Generalizations are stupid.

It'd be hard to argue that whoever bought BTC for pennies in 2010 made a bad deal with it at U$ 3000 right now!

Heck, when BTC hit U$ 100 I thought it was insane. Now it's still 30X above 100.

Governments will always use some fiat currency as a reference.

Even if BTC became THE worldwide currency, taxes and other government fees would likely still be calculated in some reference unit, maybe the US Dollar or other regional currencies.

The US Dollar and fractional reserve banking are the greatest bubbles of all time.

All currencies that followed its system, printing money indiscriminately to pump markets and to rob The People are also a bubble.

The world is sitting on U$ 170 TRILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT


This debt is inexistent value, it was printed money. No economy in the world will ever cover this debt. This money is vapor, inexistent, printed to enrich a handful of thieves.


This is from earlier this year: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/world-debt-hits-record-164-trillion-as-crisis-hangover-lingers

Debt has already grown more than 6 trillion since.

The main question for Ethereum is its computing cost IMO

The EVM costs too much to run. Simple computations cost several dollars. Why a supercomputer with this much computing cost would be successful is beyond me.

In order for the Ethereum idea to become mainstream, the computing cost would have to drop thousands of times.

Centralization is bad, regardless where it happens.

Every attempt to build one massive block instead of having hundreds of pulverized units will fail in the long run.

If the EU is centralized, then it will fail. The only way for the EU to work is to leave all states fully independent and then meet just to solve collective problems.

The immigration and economic policies of the EU are a disaster. Anyone older than 30 who lived in some EU countries before the Euro knows that the transition from national currency to Euro completely fucked up the middle class.

Basic economic education should be mandatory in all uni courses IMO

Too many people build massive debt early on in their lives then struggle for 20 years to live with their bad choices.

Learning to save up and buy active assets instead of acquiriing debt should be a skill everyone has to learn in school IMO.

I disagree with this. Investors are the wealthiest class, Bitcoin would circulate, there'd be a new use case and regardless of the stock operation (buy or sell) Bitcoin would have been held in large amounts by investors.

The advantages would be many IMO.

Bitcoin has crossed the new new thing phase. Now we need widespread adoption.

The next Bitcoin all time high will be when shops, gas stations, supermarkets, governments and everyone starts accepting it as a form of payment.

The era of buying Bitcoin for the sake of Bitcoin is what we're closing right now IMO. Now it's make or break : Bitcoin and cryptos need to become actual useful financial tools for the masses and then we'll see the next big price movements.

Being digital does not make it safer.

Decentralization is also relative. A large enough power could disrupt the most active blockchains, given enough funds.

Andreas Antonopoulos talks about the cost for a nation-state to attack Bitcoin. It's extremely expensive.

But being extremely expensive does not mean that a major world power couldn't disrupt it if they chose to do so.

The question then would be: what would they stand to gain from such an attack? Is the potential gain higher than the cost for the attack?

That's 100% good advice for newbies, but the initial statement is not necessarily true.

Ethereum and EOS for example have astronomical yields since their ICO and they're not ponzies.

But true, newbies should be skeptical of high yield promises.

People often quote "international law" when saying that someone may or may not do something, as in "that's not something you can just do".

The problem here is simple: international law is for average citizens only. Major world powers only use the law as a guideline, but they end up doing whatever they want.

China places large war vessels near islands in the South China Sea, nobody can do anything about it. The US can protest, other countries can file protests at the UN, but that's not really binding.

The concept of international law and "that's not something you can just do" is more complicated than it looks.

It's not just the US. Other major powers do the same thing in different places all the time. We hear more about the US because it's more monitored and also more powerful, but several countries do this stuff all the time within their power spheres.

The answer to this depends on the logical framework we decide to adopt.

In intuitionist logic this argument is a fallacy. There is no proof by contradiction (PbC) in intuitionist logic (IL). For example, the proof for the existence of infinite numbers would not apply to I.L. Assume there are finite numbers. Then by the principle of good ordering there must be a largest number. Show this largest number and I can show largest + 1. Contradiction met  = means the opposite of the premise is true : there are infinite numbers.

This proof only works in classical logic where PbC is an accepted derivation.

Similar argument is popularly used for the existence of God as you yourself have hinted at.

In classic logic you may be able to get away with this argument. God exists because you cannot prove He doesn't exist.

It all depends on the logic rules you set before the argument.

If you're into crypto then you probably hold the same values most cryptocurrency enthusiasts do: personal freedom, less bureaucracy and...taking control over your money back from the broken FED system.

This last idea cannot be stated enough. The FED system is broken and not for the usual things you hear about it, but because of their evil monetary inflation system that works 100% against The People.

In simple terms: the FED prints money that never reaches you. If this money reached The People, price inflation would happen. It's the FED's job to keep price inflation low.

And here's the catch: if the FED prints money for their banking buddies, and this money never reaches you, then you are unable to inflate market prices.

What do the banking buddies do?

Buy equities.

The FED has been printing basically free money for bankers who inflate the stock markets artificially for their own gain.

The prices you see on the stock market are rigged. The FED can print one trillion dollars overnight if they want to pump a certain stock. This, of course, would be highly monitored within well regulated markets such as the US and EU. BUT. The bankers have one evil genius card up their sleeve: emerging markets.

