All the current implementations of NFT are completely centralized, so in such event the central authority could intervene and mint a new NFT. This just highlights how useless the NFT technology is - it changes absolutely nothing, because you still need the same third party intermediaries, but it created hype about owning digital items, and now there's a market bubble that will soon burst.

How exactly are they hedging their positions nicely? I imagine if were to enter a 2 year long bear market now, Nayib Bukele would be seriously screwed politically, as he'll have a lot of explaining to do to angry citizens as the government sits on a loss with their big investment while their economy is doing very poorly. Plus he seem to have bad relations with the US and IMF, so who would bail him out in the worst scenario?

Bitcoin is quite likely to go above $100,000 at some point in the future, but will Bukele still be a president when it will happen?

I meant monetary volume, not transaction count, should have written it more explicitly.

It's true that there's a lot of wiggle room for hashrate before it starts impacting security, but the threat of 51% attacks shouldn't be underestimated, and the bigger Bitcoin becomes, the more reasons to attack it the people who don't want it succeed have.

It's not realistic now or in the near future, but if more countries ban mining like China did, and miners decide to quit instead of moving to other countries, then the attack could become more feasible.

Supercycle is a narrative created by bulls to instigate FOMO. It's not realistic to think that Bitcoin can go only up for really long periods of time, because practice shows that Bitcoin market tends to always drop when the upward momentum gets lost, and I just don't see how this would change in the near future. You would need a continuous streak of positive news to fuel such cycle, a new large company or a country buying Bitcoin every week - this is not going to happen.

If the whole concept of NFT depends on centralized platforms, then it means that NFT is centralized and useless. You can do whatever you want with your token, but when a third party controls what that token represents, it's no different from any traditional centralized database. Except these third parties seem to be really lazy about what they are supposed to do.

The total number of full nodes is estimated to be around 100k or even less, so either I'm missing something, or there's something wrong with this research.

I don't doubt that China's hashrate is not literally zero, but China probably lost 99% of its hashrate, maybe even more, so I wouldn't say that miners have won. Yes, government can never fully stop Bitcoin, but Bitcoin needs a lot of PoW to secure the current transaction volume, and it will only grow, and we can't get this PoW without large farms that are vulnerable to being shut down by government.

A lot of people tell newbies to HODL and don't be a short term trader, and then they also tell people to buy the dip every time the price drops, which is exactly what they usually warn against - short-term trading. Yes, you don't lose money until you close your position, so if you buy dips and wait a few years, you're still in profit, but buying dips is not a smart strategy. The best strategy is to invest all the amount that you plan to invest during bear market and then wait for a long time and sell a portion of your coins in bull market and repeat this again when a new bear market comes. Buying dips is risky, because no one knows if this is just a short-term correction or the bear market has already started.

They are different, because all those collectibles are what they are, but NFTs are supposed to only represent a right to something, but the problem is, there's absolutely no way to enforce that right without centralization. NFT pictures are hosted on centralized websites, in-game items with NFTs are stored in game server databases, and so on.

NFT is hyped as "truly owning digital assets" and being decentralized because of blockchain, but the reality is that they are all so heavily centralized that it makes them pointless.

This is not a solution at all, it doesn't prevent thieves from making an NFT. They can do it and try to impersonate the original artist, they can pretend to be a different artist and pretend that it was their original work. They can even flip some pixels to fool the reverse image search algorithms. They can scan a physical artwork of some obscure artist and pretend that it's the original work. There's lots of ways to create fake digital art and get away with it if the buyer doesn't put enough effort into verifying it.



"Bitcoin is used by criminals" is a bad argument because a relatively small share of transactions belongs to criminals, and Bitcoin is not exactly a big crime enabler, because there are better tools, like privacycoins or cash. Though Bitcoin certaintly did contribute to the rise of ransomware, and it's still the most popular payment method for it. But overall Bitcoin is a net positive because its other properties offset the negatives.

I will argue that NFT is a net negative, because it's so full of scammers who pump their NFTs with fake trades and lure suckers into buying something that is insanely overpriced, it creates other negative situations like the one that I posted, and it has very little positive effects, because the technology itself solves absolutely nothing from technical point of view.

Small artists actually tend to lose money, as minting an NFT is very costly because of ETH gas fees, and they have low chance of making profit. NFT doesn't change the fact that few people are ready to pay for art that they can consume for free - buying prints, vinyl records, etc. Those who want to do it already do it just fine with traditional payment channels.


Bitcoin gains are a multiplier on the money that you have invested. So two people who invested different amounts in the same time have gotten the same ROI, which is fair. And they had pretty much the same opportunity for investment, as there is no barriers to enter Bitcoin market.

