The Core developers post new software updates and announcements here. They hold weekly IRC meetings, which are summarized here. Most development discussion takes place on the bitcoin-dev mailing list. You can find the archives and follow along here. The project also has an official Twitter account, but it's just for major announcements and isn't very active.

This, although I'd prefer to keep them offline for time being, until there is actually a bullish altcoin market again. It could be years, after all.

Lots of dead coins from 2013 and early 2014 saw resurgences during the 2017 altcoin bubble. When the mania gets crazy enough, the market eventually starts buying up anything that hasn't already pumped. To be fair, that may not be true next time around, now that there are so many more altcoins. I really wouldn't be surprised, though. "Irrational exuberance" to use Alan Greenspan's expression, is a very powerful thing and most people underestimate the degree to which the market will get irrational.

It'll happen again, eventually.

In terms of linear scaling, Schnorr signatures can help a bit. I've seen estimates as high as 40% reduction in blockchain data, but the truth is that we have no idea what future adoption will look like, or how long it might take. It was the same with Segwit; adoption is voluntary and therefore slow.

Whether scalability improves by 10% or 40%, it's still only a linear improvement. If the network is faced with exponential growth, then the improvement from Schnorr will be a drop in the bucket. What we really need is off-chain solutions that provide exponential scale -- like the Lightning Network. The incentivized privacy benefits of Schnorr are a lot more exciting than the potential scaling benefits.

Bitcoin isn't a job. Work that pays in BTC is like work that pays in any other currency. You need to have the appropriate skills and knowledge, and you need to find employers willing to hire you. You can check out the Services forum to see if there's anything you might be hired for. You mention posting on this forum -- there are signature campaigns, but I don't think any of them pay Newbies since you can't put links in your signature. Here's a thread with information about the requirements to rank up. If I were you, I wouldn't quit my day job just yet.

What are you using for your wallet? A lot of people make the mistake of using an exchange as a wallet. That usually means very high fees on every withdrawal. Or they use a wallet with horrible fee estimation, like Copay.

A good way to lower your Bitcoin fees is to do the following: Use a wallet with good fee estimation, like Bitcoin Core or Electrum. From time to time, consolidate your inputs with a low-fee (~1 satoshi/byte) transaction -- combine all inputs into one address, because it's cheaper to spend from one input. If you don't need urgent confirmation, then don't spend high fees. When you need quick confirmation, use this tool to estimate the fees required to get in the next one or two blocks.

You have a couple options. If you realize profit, incurring taxes, you could segregate the amount due for taxes from your total capital and hold it in fiat currency. The alternative is to realize the losses on reinvestment (70% in the above case) to drastically lower the total tax liability.


I have a friend in Ukraine and this is accurate. I mentioned this article to him and all he had to say was "meh."

More than the Goldman Sachs flip flop, all this gushing over ETFs was real a eye opener for me. Give me a break! They're paper markets where you trust institutions to back pieces of paper with a peer-to-peer currency! Just say that out loud. Have you ever heard of anything so nonsensical?

It raises some interesting questions about who Bitcoin investors are (at this point) and where their principles lie -- how easily they might be co-opted in the future. Many people are now so greedy for price gains that they're praying Wall Street involvement will pump the price, principles be damned. If they really understood Bitcoin, they wouldn't advocate for all the counterparty risk that paper Bitcoin markets will create.

Governments have been trying to do that for years -- and they've been failing. About five years ago, there were multiple Congresspeople calling for all-out prohibition. They tried to deter adoption through associating BTC with crime and the darknet markets. Two bubbles later, what good did it do? Everyone knows by now that the vast majority of cryptocurrency usage is not criminal in nature. Even the mainstream media is repeating that point by now.

I imagine governments will try to push centralized coins as an alternative. I'm not sure people are dumb enough to fall for it, though. Venezuelans don't seem too impressed with the Petro.

Politicians -- like anyone else -- would be silly not to own some Bitcoin. Congressman Bob Goodlatte disclosed that he owned BTC and ETH in his last annual financial disclosure. I'm sure others will join him by next year.

Supposedly 5-10% of people in the US own some cryptocurrency at this point, so I'd expect more and more public officials -- and other such dinosaurs -- to start buying in as well.

Al Capone got busted for tax evasion. He didn't get busted for inability to prove where his income was derived from. That's not a coincidence. The IRS does not ask for the origin. They only ask for very general categories of income (including itemized capital gains).

You're veering off into paranoia when you say that possessing money automatically means the presumption of illegal activity, and further that this warrants investigation by law enforcement agencies besides tax authorities. Do you have anything to support these theories, besides hypotheticals?

It's been explained already that the threshold (at least in the US) is whether reporting was "reasonable" and in "good faith." For example, see this answer from a licensed CPA:

I'm really not sure where guys get these ideas about proof -- "if you can't prove the source, you'll lose everything or get dragged off to prison" etc. That sounds very outlandish to me. I've been filing tax returns on behalf of clients for many years as well as my own, and I deal with CPAs and tax authorities regularly.

