Investing and trading are essentially the same thing, the difference is that by investing people understand buying something and holding for some period of time, while trading is done more frequently and includes using instruments like short-selling and derivatives. Both can go horribly wrong with crypto, you can invest in "good project" and watch it crash by 99% in an hour, or you can lose all your money with high-leverage trading.

But generally investing is better than trading, there were many studies that show that majority of traders are losing money.

As for mining, you need a starting capital, otherwise its just pointless.


Just because crypto trading is a skill that you can study, doesn't mean that you will succeed. There are no proven schools or courses or books that give people an edge in trading. The only people who make consistent profit in crypto markets are insiders and manipulators. And maybe some 0.001% of traders who "cracked the pattern".

You misunderstand a few things. First, Bitcoin protocol is not about trusting a community, it's the opposite - actively distrusting everyone and verifying all information yourself. Second, consensus in Bitcoin means using the same rules as other nodes. No one can stop users from adopting different rules, but this would cause a split and existence of separate networks, but without replay protection it gets messy. And third, Bitcoin's paradigm can't be translated into other fields. The broader attempts to implement blockchain are generally a failure. So no, Bitcoin didn't change society by showing people how to cooperate.

Investing is always a risk, but what separates good investor from bad investor is that good investors knows how to make investments where potential profits are far bigger than the risks. And bad investors are on the contrary taking huge risks with little potential reward. Simply taking risks is not enough to succeed, and not taking risks with things you don't understand is actually a rational thing to do.

Bitcoin is a good investment, because it's less risky than alts and it has demonstrated a strong long-term growth. But people get greedy, they want big profits fast, which turns their attention towards high risk, low reward "investments".

These are just some of the many steps. A large part of it will be finding new exporters, obviously, like increasing their LNG capacities to buy gas from the US, building new pipelines for buying gas from other countries, and the EU countries that can should also increase their own fossil fuel production, even if it means breaking their previous climate commitments. They should also reduce their consumption of gas wherever possible. Replacement of boilers with electric heaters is a good example, it needs to happen in many other fields where gas is used.

People shouldn't think that taking an action that would reduce their gas dependency only by 1% is pointless, all these little adjustments will add-up together and help solve this crisis.

People should stop that praise of CBDC means praise of crypto, because it's usually the opposite - CBDC is governments version of crypto that they want to create as an alternative to both crypto and privately-owned payment networks. The goal of CBDC is more control over finance by the government, which is obviously the opposite of what crypto aims to achieve.


Sensationalist misrepresenting titles and crypto journalism, name a more iconic duo

I would rather look at peaks of the cycles:

$1,200 -> $20,000 : ~16.6 times increase

$20,000 -> $69,000 : 2.5 times increase

$69,000 -> ??

$172,500 is the upper bound, assuming it will be lower than 2.5 times increase

a 1.5 times increase would be $103,500, so under such model the next ATH will be in that range. After that ATH the price will drop and stabilize, and it's a big question just how big the crash will be. Previously Bitcoin was sinking to just 20% of its ATH value, but this time could be different and we might see only 50% bottom, and the next cycle's bottom could look even better

There were many cases of Islam scholars saying that Bitcoin is not compatible with their religion. Doesn't mean that all muslims think so though. For Christianity and other religions, there are no notable statements, but knowing how clerics, even the lowest ranking ones, love to comment on politics and current events, it won't be surprising that some can make a case for or against Bitcoin in their religion. Which just shows that the separation of state and religion has been a great idea, because clerics are not fit to decide financial policy or really any topics outside of their scope.

But even better strategy is to just put as much as you can on 1st Jan 2015. And I would say it's the same now - better to make a lump sum investment today than to spread it over years and get less coins. It could be also very tempting to try to find the bottom of the bear market, but with such mindset it could be easy to make a worse investment than just buying now. People could easily set some price points for buying, and then they never appear. Like how during the last cycle people waited for Bitcoin to crash to $1,000, and they missed on opportunity to buy it as $3,000-4,000.

Most likely yes, because alts are just knock-off Bitcoin that use marketing to divert investors from Bitcoin to them. For all their existence, alts have struggled to be independent, meaning they failed to actually deliver something useful - and I don't see how it's going to change, I only see how alts just get better marketing, because the people behind them got crazy rich, so now they can do multi-million PR stunts.

So, when you see a new altcoin and it advertises its unique and ground-breaking features, ask a simple question - do ordinary people on the streets want those features? Or is it only interesting to a bunch of crypto bros who want to get rich quick?

People don't really have an option to give up, everyone needs money to live. And since everyone needs to work, they might as well look for the most promising careers to get enough money not just to survive, but to live.

But I would agree that human resource is the best resource. People with good skills create much more prosperous countries than people with a lot of natural resources or land. However, certain governments tend to keep their population dumb, because smart people would question their rule, so they doom their own people to poverty. Not that they care though.

How can CBDC help Russian economy if they don't produce things? Look at this chart of Russian imports - almost all of it is just raw materials. Fossil fuels, metals, chemicals, agriculture. High technology products are just a tiny part of it. If their Western buyers will just switch to alternative sources, which is possible because there's lots of developing countries who sell their resources, Russia will have much less money. And if Western powers refuse to sell their high-tech products to Russia, Russian economy and standard of living will plunge even further.

