It's a very happy story. I'm glad that there are people like this who exist, and that at least some of them are honest. While reading, I was waiting for the part where she gave them too much info, and they got all the coins for themselves. Instead, she got most of her money, and they received a fair and still significant commission. It's really a win-win situation. But in most cases, unfortunately, lost coins are truly lost. She had a unique situation with some identifier letters missing, whereas usually people lose their passphrase, and then it's over very fast.

Medium's a platform where anyone can write what they believe, and their audience can react to that. Given that it's basically a place with personal blogs, it's not surprising that it has both good and bad articles of varying quality. That's why I usually don't read Medium articles. But what's interesting is that even reputable media like Forbes can sometimes publish misleading information (not false, but manipulative) about cryptos, focusing a lot on sudden significant drops, and not balancing it out with info about the growth of Bitcoin over the years or how many times such drops happened before and were followed by successful recoveries.

Bitcoin provides some financial freedom, I agree to that. I also must agree that Bitcoin's a good solution for any fundraising that might be restricted by authorities otherwise, and that includes the freedom convoys in Canada. But I don't support it being used and linked to anti-vaccination movements. It's not helping, of course, that Musk, who's sort of pro-crypto, is also a supporter of this Canadian movement. It's also worth noting, though, that while people who take part in these protests are usually against vaccination itself (not only the mandates) because they don't believe in vaccines, Musk actually stated that the science on this matter is unequivocal, and he supports vaccination. It's also worth noting that around 80% of people in Canada are vaccinated, and 67% of the population support Covid restrictions for unvaccinated people, so the government, in this situation, is doing what the majority wants.

I wonder why you started with Ethereum and are now moving to Bitcoin (why Bitcoin wasn't the first one), but, in any case, I think it's a lovely gift. If she kept the ETH and believes it can grow, it means she's at least open to cryptos and somewhat positive about their future, so gifting Bitcoin seems like a good choice to me. The only thing I wanted to add is that if it's a wedding gift, it probably should be for both of them, not just your sister...? People have different financial arrangements when they're married, but wedding gifts are usually for both, no? If you only focus on her, her husband might feel left out.

I think a memecoin should be based on a good and relevant meme first. I'm not sure the meme has to originate from your team, as long as you're the first to monetize it with a coin (or does copyright actually apply to memes?). Most memes aren't very useful, I think, because a meme must have a very short name and not be short-lived itself. Then, there's a part that you can't affect much, but the secret sauce is an influential supporter like Elon Musk. So it has to resonate somehow with people who have huge audiences and can thus lead to the pumping of the coin.
In any case, I don't partake in the pump-and-dump schemes and don't like meme coins rising up unreasonably. I'm sure many people are like that.

I think that freezing oneself is a way bigger challenge than keeping the coins. I would give mine to my family, to be honest, but if freezing becomes very common and very safe, I think that ways of keeping your money and possessions would as well. I thought of where one could put the passphrase, but leaving it online is impractical in case any particular server or company fails, and putting it into any physical location is also unsafe because the geography of the place can change unbelievably, and even if you know the exact place, extracting it can be a big problem. So I think the safest option would be to print out the passphrase, laminate it in plastic, and put it next to oneself in the freezing camera (if being frozen in clothes, preferrably in the pocket). I wouldn't trust any company to survive over the centuries, so I don't consider that as an option.

What op's referring to is probably that the multiplier is decreasing. In 2017, Bitcoin went from $4k to $20k during the bull run, which is a 5x increase. But the most recent bull run didn't sent the price to $100k. And, needless to say, the multiplier was way bigger in the early days. This is all true, but it doesn't mean that Bitcoin doesn't have a future (a 2x profit is still good profit, and Bitcoin's future is also not necessarily only in being an investment). I agree Ethereum's a good coin, but its days of glorious multipliers are also behind, and I don't think it's too different from Bitcoin in this regard. As for less popular coins, it's always a huge risk to buy them and hope they'll rise.

