Unfortunately, this is just a tradeoff with decentralization that we have to accept. It's very similar to the situation with encryption - criminals use it, but honest people too, and there's no way to make a backdoor that would only affect the criminals. The only hope to recover funds if the criminal refuses to give the keys is to try and crack the encryption on the wallet files.

I don't think any experienced Bitcoin worth their salt would recommend to store your coins in any of those interest earning accounts. You're probably reading suggestions from some newbies who just repeat things like "don't store coins on exchanges" because they heard them from high-rank users, without really understanding what it means and why it's bad.

Yes, it's strange that this isn't talked as much as the PayPal news were, because PayPal is like an ant compared to Visa.

Seems like Visa wants to cut the middlemen - the exchanges, and handle exchanging crypto to fiat itself. Maybe this will even be positive for crypto community, because now banks will be less likely to close accounts of customers who deal with crypto.


When was Visa an enemy of Bitcoin? Did they cut all crypto exchanges from its network? Did they ban all the Bitcoin debit cards?

How can police claim that they have seized his coins if they can't access them? Not your keys = not your coins. Having encrypted wallet file means nothing, the criminal could have other copies of it stored elsewhere, and he can have backup seeds or paper wallets or other forms of the private keys. It's even more stupid if the police doesn't even know what are his addresses - in this case the criminal could have moved the coins years ago.

Transactions don't get "embedded into nodes", nodes store unconfirmed transactions in their mempools to help these transactions to propagate through the network to eventually reach miners, so that they can include it in next block.

Miners don't "keep confirming" a transaction, the first confirmation happens when a transaction gets included in the most recent block that became a part of the blockchain, all other confirmations are just the number of blocks mined after that one block.

I would trust a reputable bank more than a stablecoin, stablecoins are just centralized payment systems that exist in a form of cryptocurrency. This means that just like banks, they can have a bank run, or they could make an exit scam and so on. Besides, if you're selling Bitcoin for fiat, you probably want to use that fiat for something, like buying a car or a house, and it's hard to do that with stablecoin.

Pump and dump groups are always a scam, so if someone offers pump and dump bots, you can be sure it's a scam too. Anything that says "easy money" in crypto is always a scam, this is the first rule beginners should learn, because crypto space is so full of scammers due to anonymity and unrestricted transactions.

You should be really careful with anything that offers you a Bitcoin investment, because it's very easy for scammers to take people's coins and run away. If someone offers high return rates, it's 100% a scam.

But even if it's something reasonable, you should still remember that not your keys = not your coins. Bitcoin already shows extremely good long-term performance, why be greedy and try to get even more profit? You can lose all your coins that way and be left with nothing.

Bitcoin is Bitcoin and WBTC is WBTC. I don't count wrapped Bitcoin as real Bitcoin, so I don't see how it affects Bitcoin's supply. This isn't a government system where everyone have to use an IOU and trust that it's still 1:1 - we have a choice to use Bitcoin itself instead of IOU Bitcoin.

I think wrapped Bitcoin should only be used for some experimental DeFi trading and never as a currency or store of value, but even then there are technologies like atomic swaps that require less trust.

Whenever someone says they found a vulnerable site that can be exploited for profit and leave a link to such site, it's pretty much always just a scam. There's a very popular scam when scammers message people telling they found a bug in a casino and ask people to deposit money so they would share their profit with them. This is just a variation of this scam.

If there was a legitimate bug, the person who found it would either exploit it themselves if they are a blackhat, or responsibly disclose it to owners if they are a white hat. The only ones who create topics on public forums are scammers. As Bitcoin prices go up, scammers become more active and creative.

He likes to have influence over the Doge market - I highly doubt that he has any skin in the game, it would be too risky for him, and he's already the richest man in the world, so there's no point for him to make money by manipulating the Doge market. It all probably started as a joke, because it's known that Elon likes memes, but at some point he became aware that his tweets pump Doge, so he started doing it for fun.

I don't recommend using mobile or any other online wallet for handling all your long-term coins, it's just too risky. You should use a cold storage setup or buy a hardware wallet. Make sure to carefully research about it, there's plenty of topics on this forum about it.

As for replay protection, when someone makes a contentious hard fork, they don't bother implementing it, because they want everyone follow only their chain. But when someone creates a forked altcoin, they do want to implement it, because it would make it easier for their users.

I think daytrading should be about trying to guess the local highs and lows, so you should be closing all your positions when you aren't ready to trade. With how volatile crypto is, it's very likely that your stop-loss orders will be filled, so you would still be losing money. If you were trading like normal, you could have noticed an unfavorable pattern and closed your positions way earlier than a stop loss would occur. The only way to keep daytrading while away is with bot, but you need to really know what you are doing.

If you're transferring your coins to a native SegWit address, such transaction would be invalid on the BCH and BSV networks because they don't have SegWit, so you don't need to worry about it. And other forks should have implemented replay protection to prevent such problems. I have many empty addresses that still hold the forked coins, and there wasn't any problems with replays.

Just make sure to prioritize the safety of your bitcoins first - never put a private key that still has Bitcoin balance in any altcoin software.

No one can tell you that for sure, but what I can tell you is that DOGE is quite a shitcoin and in the long run it will crash to zero. People who think that Elon Musk will make it official currency of Mars or something are delusional, because he is just enjoying having such influence over a market. This leaves Doge as just another Bitcoin clone with poor security and blockchain bloating problems. And the meme status is not something that you can rely on, all memes eventually grow old and become abandoned.

Today Musk tweeted about Doge again and caused yet another pump as expected, and users on reddit actually started calling him out for market manipulation. He's not profiting from it in any way as far as anyone knows, so it's not illegal, but still he is intentionally shaking the DOGE market "for the lulz".

I think it's actually positive for crypto, because it opens eyes to the fact that most coins can so easily be manipulated and don't have strong fundamentals that would give them more stable value.

Crypto itself still heavily relies on centralized finance, as centralized exchanges host the majority of crypto market volume. This is why governments are not scared of crypto - they understand that if you regulate exchange you have successfully regulated crypto. And this is why companies like PayPal and Visa are creating crypto products - they too don't feel threatened that crypto will replace them, they see it as an opportunity to make more money.

Traditional finance is still as strong as ever and there are no signs that crypto is a threat to it. For now.

If this was the case, objectively describing any community in existence would be impossible, because you'd have to be a part of it, which I don't agree with - yes, biases are possible, but people can be critical about something they are a part of.

It's easy to see that authors complaints are unjustified. Merit system does not hinder newbies in any practical way, it just prevents them from using comstics like signatures and avatars. There's no hidden boards for high-merited users. Whatever drama happens between prominent users, it doesn't affect bystanders.

They are needed already, since they are the best solution for private payments on the Internet, and as cashless society gains more and more ground, they become even more necessary. But Bitcoin is getting more private too - Lightning network transactions are private, there is coinjoin, new proposals like Schnorr signatures will get implemented. If Bitcoin will cover the needs for privacy, there will be much less reasons to use special coins for that, especially if they come with problems like blockchain bloat or 51% attacks.

Tulips went to the moon and then crashed to the ground, but Bitcoin had many bubbles already, and somehow it keeps recovering from crashes and outgrow the previous highs. It's not like a tulip bubble, this is already clear at this point.


But this was in the past, today less and less experts are having such opinions, and there's a large shift in the minds of institutional investors going on right now, they are starting to view Bitcoin as a legitimate alternative to assets like gold.