Having an interest is fine.  Having an obsession might not be.  Why are people having difficulty comprehending this?  Are people just reading the OP and completely ignoring all the replies?

Are you familiar with the phrase "everything in moderation"?  It's when people take things too far that it becomes an issue.  If someone becomes so consumed with checking their trades that it starts to have a detrimental impact on their life, then they likely need help.  

I've seen it happen right here on the forum with someone complaining about "problems in Bitcoin" when their actual problem was addiction.  They were completely in denial and wanted to blame everyone else for the fact that their life was falling apart.  They couldn't leave the exchange alone and kept trying to place manual trades in a futile attempt to keep up with automated trading bots.  No wonder they went crazy thinking that would work.

Thanks for the invitation.  My answers to some of these turned out to be much longer than I thought they would:



I first head about Bitcoin around mid-2013.  I had started to distrust the national media, so started watching news channels from other counties.  While watching RT, I happened to catch an episode of the 'Keiser Report' where they frequently discuss how corrupt the traditional banking sector is.  Naturally, that resonated with my own impressions of the world, so I got into a habit of watching it.  In a few episodes they started talking about Bitcoin. 

I didn't quite "get it" at first because they only discussed the speculation side of it, but figured I'd look it up.  Found some Andreas Antonopoulos videos and started to understand the idea a little better.  Played with a few faucets (as they were actually worth the time in 2013) until I was ready to buy.  Kept digging and learning more.  Fast-forward a bit and here I am today.  I grew tired of Max Keiser after a while, though.  Bit over the top.  Too much bluster.  Also, that altcoin he launched was an absolute atrocity, so that was probably the nail in the coffin.



I bought my first bitcoin in late 2013.  Seemed like a no-brainer after what I had learned and also taking into consideration the torrid state of traditional finance.  I wanted an "out" and here it was.  It was an in-person cash trade because handing out bank account details is extremely risky and I've always been wary of that.  Met them at their house, which I'd been to many times previously, handed them a wad of cash, they sent the BTC to my address (along with a much smaller amount of LTC and NMC to their respective addresses, since I figured I'd diversify a bit). 

The whole thing felt a bit frantic, as the BTC price was climbing pretty rapidly on a daily basis at that point, so I was naturally eager to get the trade done.  Managed to get onboard around the halfway point of that early bull-run to ~$1200.  Then continued holding all the way back down to around $200.  It was a concern, initially, but I never considered selling.  Quite the opposite, In fact.  I bought a little more on the way down, having originally planned to buy more on the initial purchase if it weren't for the price rising so quickly.  



Can't remember exactly.  Probably just found it on a search engine while researching.  Glad I found it, though.  I've learned more here than on any other website.  Aside from bitcointalk.org, the only other social platform I'd recommend to others is bitcoin.stackexchange.com because pretty much all other social media is terrible.  This place is a veritable treasure-trove of information and knowledge.  I like to think I do my part in helping keep it that way.



In short, bad first impressions and bad habits.  Lots of people are somehow given the impression Bitcoin is some sort of get-rich-quick scheme, so straight away they're off to the wrong start with some pretty big misconceptions about what they're getting into.  Or they avoid getting into it at all, because they would naturally be wary of get-rich-quick schemes.  On top of that, most people have spent their entire lives trusting financial institutions and don't know how to function any other way.  People tend to leave their funds in the hands of third parties because it's "convenient" and then they effectively receive a third-rate experience of what Bitcoin really is.  If they don't embrace the mindset Bitcoin was founded upon, they're probably going to have a poor experience and they definitely won't receive all the benefits Bitcoin potentially confers.  I know some of us die-hards sound a bit stuffy and boring when we talk about the underlying principles and personal responsibility, but Bitcoin was designed this way for a reason.  Person A signs the transaction over to person B and that's it.  Job done.  You don't introduce any middlemen to the equation, because they can then block your transactions or lose/steal your funds.  Which kind of defeats the purpose.

