I wouldn't call Bitcoin a commodity, commodities are meant to be consumable, and Bitcoin is obviously not. Collectibles are valuable because of their extreme rarity, and Bitcoin is not that rare - up to 21 million coins, and 100 million times more satoshis. I don't think that Bitcoin is all that different from fiat money - they are both valuable because people believe in their value, while inherently they have no uses beyond monetary. The key difference is that fiat's supply is created in a centralized way, and now with the shift towards digital payments, the payments are also processed in a centralized way too.

Satoshi himself admitted that mining would eventually be done by big mining farms. Heavily decentralized mining was never a major goal of Bitcoin's protocol.


How it's their plaything? They don't control the price or the network, they are just investors like the others. Bitcoin does not prohibit "the elites" from owning it.


How can it be replaced by any altcoin if those altcoins have even less adoption?

Every government implements restrictions on operations with cash, and each year they make them tighter and tighter. Sooner or later they will do the same with Bitcoin, and they aren't interested in trying to stop you from installing Bitcoin clients or anything like that, they want to make it hard to spend Bitcoin without doing KYC or explaining the source of funds in some cases. They might tell exchanges and other services to threat mixed coins as suspicious, and demand customers to show their transactions before mixing and freeze their funds if they refuse.

I'd choose password-protected seed over a password-protected QR code, because QR codes might have lower tolerance to data loss than the seed phrases, even with QR code's error correction. With seed words, you can still bruteforce your phrase if you lost a few words, and a loss of individual letters is not a problem, because it's easy to get the words from them. With QR codes, if there's too much damage, your key will be impossible to recover.

Your post fails to explain how password reuse hurts users, you only make a general statement that "it helps scammers". And your advice of using uppercase letters and numbers is just misleading, those things don't improve security by as much as you'd think.


Making an explanation would encourage them to choose their posts more carefully, and it's also a chance to earn additional merit for the explanation itself, if they can demonstrate that they understand what makes a post valuable.


It's only begging if it's unsolicited. Merit giveaways/contests/etc. is a normal practice on this forum.


Newbies seem to interpret "making helptful posts" as "creating guide topics", and I want to show them that you can earn merit by just participating in discussions.

This current bull market is driven by institutional investors, and whomever is in charge of deciding which assets to buy over there is most likely not a millenial. Millenials are highly represented among the retail investors, but Gen X shouldn't be underestimated - they are also quite tech savvy and have more money than millenials.


The future of Bitcoin is in everyone's hands, and I also don't think that millenials have some mission to teach younger people about Bitcoin - they could easily discover it on their own.

No one told them to ban posts about Bitcoin, they did it on their own because of so many Bitcoin and crypto-related scams - doublers, cloud mining, ICO, etc. They can't dispatch real humans to check these posts, so they use algorithms to match keywords and automatically delete these posts. Maybe in the future they will train some AI models to separate scams from legitimate posts, because blanket banning everything is hurting their business.

No asset can rise infinitely, or even just for long periods of time, and stock to flow model does not tell us when it will stop, in fact it tells that every halving is as important as the previous ones, while actually we'll have such low reward in just few decades that it will stop being a major factor for the price.

There's is a good connection between bull markets and halvenings so far, but maybe some other model that takes it into account could make a better long-term prediction than S2F.

There's nothing scary about getting your posts deleted together with the topic, unless you are counting your every post for your signature campaign. In any case, if you want to minimize such events, it's not enough to just becareful of newbie OPs, you should get a sense if a new topic might get deleted or not. Generally topics get deleted if they are obviously worthless, like some questions that get asked every day, if they are offtopic or spam (spam usually contains links).

I saw similar charts a few years ago, and a lot of people back then tried to argue that volatility isn't going down and that it's actually increasing, but now it's even more clear that it's not true, and of course it makes sense that as we get more volume, and the novelty factor disappears, the volatility is bound to go down. Even if this bull market will make volatility increase, this volatility won't be as big as that of the previous cycles, so the trend is correct.

But it seems like if you extrapolate the line, the volaility will long-term stabilize at some level, like 10-15%, which also makes sense, because there's no price stabilizers like with fiat currency.

