Why is Warren Buffett like this? I mean a lot of the major players in the current economic environment are against bitcoin, but Warren Buffett appears to hate bitcoin with a passion, and I can't explain why this is the case. Perhaps he had a bet with one of his wealthy investor friends regarding what the price is going to be, so he is trying to manipulate the price as a goof?

I mean, if that's all you are doing, then more power to you, I somehow thought that you were awarding people just because they were newbies.

But I'm not sure the additional explanations will help, that's what I was thinking. The beginner board is also full of the same topics as everywhere else: "Can bitcoin be trusted?" or "I have $500, which coin should I buy" and so on. I appreciate you trying to encourage the beginners, but the content quality is pretty much same everywhere; you could do what you're doing not only on the beginners board but anywhere else as well.

Please stop asking for predictions. The market is so volatile that it is impossible for anyone to predict how the price is going to be. Just follow the news and hope for the best, other than that, pretty much no one knows anything.

What do you mean "backed by smth real"? All coins are pretty much virtual are not backed by any concrete object. If you are asking exclusively in terms of stability, you can't go wrong with the major altcoins like ETH and LTC. They are as stable as they come.

Isn't awarding merits for other reasons than quality content against the idea behind merits? I thought the idea was to encourage and promote good content by giving merits exclusively to such posts.

Since there is a limited amount of merits anyway, I'd suggest you to give those merits to posts that are actually good. You're contributing to the overall post quality in the forum in any case, you might as well give the merits to posts that actually deserve them.

It amazes me that people still haven't figured out how a Ponzi scheme works and the alarm bells don't start ringing when they see that they have to bring in more users in order for the system to work?

Or perhaps, what is even worse, these people know that it is a Ponzi scheme but they are counting on the fact that they will have won their investments back by the time the system implodes, which would mean that they would be knowingly bringing people in and trying to scam them out of their money.

I don't know what is worse: Ignorance or malintent.

People wanting to rank up is not the problem, in my opinion.

Let's get a few things out of the way a priori:

1) Almost all of the users signing up here are in it for the bounty money, and not to learn more about crypto. There are far better resources for that on the internet.
2) Higher ranking members get paid more than lower ranking members.
3) Handing out (and receiving) merits is not an objective process, even if you write brilliant stuff in your every comment; if no one stumbles on it, or if people don't feel like giving merit, you will not get any.

As such, you can see why people are getting frustrated. If people write good content and do not receive any merit, it's like working your ass of at your job and not getting promoted. So what would the result of that be? You either quit (= a lower amount of quality content) or realize that the hard work you put in is not being recognized so you start not caring at all, because whatever you do, the amount of recognition you get and money you get paid remains the same (= filler comment after filler comment, which again leads to a lower amount of quality content overall).

Starting from the beginning, I have repeatedly said that the incentive system is not going to take off unless it is integrated into the user's experience on this forum. Currently, why should anyone give anyone merit? If you're giving merit, you are doing it out of goodwill, because you are a good person. But otherwise, the forum doesn't award you for handing out merits in any way.

People often make comparisons to reddit, which also employs a merit-like system in upvotes and downvotes. But upvoting a post on reddit means that I'm likelier to see that post at the top of the thread, which results in an improved reddit experience for all users; so users have an incentive to hand out merit, because it is beneficial for them as well. But we have nothing like that here.

To summarize my points:

1) People are here for money. Let's not kid ourselves, talking about knowledge, friendship, cotton candy and rainbows.
2) If people write good content and feel like they are not being rewarded for it, they will eventually stop producing quality content.
3) Unless the merit system becomes an integral part of the user's experience on this forum, it is not going to take off.

Sorry for the wall of text, and thanks to anyone who read this far. Cheers.

In all seriousness, you are not going to say that you were thinking that the governments would leave crypto untaxed, do you? Especially after they saw how much potential it has?

"Some got scammed, some got rich, the rest is trying." You should end that sentence with "and none of them paid any taxes". That's why the crypto regulation is inevitable.

Well at least it has stopped dropping consistently, it is at least something. I think bitcoin will have to remain green for at least a few days in a row for us to be able to say that bitcoin has started recovering, but the current status is way better than what we had in the last month.

Isn't this the exact opposite of what cryptocurrencies stand for? We praise the crypto environment for being decentralized, yet you propose to centralize our efforts to fight the most centralized opponents of all time, i.e. established financial institutions?

Our power comes from the fact that we don't have to act as one. If we continue with what we're doing currently, that should be enough. The disruptive nature of crypto will win out eventually.

I agree that bitcoin is currently dead as a currency, but it doesn't have to be a currency in the first place. It is perfectly fine as a commodity, or an investment method as well. There are countless other coins out there which are very fast and have low transaction fees.

All coins serve different purposes and I'm perfectly fine with bitcoin not being a currency, i.e. a mode of daily payment.

There are countless threads like "do you think bitcoin has a future?" or "is bitcoin a scam?" which are obviously totally pointless, but they have tens of pages of responses, which are also pointless and "filler" comments as well. So just because a thread has many replies or views doesn't mean that the thread is constructive.

Actually, in my experience, the longer a thread is, the more it is full of filler comments. A constructive discussion is generally over within ten pages at most.

What does that even mean? Bitcoin is not money out of thin air, if it was completely worthless it wouldn't be worth any money. So it is definitely filling some need that people have. As such, it is a commodity which has a certain worth, which appears to be around $8.3K at the moment.

If you need some quick money? Other than that, some people may hodl to hopefully have a lot of money sometime down the road, some are happy with selling off some of their coins every now and then to increase their income. Everybody has different motivations and one is not necessarily better than the other.

What $6000 are you talking about? As of right now, the price is $8400, and the overall trend over the past few days has been positive. I agree that what bitcoin experienced was a crash, but this may be the beginning of a recovery.

You should know that all predictions are baseless and they are speculations, rather than predictions, because especially this latest drop should have shown everyone that all the charts and analyses and predictions amounted to pretty much nothing. So no way to say what is going to happen to the price.

There is no way to circumvent this, is there? Major news outlets will never stop using sensationalist titles for crypto related news, doesn't matter whether right or wrong. And since cryptocurrencies are so prone to be affected by news and social media, I feel like every time some major government wants to implement some new crypto regulation, we are going to experience these price drops every single time.

News like this will help hugely to dissipate the FUD that was floating around recently, since a lot of governments were not giving clear signals about what exactly they were thinking about cryptocurrencies. Things are starting to get better new, and developments like this will only make things better.

$10K is a huge stretch, and no one knows when the crypto market will eventually recover to come back to the old levels. I'm thinking $5K-$7K levels would be justified, but I'm not feeling $10K so far.

McAfee is just talking for the sake of having talked, his comments have no substance. When did he even become an expert for cryptocurrencies? We should stop paying any attention to what he is saying.