Here's how the global stock markets work today:

1) The FED/BOJ/ECB print one trillion dollars.
2) This trillion is sent to Brazil, India, China or whoever. Emerging markets. Here the trillion dollars is celebrated as incoming investments. But it's a Trojan Horse.
3) The hot money, lent at ridiculously low interest rates to FED banking buddies, enters the emerging market and makes prices jump.
4) The victims believe the pump and go in buying as well. Euforia takes over.
5) The FED banking buddies start to slowly dump the initial investment. They do it slowly, after all time is on their side (ridiculously low interests).
6) The one trillion becomes 5 trillion dollars which is sent back to the original bankers.
7) The original trillion is paid back to the FED. Bankers keep 4 to 5 trillion profits.
Months later the emerging market notices that the foreigners have already left.
9) The emergin market collapses 10, 20% or more.

This is how you play the world markets when you can freely print money.

If you look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1981 you'll see a permanent positive slope. The DJIA may have collapsed in 2008 but if you take a ruler and draw a line from 40 years ago, you'll see the US markets only grew in the long run.

Now take a chart from Brazil or Turkey from 40 years ago and you'll see it's a zig zag. Historical pumps and dumps.

That's the difference when you print money and when you're subordinate to printed money.

Well I hope this short brainstorm about how the completely immoral FED system works has given you a better idea at the fake virtual finance that runs the world today. You work 9-5 to earn some fake money that the FED can print at will. When bankers need some money for their yacht parties they don't need to work even a minute longer for it, they can pull money out of thin air. While you work harder and harder for the same purchasing power.

That's correct.

You also have monetary inflation, which is what the FED does.

The "solution" to the 2008 crash was to print money. The FED discovered something very interesting (but evil): if you print money and give it to the masses, price inflation happens. In that case monetary inflation leads to price inflation.

BUT. And here's the evil twist to the FED's game: if you print money and that money stays with bankers, and never reaches The People, then price inflation does not happen. Because The People can't spend the newly printed money.

That's the FED's game. They print money for bankers. This money never reaches you.

If you try to buy stocks and other equities, you'll find that your money isn't worth anything because the FED has printed trillions of U$ and bankers buy it all cheaply while you work 9-5 for 30 years to build savings that they can simply pull out of their virtual money system.

That's the cruelty of the FED system. They simply print money for themselves, this money never reaches you. 15 families for whom they print money hold half the world's wealth, while 7 billion people work for them for free.

That's the difference between monetary and price inflation. The FED discovered a way to get one without the other and that's what's destroying the middle class around the globe.

ICO's are simply lesser regulated IPO's!

The economics are the same.

With the recent crypto bull run, tons of projects abandoned their IPO prospects and went for ICO instead.

In the 1990's I lost a good sum of money investing in Sillicon Valley IPO's. It was the exact same overall excitement (and bust) we're seeing now in the ICO.

Therefore this phenomenon is not restricted to crypto, it's a general market thing. Whenever something new arises people jump on the bandwagon without thinking.

If you want to know how crypto ICO's will play out, simply read any book abut the dotcom bubble! It's practically the same movements we've been seeing, except this time it involves a newer tech (cryptos).

I agree with OP.

A lot of newbies think the economics behind cryptos are any different from the economics we've learned in thousands of years.

Cryptos are simply a new form of value representation that uses technology instead of paper and metal. Cryptos do not introduce a new economic theory, but simply reflect the real world economics the cryptos themselves were generated in.

Having said that, if equities markets have taught us anything, it's that saving for the long run is the best crypto strategy.

Whoever started buying Bitcoin in 2011 in small monthly installments has built astronomic percentage gains today.

But if you bought on december 2017 hoping to get rich quick, then you're hurting right now.

There will come a point when crypto prices become attractive enough for people to join back in. That's when the prices will rebound.

One important thing to note is over U$ 46 billion exited the equities markets in November 2018. It's not just Bitcoin and cryptos.

Europe is ending their corrupt banker money printing program (QE) and the US will likely follow suit because all they've achieved in the past 10 years is to create a market distortion that will be tough to fix in the next 50 years.

The FED has printed so much money, the world sits on U$ 170 trillion in debt. That's right, several times the US economy in 100% pure debt - money that does not represent anything at all except the US' capacity to pay that debt. But how many years would it take to pay for so much printed money? Decades! It's 100% virtual money with no underlying value.

This QE money was already flowing into Bitcoin a long time ago, especially last year.

Now that QE is being tightened, the banker/FED money will exit cryptocurrencies as well. It's natural.

But I do look forward to a lot of people saving up in gold and Bitcoin.

I think that was their original intention, yes. To use a referendum just to validate their bias. Except The People revolted in the referendum and decided out.

Worth remembering that the UK chose to enter the EU using an exactly identical non binding referendum decades ago and its result was respected.

So, for the purpose of joining the EU, just one non binding referendum was enough. But to exit the EU they want to ignore the vote and keep voting until Brexit falls?

Bitcoin's disk growth rate is relatively fixed at one block every 10 minutes. The block size is fixed, so you can easily do the math.

Hard drives are getting larger and larger. You have multiple terabyte SSD's now for the price you'd pay for same size spinning disks just a few years ago. So storage will always be plenty.

The future of cryptos will be interesting decentralized apps that actually solve problems. I think Basic Attention Token has potential because if it achieves what it set out to do, it'll solve the online ads problem. Lightning Network looks awesome as well, allowing almost instant transactions with almost no cost.

Times are rough for people who bought at all time highs, but the future looks just as promising as it did 8 years ago!

I've always known that this is how the Internet actually works.

Why we designed so many large centralized systems is beyond me. We should be running decentralized search engines, social networks and everything else by now .