Thankfully, I have been getting better responses. Thanks to a recent legal battle won by crypto proponents. The thing is that people seem to consider Bitcoin, ethereum, ripple in the same category of some fancy internet company stocks. I have a hard time trying to convince that Bitcoin isn't a "company" per se. Then the next question is then why do people buy its "shares". How can you predict when it goes up and when it goes down.
The argument about a non-inflatable asset with a possibly bright future is something that cannot be used to convince people who are just looking to make some money. But people have been exceptionally open off late because of certain initiatives from involved exchanges etc. It is quite clear that when the businesses like exchanges put effort into spreading the word, it works.

Hello OP. Bitcoin's proposed "world-economy" scenario has been a matter of debate for quite long now.  Your analysis is based on the established understanding of economics. The one which says that an incessant pursuit of "growth" in GDP numbers is the only way for the economy to function. You are wrapping this idea in form of an analysis of what it would look like to have bitcoin as the only currency. In layman's terms, it naturally sounds like it cannot be done.

This premise that bitcoin will be the only payment method is false in itself. No bitcoin proponent sees bitcoin as the "only currency". The major argument is that it should replace USD/SDR as a reserve currency. This proposes a system where economic machinations will not become dependent on one country's geo-strategic requirements. Wars will not be used as a way to generate demand. These are not conspiracy theories. These are all very real outcomes of an economic system which has relied on the USD as a reserve currency and establishing supremacy of certain institutions in deciding how the world grows, through an indirect control of the economy. What bitcoin envisages is a world where Public spending will be transparent, traceable and decentralized, apart from every citizen having a hand in the pie of a non-inflatable stable asset.

That is the bigger picture for bitcoin's usage. LN enabling coffee micropayments would just be nice to have.

From the topic, i thought this was some flat-earth conspiracy theorist calling SpaceX a scam. These giveaway scams, especially on twitter are ubiquitous and old now. Yet, people fall for them in hordes. Famous people like Musk, Buterin, Lopp etc have consistent profile pics. The handles are generally very similar. Buterin even started adding [not giving away ether] and then scammers copied that too.

It is a terrible thing to witness thieves and charlatans damaging the whole market for these new people who get bitten by such scams. These people generally dive into it thinking "Ohh, this is a new opportunity and only I know about it". They don't realize they are new to the place and maybe their cousin doesn't know it yet but  everyone else already knows it.

People will do unimaginable shit to scam or get away with money. Yet, its not all that easy in India because if the authorities decide to investigate, you WILL get caught. The problem in this case would have been that it involved a foreign national and his family. There wouldn't have been an investigation but probably a record of hospitalization and a death certificate. Of course, stranger things have happened:

Man kills labourer , burns body in car to fake death for insurance claim

Man kills friend to fake his death for insurance claim

His "body" was repatriated for the funeral. Although it will be heartbreaking but can you blame the people who lost their lives' savings for doubting the story??

What is amazing is that the highest of authorities expect these things as threats:
1. A tech-savvy generation burdened by debt and disillusioned by the shackles of monetary system (college debt, mortgages etc)
2. Availability of a non-freezable "money" which a potential resistance can use to fund themselves.

Does this sound like pre-empting revolution against a corrupt state to anyone? The "wargame" is based on the premise that this tech-savvy generation has been affected by events like 9/11 and the recession in their childhoods. They grow up to find themselves in debt and want to build a better world. Whose side exactly is the pentagon on?

How is it acceptable that they can treat this as a potential method of resisting the status quo of the monetary system? How isn't there more outrage about world's biggest millitary resisting social change supposedly brought about by people?

It is always good to have adoption. Though the article says the users have to first install the "Sylo smart wallet". This should only be optional and users should have the freedom to pay BTC through any method they want. Even the partnering payment processor, Centrapay would benefit more if they were to just take responsibility of setting up an open payment method at the vending machine end and not restricting the user to install a separate wallet for it.

You do all the partnership, marketing thing. You put in the hard work to get yourself a deal with coca-cola executives and then shoot yourself in the foot with a restrictive wallet service. When will business people learn their open source lesson? Still, good news. One step at a time.

If the major exchanges and services were to promote SegWit as a way to save transaction costs, more users would be coming on board. For this, the multiple exchanges and routing services benefiting from bitcoin should be doing more. Earlier, there used to be a lot of community driven advocacy of such issues on r/bitcoin, crypto-twitter etc. There was regular encouragement about adoption and on-boarding merchants. Does anybody else think that bitcoin is sort of losing ground here? Or maybe my twitter feed isn't tuned in..!

I have sent a PM to you regarding a trust issue. Have you seen it? It'd be nice to have a reply..Thanks..

