And risking also makes people poor when they lose all their money while trying to start a business or investing. The only thing that separates the winners from losers is luck and smart decision making. You could make money by taking risky choices with bad odds, like investing in ICO or altcoins, but most likely you will lose - while those who invest with positive expected value are likely to succeed, unless they get a really bad luck.

I wonder if CWS is so incompetent because he is legitimately stupid, or if he actually makes such stupid mistakes because he is afraid that the wrong people (security services of big governments, kidnappers, etc.) would actually believe he is Satoshi and would harm him.

If a coin can be taken down by arresting a single developer, it's not really decentralized. If SEC or anyone else tried to do the same with Bitcoin, they would fail, even if they imprisoned multiple Core devs, because Bitcoin development is actually decentralized, contributors from around the world work on its code, and some of them even maintain privacy, so the government wouldn't be able to find them.

So, no, they can't go after decentralized projects, it's just that almost all altcoins are actually centralized.

Fiat currencies don't really have a need to be globally accepted. But there actually is a globally accepted currency - the US dollar. While most countries won't allow their whole economy to rely on a foreign currency, at least the informal part of the economy is gladly accept the US dollar wherever you go. And there are exchanges for US dollar and local currency in almost every country in the world.

A currency with even distribution is impossible and pointless - the goal of currency is to exchange it for things, so even if you airdrop equal amount of a new currency to all people and make them use it, you'll again see unequal distribution very soon.

Financial institutions like banks or exchanges have a right to refuse a client if they deem them too risky. Just like some banks don't want to deal with clients who have crypto-related transactions, some crypto exchanges don't want to deal with crypto gambling transactions, because most of crypto gambling is unregulated and could indeed be used for money laundering. Someone can just move their dirty money through a money-laundering casino which would create a fake winning for them. This doesn't happen in regulated fiat casinos because they run special software that allows the government to make sure that no fake bets are made.

There are two kinds of bubbles - the one's that go to zero or nearly zero, and the ones that keep growing after the crash. Bitcoin and some stocks are the second type. They can be overvalued at certain times, but they still create economic growth over long time.

The first type is just a zero-sum game where the money moves from late investors to early investors.

Wallstreet is not a singular entity, unlike some people might think, like those who like to believe in conspiracy theories, so it's quite likely that other companies that can be considered "Wallstreet" are participating in this short squeeze on the side of WSB. It's even unlikely that retail investors alone have achieved such a big price pump, they simply don't have as much money. Those reddit posters who show their screenshots of tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested don't represent the average capability of a WSB user.

It's not exactly big news that when price goes up, there's more network activity. Newcomers create their Bitcoin wallets and withdraw from exchanges, hodlers sending coins to their exchange accounts - this is all expected. You can't even use this data to predict the price, because it's a lagging indicator.

There's so many ways that hackers can inject malicious code into software that it's really not a simple task to verify an open source software. A good example is a failed attempt to backdoor Linux kernel by changing a single character to introduce a privilege escalation bug - and it failed because it was done as a commit. If someone was reviewing the whole repo from scratch, it would be easy to overlook it.

There are also techniques for code obfuscation which would allow hackers to hide malicious code from searching for potentially dangerous code, like using file system, internet connection, etc.

If reviewing code was so easy, software development companies wouldn't have to hire as many programmers.

If people naively believed everyone who said that they created a big invention that will change the world, scammers would run rampant and resources would be wasted. Just like it was with ICO.

Early Bitcoin adopters took a great risk in devoting their money and especially time into something that could have failed and disappeared, so it's reasonable that they got such a big reward if they still hold some coins.

You can forget about alt season if Bitcoin drops, and Bitcoin has already dropped significantly from its ATH, which combined with the previous explosive growth puts it into a very dangerous territory as the popped bubble pattern forms.

Also, there will never be a second big altcoin season like in 2017, when all alts rallied so hard that Bitcoin's dominance fell to 35% - there's no doubt now that Bitcoin is king of crypto while alts constantly fail to deliver anything useful.

The chart already looks bearish, and the institutional buyers understand that too, so if they will stop buying, the $30k support will easily get broken, as institutions will hope to buy Bitcoin at much lower levels, like at $20k and below.

There's no rule that says that Bitcoin's bull markets need to last 1-2 years after the halvenings, and since everyone is so aware of this pattern, the pattern stops working.

Let's look at covid - the initial market panic made Bitcoin drop 50%, then both it and stocks recovered and entered a bull run, likely for different reasons, but still. Bitcoin is now viewed as an insurance against inflation caused by covid's damage to the economy.

If a war would have similar effects to covid on the economy, you could expect some growth, but for that to happen major powers like US and China need to be significantly involved, and that would make this war very risky because of the nuclear threat, and you don't want to hold Bitcoin in a nuclear apocalypse. But realistically, such war would only be a local one, with big powers only providing aid to the fighting countries. So in this case Bitcoin won't be affected.

When Bitcoin was having high fees in 2017, the Ethereum crowd was saying that this is the proof that Bitcoin is outdated technology and that Ethereum will replace it because it's more scalable. Now the same is happening to Ethereum, and there's actually not much chance that Polkadot or whatever other hyped coins out there would dethrone Ethereum, just like it failed to dethrone Bitcoin. All these Ethereum competitors are either even more centralized or would suffer from the same scalability problems if they were to be adopted. The only real solution is systems like Lightning Network that radically change the way transactions are made.

I seriously doubt Satoshi would pay someone to keep his identity secret, if it happened, it would just be a matter of time until it becomes public, so Satoshi would only waste money and make himself look vulnerable for extortion with such move.

As more time passes, there's less and less chances for Satoshi to be discovered, because whatever evidence there may be gets buried deeper and deeper or maybe just destroyed.

You can't truly cancel an unconfirmed transaction, because you are submitting it to a decentralized network with thousands of nodes, you'd have to ask all of them to remove this transaction from their mempools, but there's no mechanism for that, because it would probably only create problems. Instead we have the replace by fee feature that was easier and more practical to implement.

Your second point is included in your first point, because you can't afford to lose what you have borrowed, obviously.


This is one of the worsts advises you can give to someone in crypto. Altcoins have horrible long term performance, if you're holding them for years, you're going to either lose money or miss out on profits compared to BTC.


Storing your coins on exchange is never a good idea, only keep a small amount there, and if you're daytrading, you'll use leverage anyway. The rest of your coins should be in cold storage.

Altcoins are mostly traded against BTC or ETH, so when they drop, there's not much fiat flowing into BTC. Those who bought alts with fiat will probably keep holding fiat after dumping alts, and those who bought with BTC/ETH will keep that coin. This is why there's no complex patterns between fiat, Bitcoin and alts, they simply follow BTC when it makes big moves, and sometimes have their own pumps and dumps and that's it.

I don't agree with all these posts telling newbies what to do. This is a place for discussing Bitcoin, it's not a career or an education institution, no one owes anybody anything. The only thing you have to do is follow the rules of this forum and not be a shitposter. You don't have to learn if you don't want to learn. You don't need to force yourself to make some "well-researched useful" posts if you don't want to.

There may be an argument that the original WSB trade on GME stock is not a simple pump and dump, because of the short squeeze, though still a lot of retail investors will lose money, but pretty much any other suggested market, like other stocks or DOGE is just a blatant case of pump and dump. There's no conditions that could justify rising in their price, it's just an attempt at manipulating clueless retail investors. Don't get emotional and greedy on this market, be it stocks or crypto, the crash will come and lots of noobs will be left with bags.