I think the chance of Monero, together with other privacycoins, getting banned is fairly high. Look at the US, they already proposed tracking of self-hosted wallets, banning privacycoins is a pretty logical next step. Monero's price would take a really big hit if that would happen, but its network would still function without problems, and darknet users or hardcore privacy enthusiasts would keep using it.

A part of me actually wants to see it happen, because it would be a good model for what would happen if Bitcoin would to get banned.

They only have hypothetical advertised use-cases, and serious investors understand that and avoid them. This is the reason why institutional investors are picking Bitcoin over any altcoin.


This is a poor advice, volume and popularity don't guarantee that a recovery will happen, there's no connection here. Also, the point of long-term investing isn't recovering from losses, the point is having high returns, and altcoins have no reason to yield high returns over long time - for that to happen, they would first need to actually deliver on their promises, and even here they fail. Take Ethereum for example - who uses it as a "world computer"? Ethereum team promised that everything will be moved to smart contract and centralized system will be abandoned, but the only thing ETH achieved is an ecosystem of tokens, which are mostly used for scamming.

I can tell for sure that the users who are hardcore Bitcoin enthusiasts would continue posting on this forum even without signature campaigns. But it's also true that some of the high quality posters are motivated by signature campaigns, especially if they are enrolled in a very high-paying campaign like Chipmixer. This means that signature campaigns aren't inherently flawed, the problem comes from poorly-managed campaigns, but merit system already made a huge improvement.

Also, it's not like without signatures only high quality posters will remain. Check the Serious Discussion board, which is not counted towards any signature campaigns - the quality of discussion there isn't much better than anywhere on this forum.

I occasionally visit the Altcoin board here, and to some people no amount of proof will be enough to admit that Bitcoin is the king of crypto - the keep hoping for alt season and repeating their mantra how their favorite altcoin is better than Bitcoin and will soon replace it. My only hope is that beginners don't get caught in their false marketing - if you have friends who are still new to crypto, please warn them about the danger of investing in alts.

As Bitcoin reaches new highs, people start comparing it to the prices, but this isn't a good idea. Past performance does not guarantee future performance, the causes behind price movements change with time, and expecting the history to keep repeating itself is quite naive. These institutional investors that are active now do not "hodl and believe", they make market analysis and decide that right now Bitcoin is a good investment, given the current circumstances. Learn from them and approach investing rationally instead of emotionally.

I think "overpricing" only makes sense if someone controls supply and sets a fixed price for it, and if the price is more than most potential buyers are ready to pay, then you have an overprice. But with Bitcoin, the fee prices are regulated by a bidding system, it's a free market, which is the best mechanism for price discovery. Overpaying on fees only happens on individual level, when some users set a much higher fee than needed for some reason - maybe a flaw of their wallet, or they simply put those 200sat/byte fees because they can afford to throw money without thinking.

The most important part is actually having a feasible idea. If you idea is unrealistic, then even hiring the best devs in the world won't help you. And altcoin field is full of projects that just can't succeed - medical blockchain, VR blockchain, renewable energy blockchain, etc. This is just the famous "garbage in - garbage out" principle. I think overwhelming majority of altcoins have both bad devs and bad ideas, rather than good ideas that suffer from having bad devs.

It's only hard to guess the market when it trades sideways - if the trend has been established, it's easy to follow it, especially if you come early. It's true that institutional investors won't panic sell, but this doesn't mean that they won't sell at all, taking profit is a part of trading, and trading for short or medium term is just as valid as trading long term.

What if institutional investors didn't come here to break the cycle, but to ride it? In that case, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy - the cycle will happen again, because investors expect it to happen.

The risk of buying Bitcoin 5 years ago was pretty big, and even today it's big too. Unlike with stocks, there no way to calculate how much Bitcoin should be worth, everyone is just taking a guess. So, there's nothing actually remarkable here that Bitcoin outperformed stocks, in fact if it didn't outperform them, it would have been a terrible investment, because you'd get less reward for more risk - just like we currently see with altcoin investments.

How can you say that they don't plan to take profits anytime soon with certainty, if all you have is just a fact that they withdraw their coins to their wallets. Cold wallet doesn't mean that it's hard to access, even with self-made setup it takes 10 minutes to transfer coins. Different traders have different levels of greed, some are satisfied with 20% profits or 50% profits, which is why corrections occur - someone exits because they already got enough profits. Bull market is not only about hodlers refusing to sell, you also need new buyers.

