I agree with you on this. It's pretty difficult for traders especially in the spot to make money in these times because along with bitcoin almost every coin is falling miserably. There is no coin that you can find in an uptrend. For people who can trade in futures, they still make money using some shorting but people in spot can't really do this. But I don't think this market phenomenon would ever change now, because bitcoin is the most dominant cryptocurrency, this is only possible if the dominance of bitcoin goes much below 20% or basically we get two three different coins which are almost equal in terms of the market cap because only then bitcoin would not be seen as a barometer for market. Until then this phenomenon would continue. Rules of markets once made aren't easy to mend. This has become a customary rule of this market for quite some time now I really doubt it could ever change.

I think a huge crash could eventually come in the Economy due to the after-effects of the pandemic. It's because stock markets around the world haven't really discounted the pandemic and economic indicators. This is generally a short-term deviation and in the end, the market coincides to show the health of the economy. The huge money supply has so far been the reason that markets are stable. In developing countries, new retail investments have come into the markets which have kept the market intact until now, we will see a big crash in the next 3-4 years I think when the investors would eventually realize that all these attractive valuations couldn't realize themselves.

It's even worse than trading into futures, it's because exchanges aren't directly manipulative. If you are a little bit cautious and play a risk management game properly trading in futures or even options on a normal exchange like Binance could still be profitable. But the same thing cannot be said for such websites as Binomo because they have ultra-high leverage, even a small move on the other side would be so swift that you won't be able to take out your money in time. Also most of their moves are absolutely rigged, they decide which way to go based on which side they can liquidate more positions. Their advertising strategy pretty much conveys that they are a scam.

You trust Binomo and IQ option? Really? Even my dog knows these things are scam. these companies have reached that level of advertising which is usually done only by sex toys and fake dating sites. This thing itself is the hint that how desperately they are trying to get more people onboard but are unable to find any as people have realised what a big scam they are. Their option trading is a complete hoax and absolutely manipulated. Even if they enter in crypto, their crypto platform too would be pretty much the same and manipulations would be at new heights because arbitrages in Cryptos are very normal and generally high too. Stay away from them.

Money is a hoax in itself. Humans basically strive for luxuries and comforts, money is just a way to achieve it.  Money is after all root of all evils but only if you see it on a macro level. For example the countries around the world fight for power which would eventually give them economic fortunes, political parties use god knows what ways to defeat each other just to satisfy their power hunger which would eventually give them money. Even businesses use all the unethical practices to make sure they can be the most valuable company around the world. So a lot of money is definitely a root of evil, but this is what keeps humans busy, to be honest, this is what has made us so advanced today that we are discussing this issue despite sitting at different corners of the globe. Even though money is most of the time the driver but we get inventions and innovation as a by-product too. No one has seen the heavenly god or father you are talking about, so I think it's better to use your life for such innovations than to donate it to a heavenly person you don't even know exist.
 

PS: I don't know if it is appropriate to discuss this in the economics section but let it be.

I don't know newbies know it or not, China has tried to crush bitcoin numerous times starting from 2017 but till now in the longer-term bitcoin value has gone terribly up. See here is an article from 2017 citing that China bans bitcoin and therefore market crashes terribly: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-ban-bitcoin-exchanges-2017-9?IR=T

See how price fell to $4k and everyone was terribly pissed with China at that time too, fast forward to today, Bitcoin has gone past 60k and is now resting around 40k which still is 10 times the price it fell when China first banned it. One economy no matter how large it is cannot curb cryptocurrencies, It's difficult even for a cartel of countries to do it together.

Almost every country around the world has been hit so badly with inflation this time. India has shown a wholesale inflation rate of more than 12% and a retail inflation of more than 6%, I think capital appreciation is going to get much more difficult now as the interest rates are still quite low, Infact, even most of the Term Deposits are offering lower interest rates than the Inflation rate of the country this time. I think the only source of Investment left to protect your Capital from Inflation is just Stocks and Crypto. While Stocks too should be chosen in an intelligent manner. High Debt stocks can become riskier if Interest rates try to coincide as per Inflation Rates, High debt companies might not be able to Maintain Adequate ROE if this happens.

Have you personally made any profit with this so far? Moreover, I don't really think a decent profit can be made if you buy from one exchange and then transfer the money and sell it on the other exchange. I think either the withdrawal fees will eat up your profit or the transaction time would autocorrect the price at parity. A better approach and how most people do it is using futures. You buy in a spot where the price is lower. Sell in Futures where the price is higher, then transfer the spot coins to the other exchange and square off both the positions. This way you can at least beat the transaction time. But Hefty withdrawal fees are profit killers unless you have 1 Million to Arbitrage with.

