If some rich or middle class person invested $1,000 or $10,000 into BTC early, they had no reason to liquidate at 2x profit, because they didn't need those money anytime soon and could afford to risk and wait more. I won't be surprised if that's how many of the current whales were made - they kept hodling because they could afford to lose their investment.

Srsly, why would they want to put their trades on fully transparent ledger that can only handle a million transactions per day globally and is not controlled by either of them? What if they will need to reverse a transaction, or block transaction if a hacking incident occurs? I doubt they will ever even hold Bitcoin as a reserve asset, purely out of fear that the US has backdoors to it.

Except for the privacy part. The only way to get privacy in Bitcoin is to use mixers and similar technologies, and even then you're not guaranteed anything, because chainanalysis companies are working on "un-mixing" as well as other forms of tracking and deanonymization. Monero is a beter fit for this description, but it comes with its own problems and tradeoffs, so it will never even have a chance of taking Bitcoin's place.

No, I don't think that the second Bitcoin's mined supply goes from 89.9999% to 90% it will start going to the moon and we'll all become millionaires. This is not exactly news, everyone always knew the Bitcoin distribution. Bitcoin price will likely continue to grow in the long term, but you can never know what will happen in the short term - it can go sideways, it can crash, it could stagnate, it could suddenly pump.

Ponzi scheme is when someone is taking money of new investors to pay the early investors. In Bitcoin no one is making any investment profit payments, you buy it and later sell it, just like with any other asset. If someone tries to insist that Bitcoin is a Ponzi after this argument, they just want to believe in what they believe, even if it has no basis in reality.

Yes and no. The same principle still applies to any investment - don't go all in on just one investment or "invest more than you can afford to lose", but the risk of investing in stocks is lower than investing in Bitcoin, and so are the profits. And stock performance is at least to some extent can be tied to how well the company is doing, but Bitcoin short-term performance ignores all fundamentals. The network is the same today as it was a year ago when the price was only $10,000. Where's any guarantee that it won't crash just as fast for absolutely no good reason?

Bitcoin is still risky because there's no way to predict where its price will be going next. Literally nobody saw the current bull run coming, we had a market that was stagnating for a long time, and then suddenly the price started doubling extremely fast. There were no fundamental changes, so similarly a crash might come for no big reason at all.

I am currently very deeply exposed to BTC, its around 75% of my networth, and I think it's a bad idea and a huge risk. To me, and probably to most people, not being poor is more important than being increasingly more rich, so taking profits and diversifying into other asset types is an objectively good decision, even if it's going to be not the most optimal decision in retrospect.

Also, newbies shouldn't invest too much because they have higher risks of losing coins to things like hacking, malware, fake wallets, trusted third parties, scams, mishandling their private keys, etc.

Exchanges can't detect if incoming Bitcoin transaction belongs to you or a third party, at least most of the time. They are actually more concerned about fiat deposits and withdrawals that concern third parties. For example Binance just won't allow you to withdraw to a bank account with a different name than the name that you registered at Binance. And you probably can't deposit fiat from a bank account with different name too, that could be abused by thieves and other criminals, or just be used to bypass some restrictions, like serving clients from sanctioned or unsupported countries.

There will always be new and fresh topics, because the world is constantly changing. 4 years ago no one talked about Elon Musk on this forum, but this year when he got involved with Bitcoin there were quite a lot of topics about him and hist statements. In the future there will be more new events and we and future generations of Bitcoiners will be discussing them. And don't forget that technology changes too - new cryptography, new hardware, new code will emerge and people will discuss it too.

When a person who constantly makes the same prediction does it again, there's really nothing special about it. If it was some prominent economist who actually makes in-depth analysis and is not known to have biases or ulterior motives, then it would be something that you would want to pay attention to.

Sooner or later we'll have a global economic crisis again, but this doesn't mean that those who warned about it were right - after all, if you make the same prediction over and over, you will get right eventually, but you will also be wrong most of the time. If they can't predict a close enough timing, such predictions are worthless.

I really hope that Satoshi will never be found, if that is their desire. Way too many people in Bitcoin community, generally newbies, think that it would be fun to uncover the mystery, ignoring the fact that privacy is a large part of freedom, and desire for more freedom is what lead to the creation of Bitcoin.

It's really unrealistic that all current devs would stop contributing to the code. Covid would need to have like 99.9% lethality to kill all Bitcoin devs, so we'd have bigger problems than Bitcoin development if that happened.

Over the course of Bitcoin's history many people stopped contributing, like Mike Hearn or Gavin Andersen, and as you can see, it's not a problem. In the highly unlikely event of mass quit, the development would slow down for some time, but eventually it will get back on track.

But what can we as regular users do? This attack does not target us, it targets servers. So it's important to not leave your personal info everywhere, which is easier said than done, as sites like Amazon or Ebay require it for deliveries.

This is the reason why I haven't mixed my BTC. I don't spend it, but I have plans to make fairly large sales (and already did one), so naturally I must be prepared for answering to my bank or tax authorities about the origin of my coins (but so far it didn't happen, luckily). So my logic is, better to not mix the coins, to not make them look suspicious.

