There are several reasons why bitcoin is (potentially) better than gold as a safe haven asset. This has been discussed many times, but as one example, bitcoin has a fixed maximum supply, gold doesn't. You can't say once all the gold in the world is mined then that is the maximum, as we will probably be mining asteroids for precious metals before too long.

It makes absolutely no difference which one you pick.

If you have 1 bitcoin to put into trading:
Coin 'A' costs 0.01BTC.
Coin 'B' costs 0.1BTC.

You can buy 100 of coin A or 10 of coin B. The price per coin is irrelevant. In either case you have still bought 1 bitcoin's worth of the new coin. If you sell immediately, you still end up with 1 bitcoin.

If coin A increases 100% to 0.02BTC and coin B increases 100% to 0.2BTC, and you sell, again it makes no difference which coin you bought, you still end up with 2 bitcoins, and a 100% profit.

Don't look at price per coin, it has no meaning in itself as a single value. Instead look at trading volumes on that coin, and its price history. Low volume coins are a huge gamble because a) they are more prone to manipulation, and b) there is often a big gap between bottom sell order and top buy order, which means you are at an instant loss that you'll need to recover in order to just break even.

I've seen this argument all over the place in the last few weeks, and it's just wrong. I've responded in a few different threads, and I will again (very briefly) here.

Bitcoin is not a safe haven asset yet. It has the potential to be the absolute best safe haven asset, as we all know and have discussed many times before... but for the moment the crypto markets are relatively young, volumes are low compared with traditional markets, which leads to volatility, which is self-perpetuating. Bitcoin at the moment is a high-risk high-reward gamble. But that will change as crypto matures and intersects with the mainstream, and as volumes increase. This is not the end state, we are likely years away from that. Don't confuse what bitcoin is now with what it will become.

I agree with franky1. This is not China hiding its figures.
If someone says 'my previous figures were incorrect, these are the new figures' - then that should make you trust them more, not less.

Countries are overwhelmed, health services are overwhelmed, people who are dying of this are not just dying in hospital, people are dying in care homes and indeed in their own homes.

Data takes time to come in. There is inevitably a degree of late reporting when you are collecting information from disparate sources, especially in a country like China with a billion people.

The problem is that we need the latest data now, right now, all the time. The initial figures will be just that, initial, and subject to revision.

I started reading that article. I got as far as "a highly centralised socialist system", and then the alarm bells started ringing.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/zero-hedge/

OP, I should add that if you are aiming for something that will increase x100 in price, then that potential of high reward also comes with high risk. If you are chasing after something like that, some obscure low cap coin that might be a huge success, you are far more likely to lose your money. Don't throw everything at the obscure stuff, most of it is obscure for a reason. If you want to gamble with high risk coins, then just do that with a part of your holdings. Keep the rest in solid coins, particularly bitcoin, but also maybe some good high cap alts such as ETH. Throwing everything into something that might go x100 is a huge huge gamble.

I think that attitude is the most important thing. If you want to learn, that is the biggest asset you can have.
I am not a bitcoin or crypto expert, but a general point is that this is a huge field of study and it can become very technical. It would be a mistake to try to learn everything, if you try this then there is a big chance that you will just become overwhelmed. No-one can know everything, this is true across all areas of expertise. Experts in any field are generally those who specialised in a very specific area. Heart surgeons and brain surgeons are both highly skilled medical professionals, but that doesn't mean they can perform each others jobs. Compare this with a general medical practitioner who treats a huge variety of illnesses and ailments, but for anything complex refers to the patient to a specialist. What I'm saying is that there is a trade-off between breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge. You can know a little about lots of things, or a lot about a small number of things, you can't know everything about everything. This is as true in crypto as anything else.

So my only advice really isn't don't get dragged into the finer technical detail. A best approach might be to cover the basics of everything, and then once you have a decent overview, you can focus a bit more on a specific area that interests you.

Also, when it looks like someone knows everything about crypto, this won't actually be the case. If you know 5% of a subject, and someone else knows more than you, it is easy to assume they know 100%, when in fact it is more likely they know 10%, it's just that for the person who knows less, it's impossible to determine the extent of knowledge of someone who knows more. For example I contribute a lot on the quantum computing threads; to a casual reader who knows say 1% of the subject, it may appear that I know everything, when in fact I really really don't, I'm probably at 2%, and there are huge parts of the subject that are a complete mystery to me.

Ignoring the data for a second - it makes me shudder to say that, because in general I demand data and evidence - but ignoring the data...

The reason that bitcoin is not getting the uplift that gold is getting is because: bitcoin is not seen as a store of value.

We all know that bitcoin has the potential to be a safe haven asset, and the ultimate store of value. We all know the reasons for this, it's all been covered many many times, including why bitcoin is superior to gold as a safe haven and store of value.

However, at the moment the crypto markets are still (relatively) young. The bitcoin market is still comparatively low volume, which means that volatility is high. We are some way away from an end state here. Bitcoin is at the moment considered by the general public to be a high risk high reward gamble, in short, the sort of asset that you might buy into when stocks and shares are enjoying a boom, when the economy is healthy and you have plenty of money, it's speculative, a long-shot that if you are a big investor you might throw some money at. But it's not currently a place to go when the economy hits the rocks and you are pulling out of stocks and shares and looking for somewhere safe.