So Binance is being the tip of the spear for crypto's eventual disconnect from any sort of mixing services. At least the publicly regulated part of it. This won't change the fact that mixing/ obscuring is a major requirement for people with a lot of bitcoin. From an outsiders' perspective, I would say that volume and liquidity needs make these bigger exchanges the only source of fiat for those holders. (Are there any others?? Like some secret OTC services on darknet, no questions asked??)

Blacklisting mixers has another benefit for bigger exchanges. They will have a business opportunity to provide the typical "Swiss bank" equivalent service to its rich customers. You only talk to the banker and the banker talks to nobody. CZ is a clever businessman. He was the first one to see the huge opportunity in giving a platform of legitimacy to Alt-coins. Alt-trading wouldn't be where it is today if not for the marketing and support given by binance.

When the bull run happens, the congestion inevitably happens because of newbies FOMOing and holders looking to sell at their target prices. What else in your opinion causes the congestion??

Its not like suddenly everyone starts using bitcoin to buy coffee. So it would be illogical to think that a bull run will inevitably have congestion. The congestion in 2017 was also due to the unique combination of an ATH and an ICO market with everyone looking to send in their payment first to get the most "tokens". Nothing of that sort exists today.

I don't think the LN will play any role once the bull market comes. Its reverse infact. The bull market may only come if LN starts playing an actual role. Why else would we witness a bull market when the usage is same?? Everyone is just so sure that history will repeat without the same kind of circumstances. MADNESS, I say.

Nigeria is your typical third world country which has been caught in the information era without the necessary jump through the mass agriculture and industrial era. In this regard, India was quite lucky to have a govt that practiced a mixed economy. They focussed on agriculture and a little bit on industry.
Industry got left behind but sufficient investment was made for bare minimum self-reliance in industry to enable things like a nuclear programme, infrastructure building, self-sufficiency in food and electricity, transportation and a space programme. Seeing how African economies that got independent around the same time as India, I feel relief that the Indian govts of past did not fuck up as bad as them guys.

Nigeria, honestly is strange. I mean the people there were intelligent and shrewd enough to be pulling off scams back in the time of yahoo messenger. Then they seem to be fucked enough to support an organisation that literally means "western education is sinful". I once met a beautiful, intelligent girl from Nigeria. Together we spent a fine day. From what i heard from her, it was quite clear that the Nigerian men are a major problem.

For those who have a lot of bitcoin from early days, what other option do they have than to obscure the source before spending? Even if they want to do a small peer to peer transaction, nobody would like it be known that the addresses that can be traced to them contain 100s of BTC. It would be dangerous for their personal safety in light of the "five dollar wrench" attack.

The exchanges maybe choosing to do this not merely to comply to KYC. They have bigger interests. Imagine a future where you will have to provide proof of your BTC source as being non-mixed or non-tainted. In that case, exchanges can easily claim to be the only "legitimate" source of "untainted" bitcoin, much like a federal reserve on their own.

So coinbase, binance etc must be opposed in some way before this solidifies as an acceptable norm.

Herd immunity was proposed in the UK as the first response and the authorities later retracted their view, after probably witnessing the enormous load on healthcare system in Italy. This response from authorities will vary from country to country. For sparsely populated, developed countries with concentrated centers of population, the cluster approach will work and they will not have to play with citizen's lives in the hopes of herd immunity.

In poorer countries with huge population like India or Nigeria, people themselves seem to have accepted the fate that it will spread, no matter what. If you live, you live. If you or someone you know doesn't survive, well, mehhh. The govt will be happier with the herd immunity outcome. The problem is that coronaviruses are not like say, measles, smallpox or polio where immunity if for a lifetime. The most worrying phenomena is that it may only be seasonal immunity. That is why we can never give up on the approach of finding and isolating cases. This fucking virus needs to be starved of human bodies.

Story of my life..LOL..I am sure a lot of people go through this before they find something they can be proud of.

Right. Even I have been trying to get enough knowledge to build something. There are no shortcuts to it. You HAVE to start with the nitty-gritty. For example, At work, I have to learn about a communication protocol used in transportation. It involves revising the basics on OSI model to the programming tools used for configuring the system. To get an actual system working, you have to break it down into goals. I have been trying this approach and it works. Smaller goals and milestones. You can still make the website work. If not now, maybe later. MyBB has a community themselves. You can find answers there. Keep it in the backburner for a while till you feel like going to it again. Good luck for your next project. Just pick something, you'll find it.

