTC compared to his Bitcoin Cash holdings.

The only thing you can fork is the database. Everything that has been built around a certain coin, the whole ecosystem, community and partnerships and whatever you want to think of, simply can't be forked.

Very well said, Bitcoin is indeed a lot of things. It combines literally any science out there in one or or another way or at least touches upon them or has an impact on them. Only because Bitcoin is about decentralized governance, mainstream economists should still be able to objectively get their head around Bitcoin and whether it could play an important role in global monetary order and systems.

This totally depends on the country you are living in. There have been a couple of surprises in the past when it comes to government backed securities or bonds. I know that Greece is not the best example because it was quite well known they were in dire straits, but that is one example for a government to go bankrupt. Often times people think that governments cannot go bankrupt because they could just print money. That is not the case for any government that is part of a union anyway, and for the other governments they'll go full speed into hyperinflation (Venezuela). 

The problem for some people is that it requires effort to understand Bitcoin. Going down the rabbit hole takes time and effort. What's also a problem is that some people have a kind of mental resistance against learning about new stuff, and in particular against learning about new technologies.

There are those who find that exciting and can't get enough, and there are those who throw their TV out the window when the remote control doesn't do what they want it to do. How should the latter ever understand what Bitcoin is and what it does?

But let's be honest, even though these features are awesome they also sometimes evoke distrust among people. If you get hacked, there is no way for recourse or getting your coins back. A bank would just give you your money back if they get hacked or you get hacked without being the one to evidently blame. You also have irreversible transactions, if you make a mistake your money is gone. It is as simple as that. Being the manager of your money is cool, but some people just don't like the hassle of carrying all the responsibility that comes with custodianship.

Hey dezoel, thanks for lining out these examples. Two question if I may:

1. When you pay express VPN with BTC, do they request your personal information? They are required to aren't they? Or do they provide a key two a specified email address or anything?

2. When you make all these payments with BTC, are you running into any tax related issues?

I would say the OP is right and the majority of economists calls Bitcoin out as being a big fat bubble but nothing else. Maybe they lack understanding, maybe they are even right. First and foremost I think that a lack of knowledge in technology combined with monetary theory may lead them to their negative conclusions about Bitcoin. Most of them often argue that it is inconvenient and expensive to use, but that is only the first half of the sentence because Bitcoin can improve. If you just look at that statement, they are correct. For now Bitcoin isn't what it probably is supposed to be, but that doesn't mean it is the end of the story as those economists often put it.

You can never really rule out the possibility that some type of manipulation, even the one you described, could theoretically be happening. However, the way you described it would mean you are talking about OTC trades. Those don't affect market volume or market volatility. As far as I know that data is nowhere to be reported. What does happen though might be coordinated short squeezes, meaning that if a lot of short positions are open, some whales might coordinate an attack on those short positions by buying up Bitcoin massively such that those short positions get squeezed out. The more expensive Bitcoin becomes, the harder it is to move the market in any direction, meaning that coordination could indeed become valuable even for whales.

Hm, are you sure Bitcoin's price is not related to decentralization? You may respond now that any currency being decentralized would then be as valuable as Bitcoin, but that argument doesn't hold true as Bitcoin is a forkable (don't know if the word exists, but you know what I mean) protocol, but not a forkable ecosystem. The fact that not a single entity can change the database at will gives Bitcoin value. The fact that only with the consent of the majority the database can be changed gives Bitcoin value. If it were to be decided that by August 1st there'd be one single entity in charge of keeping the database intact for the rest of the world would send Bitcoin's price on its way to zero. Or what do you think?

Good point because as we have seen at the start of Coronavirus Bitcoin wasn't performing very well. The problem with crises and Bitcoin price is that nobody has money to invest into Bitcoin. Rather, Bitcoin holders need to liquidate their positions in order to be able to pay their bills, mortgages and for everyday needs. That's a common misconception so far I believe. A lot of people think that during a really bad crisis Bitcoin goes up. That could be the case if you were able to look at a currency crisis in an isolated way. The issue with this point of view though is that a currency crisis isn't an isolated event. It comes with all the surrounding that ultimately force people to liquidate whatever assets they have. The only guys who'd benefit from a currency crisis are the rich. They have the money to gobble up cheaply liquidated Bitcoin and they have the time to endure the crisis until everything goes up again until it is time to sell into the Bitcoin buying masses at higher prices than they bought for.

This is a great topic you opened here and apart from all the issues raised like volatility, or the tendency to keep onto it because of the potential for price appreciation, and so on. The most important issue to me is what Andreas Antonopoulos once raised: taxes! He travelled around the world and paid with Bitcoin whenever he could and in order to annoy the IRS, he decided to print excel files onto paper for the innumerable amount of micro transactions he did, just to make them work so much that the amount of taxes was by far not enough to cover the work that has been put into. I think that is a big problem in many countries. They don't allow for tax free micro transactions, like paying the coffee and stuff.

I sometimes have the feelings that many people tend to make their final judgment over Bitcoin way too early. It is like going into a store, pointing at a tyre and saying "hey, wasn't this supposed to be a car?". And even that analogy lacks a bit of substance because a car is a final product, or maybe not because even that is going to evolve over time into whatever, I don't know...
We don't know how much of what is happening Satoshi was able to anticipate, or let's say partially anticipate. Bitcoin is an evolving system of which the underlying technology is constantly being worked on. I don't see why there shouldn't be the possibility that with a couple more years of development Bitcoin becomes indeed an electronic cash system. Who would have imagined even in 2013 / 2014 what this space could turn into by 2020. In my humble opinion, I guess almost nobody. Yes, we all had this vague idea that there is so much more to come, but what that could mean in concrete terms, there weren't so many to know that in advance.

All these threads here discussing "what is Bitcoin in 10 years from now" are kind of funny. I have this idea of a decentralized world, but I might be way behind with my idea and who knows, maybe we are already communicating over blockchain with a flying spaceship of Jeff Bezos, sending encrypted message with lightning speed to space.So much speculation, but one thing is for sure: we won't develop backwards technologically, unless we are facing a war in the meantime.