If Bitcoin is so popular, then why its marketcap is only a fraction of gold's marketcap? Maybe because gold investors are ready to put large sums into it, while Bitcoin investors only put smaller amounts because of the volatility risks. Or maybe such popularity is only present in Russia and a few other countries while the rest of the world is less enthusiastic about it. Though the US and a few European countries are leaders in node count, so this is probably not the reason.

If everything plays out well, Microstrategy will never sell all their coins, but it's expected that they will be taking profits from time to time, what's the point of investing if you never sell? And if they will use Bitcoin directly to purchase something, it still counts as "sell".

If a person already has a job, they most likely shouldn't pick up crypto as their second full-time job, it would leave them too exhausted. Also, crypto doesn't need to be time consuming. All you need to do is learn the basics of Bitcoin and read some news from time to time. It's the people who daytrade or chase altcoins might find themselves in situation when they are spending too much of their time on crypto to the point when it starts getting detrimental to their health like OP describes.

There's no such thing as a stupid BTC purchase. Bitcoin is money, if you wouldn't regret spending US dollars on something, you shouldn't regret spending BTC. No one could have predicted how high Bitcoin will get in all these years. You just need to have a clear strategy. If you view Bitcoin as your savings account, try to replace whatever you are spending. If you're okay with taking profits right now because you want to buy something, then don't regret it in the future.

Not knowing the rules is never an excuse for breaking them.

Pretty much all rules on this forum are a common sense, if you're breaking them, you're not a harmless newbie but a malicious actor. Plagiarism is wrong, you can't just copy someone's text and present it as your own to earn merits and activity. Spamming and shitposting is bad, it just creates noise that distracts everyone from decent topics. Scamming is always morally wrong.

IMO the market is in very undecided state now. On one hand the rate of growth has slowed down, and when that happens a downside movement becomes quite likely. On the other hand, Bitcoin just established itself above the psychological $50,000 level which is quite bullish. I think it's very likely that there will be a bit more upside movement, maybe $53-54,000, and then a new test of support.

There's not enough services to see hacking incidents every day. Let's say a service gets hacked once in three years, this means there should be over 1000 notable services to see big hacks every day on average. Of course there's much less prominent services than that.

The thing is, everything gets hacked, not just crypto services. However, hacking is especially dangerous when it comes to crypto because there's no way to undo it. Hacking banks is not a lucrative because banks can undo it if they detect it quickly and they often trace hackers because their systems always require KYC.

There has recently been a post on reddit about a guy who lost his Bitcoin stash to leveraged futures trading. The big reason why he decided to trade was because he watched Saylor's videos. Of course you can't say that Saylor is directly responsible for someone's trading loses, but I think that this hype is not healthy for the market, it just creates volatility and some people are bound to lose their money when there are large price movements.

Bitcoin fees will be high, $10-20 on average with spikes to even higher levels, purely because the block space will always be very limited while the demand will grow. On chain transactions will not be used for small transactions, they will be used for oening LN channels or making large transfers, in both cases paying today's equivalent of $20 can be justified.

You can't solve an economic crisis by having your people holding Bitcoin. Economic crisis is when there's no jobs, no opportunities for business, no good ways to make money for the population. Poor people can't live off buying and holding Bitcoin, especially not when they have little to start with. It's completely out of touch with reality to think that Bitcoin can solve an economic crisis.

From your own chart you can see that when this bull market started in the end of 2020, the amount of Bitcoin reserves on Coinbase was at ATH for quite some time, then it started lowering even while Bitcoin had a dip. I think there's no strong correlation here that could allow to predict the long term price movement. People very easily can send thousands of Bitcoin tomorrow to dump them. Maybe it only means that investors are becoming more aware of the risks of holding coins on centralized exchanges.

We are lucky that Jack Dorsey is a Bitcoin enthusiast, if someone else was their CEO, the chance of Bitcoin integration right now would have been very low. Very few prominent companies, especially those who are not financial by their nature, are interested in rolling out Bitcoin payments. The demand from people is just not there yet.

This is so bullshit, you can't make $1,000 per month on an "old gaming PC", if you could, lots of gamers would be getting rich. $1,000 per month in mining revenue can be done on a multiple GPU rig with the latest gen cards, which would cost thousands of dollars to get. And the reinvestment is bullshit too, ETH mining doesn't have such a short ROI that you can grow expontnetially, a card takes 6-12 months of mining to return its cost. Something is very fishy with this article.

I always found "criminals use USD more" a very poor argument, because fiat is used for EVERYTHING much more than crypto.


Both centralization and decentralization can be used for good or evil. Bitcoin is important not because it is always better than banks in every situation, but because it's an alternative system that gives people more options and better opportunities in certain situations.

If Afghanistan government stored their money in BTC, they could have easily evacuated it by sending the coins to the US government or just taking the private keys out of the country. It's the storing of cash or gold would have been a problem because it would have required logistic solutions and the government fell in a matter of days.

The advantage of centralized custody in this situation though is that if Afghanistan government had some defectors or sleeper agents of Taliban, they could have taken bitcoins before they could be moved out of reach of Taliban, but with foreign custody it's impossible.

When Bitcoin goes down, it usually does it very fast. The fact that there has been 3 weeks of a narrow range at the top could also be a bullish sign. It was quite common in the bull markets of the past to have longer periods of stability without growth. The market is undecided for now, but I'm sure that a big move will happen very soon.

Nayib Bukele is not a tremendously popular president, he and his closest people were accused of corruption many times, so this is where the idea that Bitcoin will be used for money laundering comes from. Also, if the government will decide to store a large portion of its assets in Bitcoin, then volatility is a very valid concern. I would protest too if my government held more than 5-10% of its treasury in Bitcoin, even though I myself have a much higher portion of my networth in BTC.

If you're doing something that will get you into trouble with law enforcement, then they will easily make coinbase or almost any other centralized service give up the full list of your customers. But if this isn't a problem for you, you can use some other centralized service as a "wallet" like an exchange or a casino. From the outside it would look like all your customers are receiving money from that service. But the withdrawal fees are generally pretty high regardless of the actual network fees. And exchanges could probably close your account for such activity, because they will see that the account clearly isn't used for trading.

A better solution is to use coin control to have no more than 1 output (aside from change) and immediately mix your change outputs and never used unmixed inputs.

This isn't even true for all fiat currencies, most countries basically let the free market decide the price and the central bank participates on this market to lower the volatility, i.e. it buys the national currency when it goes down and sells it if it grows too fast. There are still some countries that fix exchange rate, but they are a minority.

I'm not going to say that Bitcoin will never switch to PoS, the future can be very unpredictable. There were people thought that Internet is just a fad and won't get any traction. But currently such switch seems to be very unlikely and the overall probability is very low, because Bitcoin's main goal is maintaining decentralization and PoS is against it. But maybe Bitcoin community will change after many years and will be more accepting of introducing centralization, or maybe some improved versions of PoS will be invented that will be more decentralized and attack-resistant. But PoW works well enough, so there must be some strong reason to seek to replace it.

I doubt that Americans (or anyone really) study the platforms of political candidates, people simply vote for someone who resonates with their views the best. I think making Bitcoin a legal tender would be a very unpopular move, but if such candidate does not advertise this plan too much, a lot of people could not even notice it. And if such candidate is a lot more popular than their main opponent, there's a good chance they would win.

But realistically DNC or RNC would do everything they can to stop such candidate if they will be gaining popularity.