You're contributing quite nicely towards the deterioration of the English language as well.  Unless you can find me an English teacher who would agree "This is frown" or "This is smirk" are valid sentences, maybe consider not lecturing others about their grasp of the language.



But embracing the concept is harder than simply understanding it.  Most people understand the meaning behind "Not your keys, not your coins" but fewer people change their behaviour to demonstrate that understanding.  Merely moving funds into Bitcoin isn't enough.  Because chances are people will just lose those funds and end up disillusioned because they were approaching it all wrong.  They have to adapt their mindset and their behaviour in order to get into Bitcoin safely.

Many people can't do that.  It's wrong to assume they all can.  Some people have spent their entire lives relying on banks and they don't know how to function any other way.  They aren't ready to just dive in to Bitcoin and pretend everything will be okay.

I think I understand what the OP is referring to.  The thing that worries me is that certain services do effectively turn Bitcoin into a two-tier system. 

All the people who understand the importance of "not your keys, not your coins" and are sensible enough to store their funds securely in a wallet where only they have access to the keys and make appropriate backups gain all the advantages Bitcoin has to offer.  Total autonomy over your wealth, incredibly strong security, fairly decent privacy, etc.

Those who don't take the time to learn, who keep the entirety of their funds stored in some third-party custodian like webwallets or exchanges because it's "easier" are the ones who get the second-class service.  They're the ones who lose out every time there's a data leak of personal or financially sensitive information.  Or, worse still, lose their funds when a service suffers a security breach or they fall victim to a phishing site and mistakenly give out their login credentials.

The likelihood is, as adoption increases, we'll see an ever-growing number of users who don't take the time to learn.  More potential victims.  I'm actually pretty skeptical of the very notion of mass adoption now.  Particularly after that Twitter hack where far too many idiots willingly handed over their funds to obvious scammers because they genuinely believed a celebrity was going to give them free money.  It seems people generally can't be trusted with the responsibility of being their own bank.

Mass adoption, in the sense most people here dream of it, would be an unmitigated catastrophe, in my opinion.  The world isn't ready yet.

For the topic as a whole, it highlights the pitfalls that generally come with new users having preconceived ideas about how it should all work.  It's important to keep an open mind, as it helps when you're trying to understand the differences between Bitcoin and traditional payment methods that you might be more accustomed to.  There's normally a very good reason behind why we do things a bit differently in crypto and, for newer users, it's not always immediately clear what those reasons are until you really start to understand how it all works. 

It's certainly possible to fall back on old habits and try to treat Bitcoin in the same way you would handle your traditional banking and savings, but there are notable risks in doing that once you've realised that you aren't afforded the same consumer protections here.  It might seem easier to do what you've always done before.  But it's generally safer to learn some new habits and do things the right way.

As for the discussion around earning through bounty campaigns, please try to keep in mind that while some opportunities are there right now, don't expect that to always be the case.  Many of these bounties may well end up the same way as faucets at some point in future, meaning they may prove not to be worth the time and effort you need to invest over the long term.  Due to supply and demand, it's not realistic to believe the current payment rates will continue forever.  As competition increases and more people are trying to take part, it's only natural that people looking to advertise their service can get away with paying smaller amounts because they know some people will still be prepared to do the same work for less reward.  There's also going to reach a point of saturation where they simply don't need more participants for their campaign.  Consider yourselves warned, if you're going around telling everyone they can easily make money doing this, some of them are going to end up disappointed and might hold you responsible for offering bad advice.

It means, like many things in life, if you buy cheap, you often get cheap in terms of quality.  Sure, you might pay lower fees, but there's a greater risk of hashrate attacks due to the weaker security, weaker network governance, meaning controversial changes to the protocol could slip through more easily because there are fewer nodes to convince, more chance of people losing faith in your weaker chain and diminishing the value of your funds.  If your coin is repeatedly attacked and the value goes to zero, just remember that's what you signed up for because you thought it would save you on fees.