Not yet.

Trump certainly wants to cut the funding. Whether he'll be able to do so from a legal perspective is another question.

Of course this has nothing to do with the efficacy of the WHO. This is just the classic Trump behaviour of looking around to find a scapegoat to deflect from his own poor decisions. At first he tried to blame CV-19 on China, now it's the WHO. At least with China there was some culpability in their silencing of the initial whistleblowers, even if their response after that point was very good. With the WHO though, they haven't done anything blameworthy at all. The fact that the US is struggling to contain this thing is a consequence of the decisions of the US administration.

Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk, saying 'the buck stops here'. Trump doesn't.

I'm going to break the rule and suggest one fiction book and one factual, sorry!

For fiction, À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust. For years I avoided it through sheer stubbornness, as it is at the top of so many 'best book ever' lists. However, I did eventually relent. I have to admit this is the best novel (actually a series of seven) that I've ever read. I'm sure you've heard of it, it's been translated into many languages, and is often called Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time in English. Difficult to describe what it's about, although the nature of memory is a huge part of it. Proust has a perhaps unparalleled way of being able to describe a scene but then just drop through that to reveal the underlying reality. Definitely worth a look if you are interested in literature or just what it is to be a human amongst other humans.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time

My top recommendation for a factual book is Capital in the Twenty First Century, by Thomas Piketty. This is simply the best book if you want to understand the current economic status of the world, and how we got here. It is all about wealth and income inequality, and the methods by which these are created and changed. It has been lauded by economists and public figures around the world, and it's full of data rather than relying on uncorroborated theory.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century

These are both quite heavyweight suggestions - happy to suggest something lighter if you'd prefer

Also I would second @KonstantinosM on A Clockwork Orange - that's a great book.

I would be suspicious of all sudden price movements for very small coins. Obviously the smaller the coin, the easier it is to manipulate the price. The simplest way to determine if the movement is genuine is to look for recent news about the coin. If there is a genuine reason for the coin to rise, then likely it is normal FOMO price movement. But if you can't find any reason why the coin should be increasing dramatically in price, then it screams pump-and-dump.

It's still a shared secret though, right? It's still a key?

Maybe I'm being stupid, but I don't see how this can exist.
Surely there are two ways that the data can be decrypted: either you need a shared secret, or else the communication itself contains the means of deciphering it.
So in the first instance, the secret is the key - whether we call it a key or not, that's what it is.
And in the second instance, there is zero security because anyone can derive the data from a thing that is entirely self-contained.

I was wondering if transmissibility of a virus might in general be inversely proportional to mortality rate. Looking at things from an evolutionary perspective, and from the position of the virus, it would be counterproductive for the virus's own survival if it killed all hosts. A virus that kills 100% of its hosts is not going to become a pandemic, because those hosts will quickly become incapacitated and not be able to spread the virus to new hosts. A virus that kills no-one on the other hand, and that only elicits minor symptoms, is likely to spread like crazy - the common cold as an example.

Does anyone have an opinion on this, or (preferably) data to either confirm or refute the hypothesis? It may be the case that we are very unlikely to encounter something that is both highly transmissible and kills a high proportion of people, it may be that it is almost always one or the other, never (usually) both. Or is this just blind hope?

I've had a quick look on the web, and found the table below, which would seem to corroborate what I'm suggesting. But I'm saying 'almost' and 'usually' above because smallpox looks like a bit of an outlier...
I think it looks like there is a relationship there. First one to suggest confirmation bias gets a virtual de-merit. 


_{https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1286457920300265}

They (we) want the spread of the virus to slow to manageable levels, to 'flatten the curve' so that the number of new cases doesn't continue to grow exponentially, massively overwhelming the healthcare system and causing huge numbers of otherwise avoidable deaths. That's it, really. In the absence of a vaccine, the best we can do is to slow the spread so that those who can be saved are saved. Lives are worth more than dollars.
Of course if governments had been a bit more pro-active and implemented lockdowns much earlier, the economic hit and the healthcare hit would both have been much lower - but that's a different argument.

It doesn't really work like that. If a coin has low trading volume, then it is easier to manipulate. Someone with a lot of money can manipulate a small market very easily, but might struggle to manipulate a coin with bigger volumes. If you have $1000 then you can dramatically alter the price of say a small alt that has only $2000 of total orders, but you wouldn't be able to impact bitcoin price at all. A 'whale' is just someone with enough money to single-handedly (or as a pump-and-dump group) alter the price of a coin. The smaller the market, the more a whale can have an effect.

The problem with this is that you will get endless replies from bagholders who want to dump their useless tokens. I have plenty myself, but I'm not going to advise you buy them! You may get good advice about little-known gems, too, but you have no way to distinguish the small amount of good from the larger amount of bad. At best you'll have a few coins where you might want to DYOR.

Are we just talking about the distinction between symmetric and asymmetric cryptography?