I must say that I like the 'if ... were honest' format in general, so I was excited to see it being applied to cryptos. The video itself is a little too harsh on cryptos, though. It's not slaughtering the environment, and it doesn't align a person with pedophiles. And decentralization is not a fancy word, it does matter. So it does have some merit, highlighting how a loss of password can affect you, and how cryptos largely can't be directly spend on goods, as well as the GPU price problem. The video is too long, often not fair (and the whole point of the 'honest' format is that it does need to be honest), and could be improved if it focused on one idea specifically: targeting Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, ICOs or worthless low-cap altcoins.

I agree that financial education should be taught properly at schools (at least some basics of managing finances, living on a budget, investments, inflation and other things like that), and it's usually not being done in useful ways. As for the investopedia advice, it's obviously an advice for the riches looking not to lose what they have, but it won't help those who suffer most during the inflation (ordinary low-income people who live from salary to salary and can now afford way less than they could before). And as for investing in a home, it's a very US-centered sort of advice (at least, the fixed-rate mortgage thing) because many countries, AFAIK, actually adjust the mortgage for inflation.

It's a good topic, and I'm curious to see what the majority believe. It's true that Bitcoin didn't face a complete economic collapse, but there was something I'd like to use as a base for my prediction: March of 2020, when Covid was declared a pandemic (can't believe there was a time before Covid, to be honest). The stock market (I'm looking at the S&P 500 chart as a reference) went down but started recovering in April, making a full recovery to pre-pandemic value by August of 2020. Bitcoin's behavior was very similar in that case, but while it was the biggest recent crash for the stock market, Bitcoin has had more significant rises and crashes since then. So my guess is that Bitcoin will initially go down along with everything else, but it will start recovering within a couple of months, and will do that faster than the stock market because Bitcoin doesn't really depend on world's economy and because it will probably receive investments from those fleeing the crashing stock market. And then Bitcoin will have its own high and low points, while the world economy simply keeps crawling back up.

You say left-leaning media, but link a source that is a very right-wing populist one? I don't think it's fair, and Tucker, as you can probably see from other posts as well, has a certain reputation. I watched the second half, and there's a short clip from CNBC featuring one woman saying stuff about white supremacy (not even directly linking Bitcoin to white supremacy). By the way, Tucker seems to be getting worse, actually, over time. Last time I watched him about two years ago, he seemed at least lie the kind of guy some reasonable people might like. Now he's even more manipulative, more emotional.
As for the reality, of course there are white supremacists, anti-vaccination leaders, and money launderers who use Bitcoin. But there are also charities, universities, famous companies and people from all parts of the political spectrum using it. I hate it that Tucker's show basically appropriates Bitcoin, but I hope it won't change anyone's mind. Bitcoin is for everyone.

The limit on earning doesn't automatically make it a job, and the way you describe going through adventures and doing some tasks as a job-like activity means that many games (even whole types of games, such as platformers) don't qualify as gaming experience for you. As for the limits, I think they should exist for various reasons: so that it's harder to abuse the system, so that nobody is motivated to spend as much time as possible in front of a screen, so that companies don't lose more money than they expect to lose.

CBDCs compete against fiat, in my opinion, because they are both centralized and both aim to be used as a main means of payment in a particular country. While CBDC competing against fiat is not a real thing for now, it does make sense that they might do so in the future, in a certain sense. As for decentralized currencies, they, IMO, aren't threatened by fiat currencies or CDBCs because they indeed have their own niche. But, as some pointed out, there's room for competition because decentralized money (if we view cryptos as money) is an alternative to centralized money. Right now it's also not really a competition because the possibilities of using Bitcoin as payment are very limited, and many view Bitcoin as more of an investment than a form of payment.