But with NFT small artists get nothing while celebrities instantly make millions. I'm not saying that inequality is evil and we should fight it, but this is a counter to the popular argument that NFT helps the artists. It does not, it generally only benefits those who don't need the help.

Today I found an interesting post on /r/Cryptocurrency about an artist who had to shut down his online gallery, because people keep stealing his works and turning them into NFTs - here's the original post.

NFT technology is legitimately useless, all it does is creating a unique token on blockchain that has zero meaningful connection with the thing it's supposed to represent. When you NFT is an url that points to a centralized site, it's really no different than buying a star or moon land from some scam company.

The artist said that NFT hosting sites refused to cooperate and remove the stolen art, but even if they were doing their job, it would still mean that the whole system is centralized and pointless. Deluded NFT fans like to say that NFT gives people the ability to "truly" own something, but in reality NFT owners own absolutely nothing and are at mercy of NFT hosting sites.

NFTs were said to help support the artists, but here we see how they did the opposite and forced an artist to close their gallery and reducing their chances of selling their art or getting commissions. The artists who are profiting from NFTs the most are the big names like Grimes who are already rich.

Against what exactly do the scarcity of gameplay or cosmetic items needs to be ensured?


Lootboxes are popular, and that's a problem because of how predatory they are. NFT has a chance to become another kind of this cancer, especially when combined with lootboxes and other similar practices - people and especially kids will end up spending more money on junk content.

That's why sometimes it's important to use concrete metrics instead of broad terms like "adoption". For example, we can look at Bitcoin's usage for consumer transactions and compare it to use of Visa, or compare how much people hold Bitcoin and how much people hold gold or other assets that are traditionally viewed as a hedge against inflation. Also the volumes are also important - so here we can look at Bitcoin's share in investment portfolios, volume of consumer payments, etc.

The advice of taking emotions out of trading has been given here countless times, no need to post it again.

"Data-driven" hodling or rather trading is not as popular as you might think. There's a lot of models based on past performance, and they are all too inaccurate for any practical purpose. There really is no good way to predict the short term price, if there was such method, you could become insanely rich by applying it to volatile markets, and there is no extremely rich people who made their money with daytrading.

What do you mean by "100% mass adoption"? When all people in the world switch to Bitcoin? Then it would just be "share of global population that uses Bitcoin". Or is it percentage of some theoretical maximum of Bitcoin adoption? And what do you mean by adoption? Does it mean owning any amount of Bitcoin? Or does it only count if you regularly use it as a currency?

I have a strong feeling that this project will fail because the costs will prove to be higher than anticipated, there will be lots of small problems that would together slow things down significantly, and there will also be political factors, both from inside and outside of the country. Not the first "dream city", not the last.

Why not take an existing city and make it a special economic zone, why should it be a brand new city? Just because of the volcano mining hype?

Companies don't want to accept Bitcoin directly, there's too much problems with it - potential legal and regulatory headache, higher security requirements, risks of price volatility and so on. They choose to use existing payment proxies like BitPay that will take care of it all and give them fiat money for each Bitcoin transaction. Unfortunately it means that the users will get screwed and have to deal with all the inconveniences and problems of payment processors, and that market is not looking good right now, with BitPay being the largest player.

I don't think that smart contracts are needed for drive-by attacks - when you visit a site and it steals your ETH and tokens from your wallet. Smart contract is basically and address, you need to make a transaction to interact with it, so if an attacker can make a transaction on your behalf, they could just send their coins to regular address instead of a smart contract.

Smart contracts are used in scams by hiding some sort of backdoor that would allow them to steal money of anyone who interact with it. Like how they promise some profits from something like yield farming or staking, but then just steal all the tokens that were sent to them, because no one realized that the devs added some hidden function for that. Or hackers could find a legitimate bug that could lead to this scenario, but I'm more inclined to believe that a lot of the "hacks" are just inside jobs, because it's easier to put a bug in the software than to find one in the wild, and crypto space is full of scammer "developers".

You can't learn it, you must grow accustomed to it. When you have hodled for many years and seen countless ups and downs, you will naturally start ignoring all these crashes. You will probably even stop checking Bitcoin's price compulsively. But it's unrealistic to expect such things from a newcomer who just yesterday was excited to see their investment grow, and now absolutely naturally worry when they experience their first crash.

Developers want to be recognized for their work, maybe have it on their resume, they can be understood.


This is where Michael Saylor and other whales should come use their profits to reinvest them back into Bitcoin ecosystem.

https://twitter.com/stalker_thegame/status/1471620399997886472


S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 NFT is officially cancelled. I was right when I was telling on this forum for quite a while now that gamers don't want NFT, but it even surprises me just how much backlash these NFT announcements are receiving. NfT really does have a very negative reputation outside of crypto space, because people see it for what it is - a useless speculative fad and a vehicle for scams.