That depends on how you look at it. Bitcoin itself is totally decentralized, but its market is mostly split between a few large exchanges, which creates certain risks. These risks don't threaten existence of Bitcoin, but they can cause certain problems. So ideally everyone would use Bitcoin in a way that is harder to regulate, to avoid government controlling certain aspects of Bitcoin.

"For now" is the key word here. Oil and gas prices will drop when countries will start producing more of them. And Russia can't simply sell all the oil and especially gas that it was selling to Europe - there's no infrastructure or demand among its friends for that. Combine this with the discounts they have to make to make their oil more attractive, and you'll see that in next 2-3 years Russian fossil fuels revenue is going to drop. And that would be very painful, because that's 50-60% of Russian budget, as they don't have any significant high technology or service exports.

I would say that credit cards, online banks, and methods like PayPal represent digitalized fiat currency. It's not purely digital, because it exists in paper form, and you can go to an ATM or a bank office and withdraw that cash, but in many countries a majority of fiat transactions already happens in a digital way, and this tendency is growing.

Inflation is the increase of prices. Even if we imagine the most impossible scenario that everyone, including governments, switched to Bitcoin, inflation could still happen. Things like food or gas could still go up in price as a reaction to global events. Government and banks could still inflate supply of Bitcoin by creating debt and using some Bitcoin IOU tokens instead of real Bitcoin transactions, including LN.

Probably not, because it doesn't look like a major psychological barrier - that would be close to $10,000 which is also a point from which the bull market has started. Also bear markets usually last for many-many months in Bitcoin, and it hasn't even been one full year since the ATH.

There is some chance that it was the bottom, but I wouldn't rush to buy Bitcoin now, there will be plenty of time to wait and see if there will be a better price or not - it's not going up anytime soon.

Bitcoin traditionally has bull markets after a halvening. The next halvening is in 2024. So a bull market might start in late 2024 or early 2025.

I think it's naive to expect that this bear market will be short. Especially since stock market is performing so poorly and global economy is not doing great - we already know that Bitcoin is not a safe haven but a risk asset.

Of course a miracle can happen and Bitcoin could do the unpredictable and suddenly moon out of nowhere. But it would be foolish to bet on that.

Those other coins don't have utility, they have marketing teams and hired shills (bounty hunters) that create an illusion that a coin has technical merit. In reality it's always the same - they have faster confirmation times and can process more transactions because they are centralized, which defeats the whole point of cryptocurrency. Smart contracts don't add utility to a coin, because they have no practical use in real world, and it's also not a good idea to have your monetary system also act as a cloud computer.

I don't trust any studies that are done by people who were hired by the industry that they are studying, that's how we had studies that said that tobacco is harmless for health.

I'm not going to believe claims that Bitcoin miners are helping to switch electricity production to green methods, until I hear it from independent and reliable sources.

And as for EU - they are going through one of the largest energy crisises in their history, I think it's understandable that they have to take extreme measures like bringing back some coal plants.

There's a problem though, after such crashes Bitcoin was growing by thousands percents. But this time the difference between peaks of two cycles was only 250%. The difference between bottoms was also huge $250 vs $3,000. A now $3,000 vs $17,500 isn't as impressive, and if it drops to $10,000 that would look even worse.

One of the fundamental expectations that Bitcoin will not break below certain historical levels has been broken and we're never going back. Now people think that if $20k was broken, why can't $10k be broken?

I don't think that existence of fraud disproves subjective theory of value. From the point of view of defrauded people, they are having a good deal, and if they knew the truth, they would change their evaluation.

Stocks can be analyzed by looking at performance of the company, state of the market and so on, and then calculating how much should they be worth, based on expected profit, but if a company lies about the state of its operations, you will get defrauded, even though you used math to calculate "objective" value.

Satoshi never said anything about the unbanked. Also, "the unbanked" is a marketing term created by new online banks, so that they could tell investors how they will attract millions of users. The whole point of the term "ubanked" is to make them "banked", not "bitcoined".

Bitcoin is not running out of units of account, the network would need to lose 99.9999999% of its total supply before it would start becoming a problem, and current estimate for lost coins is something like 5-20%, and the rate at which coins are getting lost has greatly slowed down

So essentially he wants more and more government regulations? But when Bitcoin was above $60k, everything was perfect, those things weren't a problem, Bitcoin was a strong and independent swarm of cyber hornets that needs no dirty regulators, am I right? He sounds desperate, because he knows he won't be able to endure Bitcoin winter for long, as he has obligations to shareholders.