//EDIT:

Either you're trying to be funny and I'm not getting the joke, or you genuinely don't understand how weak your chain is.  In terms of raw hashrate, your preferred chain is a fly splattered across the windscreen of Bitcoin's 18-wheeler.  Even if your chain was compliant with regulators (and it isn't), you need to comprehend that regulators are in no position to help you when your chain gets attacked.

If you wish to continue promoting your forkcoin, please do so in the altcoins board where it belongs.

You're welcome to that opinion.  If you can find users who agree with that stance, you're free to form and secure a different blockchain with them (and clearly you already have).  But that doesnt appear to be the stance of the users who are securing Bitcoin's network.  And, since they're the ones paying the cost, it's their choice.  You aren't in a position to force your ideals upon them.

That's how network governance functions.  If you want to change the rules to offer lower fees, find the people who agree with you and go ahead.  Just don't expect others to tag along.  You also have to accept the consequences of your ideals when they invariably result in a weaker and more centralised network.

It's a difficult balancing act.  They have to do something, but clearly they can't please everyone.  I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers, but they've highlighted an area that does need some attention.  Once we know exactly what form the regulations will take, then we can make an informed judgement as to how draconian it is.

Or not.  Stablecoins are comparably even further away from gold than Bitcoin is.  Those are more akin to an IOU.  And that's the charitable comparison.  Part of me just wants to dismiss all stablecoins as outright scams, as I'm yet to see much evidence to the contrary.

That sounds a little dramatic.  I'm all for nation states being less powerful and intrusive, but at the same time, stablecoins are a ticking timebomb that will only get worse if something isn't done to make them less shady.  How many more scams do you really want to encourage?  Literally anyone can claim that their new token is backed by fiat, but if they're lying, the token is worthless.  It's a modern day alternative to counterfeiting.  You don't even have to make the effort to make illegal copies of banknotes, you just create a crypto token and say it represents money that doesn't even exist. 

It's natural for people to try to compare Bitcoin to whatever it is they're using it as.  But it's not like we could expect it to match up perfectly with any existing currency or asset because it's unique.  If you look closely enough, you can't compare it to anything without finding some inconsistencies.  Lately I mostly see it as a pension pot to make up for the actual pension I'm clearly never getting, but someone could write another enormous blog to explain why that comparison isn't particularly apt either.

I feel like a lot of the "Bitcoin versus gold" stuff actually comes from the goldbugs.  They find themselves in the presence of something they can't quite quantify, so they compare it against the thing they know.

I'm not expecting any banks to launch their own stablecoin.  I could be wrong, since I haven't read it all, but I don't think this new legislation opens up that many new avenues for European banks to start offering crypto-related services.  And even if it did, they'd likely find it difficult to attract crypto-enthusiasts, who are often quite skeptical of traditional finance, to any such products they might launch.

I always wonder if people would still keep all their wealth in traditional banks if the money wasn't insured and there was a strong likelihood they could lose some or all of their savings whenever the bank got robbed.  Something tells me plenty of people still would, even if they understood the risk.  Learned habits are difficult to break.

Active traders have a difficult balancing act to play, since they need funds available to take advantage of any sudden moves in the market.  They need to keep some quantity of funds in there.  But anyone who isn't actively trading needs to stop using exchanges as though they were like a savings account.  There's absolutely no sense to it. 

I'm pretty sure when they say it's "outside their scope", that loosely translates to "we couldn't even if we wanted to".  There's no way for them to regulate Bitcoin in the same way they can regulate a stablecoin.

Think of it this way.  They've already got regulations for custodians like exchanges and webwallets.  Regulators can help look after your consumer rights and enforce legislation upon those companies when they misbehave.  The part they've now realised they are missing is that they don't have sufficient regulations for companies that claim "our digital asset is backed by X amount of $/€/¥/etc and will be pegged 1:1 to those assets".  And, just to be abundantly clear, that's what a stablecoin generally is:  a company making a promise and you have to trust them to keep that promise.  People can buy those tokens believing that the fiat money is there.  But if said company are lying and the funds aren't really there, it could be difficult for regulators to act.  So they want to bring in this legislation to help with that. 