First of all it's not Musk who holds bitcoin but it's Tesla who holds them. 1 thing I am pretty sure that they are not going to sell it off in losses. TESLA is already a loss-making company, A loss so big would hurt their financial statements so much that it might take them years to recover, and also the strategic thinktank of the Company will be criticized a lot for this mistake. So I don't think they are going to sell it off for a loss of even a single dollar. Moreover, I think Elon clarified in May that TESLA has not sold even a single bitcoin apart from their sell-off in the previous quarter which was for showcasing liquidity in bitcoin. And After that the price has never crossed TESLA's buying mark, so I am sort of sure that he hasn't sold any bitcoin from his bag of bitcoin.

You and I cannot do anything about it. These types of scams will take new forms but the money of innocent investors is the bread and butter of big whales. Even in the stock market until today, penny stocks exist, which means even until today there are a lot of stock market investors who lose money in penny stocks. If a regulated market hasn't been able to curb this practice, how do you expect an unregulated market like cryptos to curb this practice? It's the money of the investors themselves and it's their responsibility to get educated about their money, So I don't think you or me or even anyone in the community can do anything about it.

An Asset always has an intrinsic value that is based on its utility, for example, gold has an ornamental value and is considered as a luxury, Stocks of different companies derive their values from the underlying assets and liabilities and the value of the future cash flows which that company might have. The value of currencies is generally based on the economic conditions of the countries which is why the exchange rate between the countries generally reflects the purchasing power parity between two countries. Similarly, the utility of bitcoin is as a currency. Any Asset which doesn't have a utility is basically a bubble, so this is sort of a paradox, if you consider bitcoin as an asset, it basically is not an asset at all because its utility lies in spending it not holding it, while if everyone starts spending it as a currency it's value might fall a lot from what it is today.

Bounty is a set part of the award kept aside for people promoting the project, these people are paid some coins/ tokens from the total supply for the services that they have performed. Generally, there are set stakes for every activity that a person does, and based on the stakes of every person, a person gets his share from the total bounty pool.

For example A bounty pool for XYZ Coin has 1 Million Coins, 1 week of the signature campaign gives 10 Stakes to Senior members and 5 stakes for members, Now after 4 weeks, A senior member who works all 4 weeks will have 40 Stakes(10 x 4) while Member who let's say just worked for 2 weeks would have 20 stakes( 5 x 2). Out of a total pool of 1 Million coins, the distribution would be 800k coins to Senior Member and 200k to Member.

Now the person who does all this calculation of staking, creates the bounty thread and manages it, and also ensures everyone is obeying the rules of the bounty and project is called the Bounty Manager.

I never recommend investing in cryptos by taking any kind of loan. It's because this market is pretty new and fragile, even though you might be profitable because of the natural cycle of bitcoin bull-bear run but adoption wise, not a lot of things can be said so far about the cryptocurrencies market in the longer term. a few bad news can affect the market so badly that a bear run might last too long. Also, who knows if this is the rock bottom market that would go before the next bull run? So putting in all the amount at once into the market is also a different sort of challenge. But if the money is being borrowed from someone in your family and it's interest free with no certain return period, I can say you can borrow, but don't enter into the market all at once, get a good 25% position at the current price then buy more if it goes down averaging your position size. This way you would be more profitable.

1. Nigeria has a very restricted usage in regards to cryptos, it's central bank has banned all interactions of the banks with the crypto exchanges, so how is it on the front lines of crypto?.

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Even if a country accepts bitcoin as a legal tender, let's say el Salvador or Venezuela in future, how will the country develop an equitable distribution of income? It's not that government is going to pay a universal basic pay to everyone and neither there is going to be any sort of special subsidies for using bitcoin, it's just the same, if you have the skill you get paid for your skill, just the payment comes in crypto? So why are you hopeful? How is there any Direct/ indirect relationship between both?

Actually problem is that these developing Economies that have got some stupid extremist governments have started to think that social media is making it difficult for them to maneuver the brains of common folks. Ironical thing is that these governments themselves used these platforms to gain popularity but now when users are using these platforms to spread some negativity against them they are behaving like 12-year-old children. Nigeria isn't the only case, Some similar sentiments grew in India too but thankfully the government isn't that bad here that it takes decisions without giving things a second thought.

But for Twitter too, I think Twitter has been crossing some lines, Acting against false information is okay, but being hyper-aggressive in banning tweets and accounts of leaders is a height of stupidity. If the democratically elected President of a country does a tweet, which isn't a piece of false information, there is no way that Twitter should ban it even if Twitter thinks it incites violence. It's the responsibility of the President himself to maintain peace in the country, not Twitter. He will be accountable for his words, Twitter isn't a decentralized platform afterall.

Actually yes there was a lot of Tax Evasion through cash routes was much easier in the earlier economy. Take the Indian Economy, for Instance, count of black money transactions was too high 50 years earlier and it has come significantly down with the adoption of banking for most of the payments.

Talking about Ancient Greek, we do not have any data related to that, we don't know what percentage of the money was floating around as black money but I am sure there must have been a lot of it.

Also with the advent of technology and such easy dissemination of knowledge these tricks would be easier to communicate to a lot of people. I am not saying there would be 99% tax evasion but even a 30-50% is enough to hurt any economy around the world.