Regulations will happen regardless if we want them or not, but it's up to us to choose if we want to be a part of the regulated market or unregulated. I think having a large share of coins being a part of the regulated market could be dangerous, because the government might start demanding changes to Bitcoin protocol, like surveillance or changing to PoS, and a large number of holders would support these changes if it would mean saving their money or making profit, and only a minority would stay true to the decentralized, peer-to-peer roots. This is the risk of Bitcoin market becoming dominated by rich people and institutions.

This is a typical survivorship bias. Everyone knows about big ground-breaking innovations that changed the world, and how they started small and had critics, so it's tempting to compare any innovation, in this case Bitcoin, with them. What gets ignored is millions of innovations that ultimately failed. Tons of innovations didn't go past the prototype phase, or they had fatal flaws that became obvious at early stages, or maybe they just weren't needed, or their flaws far outweighed their gains.

Also with your logic that Bitcoin is destined to succeed simply because its innovation, one could say that ETH will kill Bitcoin, because it's innovation over Bitcoin, and then some "eth killer" shitcoin will kill ETH, because it's also innovation, and then it will repeat again and again.

You don't need any outstanding technical capability to make a social network, this isn't some military secret, lol. There are Facebook and Twitter analogues all over the world, like for example Russian Vkontakte, which is very popular in Russia and many of its neighbours, much more than Facebook. They can't become global because of the network effect - there's already global social networks and no room for two.

And if you think that the grass is greener on the other side, then think again - China and Russia do so much surveillance that the US is a bastion of privacy, compared to them.

The actual alternative to social networks owned by companies are decentralized social networks that run on open-source software.

Bitcoin doesn't have production cost, because if miners stop mining, the difficulty drops, so the production cost drops too, and it could drop so low that you could mine it alone on an old laptop, basically sustain the whole network with nearly zero investment, just like Satoshi was doing in early days. So, the costs of mining have no influence on Bitcoin's price - they are miner's problems to figure out.

Bitcoin will always be more volatile than fiat currency, because fiat currency has central banks that can intervene and push the price to the opposite direction and negate volatility. And you are right - it's hurting Bitcoin's attractiveness as a payment method to some extent. But Bitcoin could become less volatile, like gold for example, which also doesn't have any central bank. So, hypothetically this problem could disappear in the long run.

A single day is too short term to predict anything. It could go to $22k tomorrow, or to $17k or stay at the same level. What is important is that the peak of a previous cyclle was broken on the downside, which happened for the first time in Bitcoin's history. Previously, Bitcoin had higher highs and higher lows, which was a sign of long-term bullishness, now this perception was weakened,

"ATL" will never be the right word to use when talking about Bitcoin, it started from zero and it can't go negative, unlike certain commodities, so forget about this word. Bitcoin can only have bottoms of a bear market.

Anyway, $10k is the next huge stop, arguably the most important test in Bitcoin's existence so far. Because $20k was the peak of previous cycle, and this is the first time of breaking below one, while $10k is the start of the most recent bull run - going below that would be an enormous blow to Bitcoin's image, it would show that Bitcoin is no longer guaranteed to be long-term bullish all the time.

Bitcoin has progressively smaller bull markets, it's less and less likely that the exponential growth of early days will be replicated. Bitcoin's fundamentals are very unpredictable - it's a purely speculative asset, if people will simply refuse to believe that it will go up, it won't go up. Bitcoin shouldn't be viewed as a substitution for saving accounts, that's insanely irresponsible and basically gambling.

Bitcoin broke expectations when it only peaked 3.5 times higher than the previous ATH, compared to the x20 growth between 2013 and 2017 tops. Now it broke the expectation that it won't go lower than the ATH of 2017. Just another proof that Bitcoin is hard to predict, there's no strong rules - pure speculation. Could go to $300 in the next 3 years, could go to $300,000. Both extremes are unlikely, but who knows.

I'm still going to HODL, because I see that there's enough interest in the world, this crash wasn't caused by a broad disappointment in Bitcoin or some deep flaws. The crash to $3,000 was also shocking and unexpected and it defied certain expectations about how low Bitcoin could go, and yet it fully recovered and made quite some gains. I'd still say that the long term prospects are rather bullish than bearish.