As controversial as it may sound, until people can understand crypto properly, I'm beginning to feel like "mass adoption" would actually be a bad idea right now.  I don't think human beings, generally speaking, are ready for Bitcoin.  They've got too many bad habits to unlearn.  I want Bitcoin to be for everyone, but at the same time, I want everyone to be safe when they use Bitcoin.  And right now, most of them would use it in an unsafe way.  They need a bit more time and a lot more common sense so they don't hand their money over to twitter scammers impersonating celebrities, as they're seemingly prone to doing.  We don't need more of that, so mass adoption can wait until people are smarter (again, generally speaking).  I know it sounds harsh, but I don't think it's wrong to believe that, given the depths of sheer foolishness I've witnessed recently.



Honestly feeling a fair amount of indifference to this question.  I figure if these projects are going to find a way to advertise somewhere on the internet, it might as well benefit our little economy here.  Probably doesn't make a big difference in the grand scheme of things, though.



Firstly, I'd draw a distinction between investing financially and investing conceptually.  Not everyone does both.  If people are just looking to gamble, they don't require a great deal of education to do that, aside from being able to spot obvious scams.  But if people really want to understand the ethos of Bitcoin and get involved in the correct way, then yes, spend as much time as you can educating yourself before taking the plunge.  As I pointed out regarding mass adoption, there's a great deal to learn.



Having been around prior to the creation of the Merit system, I can comfortably say the forum is a much better place as a result of it being implemented.  There's now a certain expectation that junk posts won't be considered acceptable, which is healthy for the community as a whole.  It's still sometimes a challenge to find a stimulating conversation, but that might be partly due to the fact that I've been around long enough to have heard many similar ideas rehashed over and over.  But the quality is still higher than what it was in the olde days.

And I think, even more important than merit, is the sterling work some users do in reporting plagiarism and bots.  It's bad enough to have similar ideas rehashed, but when it's the exact same post you read just two pages prior, suddenly duplicated next to another username, that's when it gets really tedious.  It really is a community effort to keep that crap to an absolute minimum, so my thanks go out to those people.

As for signature campaigns, the honest answer is it depends on the campaign in question.  Some definitely have higher standards than others.  It's clear there are always going to be a few companies that just want to advertise their product cheaply and aren't overly concerned if their participants are producing good-quality content or not.  Sometimes it feels like they target a bare minimum, but could probably do better if they tried.  It's a tricky one to get the balance right.

I do think signature campaigns should be prevented from forcing participants to make a minimum number of posts per week/month/whatever to qualify for a payout if that hasn't been done yet.  Making people post when they have nothing worth saying is a really bad idea. 



Wow, where to begin?  There are so many fantastic people dedicating their time and effort to help.  I suppose if I had to nominate one person in particular, since they're noticeably absent at the moment, I'd give a shout out to DannyHamilton.  I do miss their well-reasoned and informed contributions to the forum and hope they return at some point.  For topics, this one is crucial reading for anyone who isn't quite clear on what this Bitcoin stuff is all about:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5215927.0



Uh... I think I proposed adding descriptions for some of the subforums that don't currently have descriptions once.  I'd like to see more strict guidelines for the Press/Media board to prevent spam and maybe cut out the cryptoblogs who sadly haven't proven to be any more respectable than the mainstream media in terms of journalistic integrity.  Other than that, I'm fairly content with how things are.



I'm quite cautious.  I used to dabble with altcoin trading in small sums, but haven't logged into an exchange in ages.  There are just too many reasons not to do it anymore.  I don't trust any of them and can't comprehend how people just leave vast sums of wealth in the hands of total strangers on the internet.  It's downright crazy when you stop and think about it.  Another factor in the decision was the increase in prevalence of KYC/AML requirements, which I'm convinced creates more identity theft than it prevents.  Fortunately, when the exchange I was primarily using annouced they were implementing KYC, I was up overall and decided to quit while I was ahead.  Dumped any alts I had on that and any other exchanges for BTC and withdrew it all.  I don't have much in the way of altcoin holdings these days.  Only the ones that never got deposited online. 