As far as transparency is concerned, isn't it the same with provably fair dice and such things? In online casinos you already have that. Its just that instead of the randomly generated seed, they use random numbers from the blockchain itself. Another USP being touted is that these are "decentralized". So similar to a decentralized exchange, you don't have to worry about KYC. Though the volumes are so low that nobody would care about KYC anyway.
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True. Like i said above the best motivation for a bustadice player would be if bustadice itself came up with their own "Dapp version". Maybe even offer some promotion. Pretty sure that people would like to try that at least once.

The "community" in most of those Dapps is limited to the people who joined in the beginning and got cheap native tokens. For anybody wishing to gamble with cryptocurrency, there are enough good options available at present. On the other hand, most of those gambling dapps are mobile based with clunky UI/ UX.
The response times are bad. Everything from funding the wallet to placing a bet feels insecure due to the often closed source nature. I don't mean to say that this doesn not have potential. In fact, some of the established names in crypto gambling should build their own Dapps and offer them to users as a sort of "blockchain" alternative. When it comes to casinos, the brand name matters in order to build confidence.

Lets not call it "Leadership". This man is simply out there trumpeting himself in the hope of establishing himself as a sort of RW parallel to Nehru. The freakish tendency to coin acronyms and tell people out 3 D'S, 4 S's or whatever the fuck he come up with next is worrying. Authorities down the line are least concerned about performing or real ground results as long as the media and the ardent supporters remain hypnotized.

The loans being extended to MSME's on a "No-collateral, zero interest" for first year are basically business loans which the Indian economy would have needed anyways. Especially after the fiasco of an ill-implemented GST. In the garb of this package, the opportunist BJP has exposed its true neo-liberal face. They literally have zero idea about the poor and disenfranchised of this country. They completely forgot about the migrant workers while implementing the lockdown resulting in people walking hundreds of kilometers on foot to reach their villages where they could hope to at least have food to survive. All the much touted "Dreams of new India" have been ruthlessly crushed by this calamity that Modi and BJP have put the poor of India through in the last 2 months.

The so-called "package" also talks about disinvestment of Public enterprises. Even the profitable ones. This is another step by BJP to strengthen its business-support group. They already paid back Ambani with favorable regulatory stances to help establish Jio at the cost of other telecom giants. The next in line seems to be the big Oil and manufacturing PSU's. Get ready to see another round of lucrative acquisitions by the private sector in the form of prime locations and factories at cheap prices.
 
This "Package" is a Joke on the poor and the salaried middle classes who will pay for it by taxes.

Here is the original blog post by Bill Gates. Its amazing how the man has quite a deep and clear understanding of communicable diseases, vaccines, testing etc. He mentions about the opening up of Microsoft China that the chinese are still being conservative about opening up and are encouraging people to work from home. They are following this even though the peak has passed for them for a long time now.

I feel worried here back home in India because we have all but opened up. There is no official communication to stay inside and the govt is relying on the self-awareness among the population to maintain distance and wear masks etc. The infections are still climbing in major clusters like the hugely populated and congested metro cities Delhi and Mumbai. The smaller towns are also starting to see an increase in cases. The demographic is such that people cannot afford to remain indoors. It remains to be seen how this affects the infection numbers or the fatalities.

That was a quick one. By the way, the domain name is pretty slick. There isn't another ethereumtalk that comes up in google search. For that matter, this too doesn't come up yet on the first page. I thought something more along the lines of this forum for ethereum was a good idea. Especially if someone can get the original people onboard for it.

Would you care to take some time to share what prompted you to go for it and then drop it. These are often learning experiences and I personally would love to learn from yours. I know it can be difficult to sustain side projects if you have other occupations. A first hand experience on what difficulties you faced in terms of lack of time, money or knowledge to build this.

I just don't understand why everyone wants to use previous halvenings as a hint to the present. The conditions were so much different back then in terms of the sheer novelty, the new hardware manufacturers pouring investment, new exchanges, gambling places, marketplaces, damn we even had BTC payments on Steam. Today its a pretty much settled scenario hurt by vaporware and scams.
Adoption is something that the community seems to have totally left on the merchants and consumers in a "Take it or leave it" fashion. So, This halvening is nothing like the last ones. That ebullient mood of a brave, new world has changed now. What we need is positive adoption and reliability news on LN end. Maybe another set of new features driven by actual open source changes.

There is a "terms and conditions" clause but they are not defined. So users will just be ticking them off without knowing what they are. Its not moving past the "Add profile pic" frame though.
There isn't any intro before you make a profile.So it seems like you are just trying to get this up and running ASAP to have some sort of first-mover advantage on that domain name. Lets see if that profile actually goes through. Maybe then we can see what the insides are about. It still needs work and testing. Good Luck.