Anyway, personally, I would avoid talking to the IRS directly about your own case. Consult a qualified tax professional (or two) and follow their advice. That way, if the IRS ever comes after you -- highly unlikely IMO if you pay your taxes with reasonable accuracy -- you'll have formed the basis for a "reasonable cause and good faith" defense.

Sadly, it's the type of thing where people will keep doing it until they have a compelling reason not to. They're convenient and easy to use, and the alternatives are anything but. People often don't understand the incentives to avoid centralized exchanges until it's too late.

It's scary how much personal data these exchanges have on people -- their withdrawal logs combined with KYC is a treasure trove for police agencies. Sometimes I wonder if BitPay is a honeypot. The truth is that any centralized entity large enough to get the US government's attention is liable to give up their database at the drop of a dime when the time comes.

I think Coinbase is long done playing that game. The block size debate and Brian's personal involvement was a PR nightmare for the company. I imagine their shareholders put a stop to it.

I think their push into altcoins is more about their perception of where the market is headed. It's the same reason GS/Circle bought Poloniex with plans to make them a legitimate broker-dealer. They might be wrong about the market -- companies are wrong all the time. But that's what I think.

Anonymity? They obviously log IP addresses, browser and session information, etc. They blacklist coins and work with law enforcement. I figured this day would come. FinCEN probably threatened them with an enforcement action.


More like disguising it as a loyalty program. That's cute.

Andreas hit the nail on the head here:

Who are these users? Not many people took part in Bitcoin's early days, where the gains (up to now) are so impressive. And I think most people from the earlier stages also sold most of their coins early. I sure made the mistake of selling too early -- years ago -- and most people I've talked to have made the same mistake.


The ledger is public and transparent. On the current trajectory, bandwidth and storage requirements are unlikely to make running a node inaccessible for most people. Price-wise, early adopters are always better off. But in terms of usability, I think the combination of Lightning and other protocols with the infinite divisibility of BTC will keep Bitcoin accessible. Late adopters just won't be able to afford much of it.

That's possible, but I think it's more likely that the same cycles of the past will play out. Many altcoins experienced a bubble in early 2014, then repeated the cycle in 2017.

There is a theory about stock market patterns called sector rotation. For better or worse, and without speaking to the fundamentals (or lack thereof) underlying altcoins, I think that this same mechanism plays out between BTC and altcoins over and over. During the bull markets, greedy new investors and traders are chasing whatever they think will rise in price next.

There are no experts in this market. Bitcoin has been around for less than a decade. Most of the commentators you see on TV don't understand the technology nor its built-in economic incentives. I don't take their predictions seriously at all.

I do remember sensible people warning of the upcoming crash once the price went vertical and into 5 figures. After all, a crash is only natural after the kind of rise we saw in 2017. If you hadn't been through a Bitcoin "bubble" before, now you know.

At the end of the day, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is the market -- it reflects whether people have faith in BTC and whether the network is growing in adoption, in spite of its practical shortcomings or nascent state. If all these complaints really posed a threat to Bitcoin so that people stopped using it, the price would be closer to $0 than $6,500.

You're always going to hear naysayers and people fighting the adoption of Bitcoin, whether because they're stubborn and closed-minded or because they have financial or political interests that benefit from that. In spite of those people, Bitcoin continues to grow at an impressive rate in network reach and mainstream acceptance, and I think that's reflected in the price.

If you're cherry picking small time periods like 9 months, you can obviously make it seem like a bad decision to HODL. That misses the point entirely. The term emerged from the idea of holding through a bear market even as losses mount, based on fundamentals and long term trend. The guy who coined the term spelled out why it makes sense to HODL: most people make bad traders who just lose money.

FDIC insurance only covers your USD balance on Coinbase. Also, I think it only extends to United States residents:


They have insurance on their online hot wallets, but not their offline storage, which is >98% of cryptocurrency they hold. If their cold storage gets compromised, they could easily become insolvent. Then you'll only get a fraction of your coins back through the bankruptcy process -- just ask Mt Gox victims.

You should get a real wallet like Bitcoin Core or Electrum. If you have to, use an actual online wallet (not an exchange) that gives you control of your private keys, like GreenAddress.

I've only seen speculation on Reddit and clickbait stories to support this theory. I haven't seen anything particularly convincing. Any blockchain evidence that shows these coins went to exchanges? If these were controlled by the US government, they wouldn't be dumped on exchanges of course. They might be auctioned, though.

Markets thrive on fear (and greed, but that's another story). Major BTC movements (triggering high bitcoin days destroyed) have always fed into fear, like any other FUD, e.g. that news about Goldman Sachs earlier. I don't think these coins were dumped. People are just fearful and panicky.