One thing to keep in mind is that if someone does possess a sizeable amount of wealth and wanted to manipulate the price of an asset, it would still be easier and less costly for them to move the price of an altcoin.  People pump and dump smaller coins all the time.  It's low-hanging fruit.  Smaller coins generally have fewer people holding them.  And the people that do hold them may not have a particularly strong level of confidence in the long-term survival of such coins.  All in all, this makes for weak hands who are likely to sell.  Far easier to manipulate compared to something like Bitcoin.

It might, but don't believe everything you read.  Basically, we live in an era of extreme sensationalism.  The people who make the most outlandish claims tend to attract the largest audiences.  Unfortunately, such people generally don't tend to face any repercussions for this.  When people realise there aren't any consequences for over-embellishment, it just emboldens them to make claims that are even more preposterous.  A 50% drop is possible.  I've certainly been around to witness larger plummets than that over the years.  But I wouldn't say it was likely at the moment, given what we're seeing in terms of demand.  And even if it did happen, it certainly wouldn't be the end of the story.

I honestly can't be bothered to read 20+ pages of this topic to see how many of you are brainwashed antivaxxers, but I'll give my thoughts all the same:

The only concern I have regarding the vaccine is that they can't confirm whether or not it prevents transmission of the virus.  It's easy to imagine it might give the general public a false sense of security and actually increase the rate of infection if people aren't careful.  I suspect once people have had the vaccine, they will go out socialising right away because they won't get sick.  They will then become a carrier for the virus and show no symptoms.  Then they will mix with unvaccinated people in their bubble and infect them.

If you care about your loved ones, continue socially distancing until everyone you know is vaccinated.

I'd taken you for one of the more sensible people on the forum.  I'm disappointed to hear this.  "Gullible" people are those who are easily mislead.  Personally, I'm of the mindset that anyone who doubts science and would rather believe what antivax imbeciles are spouting are the gullible ones. 

Just try not to be too great a burden on public services when you get sick, please.

Focus on your own wealth.  Otherwise it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If everyone became paranoid about the supposed influence of whales and didn't get involved in Bitcoin, it really would hand full control to the whales.

In fact, one might suspect that's the gambit of peddling such a narrative...

I know I've got a friend with some funds still stranded on Poloniex.  Their stupid automated KYC thing kept saying the picture of their photo ID wasn't clear enough.  I'll have to remind them to try again now that the value of their holdings has significantly increased.  I was lucky in that my account was older and for some reason wasn't subject to the same conditions.  I got mine out ages ago.  Never touching that site again, though.

I'll check to see if I've still got some alts on any other exchanges.  It's likely just some Byteball/Obyte, though.  I'm 99% sure everything else I had on exchanges got dumped for BTC and withdrawn over a year ago.

Whether it maintains its peg isn't all that significant for me.  It couldn't maintain its integrity, which is the more crucial factor.  A company made an arrangement that their token would be remain 100% fully backed by US dollars held in reserve.  Then it reneged on that arrangement because it suited them.  They can change the deal in any way they like.  Tether could print another billion tokens from nothing and announce it's now backed by polystyrene packaging beads, or even grains of rice if they wanted to.  No one can stop them and there's absolutely nothing users can do, aside from dumping it.  So it's utterly worthless.

Stop being victims-in-waiting and recognise it for what it is.

They aren't claiming that anymore.  They haven't been for some time now.  I thought people knew that?

I think I'm done with this topic.  We've got Apollo with one forkcoin, hv_ with another and aliashraf discussing his plans to launch a third with a minuscule fraction of the hashrate because he doesn't understand the meaning of the word "consequence".  He thinks that a network with individuals mining from home could match the hashpower of farms full of specialist hardware or people pooling their resources.  Let me know when any of you hopeless fools are ready to discuss Bitcoin.

Yes, we're familiar with your elaborate and well-devised solution of closing the gate after the horse has bolted.  You've mentioned it enough times already.  I assume the reason you keep bringing it up is due to the part where you're still no closer to making it happen?  How long do you envision it will take before you actually manage to get the ball rolling on this distant pipe dream?

