I'd say 10k - 20k USD might be well within Bitcoin's grasp the next 4-5 years, but I don't think 100k USD are reachable anytime soon. Possibly in a couple decades when inflation has taken its course, but not within the foreseeable future.

However to allow for any significant, sustainable growth, Bitcoin still needs to get its house in order, ie. finally solve the scaling issue once and for all. Right now it seems like we're heading in the right direction, but that's not worth much until solutions such as lightning network are actually deployed.

Either way I don't think any of the currently existing alts will be able to supersede Bitcoin. Not as store of value, at least.

Trezor passphrases can be up to 50 ASCII characters in length, Ledger can handle up to 100 characters. Both of which should still protect your holdings short- to mid-term if you avoided using publicly available phrases such as song lyrics or literary quotes. However, you shouldn't be considering your wallet as safe anymore since once the seed has been compromised your wallet security will be taken down quite a notch. Otherwise why would go through to all the lengths of keeping the seed airgapped?

In short, if your seed gets public, you should consider your passphrase only as a temporary security measure that will buy you just enough time to move your coins to a new wallet. So if you don't trust your friend enough to not do anything stupid with your backup seed... find somewhere else to store it

Ah yes, that's true. Impatient is a very fitting description of the modern crypto investor.

Both traditional and crypto investors are greedy in wanting big profits, but crypto investors want them now while traditional investors are used to slower paced markets. To be fair, traditional markets are indeed quite boring compared to crypto, even during times of major growth and corrections.

Well it's not that ICOs couldn't give their tokenholders more rights, it's just that many don't choose to.

Apart from that, you're right. While not all crypto-enthusiasts are fans of regulation, there's probably a significant amount of people from the mainstream markets that would be willing to invest in ICOs if they had a stronger legal foundation. Assuming there are ICOs that would be willing to succumb to a regulatory framework

I wouldn't be so sure about the late 1990's being more idealistic and less greedy, but you pointed out an important factor: Deliberate scam attempts.

During the dot-com bubble the problem has huge overvaluations of companies with little to show for. With ICOs you have more of the same, with the added risk of scams attempts. Usually the latter would get filtered out early by regulations and a market of more experienced investors, but with ICOs you have neither in place. But maybe that's just my cynicism talking.



Gullible investors may not be targeted by hungry salesmen anymore, but they are still targeted with meaningless whitepapers, buzzwords and cookie-cutter fancy websites. I also doubt that the knowledge base has gotten much better since back then. Sure, people probably spend more time reading up on each project, but that's of little use without understanding the surrounding market, the underlying technologies and subsequently the challenges to be faced. The result is still the same: millions of funds poured into projects that do not make any profits.

It's a fun idea, but I'm afraid the problem comes from the back pressure against the miner fan: To reach the same amount of cooling you'd probably have to run the fans at higher speeds, which means the additional energy necessary to run the fans would be higher than the energy that could be regained by the wind turbine. Placing the wind turbines far enough from the fans so that the back pressure doesn't matter would probably lead to the problem that the wind turbine is exposed to too little energy as to actually move.

TradeFortress. Used to run CoinLenders and inputs.io back in 2013. The first was most likely a ponzi scheme, the second was to be used for off-chain transactions (I think either CoinLenders or some now defunct exchanges required inputs.io deposits at one point, not sure anymore). After a couple months both sites disappeared and the coins along with them. I can't recall if he actually bothered to claim to have been "hacked", but it was fairly obvious that he just took a run for it.

Do we have a roadmap for LN? I've seen that the first tests have already been conducted on BTC testnet but didn't find any estimates on when the first mainnet transactions will be made.

I personally also am more interested in BTC as a digital store of value, however I love using BTC as a currency. Unfortunately with the current fee market that's hardly viable, so I'm really looking forward to LN and being able to use BTC like in the old days.

All known security flaws with Trezor so far required physical access and were dealt with swiftly, with SatoshiLabs being transparent about both the flaws and how they were fixed. So unless there are any specific reports about unpatched security flaws I would be highly surprised if that were the case.

Does Ledger have any features that make securing it easier?

