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.

Yes, it's not like 51% attack will become possible after this 20% drop. Think about it, it didn't happen in the past when hashrate was 50% lower. Price and hashrate are influencing each other, but it was never a mathematical formula that ties them both together exactly. We've seen a lot of times one change without the other changing much, or many examples of opposite reactions at different times.

Someone's qualifications don't make them automatically right all the time. You know that there's a lot of highly educated nocoiners, including some Nobel prize winners. Hell, even CWS holds a lot of degrees.

And the problem here isn't even whether he's correct or not, it's just that he uses way too much silly allegories that make us Bitcoiners look weird to people who don't know anything about Bitcoin. If I didn't knew anything about Bitcoin, his tweets would make me not want to buy Bitcoin.

Bitcoin certainly is a remarkable invention, but in the grand scheme of things it's not very influential for now. With adoption being so low, Bitcoin can't really be viewed as a new paradigm for humanity, it's just a niche tool, a tiny alternative system. I don't see Bitcoin shaping humanity's future until at least 20% of the population is actively using, maybe even more. And that's a very big condition, because right now the adoption level is around a few million people globally. That's a pretty low result for something that exists more than 10 years.

If all on-chain transactions were LN channel opening/closing and a significant part of the population tried to switch to Bitcoin, the mempool would instantly be full and fees would skyrocket. If more LN adoption will mean more Bitcoin adoption, there won't be any problems. Another thing is, people would still be doing on-chain transactions, simply because they are more reliable (not that LN transactions are unsecure, but on-chain ones with enough confirmations are 100% solid). People won't be buying cars or houses through LN.

Private money as a concept existed long before Bitcoin, I know that Hayek envisioned them, but maybe there are even earlier examples. And digital payments have existed long before Bitcoin too.


It didn't start with Bitcoin, ever since the fiat system was established, there were people who opposed it.

Bitcoin is in many ways revolutionary, but it's no the first in literally everything it does.

Neither. Bitcoin's price will not forever be tied to Elon Musk's opinions. It wasn't even tied in the past, Musk tweets simply triggered the price crash that was already building up due to the loss of bullish momentum. On July 22 the price will move up or down a few thousands of dollars at most, if it will move at all. And Dorsey will definitely not be able to convince Musk to accept Bitcoin payments again, because he has to answer to shareholders who don't want this to happen.

It's way too early to make such predictions, we need to see how El Salvador's experiment will play out. If it will flop, few countries will want to repeat this, especially with programs like giving away pre-loaded wallets, or just updating their infrastructure to accept Bitcoin transactions, which can be too costly for poor countries. It will take 2-4 years to see the results of El Salvador's decision.

Anytime someone says they will prove something with math, I'm bracing myself for a load of bad science due to poor methodology, numbers pulled out of ass, made-up equations and so on.

I agree with possibility that Bitcoin could decline by 95% or more if existing users will lose faith in it and there will be no adoption, but there are absolutely no signs of it happening, in fact it all looks the opposite as Bitcoin gets more and more recognition with each year.

It's safe to say that Bitcoin is already here to stay, unless something very unforeseen happens, but chances for that are extremely tiny. However, if we ignore Lightning Network, transaction volume is probably be no different from what we have now, because it's unlikely we'll have a blocksize increase in this decade. And Lightning Network would actually make it very hard to count volume, because you can't monitor its transactions, so we'd have only some estimates.

Yes, people will have to wait and download the whole blockchain, hopefully the bandwith will increase by that time. I would be more concerned about longer perspective, like 100 or 200 years, if our storage and bandwith technology will stagnate, eventually running a node could become a big problem, and the network would be slowly becoming more decentralized. Perhaps a blocksize reduction would be needed at some point in the future to combat this. But this is a problem for future generations.

People can't control weather, people can't control cosmic processes, people can't even cure all diseases. Bitcoin is just software, and by definition it is controlled by people. Bitcoin community agrees or rejects on changes - that's control. Any ideas that Bitcoin is an independent entity are nothing more than Saylor-style cringe pseudophilosophy aimed at impressing noobs. IMO it even makes Bitcoin look bad, like some sort of a cult or a scam. Please, stop.

Of course they will be, but I was thinking more about privately created cryptocurrencies, maybe managed by a company, or even decentralized like the real cryptocurrencies, but with this backdoor for governments. They will try to sell it as a more decentralized alternative to CBDC, though of course it wouldn't matter with this full backdoor.

You don't get merit for quality posts, you get merit for posts that other people like or respect. Quality posts are not the only kind of posts that falls within this category, it could also be a funny post or a simple opinion post. However, I would advice you from making posts for baiting merits, people can easily see through it.

News and tweets can absolutely affect Bitcoin, and this will be happening for a long time. Bitcoin's short-term price is decided by day-traders who quickly act on the tiniest news.

And it's pointless to give Soros advice, he's one of the best traders in the world, he knows what to do.

Nocoiner bears are very emotional, they present their opinions as facts and simply state that Bitcoin will go to zero because they feel that it's bad. There's actually not much good bearishness about Bitcoin, but this doesn't mean that Bitcoin is flawless and will have a guaranteed bright future. Things like the warnings of Core devs that Bitcoin is an experimental techonology that could fail in the future is an example of positive bearishness. It's a reminder to never go all in on something that still is considered an experiment.

Yes, confirmation time is a bit of a problem, but fees is a bigger problem, because instead of just being annoying they make certain transactions just uneconomic. So, Lightning Network is the answer to both problems, and will most likely be used for all small transactions in the next 5-10 years. IMO if Bitcoin on-chain fees will be low enough for small transactions, it will be a sign that Bitcoin is not being used as money, because 7-12 transactions per second is really-really low.

Sooner or later we'll see a fully compliant shitcoin where FBI or some other agency will hold a master key that would allow them to do whatever they want with transactions and coins. And of course this coin will be advertised as a coin for mass adoption, and I'm pretty sure it will fail just like CBDC will fail, because crypto enthusiasts are not interested in this centralized crap, and regular people are not interested in crypto in general.

I'm in the same boat as you, not being able to pay with BTC, because no one is accepting it. But that's probably because I almost never buy anything on p2p marketplaces, and big retailers don't accept BTC here. Although I actually never heard about crypto being used for payments often in my country, aside from drugs.

But even if I had such option, I'd probably use fiat instead, because Bitcoin is an appreciating asset, so I'd rather get rid of fiat first, especially with how unstable it is in my country.

And sadly these words still hold true to this day, even if Lightning Network will get widely adopted in the next few years, the on-chain capacity would still be not enough to allow Bitcoin to be as popular as major fiat payment networks. Our main hope is some new fundamental breakthrough in Bitcoin protocol that would allow even more scalability without compromising any decentralization like bigblockers want. But it could take many years before such change is even invented, and then more years before it's implemented.