Financial networks are just tools. Being able to send and receive money doesn't automatically mean that your economy will do great. And this is even ignoring the fact that sanctions are hard to bypass on practice, because very few companies want to risk it.

Law enforcement and other government agencies need to break people's privacy in order to function. If citizens could just say "I have no desire to let my house be searched" when police is conducting a criminal investigation, then how would society work? How would the government collect taxes if people decided to refuse to share any of their financial information? Secrecy is just a subcategory of privacy, it's not a separate thing.

Decentralization and privacy are not the same. Privacy is not letting others know about your actions, decentralization is lack of central control over system.

A society with total privacy can not function, because things like law enforcement, taxation, military conscription and lots of other things. A society with total decentralization would also be dysfunctional, because it wouldn't be able to defend itself, solve any major crisis, have any national program and so on.

If a country ditched their national currency for Bitcoin, they would be extremely vulnerable to its volatility and it would be very hard to perform certain functions. Imagine if a country sets a budget of 100,000 BTC for the next year, and Bitcoin crashes by 30% and now they have to find more BTC or cut some programs. Then Bitcoin rebounds and the plan needs to be changed again.

Call me a Bitcoin maximalist, but I view all these algorithmic stablecoins as just a new and more elaborate method for scamming investors and traders - we've seen quite enough rugpulls, hacks (that could be just inside jobs), premine dumps, pump and dump schemes. So the fact that some shitcoin project owns a lot of BTC to support the price of their token doesn't mean anything - in the long run they will have to liquidate more and more BTC to support the price. I don't see any reason why would the masses want to adopt this token, and that's the thing that most people ignore - it doesn't matter if a token has web3, NFT, smart contracts, zero fees and all the other stuff that is there to attract investors; without real users such product is doomed.

Are your backups really in 4 separate distant locations, or are they all in your house? Because if its the latter, then you will be vulnerable to any disaster that can damage or destroy your house - a fire, flood, tornado, war and so on. You should take a strongly encrypted backup and ask a very trusted friend or family member to store it, or use a bank safebox.

A hardware wallet will not protect you from all possible threats. It's mainly created to mitigate hacks, but even then you should be very careful when you are making transactions with it. Hardware wallet won't protect you from physical attacks, natural disasters and other similar threats.

Satoshi didn't have any strong and concrete expectations for Bitcoin. He famously said that Bitcoin will either be worth a lot or nothing.

Would Satoshi be pleased with today's state of Bitcoin? Or is he, if he's alive and well right now? I think there are reasons to say yes and no. Bitcoin's price has certainly performed well, the network is very strong, and the devs are preserving the original values of Bitcoin to ensure the longevity of the project. But its adoption for payments progresses very slowly, most of the community is only talking about trading and using it as a store of value. For every "I paid with Bitcoin today" post there's hundreds of "will Bitcoin go up or down" posts.

But I wouldn't say that Bitcoin has failed Satoshi's vision. There's a lot of factors that prevent broad adoption for payments, and not all of them are related to only the technology.

Except Internet connection will also be gone in areas close to the front lines and occupied territories, so you won't be able to use crypto while there (and don't start with satellite Internet - it's not available everywhere and can theoretically be jammed). Also, Bitcoin adoption for payments is not widespread, so while you are in such extreme conditions, you will need to find ways to convert it into fiat - which could easily be impossible.

A "smart" thing to do is to have enough cash to survive, and store your wealth in Bitcoin. Providing that you can manage it properly and not lose it all because you had only one copy of your seed and it's gone for some reason.

But I would say, in general Bitcoin is not a good asset for a crisis. If you have lost nearly all your physical possessions, and then Bitcoin crashes by 20-50% for no reason, and your only choice is to sell Bitcoin, even at a loss, just to survive - that's not a good deal. It could be used to smuggle your wealth across the border or military checkpoints, but after that it's better to convert it back to fiat once you are safe.

Centralization-decentralization can be viewed as a scale rather than a binary value. For example, lots of altcoins have very small node count, and not everyone can launch a node, and not everyone can contribute to their code, but many people still say that those coins are decentralized, because they have a blockchain, just like Bitcoin.

If a "service" is closed-source, it already means that the developers can make any changes they want, and the users might not even know which changes were made, as they can't see the code. And there's no freedom to fork the code, if you don't agree with new changes. So in regards of development, closed-source means total centralization.

Dude with a networth of 9 billion is firing shots at other billionaires like he is some Karl Marx or Lenin. He's just mad that he isn't a #1 billionaire.

Is no one here finding it sus that lesser millionaires and billionaires are hopping onto the Bitcoin train and become freedom advocated? As I see it, they only care about their enrichment, just like Buffet or Dimon, and Bitcoin is just a tool for that.

It can be positive to have these rich people involved, because they can influence the lawmaker, but it can also be negative - they could try to change Bitcoin for the worse, the SegWit2x attack was one such attempt.

Of course crypto experts will always tell you to invest in crypto because of their inflation narrative. But objectively speaking, in times of war a good investment would be stocks tied to defense, food, energy and other things fundamental for society. Some commodities are going to skyrocket because of diminished supply.

Also, why do people think that war in Ukraine is going to cause inflation of US dollar? US is barely even involved, ~15 billion is not really much for the US economy, so there's no need to print money for that.