Since I was always pretty cautious back when I did trade on exchanges, most of my "losses" are theoretical ones caused by not selling at the right time.  I'm still holding some Byteball/Obyte which at one brief, glorious moment was probably worth around 3 BTC.  It's sadly nothing like that value now.  Definitely regret not selling that when I had the chance.  But they were completely free to obtain (via what was quite possibly one of the only few credible and legitimate "airdrops" the community has ever seen), so I take solace from the notion that it's not an actual loss.



In theory?  Sounds good.  In practice, based on what little I've seen?  Sounds utterly abysmal.  I call shenanigans.  If it really was decentralised finance, it wouldn't be so profitable to exploit and there wouldn't be anywhere near as much hype around it as there currently is.  Maintaining a safe distance unless I start to see signs of legitimacy.  For the moment, I just get the impression people are brazenly glossing over all the negativity and obvious scams with ICOs and simply rebranding them DEFI, or "wrapped" tokens to pull the same old stunts all over again.  They're just trying to make a quick buck with marketing buzzwords and outlandish claims.  Avoid at all costs for the moment.  There might be a few honest attempts in the mix, but most of it looks pretty toxic.

That said, I'd love to see a day where we can completely abandon custodian exchanges and consign them to the history books where they belong.  I still love the idea behind "atomic swaps" which would allow purely peer-to-peer trading between blockchains.  It's just the current trend I'm not keen on, where some people are clearly abusing the idea to sell snake oil through mindless tokenisation.  Overall, it feels like the technology isn't there yet.  There's still a fair bit of development work to go before atomic swaps are truly viable to enable the kind of genuine decentralised trading this current, largely illegitimate, DEFI fad wishes it could emulate.



Not really.  I certainly wouldn't go as far as saying it's vital, but at the same time I feel like I could have easily done more to obfuscate it. 



Never have, heh.  In some ways I like to think I'm a clever person, but in other ways I'm an absolute philistine.  I should read more books. 



Can't offer any specific advice, since I'm mostly out of the altcoins game.  And wouldn't feel particularly comfortable doing so even if I could.  If you are going to speculate, make sure you're thinking for yourself.  You can't rule out the probability that someone is a bagholder of any given coin and is looking for a way to pump the price so they can get out.  I've said this already in a recent topic, but never ask for investment advice unless you're in a position to be able to verify what you're being told or you trust the expertise of the person providing the advice implicitly. 

Also remember that trading is often as much blind luck as it is looking at the fundamentals of each coin and reading charts and so-called "technical analysis" (which you need to take with a large pinch of salt).  Speculation is a variety of gambling.  No ifs or buts about it. 

I will, however, say sternly what to avoid.  People need to get the hell out of Tether/USDT while they still can.  I can see that ending badly for all involved.  Stablecoins in general seem pretty shady to me, but Tether is blaring all the warning sirens. 



Ask me in thirty years or so.  I've got no plans on selling any time soon.  My concept of "value" isn't in how much fiat I could obtain for my Bitcoin in the short term.  Future purchasing power is certainly of interest.  Maybe one day I could buy a house or something.  But for the most part, this is my "nest egg" or retirement fund.  I can't trust society with safeguarding my conventional state pension and I sincerely doubt many in my generation are going to get one at all, let alone one they could actually afford to live on comfortably.  Troubling times ahead, methinks. 



Caught me a bit by surprise, so thanks for asking me.  Honestly wasn't expecting to be contacted for one of these.  Hope people find it interesting or useful.  I better get on with reading a few of the other interviews I've missed since I last checked in on this topic.  Cheers.  

I don't doubt there's an element of that going on.  But at the same time, it's a little surprising to see how few people recognise the potential for addiction here.  Speculation is just a form of gambling by another name.  Surely people must see that? 

People who suffer from poor impulse control can become addicted to just about anything.  And I'm speaking from experience.  I've caught myself doing it years ago with a free-to-play, browser-based online strategy game.  It started as "I'll just stay up another 30 minutes to finish building that unit and send it to those coordinates, then call it a night".  Next thing I know I'm getting up in the middle of the night to boot up the PC (pre-smartphone era) to log in and wasn't sleeping properly.  I soon realised it was becoming quite an unhealthy obsession that could start to disrupt my life if I didn't get a handle on it.  I went cold turkey and don't play it now.  Believe me when I say it can happen to anyone with just about anything. 