The US is a debt-based country, unbelievably so. Young people take big student loans and end up in debt, mortgages are very popular, credit cards are very popular, and taking all sorts of loans and having all sorts of debts is considered normal. The country itself does a similar thing, ending up in more and more debt. But while it's #1 by total external debt in the world, it's not even in top-10 by debt-to-GDP. Also, being the biggest superpower and economy in the world, the US can pretty much heavily dictate its own rules, and nobody would be able to actually pressure it to pay up. So while it's a lot, and it increased by so much over the last couple of years, I'm not sure it'll have any serious implications for the US economy. At least, not in the near future. But yeah, it will probably become a load on the taxpayers, once again, and of course the most vulnerable will suffer most, while insanely rich will keep living off their wealth without selling stocks and thus not really paying taxes.

The thread is new, but is the news new as well? Can anyone link a source for it, in that case? Because from what I've googled, there's no recent news (nothing this month) about FED tightening its policy, so I'm wondering if we're discussing anything in particular. If it's about the talks of the need to tighten the policy that happened in December (the IMF recommended it), and in January (the Fed Chair said the economy's in need of it), then it's about limiting the fiat supply to combat inflation. It's a fiat matter, aimed at stabilising the USD. I don't see why it should have any impact on the crypto market, to be honest. So I'd choose option 4 from the op.

I don't understand why countries can't just own it when they're lucky to have many miners, and provide a reasonable regulatory framework for them. In my country, the electricity cost depends highly on how much electricity is being used (it's one sum per Kwh if the totall is up to 100, another if it's up to something bigger, and so on), and it's a pretty fair system because it doesn't target any activity specifically but focuses on what matters: consumption of electricity.
As for the idea of taxing GPUs, I see a big problem here: how can they know if the GPU's bought for mining or for a custom PC? This could lead to prices going even higher than they already are, in this crazy period of shortages. As for taxes, why not simply tax miners with income tax, just like any other income would be taxed? They can declare monthly income and pay a certain percentage of it in taxes. As for removing the VAT exemption, that seems reasonable to me because I don't see why it's exempt in the first place. In any case, it's just a proposal by one important person; it doesn't mean it'll actually be adopted.

15) Israel Adesanya
14) Derrick Lewis
13) Jared Cannonier
12) Kyler Phillips
11) Nasrat Haqparast
10) Andrei Arlovski
9) Roxanne Modafferi
8 ) Alex Perez
7) William Knight
6) Ronnie Lawrence
5) Renato Moicano
4) Carlos Ulberg
3) A.J. Dobson
2) Sergey Morozov
1) Jeremiah Wells

Now that some time has passed, it's easy to see that Woo was wrong about the potential stability that high-stake investors would bring to the market. Big investors already entered the market, and yet we see the price being less than $45k. If they didn't prevent the drop, why would they be capable of bringing Bitcoin to a new level?
I do believe that $100k is a very reasonable prediction (by the end of 2022, though, not by June) because it's less than 2x from Bitcoin's previous ATH, and the year has only started. I just don't think this can be explained by a new kind of investors who possess a lot of money.

It's interesting to see how NFTs are now also a part of money laundering schemes (I've seen them being a result of stolen intellectual property before, but not used for money laundering), and the story of tracking the lost coins is also worth attention. It's great that they were caught and money was seized because it shows that Bitcoin doesn't prevent the work of law enforcement, and I also liked the part franky1 pointed out about a $500 giftcard to Walmart. I do trust that it was the case because being reckless is what usually get people caught (just recall how Ross Ulbricht was caught, using an email containing his name to tell people about Silk Road on the Internet).

Bitcoin can't free from governments and corporations, but it can provide some financial freedom because it's the sort of money that is not under any government's control, and it can be used without as much oversight as money on bank accounts. And while someone has to be in charge, it doesn't have to be a single person. That's not how democracies work, that's not the most popular contemporary view at all. The community can be in charge, and conflicts can be resolved by negotiations and consensus mechanisms. Bitcoin managed more than a decade without strict leadership, so I see no reason why it can't keep doing that.