There were faucets in the early days that were giving much higher amounts, I think Gavin Andersen had a faucet that was giving 5 Bitcoins, and someone made a bot to spam it. I personally claimed 0.005 BTC from a faucet once, this was in 2012, but unfortunately for me I brushed it off and later lost these coins by depositing them to exchange which later did an exit scam. IMO faucets were never worth the time you spend on them, instead of claiming 0.005 BTC 100 times you could have just bot a few dozens of Bitcoin with your pocket money.

First things first, Bitcoin is the leader of crypto market, not Ethereum. Ethereum can't influence hundreds of different alts, unless it's some sort of negative influence due to technical problems with the network, which would affect all tokens issued on it. And second, all updates are priced in long before they happen because it's a very predictable event. So the answer is no, there's very low chance that the London update will spark a sudden bull run.

If something has infinite value, it means it just never gets traded, because there's nothing to match its value. If 1 BTC costs infinite amount of dollars, then so does 1 satoshi, because that's definition of infinity. Infinitely valued Bitcoin can't be used as a currency, can't be used for anything at all. If all BTC in existence was held by a single party and they refused to sell for any price, you could say that Bitcoin is valued infinitely, but it's impossible to concentrate all up to 21 million bitcoins x 100 million satoshis.

As soon as I saw the title, I knew it was this guy without even reading the article, simply because he is the second most notable Faketoshi, and the OG Faketoshi Craig Wright knows how to not go to prison, because he is a professional legal troll. IMO these Faketoshi scammers should all be prosecuted for identity theft and investor defraudment if they promote a coin or do any other business activity while pretending to be Satoshi.

Bitcoin is not "a database", you can't write arbitrary data to it, it exists solely for Bitcoin the currency, and it was obviously designed for Bitcoin the currency. Bitcoin is not a swarm of digital hornets or a technological miracle that will save humanity from all problems, it's simply a decentralized digital currency that isn't even very popular right now. People should stop complicating things with Bitcoin or looking for reasons why it should cost millions of dollars per coin. Satoshi never claimed that Bitcoin is the biggest invention of the century, that it's a fundamental technology, etc. Learn from him.

I believe this doesn't mean much, because there can be many explanations. A non-native English speaker would likely use both spelling simultaneously if they learned English from different sources. Or maybe Satoshi intentionally used many spellings to make it harder to uncover their identity. Or maybe Satoshi used to live in different English-speaking countries and ended up using both spellings without paying attention.

In the form that it was - via BitPay - not really, it was stressful to wait for that confirmation in 15 minute window that they gave you. If Steam started accepting Bitcoin again via Lightning Network, then I would have used Bitcoin for sure. My two problems with Bitcoin payments is that fees could get high in certain days due to increased trading activity or hashrate changes, and the second is that I keep all my coins in cold storage and I'm too lazy to boot it up for a small payment. If I had an LN wallet and LN payments were accepted, I would use BTC more.

Not everyone can or should earn lots of merits and rank up on this forum. To do this, you would need decent knowledge of Bitcoin and ability to present your points clearly. Many of the bounty hunters can't even write a sentence in English without lots of mistakes, asking that they suddenly become Legendary-worthy is just too much. If they are happy with earning pennies for spamming, and if their spam is contained within certain boards, then let them be. Those who can improve will be able to do it on their own.

Either this is a bad translation or the Chinese officials choose poor words to describe Bitcoin. Because "private" means something owned by one individual, and Bitcoin is not owned or issued by anyone. A private currency is a currency issued by company, like for example XRP. Bitcoin is decentralized currency. Maybe they didn't want to use the word decentralized when they compared it and CBDC, because they didn't want people to think that CBDC are not decentralized? That would explain their choice of words.
 

What makes you think that crypto became more popular because of the pandemic? And people didn't ditch cash still, because it has been shown that it isn't playing any significant role in covid-19 transmission.

CBDCs are competitors to Visa and Mastercard and PayPal and all the other smaller companies. They are essentially the same thing, but government-owned and based on crypto technology because of the hype. But if user experience will be poor - i.e. high fees or long confirmation times, bugs, lost tranactions etc., than there will be no adoption, simple as that.