I didn't mean legally binding as in legally recognized. I meant "not legally binding" as in ICO projects explicitly denying any legal rights to token holders in their terms of agreement. You're not guaranteed to actually be able to use these tokens, even if the ICO project turns out to be successful.

Google wasn't even publicly traded yet, also the companies that prevailed such as Microsoft already had working products before the bubble

Check how Pets.com's stock went for a more apt comparison to the current ICO situation. With gambles like that the only way to make money is to either run an ICO yourself or knowing when to jump ship.

Don't hate on BTC's little crypto brother! While I don't see many use cases for LTC that BTC doesn't already cover, it's an incredibly useful testbed. Also it's always good to have a backup

I agree with everything else you say though. However I'm afraid that SegWit also won't help BTC in the long term, as 2nd layer solutions will be needed for that.

It's quite amazing really. Not only did BTC reach an incredible ATH, it also has been able to linger close to that ATH for more than 2 weeks now. It's as stable as it has ever been and that on OKish volume. Short of catastrophic news, any downward correction will probably be a short-lived one, which makes for a very bullish market situation.

I remember a couple years back there was a group of traders surrounding Goomboo, who ran a trading journal over at the Speculation board. He had a very similar strategy based on EMAs. If I remember correctly it went fairly well... until it didn't. Or rather, while reducing some of the volatility, it failed to significantly outperform a simple buy and hold strategy. So yeah, trading using moving averages has been tried and tested but rarely been actually viable.

I don't get what you mean by equity not being as easy to liquidate as a token? Stocks can be easily traded. Or are you thinking of VC-style equity?

Also keep in mind that some people actually want to own part of the company and not just to be able to redeem a token for services rendered.



If you look closely most tokens are not even legally binding. Many token holders don't have any rights at all. So shareholders having more rights than tokenholders is an understatement.

That's the thing, we're not even close to mainstream adoption and institutional investors. Sure, a lot of this potential is already priced in, but once the potential becomes reality (if it becomes reality) it will be like nothing we've ever seen before. Or rather, it will be exactly like the growth we've experienced before, just on a much grander scale.

Crypto in general will be fine, the ICO tokens are a different story. "It can really change how things work" is exactly what everyone else thought during the dot-com boom before the bubble burst.

Problem being, changing how things work requires 1) a problem worth solving 2) in a way that is actually viable 3) with an actual product that is more than just hypothetics and buzzwords.



Terror organizations such as the IS are still funded in fiat, not crypto. The terror acts themselves don't need much in terms of money, just willing fundamentalists.

Lightning Network will definitely assist Bitcoin's price, because then (hopefully) the scaling debate will be done with once and for all, as they road will be paved for a non-linear scaling solution that doesn't require any additional hardforks in the future.


There's hardly any SegWit enabled wallets yet, only some that offer it as beta feature. That's why you see so few SegWit transactions. Once wallets use SegWit by default it won't be "too complicated" for users anymore. On the surface the only noticable change will be the changed address format, it's not like using Bitcoin turned into rocket science all of a sudden.


The long, long bear market will do this to a coin. Especially since next to nothing happened in LTC development until SegWit came along earlier this year.

Yes, the smart move right now regarding ICOs is most likely to wait for the dust to settle and see which companies prevails. It also has the side effect that after these 2-3 years the market will be way less hyped and have saner price levels, which means you could actually get good value for your investment and not just a pump-and-dump lottery ticket.

There may be a diamond in the rough somewhere in this pile of semi-thought-out vaporware, but I honestly don't want to waste my time shifting through meaningless whitepapers that only aim to daze potential investors with buzzwords and crypto-babble. I'll gladly let the market filter out the companies that weren't worth looking into in the first place.

Some garbage and over-valued stocks in the late 1990s? Most of them! The only noteworthy survivor of the dot-com bubble itself is probably Google. Amazon and especially Apple and Microsoft already existed way before the dot-com bubble reared its ugly face.

But yes, once the ICO market corrects, crypto will be all the better for it. Just like the current exchange ecosystem rose from the ashes that were MtGox.

What it will take for ICOs to crash? Just... time. Most ICOs will fail to deliver. Of those that deliver, only few will be successful. And those few successful, will probably take much longer than many people are willing to hold.