This is not a recent occurrence.  It didn't suddenly sneak up on us over the last couple of weeks.  The reliance on full non-mining nodes to offset mining centralisation happened years ago.  This is simply how the network evolved to deal with the circumstances of the introduction of pools, GPU mining, ASICs, etc.  A vast majority of the people involved in Bitcoin today joined long after all this was set in motion.  Whether you're happy with the level of mining centralisation or not, this is the value proposition lots of people have signed up for.  Which would appear to indicate that people are generally satisfied with the "current situation".  To believe you can just step in and course-correct at such a fundamental level (while also assuming that everyone who is currently involved in Bitcoin will trust such an enormous shift in network governance and happily go along with it when no one can make any guarantees about the outcome) is just blind egotism on your part.  

You talk about it as though it's such a simple and minor tweak.  It just sounds delusional.  Not to mention the part where the fact that the network did evolve this way should serve as proof enough that economic pressures dictate equal distribution of mining in PoW doesn't work.  It was a reasonable assumption at the time the whitepaper was written.  But we now know the theory was flawed.  We tried it already.  It failed.  The subsequent adaptation proved more resilient.  Nothing since then, in any coin, has come close to matching the level of resilience Bitcoin has achieved.  Why do you enjoy pretending you know better and that jeopardising it all by reverting back to that flawed assumption about the security model would somehow prove to be resilient if we just slap a fresh coat of paint on it? 

Get real.

And you don't think his perspective might be just a tiny bit biased?  Of course the people selling you the dodgy token are going to tell you it's fine.  They're hardly going to turn around and say "yeah, you should avoid buying our product".

Indeed.  If everyone who was genuinely interested in DeFi were pooling their talent and resources into one unified project, it might have some credibility.  But instead, everyone is out there just trying to exploit the situation for profit and it looks totally squalid and shameful.  I suspect it's going to remain a filth pit until the next bandwagon departs.

While I don't doubt that your belief in that nonsense probably helps soothe your own glaring inadequacies and astounding lack of success in this field, the point remains that however talented someone might be, they still can't force a change in Bitcoin that other participants aren't willing to accept.

Bottom line:  Individuals can be as revolutionary as they like, but aren't in a position to force their ideas on others.  The onus is on those with new ideas to make a compelling case and convince a sufficient proportion of those securing the network to implement any new proposals.

Some would say it's only a "problem" for those who want to implement half-baked ideas.

If you're willing to take Mike Hearn's word for it, satoshi did have some ideas around payment channels, which are effectively the progenitor for the Lightning Network:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2013-April/002417.html

My assumption has always been that their preference would be that private companies are not issuing tokens which are tied to the national currency.  Libra/Diem still hasn't been given the all-clear yet and they're doing everything they possibly can to jump through regulatory hoops.

What if they simply want to avoid the likely game of whack-a-mole that would ensue?  Imagine they squash Tether, so users immediately switch to a different stablecoin and the whole sordid affair starts anew.  Maybe they're planning to launch an assault on all stablecoins in one fell swoop?  As the expression goes:

"When your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to."

I'm probably giving them too much credit by suggesting they possess that much foresight, though.  
So yeah, it's probably the discovery thing.

I think the question is more one of priorities than it is about funding.  Regardless of how centralised or not you feel development has become, I still believe the decisions would be made based on what provides the greater benefit for the network as a whole.  It's possible I'm being naive, but I think more people overall will benefit from things like privacy and scaling enhancements than they would from smart contracts.  Throwing money at smart contracts wouldn't suddenly make them more useful to the average person.

In some ways, DeFi still feels like a solution in search of a problem.  For most people, it doesn't serve a real-world use case yet.  Which is why it's primarily used as a buzzword to peddle scam tokens and fleece the gullible at the moment.  Conceptually, it's a fine idea, but I'm certain there's a long road ahead before people really need this technology.  I wouldn't say it has "failed", just that it hasn't discovered its true purpose yet.

I started writing a reply on another topic about this earlier today, but by the time I hit "Post" it was gone.  I'm guessing it got nuked because they didn't link a source. 

Lots of sites seem to be reporting it's a "crisis", but it's difficult to see how strong demand can somehow be interpreted as a bad thing.  It'll be interesting to see what impact it'll have now that Grayscale have temporarily suspended issuance of new placements.  Maybe things will calm down a little.

OP has apparently taken an interest in amateur philosophy now.  Yet somehow thinks philosophy belongs in the economics board.  And they're, astoundingly, still completely oblivious to how people might find them annoying.  Yes, it's a total mystery.