America already has lots of problems with poverty, inequality and absurdly expensive health care, legalizing organ selling is like adding oil to the fire, poor people will have no choice but to give away their health for money. A better solution is to just make every deceased person an organ donor, with an option to opt out of this program for the paranoid people, making them ineligible to receive organs in exchange.

And what does the blockchain solve in this situation? If someone wants to cheat in this system and has a power to do so, they would still do it. They can create fake identities and put them into the queue, for example.

I am holding Bitcoin for more than 5 years. At this point I'm already extremely satisfied with Bitcoin's performance, even if it stopped growing and never moved above the current price for the rest of the history, that would still be a tremendous success for me. I could cash out and reinvest it into a diversified portfolio of traditional assets like real estate and be very financially secure.

All those "crypto for specific use case" are scams and shitcoins. There's absolutely zero benefits for creating a currency for one field or use case. The whole point of money is to be exchangeable for everything.

Crypto can't do anything for farmers. It's just money, a payment systems, it can't really solve any problems not related to that.

These days it's better to just never answer unknown phone numbers if you don't expect one to call you, it's pretty much always just spammers and scammers. There are even apps for blocking all calls that are not from contact list, can be very handy if you get constantly attacked by some callers.

Such calls can even be used by attacks like sim-swapping or resetting your password.

My problem with spending merit is that all the good posts that I see come from guys who already earned above 1000 merit, so they will get no benefit from it, aside from ranking on the list of top merit earners. And people with low ranks just don't make posts that would honestly deserve a merit, they tend to mage very simplistic "bitcoin to the moon" and "i love blockchain technology" posts.

If earning merits is a hard task, then so is spending it, except nothing bad will happen to you if you are not spending your merit. So I want to thank the people who actively seek good posts to merit and decided to become merit sources, they are spending a lot of their time to make this forum a better place. Maybe without them some good posters would have gotten discouraged, though I do hope that most good posters are posting because they have something to say and not to just rank up and join a signature campaign.

Sounds good, doesn't work. Ethereum also envisioned that because of GPU mining they will have a more decentralized network, and yet no one really mines at home with their single GPU that they bought for gaming, almost all mining is done by farms, and they tend to be large data centers and not small-scale home farms. And don't forget how it ruined the GPU market and GPUs essentially got turned into professional tools unavailable for general population.

Islam and being backwards, name a more iconic duo.

And those clerics are directly benefiting from their people being more poor and uneducated, because that's how they get to keep their power. But maybe Bitcoin will shift perspective of at least a few people out there, regarding their religion.

You are less likely to get hacked than an exchanges. Exchanges are targets of cybercriminals who are ready to use the most expensive zero-day vulnerabilities, because they can profit tens or hundreds of millions from a hack. You are not a target, because they don't even know about you and it's not easy to hack a cold storage or hardware wallet.

But hacking is just one of the risks, exchanges can also pull an exit scam, or the government can seize their funds, there can be regulations designed to lock you out of your funds and so on. The risks of self-custody are clear and low, the risks of trusting a third party can't be fully calculated.

You are wrong on both cases. BTC is not backing USDT, it doesn't make any sense what you are saying, Tether is backed only by USD, and even then it's very questionable just how fully it is backed. Which leads to your second point, they absolutely can print USDT out of thin air, and maybe they were doing it for a long time.

At least with Bitcoin they have asset that is resistant to inflation and is not controlled by some centralized organization and not tied to a currency of a foreign government. Plus USD is already their official currency, what sense would it make to add USDT?

51% attack steal can't spend someone's coins or create coins out of thin air or really do anything like "controlling the blockchain". It can just undo the latest blocks, so the way to profit from it is to send someone coins, wait until they give you something in exchange, then undo the blocks with your transaction and have your coins back in your wallet. But aside from requiring 51% of hashrate, you also need to find someone who would agree to a large deal in BTC and will require just a few confirmations and not, let's say, 144 or 288 confirmations.

Such attacks happened with altcoins and exchanges suffered losses, but with Bitcoin it's very unlikely to see it on practice.

The fact that Tim Cook owns and supports Bitcoin is really old news, it has already been reported years ago. He even lost some coins to scammers, I think it was some tens of thousands of dollars worth of BTC.

This is positive, but don't invest in Bitcoin simply because celebrities do so, and don't expect the price to automatically rise when this happens.

It's never 100% safe to buy. People encourage newcomers to buy, because they don't care if they can experience a loss or not. But if you tell people to buy and HODL, then you can do it at any time, because they will make profit in the long run if they don't panic sell.

If you don't have a ton of crypto assets, then you will earn just tiny amounts from BlockFi. As yourself is having a high chance of losing the entire investment worth it? Because crypto businesses have an ugly tendency of getting hacked or pulling exit scams.

It's hard to call something a scam when it existed for 12 years, has been a stunning success and there's zero evidence of things that define the word "scam". And the argument about environment is successful because environmentalism is on the rise, and there's a grain of truth to it, but no one asks what "bad for the environment" exactly means and what are the implications of it.


The fact that people are not buying Bitcoin is not affecting Bitcoin's price or Bitcoin network.

"Strictly offline" and "connect once per week" are mutually exclusive things. The point of offline is to be isolated from potentially infected environment, but you want to so easily break this principle. Same goes for virtualization.

And why do you want to get involved with paper wallets? They are less secure if you are going to sweep the keys on online machine, compared to using offline machine to sign transactions.

IMO when you deal with Bitcoin security should be your #1 priority and convenience should be the last thing you worry about, because all your coins are at stake, and you don't want to lose them all because you were too lazy to spend some extra 10 minutes on making an offline transaction or spend $100 on a hardware wallet.

You can easily ignore Bitcoin. Millions of people don't invest in stocks or any assets, either because they are too broke or because they don't want to. Bitcoin is not air, you can live without it.

And lets not get happy when celebrities, especially the stupid ones, get into Bitcoin, this doesn't mean anything. Tomorrow someone will pay him a few millions and he will turn into a shitcoin shill.

In real life top-security vaults almost never get successfully attacked, unlike in movies or video games. Bitcoiners should be more worried about kidnapping and home invasion.


You don't need to choose options, you can make multiple copies and store them in different ways, including putting them in vault.

That's one big "only", because overwhelming majority of bitcoiners use those services. Without centralized exchanges Bitcoin wouldn't reach even close to the current price, and adoption would not be as high without convenient and safer buying and selling.

Government doesn't really care if some crypto geeks are sending each other $500 in BTC without KYC, as long as they control the large flows of money, they will consider it regulated enough.

My experience is different, I can't remember the last time I heard someone claim that Bitcoin is a scam or a fad. These days I hear more "bitcoin is bad for environment" and "blockchain technology has some merit, but other coins will replace it soon".

But I think it's not really important what some random people on the Internet or in real life say, because they are not voting with their wallets.

There are hundreds of altcoins created each year, and almost all of them die rather quickly, and not a single one of them has became truly revolutionary, not even Ethereum. And then, you should also keep in mind that cryptocurrency is fungible, so even if you have a coin from early blocks, it stops being such when you transfer it to someone. And this thing with putting coins out of circulation does not happen with every altcoin. So, overall the chance that you can get some extra value from altcoin being collectable is astronomically low.