For the OP, what suchmoon said.  But Jet Cash's point is important too.



Definitely something I need to be more conscious of when I'm posting on my phone.  Been guilty of that one a few times lately.  

I do need some help on that front, though, so I'll ask it here as it's kind of on-topic.  On my old phone it never had this "feature", but I now get this weird 'zoom-all-the-way-in-for-seemingly-no-reason' when trying to select text to remove from a quote and it's really annoying.  Does anyone know how to turn it off?  Android/Chrome if that helps.

Today, I'm closer than I've ever been to my 100th birthday.  Doesn't mean it's going to happen any time soon, though.   

It's only going to be a "very exciting week" for the people buying the hype.  Still not expecting to see an ETF approved for at least another year or two (and would be happy if it took far longer than that).

It won't help you if you don't know what you're doing.  Bots can automate the trades you tell it to make.  If you tell it to make bad trades, it may even amplify your losses beyond what you might have lost trading manually.

Almost all of your complaints are generally aimed at what different companies and organisations are doing.  None of it is a fault with crypto itself.

It's only natural that companies are going to engage in rampant profiteering in a relatively nascent field like this.  For now, it's relatively easy for businesses to capture a monopoly at this early stage, but eventually this space will mature a little more and services will be forced to price more competitively.

Your solution is either to deal with better companies, or, preferably, find a way to cut out the middleman and do it yourself.  That's the most interesting part about crypto.  I don't see a gun to your head forcing you to use those services.  Tired of exchanges?  Explore peer-to-peer options.  Don't like the conventions?  Start your own.  It's up to you.  No one is going to hand it to you on a plate, though.  Because, as much as you might complain about these companies, they put some work in to get where they are now.  If you think you can do better, you'll need to do the same.

I thought it was pretty much common knowledge by now.  The speculators are going to keep gambling anyway, because greed.  Convenience is clearly a greater concern than the mounting risks for them.  They know it's shady.

I'm actually pleased to hear that the speculators have a new favourite plaything.  Daytraders are just victims-in-waiting, so when they invariably get burned through hacks, market manipulation or exit scams, hopefully the negative headlines might get attributed to USDT instead, heh.  It also doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they'd pick such a poor "coin" (doesn't meet my definition of the word cryptocurrency, anyway) with serious doubts over the legitimacy of its backing.  I'm suspicious of so-called stablecoins in general, but Tether seems to be by far the shadiest of them.  Ultimately, USDT lives primarily on exchanges and has little utility outside of them.  That's not how crypto was designed to be used and confers none of the benefits of being in control of your own funds.

Give me BTC in a wallet that I control any day.  

If they give you too much, you can just give them some back.  Just as if you were dealing with physical coins.  There's no way for you to prevent them handing you the wrong amount, but you can work out the right amount and refund the difference.

FTFY.  Difficulty is going up and it doesn't do that if the hash rate is plummeting.  People are jumping at shadows:

https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/difficulty

It sounds nice in theory, but I'm not convinced.  The only way a blockchain can truly be transparent and immutable is if it has independent nodes all around the world run by people who are adequately incentivised to keep the chain secure.  

So the problem is twofold:

a)  What company would even consider launching a decentralised blockchain where their customers are responsible for maintaining the ledger?

And

b)  What would be the incentive be for ordinary people to start securing blockchains for lots of different companies?

Otherwise it's just a private database the company can alter at will if they control all the nodes.  It's just a database.  It can be manipulated.

At this stage I'm inclined to chalk it up to ignorance and herd mentality.  Someone mistakenly thought the hash rate dropped alarmingly, not realising it was just lousy metrics.  It gets reported in the media without being fact-checked.  Speculators panic.  Snowball from there.  Lots of fuss about not much.

That would all depend on what it is you're aiming to accomplish.  Unless I'm interpreting your words incorrectly, it sounds like you're asking us how to make money from securing a blockchain, in which case you're barking up the wrong tree in the Development & Technical subforum.  In terms of security, the way in which we're currently securing the Bitcoin blockchain is definitely "worth it", even if it isn't profiting you personally.