Keeping it very simple, A legal tender generally means that the Seller has to accept the payment from the buyer in form of cryptocurrencies if he denies payment, he is not entitled to any payment then. But this generally happens in countries that have just one legal tender particularly their own currency, In the case of El Salvador, they don't have their own currency and have two forms of legal tender, so ideally even if a person rejects payment in BTC but is willing to accept payment in USD, he shall still be entitled to that payment. Because when both of them are legal tenders then it's just based on your convenience.

More importantly legal tender means that if someone pays BTC to the other person, this would be an adequate consideration in the eyes of law, therefore a contract will be established between both parties.

A very good depiction of the truth. But I really beg to differ a bit. People think scalping is like a game they have to play. They aren't actually in it for money but instead due to the thrill of making money quickly and most importantly due to the uncertainty involved. It's entirely true that 95% of people lose in scalping but there are those 5% people who make huge money. Scalping is a profession and cannot be compared to Investing. It's like a business where you start with a capital, protect it, and try to grow it. The mistakes that every trader do and what even you did in your story are as follows:

1. Trading is Boring: Yes, you might be surprised to read this but real trading which makes you money is boring. It's because it's too automatic. You have a system, you get a trigger on it, You allocate capital as per a set formula and you enter the trade with preset profit and stop loss. That's all! This is how trading is done. But unfortunately, people find it less exciting therefore sit in front of systems for hours averaging their positions or panic selling everything. When your trading becomes boring like this. On a longer horizon, you will always make money.

2. Every person would undergo 3-4 years of graduation to get a job. But ask a trader to learn markets for 3-4 years before starting. He will put up all his money on the 12th day of trading, thinking he is a guru. You have to give a full-time learning effort to the market before you could even start earning.

3. Risk Management & Psychology are much much more important than any system or strategy. Even the best system has 70% accuracy on a good day. It's good Risk management that actually protects your capital and helps it grow.

4. People think there are no losses at all. (This myth is specifically designed by the so-called trade gurus). There are 2-3 good months and 2-3 bad months and this cycle continues. You might even find yourself at breakeven after a year but there would definitely be a time(Might be a bull run or a bear run) that you will earn a lot of money even more than the Investors who claim to have caught the early bus. Trading is a long process of earning money, you can't expect to earn 1000$ every single day of the year. It's not possible in even the best businesses in the world.

5. OverTrading: From what I read in your post, this is the reason for failure in some people. Their Trading > Learning always. Always keep a goal or a plan for yourself. Why are you trading and what is your daily, weekly, monthly goal and please make it realistic like 5-8% weekly. Don't keep targets like I'll double my money in a month or maybe get 10% each day. But make sure you take trades only as per your system and only when it triggers.

To be Honest Ratimov, Investing isn't that easy too, It sounds easy to say that read whitepapers, and invest in projects, but in crypto markets where almost all the whitepapers promise you Gold but later 90% of them end up as packed pieces of shit. In bull Run, when every project is going 10x 20x, these things are easier to be said but when the bull run would eventually get over at least 70% of the coins would be vanished until the next bull run. So both trading and Investing are equally challenging and difficult at the end of the day. But yes Trading is more like a profession because it requires you to invest a lot of time each day, only enter if you are ready to learn for the first 1 year and then here to stay and look at your trading P&L after 2 years of trading. In Investing you can spend just some time each week, splitting the apples into different baskets and trying to find the sweetest one.

Actually there are two different questions relating to taxability in bitcoin. One is the capital gain tax which will be on the fiat gain that you make. How will that be taxable? Secondly, if you pay someone in form of bitcoin when you buy a service/good then how will his income be accounted for?
 
EL Salvador pretty much solved the first problem, they declared no capital gains tax on bitcoin which means that there is no issue even if you make thousands of dollars in form of capital gains, there won't be any tax as it's a legal tender.

The second problem is the bigger one and I don't know how El Salvador would solve it. Initially, they might rely on self-declaration from the people but eventually, people could make it a big tax evasion loophole. I think this might ultimately make this country a Tax Heaven for everyone. One reason is to tether every Bitcoin address with a person through KYC but then, still, people could make a new address anytime and it ultimately defeats the purpose of making it a legal tender if you can't decide the place you want to keep it.

Some people might argue but what basically you are saying is how to do money laundering which is absolutely illegal in almost all the countries. I won't recommend this but in a few cases people have done this using a simple cash deal. The only way this has happened in a lot of cases is when people find sellers for their cryptos in hard cash. This cash can then be used to purchase something in fiat. people use forum to find sellers or other websites like localbitcoins. Another option that many people try is they make multiple accounts in name of their family members which help them to reduce tax burden while converting to fiat.

There are two legal ways which are both bit difficult: one is to convince the chap you are buying something from to invest into Cryptos. Second is to shift to el Salvador with citizenship if you have 3 BTC