A coin that still has working blockchain and is traded somewhere, but has no development activity and very low volumes can be called a zombie coin. A coin that no longer mines new blocks is a dead coin. Both zombie coins and dead coins are a type of a failed coin. But you don't need to wait until that to consider a coin as a failure, if a coin fails to deliver its promises for years after launch, then it's also a failed coin, it's clear that either the devs have no desire or not capability to deliver what they have promised, or their project was unsound from the start.

Governments are generally quite slow in adopting new tech, so things like adopting crypto are more of an exception rather than the norm that it to be expected. We actually don't see any significant progress in crypto adoption for payments by anyone at all. Government adoption will only come after mainstream adoption, which also assumes proper and full regulation, and we don't even have that still.


If governments were to accept crypto today, that would have convinced some of the nocoiners that crypto is not some scam, but if it will happen later, then it won't matter, because people would already believe in crypto.

You need to understand the reasons behind the market trends if you want to have some idea about the present and near future. Unfortunately, I see a lot of users throwing this idea out of the window and just keep operating on pure hopium.

2017 market was driven by "blockchain technology" hype. Investors were throwing their money at every altcoin out there, traditional companies were announcing that they will adopt blockchain and so on. Then, after Bitcoin has crashed, there was much less interest in blockchain.

Fastforward to 2020, Bitcoin is booming because institutional investors decided that it's worth parking some of their money in it, since US dollar isn't doing to well. Is there any reason for alts to grow here? Would anyone view highly experimental, unrpoven, untested, work-in-progress networks as a good place to store their value? Especially since their volatility is much higher than Bitcoin's? The answer is clearly no.

Altcoin season was a one-time thing, investors won't be so hyped about blockchain now, because it's no longer a brand new thing, and they see that it failed to yield any results since 2017.

Hardware wallets are good for beginners, but they are not fool-proof, there were many attacks recently, like malicious extensions that targeted transactions made by hardware wallets or third-party resellers who try to sneak in their own addresses into the wallet. And let's not forget Ledger's screw up, which is not an attack on the wallet, but still a really bad thing that wouldn't happen with software wallets. If a person can learn to verify digital signatures and install Linux on a spare computer, then they are fully ready to make a cold storage with software wallet. And those things are actually very simple if you just invest an hour or two into reading the guide and figuring it all out.

If Grayscale is on the list, then why not Coinbase and every other centralized exchange? Coinbase holds close to 1 million bitcoins, other exchange hold over a hundred thousand coins. But still we can see that the vast majority of coins is held by private holders. So, in case someone is worried that Bitcoin's supply becomes more centralized, it's still to early to worry about that, especially since Bitcoin is so divisible, and it's not a PoS system.

Crypto is just scammers paradise, you have millions of people ready to throw their money for a promise of quick returns, you have strong privacy thanks to mixers, you have platforms for selling your shitcoins that can be both centralized or decentralized, and you can even get free marketing if you hire bountyhunters with your tokens.  These factors are enough to assume that any altcoin project is a scam until proven otherwise, and by proven I mean years of good track record that shows actual development and delivery on their promises.

It's the cost of producing Bitcoin that is dependent on the price, because of the difficulty adjustment algorithm. AKA "the hashrate follows the price". But Bitcoin's price would need to grow a few orders of magnitude in order to be able to attract enough electricity to become a noticeable carbon-emission offender. As of now, there are much bigger sources of carbon emissions, to the point where blaming Bitcoin for global warming sounds suspiciously like a deflection by some of those industries.

Bitcoin and gold are too different to say that one is better than the other. Bitcoin is much more volatile and risky, so it's already a bad idea to measure their pure performance without considering it. When investors buy gold, they buy a guarantee that it won't crash for 50% in one day. When investors buy Bitcoin, they buy an opportunity to see a 20% growth in one day. Also gold has been in use for thousands of years, so people can be sure that it won't suddenly start degrading due to some chemical reactions, while Bitcoin still haven't been fully tested in some extreme scenarios.

This can be really bad for the future of Bitcoin. In 2017 Bitcoin community defended itself from the SegWit2x attack by clearly signalling that the users won't recognize the fork as new Bitcoin. But if in the future majority of Bitcoin users will only own custodial Bitcoin and won't know anything about the technicals of Bitcoin, it would be easy to hard-fork the network if miners will be onboard.

We still haven't seen a single government using Bitcoin as a reserve currency, many of them haven't even fully legalized/regulated it. Without it, Bitcoin can't become a replacement for US dollar. Plus, US dollar is also a very popular method for international trade, and Bitcoin with its less than 1 million transactions per day simply can't scale for that. If US dollar had fallen today, some other fiat currency would take its spot, most likely Euro.