I definitely support the notion of scrapping the minimum number of posts per week.  There might be the occasional week where I hit 20 posts, but it's certainly not common for me.  Sometimes I don't even hit 10 posts in a week.  My inclination is to post only when I have something to say, so I'm fairly sure the quality of my contributions would suffer if I was forced to post more than I naturally do. 

Would it even be Bitcoin if people weren't overreacting to something fairly innocuous, though?   

I get that the media need their attention-grabbing headlines, but are we still not past taking everything they report at face value yet?

I'll have to double check when I'm not on my phone and have a bit more time, but I *think* it was this recent Andreas Antonopoulos video where he raised a similar point:

https://youtu.be/15qZu-OHFk0

If memory serves, he said "you'd have to be a sociopath", or words to that effect.  It's probably a thought many of us have briefly considered at some point or another, but yes, it's sick when you actually stop to think about it.

* moved by request from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158920.msg52488736#msg52488736 *



I'd assume it's more a case of "when" than "if", so once the demand is there and it makes sense to have one, we'll probably get it then.  Difficult to tell how long it might take, but I guess that's up to devs, retailers and anyone else working towards the goal of increased adoption.

Perhaps he was generalising, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  But whether he really believes he speaks for an entire nation (and a highly populous one to boot) or not is beside the point.  Everyone is free to transact however they choose.  If you want to use Bitcoin to make payments for real world goods and services, go for it.  If you want to speculate and try a bit of daytrading, that's cool too.  If you're holding until you retire, awesome.  Whatever you're doing, keep doing it.  It's not for others to tell you what's right or wrong, even if opinions are offered on the subject.

I personally think speculation is overrated, but if that's what people want, who am I to judge?  It's their personal wealth on the line, not mine.

ETFs won't be censoring any transactions, though, because the investors won't have any access to the BTC to send it anywhere.  The sole purpose of an ETF is to hold some bitcoins in reserve and not move them.  People then place fiat bets on the price, never interacting directly with the bitcoins.

I don't think I did initially, but I'm there now.  You're approaching it from the hypothetical scenario that a majority of Bitcoin users would be reliant on these companies and would then be restricted in their usage, correct?

From the perspective of someone who definitely wouldn't be reliant on those custodians, I'd feel a bit sorry for those "users" (technically, not really Bitcoin users), but that in and of itself wouldn't constitute a failure of Bitcoin (in my view anyway), as it's simply what those people opted to sign up for.  No responsibility and no control.  If that's what some people want, it's up to them.  If, however, it begins to impact those of us who aren't using those services, that I would perceive as a failure. 

If, for example, such a cartel claimed they had an economic majority and somehow managed to pressure developers into going down a certain developmental path or otherwise interfered with network governance, that's where I'd draw the line.  Provided the users who hold their own private keys are still free to transact in the way they want to, it's not a failure.

It'll take a keener mind than mine to figure that out.  It's tricky enough keeping track of the "lost" bitcoins where people assume access to the private key has been lost, but it's still largely guesswork, as it may just be long-term HODLing.  I have coins that haven't moved in 5+ years, so do some people assume those coins are lost because they haven't moved in a while.  But I would assume that because some early adopters have vast tranches of BTC and are more likely to be of the "hold your own keys" mindset, there should still be a sizeable sum in the hands of individuals.

Plus, it's pretty well established that these third party custodians are shit at security and seldom manage to retain custody of their clients' BTC, meaning it usually ends up back in the hands of individuals anyway.   

Well there's certainly a great deal of room for personal opinion on that one, heh.

If it did happen (and I find it pretty unlikely), I'd say it depends on how much trust it would require from those of us not utilising their services.  If they started leveraging their influence and pushing for protocol changes, I probably would consider it a failure.