If I had millions of dollars worth of coins, I'd keep them in 5-10 wallets of different types - hardware wallets, physical wallets (steel plates), maybe one or two custodial wallets. I'd keep a few wallets at my home, and a few wallets in a deposit box, and I'd memorize at least one seed on top of storing it with any other methods. I would also back up at least one seed in cloud storage, encrypting it with a very strong password beforehand. With this setup, I would only lose a portion of my coins in worst case scenario and never lose all coins. I'd keep the record of all my wallets in an encrypted file and once in a few months I'd check all these wallets.

I talk about blockchain, which you mentioned in your post, and now you talk about cryptocurrency. These are two very different things. Blockchain is a programming pattern, cryptocurrency is a system that uses this pattern. It's okay to talk to broad audience about Bitcoin, as it's the only cryptocurrency worth attention, but you shouldn't spend too much time talking about blockchain - this knowledge is only needed for programmers who want to be blockchain developers, and they will learn it somewhere else.

How likely is an average user to get attacked through side channels, which requires some physical access and equpment only available to security services and maybe some top-level criminals? And it's not like hardware wallets are unhackable, there has been many reports of proof-of-concept attacks on them, and all these things with sidechannels actually apply to hardware wallets too.

What a hardware wallet does is isolating your private key from unsecure environment that might have malware. In your example you have already created a Bitcoin wallet in an unsecure environment, and there are some things that could go wrong - you could have downloaded a fake wallet, or a malware could have stolen your new wallet file/seed. Then, even if you will delete a wallet file, you'd still need to use it later, and when you'll do so, you will again be exposed to risk. Hardware wallet allows you to send transactions without those risk.


Having your own cold storage setup with an old computer or other device is very close to a hardware wallet, maybe sometimes even better. It's a bit harder to setup and use, but it's not rocket science, any advanced user will be able to do it, and it could be cheaper than a hardware wallet, as people upgrade their computers from time to time, so they probably have a spare computer quite often.

Why would people need to know about blockchain? Especially if they are from a rural area. Have you heard about someone going from village to village and talk about MySQL and MongoDB? Even if blockchain was useful, there's no need for regular people to understand it, just like people don't know how Internet works or how planes fly, but they still use them without problems. But blockchain actually isn't that useful, cryptocurrency is the only successful application, and maybe the last.

Your story highlights one interesting fact - a first negative experience can often make people quit for good, and in crypto negative experiences are waiting around every corner - scams, hacks, understanding difficulties, accidental loss of funds, etc. This is one of the reasons why adoption is slow - not only some people quit crypto after trying, they probably share their story with friends and discourage them from entering crypto too.

1. Node data could be inaccurate, as different sites give different estimates

2. Node count only means that a country might have more nodes than the other, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's more adoption.

3. Node counts for US and Germany are very close, so this doesn't mean that Germany is much more important than the US.

For point 2, I would say that the quality of Internet is better in Europe, it's faster and cheaper than in US, so maybe it's easier to run nodes there, so more people choose to.

DEX won't allow anyone to avoid regulations, they are using bank transactions or other centralized methods for the fiat side, and they report everything to the regulators. So, if you sell too much Bitcoin, which can be as little as a few thousand dollars, tax officials will be very interested where do the money come from and why you haven't paid tax on them.
Governments take tax evasion very seriously, after all, they won't be able to exist without taxes, so don't think there's some simple method to fool them by using crypto.

This isn't the first time it is reported that G7 will discuss crypto, so far nothing big came out of it. Maybe this time will be different, or maybe it won't.


Isn't it strange that after Bitcoin's price skyrocketed, we started hearing more of FUD "rumors" that crypto wallets will be banned/restricted/ I'm pretty sure nothing will come out of it, because it's almost impossible to demand from exchanges to do verification of their user's wallet, and a law that is hard to enforce will only create more headache for everyone, including the government.

No one is going to give any coins to an anonymous guy thousands of kilometers away, that's just a recipe for a scam. In general, using Bitcoin for investing in business, especially internationally, is a very bad idea, there's zero investor protection, zero regulation, and authorities will be unwilling or unable to help the investor in case of a scam.

You should keep trying with traditional finance, if your idea is good, someone will notice it. Maybe reduce your scale to increase your chances, and then expand your business later.