So 1 in 4 Russians have bought BTC. Seems about right, with the sanctions going on for the last 6 months I can see more and more people needing to move funds in and out of the country. Surprised it is not more. At a *guess* if you had asked that question 7 months ago the number would have been a lot lower.
Makes you wonder how many people are into crypto because they have to be, not because the want to be.
-Dave
Necessity is the mother of invention and adoption. The people that need to be in crypto will eventually realize that the want to be for the many of the same reasons they need to be. |
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I believe you are correct. More uses for bitcoin, more people realizing that one does not have to get out of crypto and into fiat will all help. The time to protect oneself is now. If you wait, it will be too late. When Covid hit, Central banks around the world printed enough fiat currency to prop up the economy. They printed so much fiat currency that they caused inflation. Bitcoin's run up along with the other major markets was a result of that money flowing from the large institutions. The problem is that there was a lack of actual value being produced.
The central banks now have to deal with the inflation caused by printing valueless currency. If they continue to print fiat currency to keep the economy from falling off a cliff we will experience hyper inflation. Currently real inflation based on the way it used to be calculated is at over 15%. This can not continue or the system will collapse.
What we are seeing is the result of higher interest rates and less currency being printed. It is what the central banks have to do in order to keep inflation under control.
Bitcoin is the best money ever created. What we need to see is Bitcoins adoption as money. This will take the power to print fiat currency away from the central banks and limit the up and down cycles we currently experience. Instead we will experience real economic changes in market conditions.
When Bitcoin is used as a money the value will naturally go up and stabilize based on people pricing goods in Bitcoin. The reason that Bitcoin is so volatile is that Bitcoin is being priced in dollars and treated as an investment. Bitcoin is not an investment. It is a money.
We are focusing on getting businesses to accept bitcoin as payment so that consumers will start using it to buy goods and services. This will resolve the issues that are causing it to be too volatile.
Another big issue that needs to be addressed is to not allow banks and card processors to steel value from merchants. This gives them control of the market and we as consumers are paying them to take our control away. We need peer-to-peer transactions. Satoshi had it right. If we eliminate the 3rd party from the transactions and make them trust less we will solve this problem and Bitcoin will increase in value based on people using it to purchase goods and services.
If one Satoshi is the equivalent of one US penny that would make one Bitcoin worth one million dollars. The value of Bitcoin will go up as people start using it as a money and not as an investment.
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Unless China, Russia and Iran decide to use an alternative to SWIFT, I wouldn't be surprised to see more of them using bitcoin in this fashion. |
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@Kakmakr. The Bitcoin community gets the blame for what?
I speculate that Mark Cuban is really an Ethereum maximalist and people like him will use Ethereum's switch to proof of stake to stengthen the argument that proof of work is harmful for the environment and uses too much electricity. Also, I have wanted to say this prediction, however, everyone might accuse me of antagonizing again hehehe. The prediction is Tesla will buy and hold proof of stake Ethereum.
Cuban is primarily a salesman so I really don't trust his judgement on the topic of POS vs POW. |
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Actually with crypto it won't be that easy, since one can buy/sell crypto P2P, avoiding the centralized platforms that enforce US rules.
Exactly. More importantly, once there is a critical mass in crypto, people won't have to trade in and out of it, they'll just settle up in crypto. Then there is much less need for an exchange whether p2p or centralized. This type of use if it is even real is a first step in having large amounts remain in crypto. If you buy something from ABC and they immediately trade it for fiat, what's the real point? The more controls that are put in place the more likely it is to occur. For example, when Stripe and PayPal banned the Trump campaign in Jan 2021, the obvious answer was to just switch to crypto. Ditto for other places that are getting hit by Visa such as pornhub's parent company. Ditto for banks that are denying loans to firearms companies, gun shops or oil companies. Ditto companies that are being black listed (or grey listed) on ESG grounds. Jen Psaki said that people who spread “misinformation” “shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.” She wasn't talking about just social media, she was talking about the entire realm of the digital world including online payments etc too. The end result of this will be to drive people to places that don't want to or aren't able to censor them and crypto is one place they'll end up because while it is nice to see "free speech alternatives" to some of these things, as long as they are centralized, they are subject to legal pressure. (No comment on whether this is a good thing or not with regard to it being Iran of course). |
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Bitcoin has gained so much popularity and recognition in the past few years that it rose from nominal prices to almost $69000 in 2020. It however gained hundreds of billions of dollars in capitalization over the years. The situation has changed with both appraisals/approvals and backlashes on the cryptos by some countries, especially government officials.
