Are you familiar with the concept of open source software? The author makes it free for anyone to modify and release their own versions of it. Or can just pass the role of maintainer to other people, no strings attached. And no single person controls Bitcoin development, all the changes that are made are agreed upon by the community of developers.


This doesn't mean anything. If satoshi had an alt account, he could have registered it at any point in history. You gotta show a lot of strong evidence to claim that someone is satoshi, not some single and meaningless coincidence.


Where did you pull that fact from?

You can't use 12 years of performance to make reliable forcasts into the future. Sure, governments could theoretically put a small fraction of their reserves into Bitcoin, but OP is talking about replacing US dollar, the most popular reserve currency in the world. Imagine a poor country converting 40% of their reserves into BTC and the height of a bubble, see it crash 80% over a few months and now they are unable to provide basic government services. Government can't and shouldn't gamble with their peoples money.

Gold is a poor example, it has been used by humanity for thousands of years, and even early governments held it in their treasuries.

If you want to copy someone's trading moves, then forget about it, you will just set yourself up for being easily manipulated. Like these whales will make a move, wait for noobs to copy their move, then make a larger counter move and reap massive profits from noob's losses.

There are no wallets on Bitcoin network, only addresses. Some addresses are linked together so you could with high confidense say that they belong to the same entity, but many remain unlinked. Also you can't know what "whale wallets" are doing once they send their coins to exchanges. Maybe they are not dumping Bitcoin for fiat, but instead trade altcoins? Or let it sit there and wait days or weeks before they make a move?

Governments can influence the price of Bitcoin, but they can't control it. They can push the price up or down with their actions, but they can't set Bitcoin's price at some target and maintain it, which they do with their fiat currencies to a large extent. Also a lot of their actions can work only once. After China banned Bitcoin mining for real, they can no longer influence price in that way again. Bitcoin being decentralized doesn't mean that it's immune to all influences.

Similarly, governments can ban mining or try to impose some regulations on miners, but they don't control all the miners in the world. They don't even have 51% of miners under their direct control ready to launch an attack. And don't forget about nodes, which are run by thousands of private individuals across the world and can't be realistically regulated because it's just a regular PC.

Are we still having this blockspace debate in 2021? Fine then.

84 million coins or 21 million doesn't really matter. Bitcoin would be 4 times cheaper and people would have 4 times more Bitcoin. Zero net changes.

4 times faster blocks means 4 times more blockchain bloat which means faster centralization of the network. And these 2.5 minute blocks would require less PoW so they would be less secure, so you would need more of them before you can trust a transaction, so the waiting time would be almost the same on practice.

Bitcoin can't be a world's currency neither at 7-11 transactions per second or at 28-44 transactions per second, it needs thousands of transactions per second to do it, like Visa does, and Lightning Network is the only way to achieve this.

Both are highly secure from a point of view of average users. I would recommend hardware wallets to less experienced users and cold storage to more experienced users (though they already know what to do and don't need any advice). Hardware wallet is a bit simpler to use, while cold storage is a bit less likely to be targeted by hackers. In both cases, you still need to carefully verify that your addresses haven't been replaced before sending, that you're using clean systems, etc.

Why would governments hold something as volatile as Bitcoin in their reserves? The lives of millions of people in each country depend on those reserves, now imagine there's the usual 50% "dip", how would a country survive that? Not to mention that Bitcoin's current scalability is not ready for active use by a large portion of human population, even if just as store of value.

People always make broad statements for newbies like "be helpful and don't shitpost", but newbies can't really feel the full difference between a shitpost and a good post. Writing shitposts is not always a sign of laziness or stupidity, it can often be just a lack of experience so it's kinda a natural phase for many. I'm sure that if you went to check the early posts of people with many hundreds of merits, many of them would be not so great compared to their current posts. I'm an advocate of using this forum naturally, like any other social network - don't be obsessed with ranking up and earning merits, just express your opinions and participate in discussions, if you'll earn merits that's good, if not then don't worry, it's just a forum.

I would be cautious about being hyperbullish now, because it seems that this bull run lacks the narrative to support the further gains. In the beginning it all start with institutional FOMO due to their fear of inflation, but now there's no big institutional attention at all, the inflation concerns have lessened when the US announced they will take measures against it, and now the US also seeks to impose more regulations on crypto industry, which is not at all a bullish thing. There is no big narrative behind this bull run, and the last time a bull run lost its narrative we've seen a drop from $64.5k.

You need to be selective with what you read. If you were to read every single post in every single thread that you see, you would waste a ton of time without learning anything, because there's so many low value posts, repetitive posts, unimportant topics, etc. Every beginner should start with reading a good book about the basics of Bitcoin technology, get some knowledge of cryptography so that they could start answering people's questions.

If you want 100% privacy and financial freedom, you simply avoid all centralized exchanges, instead of trying to sneak past their internal rules and protocols. If you want general privacy, than mixing will always be better than mining virgin bitcoins, because it's more private (the fact of owning virgin bitcoin already reveals that you are doing mining), it's cheaper (some mixers have zero or close to zero fees) and much easier (you can mix almost any amount, while with mining you have to wait and take business risks).