Anyone can suffer addiction.  It's actually fairly common.  Whether it be serious things like alcohol, gambling, drugs, or even more mundane things.  Some people spend more time than would be considered healthy on social media, for example.  It can still be considered an addiction.  Most people just develop coping mechanisms so it doesn't have too much of a negative impact on their day-to-day lives.

Again, see my post here where I highlighted some trading behaviour that sounded incredibly unhealthy.  If you're not eating or cleaning because you're glued to a screen watching trades, that's not normal.

Ah, must have missed that post.  I think I can answer that one.

Despite the fact they often try to shift the blame onto developers (because it helps them play the victim and make the issue appear more divisive than it really is), they probably know that non-mining full nodes are the real opposition they face in achieving their goal of an increase in the size of blocks.  It's the people running full nodes who would bear the brunt of the cost for that, so it stands to reason they would oppose it.  While SPV users are Bitcoin users, they aren't involved in matters of network governance, because they aren't helping to secure the network.  SPV users effectively follow unquestioningly.
 
Running a full node gives users the power to resist changes to the protocol rules if enough of them disagree, but bigblockers can't reconcile this with their (seemingly genuine, but ultimately wrong) belief that most users want larger blocks.  Although, in fairness, I suppose it is possible a larger percentage of SPV users would like to see larger blocks.  But that's only because there's no perceivable cost to them and they maybe don't appreciate what full nodes are actually doing for them.  Ultimately, though, they don't have a say in the matter.  It's up to those securing the network to decide.  If a majority of the users running full nodes really did want larger blocks, they would run software that allowed that.  Obviously they aren't doing that. 

As such, it's a fairly conclusive outcome.  Larger blocks aren't happening yet.  So, the bigblockers, likely in desperation, start to hint that it would be "better" (read: worse) if fewer users run full nodes because big data centres running nodes probably wouldn't resist the change as strongly. 

In short, bigblockers want to weaken network governance to get what they want.  And clearly that's not happening either.  They're fighting a lost cause.

Exactly.  Or, if you're lucky enough to have a new job lined up quickly, you effectively get a nice big bonus.  I'm sure the timing worked out very fortuitous for some of them.

FTFY.

Profit is the icing on the cake for some people.  The ideology is far more important to me.  You haven't been here that long, but even if you stick around for 10 years or more, you likely still wouldn't understand everyone's motives or goals.  Each person is different.  Just because you're hanging around to try and make a quick buck, doesn't mean everyone is.  

I haven't just invested money.  I'm invested conceptually.

If someone is looking for approval, it means they're asking for permission.  We're not asking for permission.  We don't need it.

In fact, Bitcoin almost certainly works better without being "approved".  Because, generally, in order to get permission to do what we do from the state, you have to make certain concessions.  Compromises that would make Bitcoin weak and ineffective at what it does best, which is that no one can block you from transacting with whoever you want. 

You know who's got permission? 
PayPal.  They can block your payments if the state tell them to.
Visa.  They can block your payments if the state tell them to.
Mastercard.  They can block your payments if the state tell them to.

Starting to see a pattern?

Why do you think anyone can tell you that with any accuracy?  There are no guarantees.  If someone gives you a straight yes or no answer to that question, they're only pretending they know for sure.  You might get lucky, you might not.  That's why it's called speculation.  



You mean that's all you want to know.  Some people are here to expand their knowledge and understanding.  Not everyone is looking for shortcuts.  Also, be careful when asking for advice if you aren't in a position to verify what you're being told.  It's worth pointing out that sometimes, when people think they've found a shortcut, they actually end up going down the wrong path and getting completely lost in the wilderness.  Don't be one of those people who follow the advice of others without learning to think for yourself.  An appropriate idiom for that kind of reckless behaviour would be "A fool and their money are easily parted".

If it's not your BTC, then arguably it's none of your business where the money comes from.  But given that these are institutional investors, the money likely comes from wealthy individuals looking for better ROI than they might find on the stock markets.

