It's hard to say for how long would the fees be high. If users will wait with their transactions and attacker's transactions have the highest fee in mempool, then the attack will be effectively for as long as Bitcoin transaction processing capacity allows it. For one million transactions, that's about one day. But if other users will bump their fees to get their transactions confirmed in the next few blocks, then the high fee levels would last for longer.

The bottom line is, such attack costs a lot of money and it can't stop Bitcoin transactions from being confirmed, and its effects don't last for long.

Bitcoin has a fee market, so you can't pay a fixed price to effectively stop legitimate transactions from being confirmed. You can make a million transactions with $1 fee and it won't mean you have bought all transaction space for a day - it would mean that the users who have paid $1 or less will have lower chance of getting their tx confirmed and will suffer some delays, but those who paid higher fees won't be affected. Essentially, trying to DDOS Bitcoin can only increase the transaction costs, not actually deny service, though for some cases, like micropayments that would become uneconomical, that would be a denial of service.

Yes all altcoins. Show me any alt with actual real world utility. And a few stores in the world accepting them doesn't count - there should be millions of active users to qualify a coin as having some utility.

This idea that there are good altcoins is precisely how shitcoins still manage to trick people, even after all these years of thousands of failed coins - shitcoins just convince people that they are one of the "good projects".

Bitcoin community is an echo chamber that largely repeats only the positive view of Bitcoin. If you spend all your time in Bitcoin community, you may start feeling that lots of people in the world use Bitcoin, that anything that happens in the world will make Bitcoin grow in its price, that it can only go up, that fiat money is on the verge of collapse and so on. But if you visit the outside world, you'll see that people don't know about Bitcoin, don't care about it or even hate it. That's it's nearly impossible to use it as a currency, because no one accepts it. That people don't want to risk holding a volatile currency or store of value, even if there's a good chance they will make a profit. That people don't want financial sovereignty, privacy, zero inflation if it means facing the downsides of Bitcoin - they'd rather stick to the banks.

I agree with them that some regulation is needed. It's not okay that crypto exchanges buy ads and tell people that they can become rich today if they register and start trading crypto (same goes for stocks and forex). Then those people lose their savings in the process, while exchanges can rich regardless of happens with crypto, because they get fees. In a gold rush, sell the shovels. Crypto shouldn't be banned, and government shouldn't interfere with innovation and open source software development, but regulating exchanges more tightly would be a good thing. And right now exchanges are lobbying to keep things as they are - letting them list whatever coin they want, create their own coins, offer extremely high leverage and so on. This doesn't create economic growth, it's just a transfer of money from the masses into the pockets of crypto elite.

I think Bitcoin is more fragile than people in Bitcoin community believe. Overwhelming majority of Bitcoin's value comes from the hope that ti will be worth more in the future. But what if the market will become saturated, there will be very little new investors who believe in "Bitcoin to the moon"? Then a downward spiral might begin, investors who are tired of waiting for massive profits will dump it and be satisfied with modest profits, investors who barely made any profits would dump it fearing potential loss, and so on.

I never faced criticism on this forum. If someone disagrees with me, that's good, that's the whole point of having a discussion. If someone points out my mistakes, that's great, it means I have just learned something new, for free.

If someone feels like they are criticized here, chances are they have a persecution complex and overestimate their own knowledge.

Everyone is calling Luna a shitcoin these days once it failed, but go back 2 months ago, and most people in crypto sphere believed that Luna is a "good project", that they will be rich and anyone who is not investing is an idiot. How long until Ethereum and other good coins meet the same fate as Luna? Bitcoin is the only constant in crypto, without it crypto will not exist.

You can't rely on kids to not blabber your secrets to other kids or adults. Kids really love to show off, more than adults, because they don't see the downsides of it, like in your scenario of rumors of your wealth spreading beyond your control and reaching criminals. So teaching very young children about Bitcoin is not a good idea if you plan to keep the fact that you own Bitcoin a secret from everyone.

A few years ago I blundered and told my parents about Bitcoin. You can trust your parents, they are responsible adults, right? Wrong, they told my grandma, and grandma told everyone. Now a lot of people ask me how my Bitcoin is doing, how many I own and basically think that I'm rich and they are entitled to get money from me. And this is adults, not kids.