Yes, I don't live in the US and I live in an apartment, which is where my point of view about electricity prices and regulations comes from. I wanted to remind people that not everyone has the same conditions,

Just because something is being actively sold, doesn't mean that it is objectively valuable. People are spending tons of money on antiviruses that give them a false sense of security and don't stop all malware, or essential oils and other alternative medicine stuff that hasn't been proven scientifically. Or maybe the demand for virgin bitcoins is driven by actual criminals who exchange their dirty coins for it as an alternative to mixing.

IMO if you don't engage with illegal services the chance of getting your funds wrongfully frozen is so low that it's not worth it paying the premium on virgin bitcoin or trying to mine it.

No one is giving away Bitcoin seriously. All those giveaways, faucets and bounties don't yield much and many of them are just scams that waste people's time or steal their coins. Buying and holding Bitcoin is a money-making method, but you need to have some money to invest in the first place, now more so than before because the rate of Bitcoin's growth is slowing down. So investing in Bitcoin is not a way for poor people to get "fish", it's a method for people who already have "fish" to get even more "fish" and protect their wealth from inflation.

Home mining is practically illegal in many places, because it's generally illegal to use home electricity for some sort of commercial purpose, and running even one 1-1.5 kWT PSU  24/7 definitely falls within this category. Residential electricity is sold much cheaper than the commercial one, so it's kinda stealing to use it for mining. Plus it's also a fire hazard.

Getting into mining just to obtain "virgin bitcoin" is a really stupid idea, it's crazy inefficient and virgin bitcoins wouldn't give you any good benefits anyway. Every coin is tainted to some extent, exchanges only freeze coins that come directly or almost directly from darknet markets or hackers, there's very low chance for a regular non-criminal user to have their coins wrongfully frozen. And if you trade on p2p exchanges, you have even less reasons to care about taint.

If you get your salary paid in Bitcoin, you will have no choice but to spend it on your living necessities as well as entertainment, hobbies, etc. From time to time I am selling small amounts of coins when I need some extra money for my purchases, and I never care that these money could be worth 10 times more in the future, because I live in the present, not the future. I'm not going to sit in my house all my life and wait for Bitcoin to go to the moon.

They aren't going to allow businesses to accept cryptocurrency payments directly. Bitcoin will not be a legal tender like it is in El Salvador. Crypto is not banned in Ukraine, what this law will change is just taxation and some new regulations for exchanges and other services.


This law won't be touching Ukraine's CBDC project. In fact, the law that would allow Ukraine's central bank to issue CBDC has already been passed a few weeks ago.


If EU will be more hostile towards crypto with harsher regulations and higher taxes, you could say that Ukraine is an "island of crypto freedom", but it's still far from what El Salvador is doing.

Yes, that's right. Curiously, the journalist asked about how they would verify the profits/losses and the minister said "blockchain is transperent, we can demand people to show their wallet to see all their transactions" which is a bit crypto illiterate thing to say. But on practice if you trade via centralized exchanges, there won't be any room for tax evasion.


As I wrote in my earlier post, this is actually the least exciting part. Payments directly in cryptocurrency will not be allowed. This doesn't mean that people who pay with crypto on Craigslist-like sites will be prosecuted, it means that businesses will not be allowed to receive crypto directly to their wallets, just like they are not allowed to receive USD or any other currency except for UAH. What he meant by "crypto payments" was debit cards and other similar solutions that instantly convert crypto to fiat. But you can already use them, I'm sure one of those Bitcoin Visa cards that converts BTC balance into USD will even now work in Ukraine by then converting USD into UAH.

I don't see how it's "big news" if buying crypto on centralized exchanges has always been easy with Visa/Mastercard transactions that are done with a few clicks and process quite fast. If Coinbase allowed some sort of buying Bitcoin without registration, that would be quite a big deal, because registering on exchange and passing KYC is a step that turns away a lot of potential buyers, but we all know it's not gonna happen because of regulations.

So if the choice is between losing your money quickly with shitcoins or losing slowly with less shitty coins, then why choose at all and not go 100% Bitcoin? Almost every newbie nowadays knows to stay away from "shitcoins", but because they are newbies they lack fundamental skills like determining if a coin is shitcoin or not, or the basics of trading like having a strategy, taking profits, cutting losses. If they just buy and hold Bitcoin, they will have a guarantee that they are investing in honest project not created for pump and dump.

You can hardly buy anything with gold, probably way less than with Bitcoin, yet it's still worth a lot. Bitcoin is a digital token that is secure in a way that no other digital asset is - Bitcoin does not rely on any third parties that must be trusted or can be ordered by government to freeze your money. Even if everyone who currently does stopped accepting Bitcoin as payment, it would still be worth a lot, because it's no longer solely a currency.