And what do you mean by "where the coins come from"?  The same place where all other bitcoins come from, algorithmic emission through mining.

What part of the statement didn't you understand?  And why is it so hard to believe a company have opted to invest in something experimental?  Yes, Bitcoin is still in Beta.  The latest Bitcoin Core release is 0.20.1 so the clue is in the version numbering.  Once software is out of Beta, it conventionally adopts a 1.xx.x version number.

True enough.  My recollection is somehow more vivid for the BTG one.  I had a vague memory it happened to BCH as well, but wasn't 100% sure.  BCH is definitely a much better comparison, though, since the estimated cost of attack is very similar to BSV.  Arguably, it's only a matter of time before someone decides the "vision" isn't panning out and does something naughty.  That said, would any BSV users even notice if their chain got attacked?  They all seem to be too blinded by fiction to see clearly.   

And then (getting slightly off-topic) on top of that, Cøbra also announced they were looking for someone else to take over the ownership of the bitcoin.org domain.  It sounded like they wanted to bow out of the spotlight entirely.  But after lots of drama and noise, I don't think anything concrete has been announced yet.

You don't appear to grasp the concept behind the alignment of incentives.  Any given blockchain should offer greater benefit in securing the chain than it does to cheat.  Coins which get the balance wrong have already been attacked.  See your cousin forkcoin, BTG, as an example.  They suffered a hashrate attack because they failed to maintain the incentive to remain honest.  Part of that largely unseen equation comes from the cost of sustaining such an attack for a prolonged period.  

You can see the cost of maintaining a hashrate attack for a few coins here.   Of the SHA256 coins that are listed, you might notice yours is the cheapest to attack.  You can keep relying on trust and fanciful notions such as "honest miners" , like someone who is totally ignorant of the consequences, but we're not doing that.

You need to stop pretending you can come in here and lecture us because you've been duped by a second-rate copy of a white paper.  All you have are wild theories and gross misconceptions.  You clearly don't understand how any of this works in practice.  Nor does Faketoshi for that matter.  If you're going to be a mouthpiece for someone, at least make sure they're not a technologically-illiterate clown.

You've had the answer from Rizzrack:


If you want more than that, you're encouraged to take the initiative and do it yourself.  It's not realistic to expect one person to do everything.

Did it ever occur to you that someone who has proven themselves to be a notorious habitual liar who will say anything to get attention might be making up this supposed vulnerability?  Actually, that's a rhetorical question.  Obviously nothing occurs to you aside from mindlessly spreading faketoshi's lies like a good little lapdog.  

Faketoshi has no credibility.  You have no credibility.  Why would you expect anyone to take you seriously?

Yeah, it's like "Bitcoin is for anyone, but it's not for everyone".  It stops just short of being a contradiction in terms, heh.  Anyone is free to use it, only it might not be suitable for all people. 

Not a fan of the guy at all.  Just because he might be right on the anti-bank stuff, don't take that to mean any of his other views belong in this century.  The man is a chauvinist and a bigot.  An absolute relic of days long since gone.

This seems to closely mirror my thoughts in another recent topic, albeit omitting the point about potentially paying more in fees by relying on third parties.  Some people don't understand what they're getting into.  Later, they pay the price for it.

As others have said, I don't think it's the services themselves that are responsible.  I take the stance that personal responsibility is something people need to take seriously if they want to get into Bitcoin.  There may be occasions where convenience might take priority and using a third party service might be appropriate.  But, for the most part, people shouldn't rely on them as much as they do.

Surprise, surprise.  I've felt the need to take exception to something stupid franky1 is saying.   

What kind of half baked brain fart is this?  A "waste of time"?  So plagiarism is okay if a user isn't well known?  Please explain how creating a double standard where certain types of plagiarism simply don't matter is supposed to help make the forum better.  I don't believe it's a waste of time to discourage low-effort posting.

As far as "taking things out of context" goes, are you concerned that someone might try to muscle in on your territory?  I guess it's only natural you'd want the exclusive rights to do that.  It is your speciality, after all.