Inflation is another problem, and they have successfully caused Bitcoin to remain at lower levels compared to its all-time peak of almost $69000. Its market capitalization today is a little above $454 billion, which is still a good value. However, in events that more backlashes and higher inflation negatively affect the crypto some more and finds itself at about $1000. What would be your reaction? Will you turn your back on Bitcoin or has your investment just begun on it?
As for me, my investment has just begun. I have learnt from my past mistake.
Bitcoin was not $69k in 2020, that was 2021. Unless there is some huge problem with the protocol itself, $1000 is very unlikely and if there is a problem with the code or protocol, then the price could even be lower. Given the code as it is now and the code review that goes it, that seems nearly impossible. If it is just a panic by someone selling a bunch, that is a different story. So without knowing the cause it is difficult to say, but nothing that has happened in 12 years and one month has changed the proportion: if you want to control your own money without being subject to the whims of authoritarians around the world, bitcoin (and PMs) are your best bet. |
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Any centralized platform is open to being targeted and destroyed. Authoritarians the world over don't like privacy for anyone about anything, bitcoin is just one of the targets. Cash is another - look at the countries trying to limit the amount of cash one uses, reporting larger deposits or withdrawals etc. Speech is another, look at the fascists/socialists/communists/authoritarians on social media who don't want anonymous speech and want everyone to be verified. Without the ability to be anonymous, free speech isn't free.
The only response is to have privacy built in the protocol itself. Otherwise it becomes a flag for suspicious activity for anyone wanting to control bitcoin. One of the biggest threats to bitcoin is the lack of the ability to be anonymous.
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Hey thanks for the reply. So, what to explain a block after its prior 10-min block is a 38-minute block? Is it a sudden increase of difficulty? I thought this was so obvious until i googled it and found nothing.  Random luck or lack thereof. The more hashes that are being checked, the higher the chance you will "solve" a block. Think about if it was just you mining on a CPU, you might find a block in 1 second or in 1 hour. It just depends on dumb luck. The same goes when you scale it up so that there are many people all mining simultaneously. As above, roughly every two weeks, the difficulty is adjusted so that the 10 minute average is expected for the next two week period (as measured in blocks). |
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@goldkingcoiner. So according to your argument, if bitcoin fails, no other project in the cryptospace should succeed? Is this not very much removed from reality?
I am also not saying that bitcoin will die. I am only asking if the people would reconsider using bitcoin as a store of value if it has been overtaken in market capitalization by another coin and if bitcoin's value falls continuously.
I didn't think that he meant "no other project in the cryptospace should succeed" but that if bitcoin were to die, it would indicate some fatal flaw with crypto in general which would mean that no other crypto would succeed. Perhaps it is a subtle difference, but that was the way I understood it. :-) |
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One thing I have learned from Bitcoin price history is that it is not predictable at all. There are just too many factors that influence the price and trying to link Bitcoin mining to that, will eventually fail too. We saw several predictions linked to Bitcoin mining when the Bitcoin price took a 80% nose dive in 2020.. and most of them were wrong.  We had periods of 3 years between a "crash" and a next "All-time-high" Bitcoin price spike.... so all this guess work is simply a waste of time. Just concentrate on increasing Bitcoin adoption ....and the Bull-run will happen on it's own.  Exactly, it is completely unpredictable except over long periods: if usage continues to grow - no matter what the use whether it be transactional or protector etc - and new supply follows the programmed curve, then the price will go up. It is just that one can not predict anything over shorter timeframes. |
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They all insider-trade. I completely agree with what some people in this thread are saying. Coinbase just happened to get caught. Of course, they still deserve punishment for it. Once again showing how CEX will always be inferior to DEX which will always be inferior to P2P trading.
This kind of shady insider trading is something you can find a lot of especially in exchanges which offer derivative trading. Its all a bunch of horseshit. People do not really understand the scam which is high leverage liquidation. If you want to short your coin just swap it for USDT. Now you're shorting at 1x without any liquidation point. Better, right?
Hope Coinbase gets what it deserves.