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is completely different.  Bitcoin doesn't make claims about being backed by other assets.  There's no company involved who regulators can hunt down and force them to pay out compensation in the unlikely event something somehow went horribly wrong with the protocol.  Regulators are totally powerless in that situation.  They know there's no point in trying to enforce some regulations that wouldn't actually help them in practice.  It would be a waste of their time to even try.  So it's "outside their scope".

I'm not saying all traders are to blame.  Some of them may be genuinely unaware of the suspicious and evasive behaviour that Tether/Bitfinex are displaying.  However, if traders have seen the warnings and choose to ignore them, they're equally culpable if/when it blows up in their faces and they lose everything.

Yep, it's important for anyone using the newer and more experimental features in Lightning to understand the potential risks.  At the moment, I'd probably advise people only use wumbo with people and services they know and/or trust.  Otherwise stick to smaller amounts.

Hopefully they find a solution for this and other attack vectors quickly.

I'm definitely not reading all 168 pages, but the fact that it states clearly on page 1:


appears to imply that they have no plans to attempt to regulate protocols like Bitcoin, aside from the usual AML stuff.  The focus will definitely be on the stablecoins that claim to be backed by fiat or other assets, because this is the part that requires trust.  Trust can be abused, therefore requiring regulation around consumer protection. 

In essence, protocols can't lie.  Companies can (and often do).

If it were anyone else, I'd suggest that if they made some valuable contributions to the forum of their own, they could then earn some merits to distribute as they saw fit.  But, given who the author is, we all know they'd never bring a speck of value to this board if they tried for the next decade.  So all they can do is cry about how other people don't give merit to the supposedly important posts OP would give their entirely imaginary merit to.


Overall verdict: 
The system works as intended.  Worthless trolls are unlikely to be a reliable judge of which posts are important and it's good for the forum as a whole that they don't have lots of merit to (mis)allocate.

It's not like there haven't been enough warnings.  There have been a few topics where people have highlighted the problems in clear detail:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1881199.msg18693313#msg18693313
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3202211.msg33233707#msg33233707
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5050929.msg46924908#msg46924908
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5120673.msg50162473#msg50162473

BitMEX also have a fairly comprehensive write-up about it:

https://blog.bitmex.com/tether/


I can't tell if people simply haven't noticed and we're not shouting loudly enough, or they're just too busy trying to make a buck to even care.  If it's the former, then maybe we have a chance to educate people and limit the damage.  If it's the latter, then all we can do is await the inevitable and hope that it dies before it gets too big.

Presumably this means the regulators are satisfied they've got sufficient funds to meet the standard bank requirements for fractional reserve.  Y'know, since people always tend to assume exchanges are full-reserve.   

I think you're all clever enough to know that fiat banks aren't full-reserve.  Maybe it's about time we stopped thinking of exchanges like that, since they're probably not.

If anyone has any viable alternatives, I'm all ears.  They're going to keep printing more from nothing.  New traders are probably being suckered in daily.  It's only going to get bigger.  Is there a way to collapse it gradually without causing an avalanche that brings the entire mountain down on us?

The only thing I can think of is some sort of educational campaign to highlight the dangers.  But I suspect the greed of traders will win out, just as it's been doing all along.  They're not going to listen to reason.

I think we should try both before we give up on the board entirely:


Notability and copy/paste are both problems in their own right.  I don't see how we can ignore one and not the other.

Smaller media sites have an obvious interest in generating traffic for themselves, so we need the notability criteria to combat that.

Forum users who can simply copy and paste some text and attribute a source so it's not classed as plagiarism have an easy exploit to make posts with basically zero effort.  We then end up with abandoned topics where no one actually has any interest in talking about the news, because no one even attempted to start a discussion.