About Challenge 1 - I haven't checked on Lightning for awhile, is it even theoretically possible? You need to be online to generate payment request, because you need to get some of the senders data to generate it, right? So the only solution is to run your own server, at home or in the cloud, that would generate payment requests for you. Or is it possible to outsource it (though it would be centralized)

Show me some real life "crypto finance manager" job listings. Because what you are describing is pure fantasy, almost no serious company is interested in crypto, and those that are just hire some self-proclaimed "blockchain specialist". Or they go to a company like Blockstream.

Look at this from the point of view of a customer. They don't know anything about crypto. They see a 10% discount and get interested. They start googling and suddenly it's so complicated that they decide it's not worth it. You could bump the discount to 30% or 50%, but you are right - how will you make money? Your benefit can only come from attracting more customers and saving on fiat payment processor costs. And in both cases it would be hard to compensate for the huge discount.

Crypto does give criminals new options, it's stupid to argue with that, especially if you look at how prelevant is crypto in ransomware or online marketplaces for illegal goods. But ultimately, crypto is not a gamechanger that could make crime levels grow so much that they would threaten society. Financial control still exists. A criminal still needs to launder their money, even if they are in crypto. Regulators just need to adapt to this, and they do.

DCA is not an objectively the best method to invest. It's quite possible that the market could suddenly reverse and you will be buying Bitcoin for an increasingly higher price, thus having less coins than if you invested with more money earlier.

Both DCA and lump sum investing have their own merits, but what's really important is waiting - not selling BTC if you are at a loss, not basing your decisions on media hype and narratives - simply wait for years, and take profits during bull markets if you want to spend your money.

Cashless society is a marketing meme created by payment companies and banks. They are selling some sort of futuristic utopia to the people and telling them "you can be a part of the future today!". But I can guarantee you that in year 3000 people will still use some form of physical money, because physical money has its benefits and nothing will change that. Internet, electricity, all that infrastructure necessary for cashless payments be it banks or Bitcoin - it will never be available everywhere and 100% of the time.

A coin that has been recently (in terms of time and chain of transactions) used in some criminal activity and is of interest to law enforcement. This isn't a philosophical question, it's a practical question. Centralized exchanges do freeze accounts on requests from law enforcement, and on-chain activity can be one of the reasons to suspect someone.


Those coins are not dirty because law enforcement is aware that they have been taken from the criminals. But if they seize some darknet servers and find some wallets, they are going to investigate all the transactions, looking for potential accomplices or coins that were moved to other wallets. That's how some bystanders could get caught up, although it's very unlikely to happen on practice.

Well, hypothetically some dumbass crriminal could sell their dirty coins on a p2p market and the buyer will have an unpleasant talk with law enforcement if they will be identified, for example by moving their coins immediately to a centralized exchange. Does this happen often? Probably not, I never heard about such stories. Lots of people trade on p2p exchanges without such problems.

Bitcoin marketcap was initially zero, because Bitcoin, unlike altcoins, didn't have any pre-sale and pre-mine. As for the first purchase, the first Bitcoin trades were done before any centralized exchanges were created, so little is known about the first instances of trading.

This demonstrates that it's irrelevant of how big your marketcap is at the start, it's important that the project is actually useful to people.

Everyone is looking for a mythical "good project", and yet people don't want to acknowledge the reality that altcoins are fundamentally useless. Why should a coin that no one actually uses be worth anything? Because their marketing team promises that at some point in the future everyone will use it?

It's a wrong perspective to think that there are "scams" and "good coins". An altcoin will fail even if its creators have good intentions, simply because blockchain doesn't solve any real problems.

So instead of looking for some quick gains, just buy Bitcoin and wait a few years at least. Because Bitcoin achieved what it promised the moment the first block got mined - being a peer-to-peer electronic cash.

The price of altcoins is based on hype, artificial pumps, irrational speculation. It's not based on real world utility. That's why altcoins come and go, coins that had billions in marketcap yesterday are forgotten today. Smart contracts are only used in crypto sphere itself - trading crypto for other crypto, gambling, creating tokens, etc. There's no company outside of crypto, big or small, that somehow utilizes smart contracts. Despite this being the original claim behind the "world computer". Vitalik was promising how Ethereum will automate the sale of electricity, for example.

And as for use for payments, Bitcoin is still far better than any altcoin thanks to LN. Because Bitcoin combines the robustness of its network with instant and nearly free transactions of LN, while altcoins have smaller network that can be attacked or exploited.