If you want to lower your fees, you should try to receive bigger amounts less often, instead of small amounts more often. For example, if you're buying coins on exchange every month, don't withdraw them immediately, let them sit for some time and withdraw every other month or once in 3 months. Of course it will come with increased risk of storing coins on exchange. So, you can also monitor the mempool and make withdrawals when fees are low and then consolidate your coins for the future, which will come with a reduced privacy downside, because your coins will be linked together.

Almost all people who invvest in Bcash, BSV and other Bitcoin clone scamcoins are people who hate Bitcoin, and they simply wouldn't hold hold Bitcoin if those shitcoins didn't exist. The amount of people who were honestly choosing between Bitcoin and forks and choose forks is so negligible, that in this hypothetical scenario where forks didn't exist, the price would be only tiny fractions of percent higher. You can't just take marketcaps of forks and threat them as shards of Bitcoin's value. Billions of dollars of marketcap can be created out of thin air in an instant in the crypto world.

The word "Bitcoin maximalism" makes it sounds like bitcoin maximalists are some sort of extremists, but in fact it's the shitcoin enthusiasts who are extremists, they are believing in empty promises that will never get delivered, just like some religious zealots. It's far more outlandish to say that Bitcoin is obsolete and will disappear than it is to say that alts are useless and will be forgotten soon. Thousands of alts are already dead, and the burden of proof lies on them to show us that they are useful, while Bitcoin has already proved everything it needed.

Blockchain wouldn't appear without Bitcoin. It would be nothing more than a very obscure programming pattern barely used anywhere, and the only people who know about it would be some guys from stackoverflow. It only exists as we know because of the huge marketing campaign created by altcoins and blockchain companies that tried to sell it as the next big thing.

Why would we need other currencies to assist Bitcoin? There's enough units to cover all our needs, Lightning Network allows splitting satoshis even further, and if needed, a hard fork could be introduced to allot further subdivisions of satoshis on chain.

When someone has to distribute something, it always means centralization. Bitcoin gets distributed naturally by the free market. Almost everyone has an equal chance to get their hands on Bitcoin, because everyone can register on exchange and buy some coins, except for people from sanctioned countries. But even they can do p2p trading.

Yes, I was a Hero before merit system was introduced. But if I started as a newbie, I would become Legendary today. I agree that starting as a Hero would certainly give an edge over starting as a newbie, but still earning 1000 merits is something that I wanted to celebrate.


Users who were active in the early days and then quit the forum or post very rarely likely deserve their rank as you say, but there are Legendaries who post on a daily basis and only earned a few merits in all these years. So, with reaching this milestone now I feel that my rank is truly fair.

The main practical value of Bitcoin is that it's digital money under your full control, unlike centralized payment systems that can freeze your accounts, reverse transactions, etc. If you had a lot of negative experiences with banks, PayPal, Venmo and other payment systems, then Bitcoin is definitely for you.

Another practical use is that Bitcoin operates without borders, while every payment company has to follow regulations, sanctions, etc., so it can be costly or impossible to send money to other countries.

I think the covid19-caused economic decline can already qualify for an economic crisis in Bitcoin lifetime, so it's better to say that Bitcoin has never seen a major global economic crisis. We saw Bitcoin taking a heavy hit from the initial shock, meaning it's currently not a true safe haven asset. But then came a quick recovery, and for some time Bitcoin seemed to not be correlated with other markets. Then the bull run sparked from institutional fear of US dollar inflation, and now that this fear has been reduced Bitcoin is on decline, though in larger picture it has gained a lot. But there is no rule that says that Bitcoin must behave like that during the next crisis.

I would never rely on such  services to avoid scams, just because someone isn't on the list doesn't mean they are not a scammer. By personal rules are to not deal with any sort of fresh accounts or companies without reputation, unless they go first on their end of the deal. The second rule is to check for the recent reviews. The third rule is to insist on escrow if they don't want to go first and you don't trust them enough to risk your money.

Recently I have earned my 1000th merit, which means my Legendary rank, which was achieved a long time ago, is now fully deserved. Thank you all, my dear Bitcointalkers!

The lesson that I learned on this journey is to just be yourself - don't try to impress people, don't bait them for merit, do not view ranking up as a career, just use this forum as a social network that it is. Anyone can become a Legendary if they put just a little bit of effort into their posts and have a bit of knowledge about Bitcoin.