I don't know about the 'keyless cryptography' you mention, but I suspect it needs a shared something, a key by another name? I think we have mentioned OTPs before. The weakness with OTPs is that initial sharing of the key. QKD used in conjunction with OTP gives a strong solution to that problem. With QKD you can tell when there has been an interception/hacking attempt; it's a great way to share a key. Yes there remain certain vulnerabilities in implementation, it's not perfect, just an improvement on the analogous classical method.

Asymmetric cryptography by contrast is great for things like bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The problem comes with quantum computers running the Shor algorithm, which obliterates public key cryptography. Where a classical computer takes an unimaginably huge 2¹²⁸ operations to derive the bitcoin private key, a QC running Shor takes a mere 128³.

An 18 month continuous shutdown is pointless. The article does refer to rolling shutdowns, which makes more sense.

As there is no current vaccine, strategies are just based on 'flattening the curve' - i.e., keeping the rate of new infections below the maximum capacity of the healthcare system. Once the current shutdown has continued for long enough so that the peak has passed and the medical professionals can cope with demand, then it makes sense for the lockdown to be lifted for a period of time.
After this, once infection rates start to creep up again, another lockdown can be put in place to keep the curve within manageable levels. And so on.

You would expect that the initial lockdown - the current one - is the biggest and longest. So long as the guidance is sufficiently clear and the rules strong enough to slow the rate of new cases, then it should be safe to lift restrictions once that peak has passed. The crucial thing is keeping the R₀ below 1 - so that each new infected person infects on average less than 1 other person.

If people start talking about 18 month lockdowns, I don't think there's any way it can be continuous. If after a few weeks you are not seeing a big reduction in new cases, then it means your restrictions are not tight enough, so you strengthen them, and look again in another couple of weeks. 18 months is not required. The cumulative economic damage from a lengthy shutdown means that every government faced with this choice will implement stricter lockdown terms.

Economies around the world are likely to re-open gradually and cautiously, certain types of shops and businesses first, followed by others. You can bet that everyone will take it seriously from now on, and any subsequent lockdown will likely be shorter than this initial one.

As for a vaccine - the standard response seems to be 12-18 months as a minimum, but there are things that can be done to speed this up, such as running human trials early. Obviously there is a risk attached, and any volunteers will have to be well aware of this, but I think it's not necessarily the case that we'll have to wait a year.

Hope you're doing okay out there. Here in the UK we likely have another month (at least) of lockdown.

There are definitely encouraging signs coming from Italy. Active cases may not have peaked because this metric will lag behind new cases - because people who have contracted the virus then have it for a period of time, so to an extent this is cumulative. The drop in new cases however looks promising, with March 21 a possible peak. It is another good sign that even with increased testing, new cases are not rising. There may perhaps be a delay in reporting because of Easter, but if so this should become apparent in the next couple of days. I would say we can be cautiously optimistic that Italy is winning in this initial battle against the virus. We just have to remember this is initial; with no vaccine yet available, in every country the longer fight is far from over.


_{https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/}

I do think we can hit $100k, but 2021 seems optimistic. I don't think the main driver for price increase will be increased consumer use for day-to-day transactions, I think the most likely route to a high price is the 'store of value' use case. The current pandemic has seen traditional stocks and shares plunge - and crypto too, because crypto is still seen as a risky asset. I would say give it time. Bitcoin is the ultimate store of value, the ultimate safe haven, far better than gold. We will need more money coming in, and higher trading volumes, first. This will help to reduce volatility. Once the volatility issue is improved, the understanding of bitcoin as a safe haven will come naturally. That I think is when we will start to see some big price increases.

Hi again

I suppose I'm saying that quantum cryptography is not limited to QKD, it's much bigger and more fundamental than that.

QKD is an approach to key distribution that uses quantum properties, and so is a part of quantum cryptography. It was certainly an early part, yes 1980s with the BB84 protocol. QKD has been the main implementation of quantum cryptography for a long time. And QKD does indeed have limitations, as discussed above. It's an improvement on the equivalent classical process, that's all.

But my point really is that the laws of quantum mechanics provide us with a theoretical framework through which, by exploiting properties such as entanglement, quantum teleportation and the no-cloning theorem, some sort of unhackable communication process may be possible.

QKD is an early implementation. I'm not saying it's the perfect end-state, it's not. I'm saying that quantum mechanics gives us a valuable toolset, and we would be remiss to focus entirely on post-quantum cryptography - which is, fundamentally, classical. PQC is no doubt hugely important and will certainly provide the initial defences against a future quantum attack. But the best long-term defence against quantum attack is not necessarily classical. There can be quantum defences, too. If we dismiss any possible quantum defence and limit ourselves purely to the classical, then we are missing something important.

QKD is a first implementation of quantum cryptography. There have been developments since then. I've mentioned Kak's 3-stage protocol before, a sort of quantum double-lock. This is quantum cryptography, and is a big improvement on QKD. There will be further developments and further improvements. Quantum mechanics offers us a world of possibilities. I'm just saying we need to follow this path in addition to the path of PQC.