Is it actually Coinbase that will be getting something it deserves? I believe that it is three employees who were abusing their positions, not coinbase itself. Anyway, it certainly is an abuse of trust of the customers who those employees are supposed to be serving and abuse of the trust that their employer placed in them. Whether it is criminal is a different issue due to the nature of some of the coins, it is certainly wrong no matter what though. I agree with you about centralized exchanges and trading, it is a recipe for just these kinds of shenanigans. |
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In the long term, I believe he is right. If it is a "by 12/31/2022" or something specific like that, who knows. It is just a guess.
When you see people putting $1 million in Celsius or anything like that, you have to wonder about their common sense. Of course if it was "common" it wouldn't need a special modifier, it would just be "sense".
You all are right though, who thought Luna was more than vapor with some hype? The cardiologist would've just been better buying bitcoin and sticking it in cold storage and holding it, but when you try to juice your returns with a few extra percentage without understanding the risks you can expect there is a good chance of losing the money.
If all those people who lost 10s (100s?) of billions over the last few months had just bought and held, they'd be in much better shape.
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One old forum member also having Mt Gox skin that sticks to mind is OgNasty. Just tagging here so they might see it. Think the last update I recall from them was about the NFTs being issued to members pending claims. Apologies if I was mistaken. This because of the looming repayment finally happening? I actually lost track, always seems to be "happening soon". I actually don't get any sort of notification when I'm "tagged" but happened upon this thread luckily.  I do have experience dealing with mtgox from a couple of different angles. I had a personal interaction with Mark Karpelès prior to the closure that should have raised a red flag for me and also was involved with some escrow deals involving mtgox at the time of collapse. I'm still working through the mess that was left behind, but hope to get it resolved this year. I didn't take from the recent email that we'd be getting funds next month like everyone else seems to have, but I'm hopeful nevertheless. I'm not on whatsapp or telegram, but I could be open for a chat. I was always surprised that people were leaving coins or fiat on mtgox and not moving either the coins off or the fiat off pretty quickly. The interface and software always seemed rickety and poorly designed from a computer science perspective. It turned out to be an accurate assessment from merely looking at the software from the web side and seeing some of the errors that would pop up. Nothing is perfect of course, but it seemed to be somewhat carelessly thrown together, particularly as the fiat value of bitcoin increased over the years. Even now, if one has to deal with an exchange (any of them - Coinbase or Gemini, you name it), one should put the fiat or bitcoin there and then move it elsewhere. The exchanges certainly seem to be more robust and better designed today, but do you really want to trust your coins to someone else? |
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If anything we are approaching the end of Celsius and their ilk. It has been like a broken record for 12 years now: if you don't control the keys, you don't own the coins, you are just a creditor. Anyone promising huge returns is taking huge risks and if they tell you otherwise they are lying.
In 2022 it is just a bit slicker than it was in 2010-2018 or whatever. It is the same garbage though and still no one has learned about the risks you take when you don't own your coins and 'lend' them (unsecured no less) to other people.
Same advice as before: Stay in bitcoin, don't keep your coins on an exchange, don't lend them out etc. If you must exchange for fiat, transfer to a reputable exchange and sell right away.
None of this is a reflection on bitcoin, it is reflection on people not using common sense to safeguard their assets. So, no, bitcoin is not ending. And I suspect neither are people taking huge risks with their coins and then later coming to regret it like recently.
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When you see the phrase "equitable economic growth" you know it means something other than given individuals the freedom to make their own choices and live with the consequences of them.
It means politicians want to hijack a self-governing ecosystem so that they can control everyone else involved. Bitcoin was developed responsibly so far. Other coins, well, that is a different question, but some of these platforms (e.g. celsius, MtGox et al) were just incompetent or were crooks. Or both.
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... At least the high initial inflation rates would keep the speculators at bay, and bitcoin could focus on its *intended* purpose: use as a *currency*.
...
Regarding Peter Todd's post there is plenty handwaving about the assumptions for lost coins. This isn't so much a proof as a hypothesis based on the assumptions because there is no way to use math to prove that coins are lost at a certain rate. Are Satoshi's coins lost? They haven't been moved. I have coins not moved since late 2010, but they aren't lost. Garbage in, garbage out. Likewise, continuing the block reward via tail emissions would seem to empower censorship and weaken censorship resistance: instead of the larger percentage penalty for censoring transactions and their fees, a tail emission mitigates that loss to miners. Finally as far as the quotation above stating that the "intended purpose" is use as a currency things like "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" indicate that the intended purpose might not have been solely as a currency, but to cut out the state and banks from being able to destroy the value of a currency by profligate spending via bailouts and others. Among other things. If an inflation coin is desirable or a different block subsidy is desirable, the answer is to fork the code and blockchain with these new rules and convince a sufficient number of people that the resulting inflatecoin is desirable. |
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That's how those with more resources will always dominate the ones that have not much to spend. "the rich will always have more power than the poor" Proof-of-Work:- You can't forbid or affect the entrance of new voters.