If I were spending BTC regularly, I would have prepared some mixed coins, because I don't want some services being able to learn about my other transaction and use or sell that data.

Maybe in the future every aspect of Bitcoin use would be regulated and you could use mixers and other privacy tools and be able to reveal your transactions to government if needed, but right now I don't want to risk it, not when the amounts that are large to me are at stake.

Maybe one day you will be happy that banks ask those questions, because hackers will try to drain your bank account, and these measures will stop them. Unlike with Bitcoin, where one mistake, one wrong click can cost you all your money. Because Bitcoin's independence doesn't come for free, it also brings a huge responsibility, the responsibility that most people are, let's be honest, not fit to take, as they use "qwerty123" as their password on all sites and click on random links and spam emails, and download software from the first result of a Google search.

And not everyone is having negative experiences with banks. In fact, most people probably don't, because otherwise there would be higher use of the alternatives, not only crypto but also things like PayPal or Venmo. I this year had to do some fairly large transactions, and I didn't mind that my bank had me to jump through some hoops, because I don't do such transactions every day. It means that someone can't just hijack my sim and drain all my bank account.

Machine learning is not exactly easily to implement - you need high quality data and you need to configure the network in just the right way so that it would generate the best model, but it would be in this situation mostly just guessing on how to do this. And of course neural network can't get 100% accuracy, it probably can't even do 60% accuracy, but anything over 50% is a success, because it means that profit can be generated over a long period of time.

But this doesn't mean that you should go buy one of those Bitcoin trading bots, most of them are likely just scams, because if someone had a successful bot, they would just use it themselves, instead of sharing it with others and reducing its performance.

And another weakness of machine learning is that it can't react to real life events. Like how Bitcoin crashes or pumps when certain big news happen (China ban, Tesla buy, etc.).

Ethereum's development is completely centralized, a few people basically fully control its course. In Bitcoin there is a broad community of developers, so no single individual or a handful of people can hijack it.

Ethereum's blockchain is so bloated that few home users can afford to run an actual full node, so even if Ethereum people try to claim that they have a lot of nodes, in reality Ethereum is already being run only on a small numbers of large farms. Bitcoin full nodes on the other hand can easily be hosted on old PCs and laptops, which a lot of people actually do.

With Proof of Stake Ethereum will get even more centralized, as whales will become a major factor on the network.


Except you really can't make almost anything useful with them. All what Ethereum has achieved is becoming a fertile soil for countless scams like ICO and NFT. I remember in 2016 Ethereum was promising to bring automatization, allowing things like automatically paying for your electricity bills via smart contracts, but none of that became a reality. Instead we got things like DeFi and NFT, which have zero use in real world. Ethereum is a solution in search of a problem. Bitcoin is a solution to existing problem - trust in third parties when you deal with payment networks.

The only reason why Ethereum is so expensive is because the people behind it invest a ton of money into marketing and spreading the myths about how useful and revolutionary it is.

He can avoid paying taxes by selling the coins on OTC exchanges and withdrawing USD to his offshore accounts. This man isn't just "big businessman", in Ukraine people like him take every legal and illegal advantage they can get to fill their pockets even more, despite already being billionaires. And they have influence to get away with it rather easily all the time.

He is not some genius entrepreneur with fantastic business sense, he is mainly leveraging his money and influence to steal from the government and by extension from the people. Like I said, he won a most likely rigged auction for that electricity, and he will very likely not pay any taxes on his Bitcoin profits. This is the man who moved a ton of money out of the largest bank of Ukraine, nearly bankrupting it if not for government interference, and currently he succesfully evades FBI who has a lot of questions about his activities in the US.

This is a net negative for the free market, because honest miners who buy electricity fairly and pay their taxes can't compete with people like him.

These news aren't on any English-written media yet, so I'll drop the google translate link to the original: https://www-pravda-com-ua.translate.goog/news/2021/12/10/7316898/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=uk

The journalists found a lot of details about this operation, mainly the shipments of ASICs (5558 units of Bitfury B8 and 14468 units of Antiminer S9) and the purchase of electricity on an auction, which is suggested to be corrupt, as the price is below the typical market value for industrial use. The farm, which is located in Kolomoyskiy's steel factory, is estimated to be making 80 BTC per month. And since Ukraine still doesn't have working crypto regulation, the oligarch could be easily not paying any taxes on his profits, on top of getting unfairly cheap electricity.

Interestingly, this is not his first time setting up this kind of operation, as he already done the same thing in the US last year.


I personally don't think that this has any implications for Bitcoin, in Ukraine or globally, it's just curious to see how these boomer oligarchs are surprisingly savvy enough to recognize an opportunity for profit and quickly set up a large scale mining farm. It's probably no coincidence that it happened this year, after China banned Bitcoin, so Kolomoyskyi probably got a good deal on those ASICs. Maybe this isn't the adoption that we want or need, but it's still adoption.