The cost of the mining equipment and the cost of energy , and the warehouse rental forbid anyone but the rich from PoW mining.Entry by the poor has been banned for years due to lack of profitability of PoW mining.
There is a huge difference between being "banned" from doing something and being unable to do it. It is the difference between locked in a country and prohibited from leaving - e.g. China for some people, eastern Europe under the USSR etc - and being unable to afford a plane ticket to fly somewhere else. You can alway do something to earn the money to buy one. |
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I don't agree with this bill. I mean it is like saying that contributing to the security of the Bitcoin network is not a worthy business to use carbon-based power sources, while other businesses like plastic fabrics, transportation firms or retail stores are acceptable... I thought USA was a country focusing on innovation and the spirit of freedom.
...
Look at who is running NY (and DC) and you will be able to see that elections for freedom. Just ask the Democrat party in 1860. |
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Exactly the same thing happens in bitcoin system. The senders are just transferring data (numbers) via bitcoin messaging system, without the receivers getting the ownership rights on some type of property. The receivers are just able to read the received numbers or send them to someone else. And that's basically it. That's what messaging system are doing.
Ok, let's do a test. Get 1 BTC, I'll give you my address, send that Bitcoin to my address and let's see afterward who owns it and who can send that "SMS" once more or if you can get that "data" back unless I want that too. Deal? That essentially means that there's no buying going on in the bitcoin system. No investing. We don't buy or invest in numbers. This would be as nonsensical as saying that we bought or invested in SMS message when we received one. Receiving a dozen of letters or numbers is not investing or buying, because alfanumeric symbols are not copyrighted. We use them for free whenever we need them.
Again, can you please send me some let's say 10 BTC, maybe 20 BTC if you're such a nice guy? Especially since they are free? If we need numbers for performing mathematical calculations or labeling and quantifying things, we just produce them out of thin air and represent with symbols (0-9). We don't need to buy numbers. We don't need someone to protect them in a distributed database. Numbers are stored in our minds, and they don't need protection like gold, diamonds or cars do.
So a credit card or a bank account is...what?  I don't know what the OP's motive here, to convince people his distorted beliefs towards bitcoin? What you offer him to do will basically test his premise here. If the receiver is just able to receive the numbers and not owners, let's see if he is even willing to send you even 10k satoshis. We are not buying numbers here but the value of the bitcoin itself. This is why if you have btc, you want to secure it as much as possible. If you think that it is only just a number, can you easily transfer your btc to another person without much thinking about it? After all, you said, it is just a number and don't need any kind of protection. OP's motives are probably that he is some type of authoritarian - fascist, socialist, communist, despot etc - at heart and doesn't like people being free to protect themselves and their assets from him and his ilk. |
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However, if history were to repeat itself, BTC investors may witness another epic bull run that previously helped Bitcoin reach an all-time high of $69,000.
That's a big if and judging by the market behavior in the past year alone, I highly doubt we're going to experience something similar in a few months [I hope I'm wrong]. Changes in Bitcoin prices directly impact the miners’ income,
That's true for the majority of miners, but regarding those that keep or rather hodle whatever that they mine, it'd have a smaller impact [apart from individual miners, there were also two companies that decided to not sell whatever that they mine, but I forgot their names]. The article also talks about compass mining getting cut off in Maine.
Considering that they already had a poor track record in regards to punctual payments or even paying the bills at all, I'm not blaming the current dip for what happened to them recently [it probably has something to do with poor management]. Re compass mining, it sure sounds that way. There are a lot of fly by night or fly by the seat of the pants folks who start something and then fail. I'd put mtgox and celsius in those categories. I talked to some of the attorneys etc in Puerto Rico about the benefits for US citizens of being there and they were convinced celsius was legit and well run. I questioned their other comments then and even more so after the last few weeks. The cloud miners may be good, but there are a lot of opportunities to take the money and run. |
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