I don't regret any of my past sales, the fact that Bitcoin is higher right now, so the rest of my coins are more valuable is more than enough to chase away this sort of thoughts. My only "dubious" spending was investing 0.011 BTC in an ICO scam - this was the first and the last ICO I invested in. And my biggest spending was cashing out 1 BTC at $650 to buy a new BTC, but I still don't regret it, because this PC was a big upgrade for me that made me happier and still serves me well.

Does anyone even say that Bitcoin is a replacement for stocks? I never heard such thing. But how can you argue that Bitcoin is not an investment, if people invest in it?


Bitcoin is a currency/commodity, of course it's not backed by real world business, just like gold and oil aren't backed by them too. Bitcoin is a risky investment, but so are stocks, especially those with smaller capitalization or if a trader decides to use leverage and other instruments. I can even be sure that more people lose money with stocks than with crypto, since stocks are more popular.

Bitcoin can't really help developing countries much. Volatility and potential for sudden price drops makes it very hard for poor people to use t as a store of value. Poor people just can't afford to lose 50% of their value in short time. And high transaction fees, which happen from time to time, make it hard to use as a currency. People in developing countries that suffer from inflation always choose US dollar as a store of value, because it's more stable than anything else that they can afford.

The censorship aspect has been theorized a long time ago, if you control 51% of mining power, you can refuse to include certain transactions, and then just fork if other miners do include them, forcing them to lose all the block rewards. There is some risk that in the future governments will try to regulate/take over Bitcoin, by forcing miners to do this attack.


They can target not only pools but miners themselves. So miners will have to choose between obeying the regulations by enforcing a blacklist or moving to a different country, which might be not possible. And if Bitcoin market will negatively react to this, some miners will just quit.

No one is saying that's it's a result of manipulation, institutional investment doesn't mean that it's some pump and dump scheme, it's just referring to the type of investors.  Every investor wants to buy low and sell high, so there nothing wrong with institutions buying Bitcoin to later sell it. I'm just curious what differences are there between them and retail investors, and how it could shape this rally, compared to the previous ones, that were mostly retail-driven.

Correction will happen when the price rise will slow down. This might happen very soon, because we have been at this $15.5-15.7k level for a while, and there already was a small drop, but the support was huge, so we bounced back. But if Bitcoin will fail to push past $16k, correction to $14k and lower is quite likely. If $16k will be broken, then it's impossible to reliably predict it, cause we don't know what's the next big level will be.

Absolutely, I think it's really important to distinguish the two, it always makes a point more clear.


It's not just style, style means just a preference, while correct writing helps to avoid confusion. For example, without this convention, the phrase "Satoshi's Bitcoin" could mean either Satoshi's protocol and  code, or Satoshi's coins that he mined in early days. Also, "BITCOIN" is never used, all upper case is usually understood as an equivalent of yelling in written speech.

There's many types of custodial wallets/services. Any online service that holds your Bitcoin balance can be considered as such, for example a casino or an exchange. You send them your coins and they store them in their wallets. If you store your seed or ledger in a bank's safety deposit box, that too can be considered a custodial service. PayPal is too a custodial service, with a difference that you can't get your Bitcoin, only sell it on their platform.

I don't think that being an institutional investor an a whale instantly means that they are for long term, in fact these people aren't buying Bitcoin because they believe in "HODL" or its technology, they simply care for profit. If their analysis will say that Bitcoin is going down, they will dump it without any second thoughts, they aren't emotionally attached to it, unlike many retail investors.

When people say that something caused something, it firstly means that it was a direct reason, so with this explanation that PayPal caused market action, which in turn caused a congestion you only have an indirect cause. Also, PayPal couldn't move the market so much alone, other news contributed too, like companies using it as reserve asset and FOMO among institutional investors.

When Trump got elected, some Bitcoiners were cheering, because he's a republican, and republicans love small state! 4 years later, he tweeted that Bitcoin isn't a real currency, only US dollar is. Luckily it didn't went further than this. I really don't think we should worry about Biden now, he has way too much on his hands right now - coronavirus, economic problems, racial tensions in the US, foreign policy and so on.

Such a stupid thing to do, there's no way you don't get caught if you use your company credential to steal from them, it all stays in their database forever, and sooner or later someone is going to figure it out. His only choice was to flee the country and live somewhere remote and under a new name, hoping that you won't get tracked, which is still a stupid thing to do. The fact that he used Bitcoin and mixing doesn't change anything, it's not a method to cover your tracks in cases like this.

The fact that many people view Bitcoin as an asset doesn't make the point of view of those who view it as an a currency, because it's all just relative, and it's especially pointless to argue about it, because Bitcoin is decentralized, and the protocol itself doesn't care how it's classified. Bitcoin is a currency, an investment, a commodity, a collectible, a speculative bubble, a reserve asset, digital gold - whatever you want it to be.

I think getting mad at something like this is against the spirit of Bitcoin, which is the ability to send your coins to whomever you want, for whatever reason. There's no "right" or "wrong" methods to use Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is freedom.

Perhaps what is needed is some changes to testnet, or maybe an alternative testnet where it's easier to solomine coins, or some mechanism that creates coins on demand. I know it's not the same as Bitcoin's mainnet rules, but it would allow for testing other parts of the protocol more easily.

But this time retail investors aren't coming en masse, so there's a scenario where a new ATH won't come. I can totally imagine guys from Microstrategy selling all their coins at $18k, because getting 80% profit in a few months is already crazy good. Institutional investors, unlike many retail investors, who are often noobs, understand that this market is prone to bubbles, so it's important to take profit fast, before the bubble has popped.

Institutions are using custodial services because they believe they are less likely to be hacked than themselves, and if this would happen, they will have someone to blame instead of themselves.

Yes, Coinbase is bad, as are other exchanges, but overwhelming majority of coins are still held by users themselves, so there's really no need to worry about it too much. Coinbase already tried to centralize Bitcoin with their support of Segwit2x, and it only demonstrated how powerless they are before our decentralized community.

I still prefer Electrum's mobile version rather than any other alternative, because I'm very satisfied with their desktop wallet, so I trust that there's nothing shady going on. Plus, I don't have any coins in my mobile wallet, I use it only in watch mode to occasionally check my cold wallet and to broadcast transactions. In general, it's recommended to only store small amounts in mobile wallets, because the platform itself is less secure than good open-source OS', and plus it's nearly always online.

Having a few percents of Bitcoin's supply owned by many centralized entities hardly counts as centralization, even Satoshi, a single entity (most likely) holds more Bitcoin than that, and it never was considered a point of centralization by Bitcoin fans.

I personally don't see any problems here, there's enough BTC for everyone, and maybe it's even a positive, because Bitcoin will be less likely to get banned if institutions are already invested in it, we all know that money are influencing politics, so now these companies could be spending money to lobby for Bitcoin, to protect their investments.

Let's assume that it's like this article says and this rally is institutionally-driven. What does it mean for Bitcoin? Will this bring us to some very high price levels, like hundreds of thousands, or are these experienced investors going to take the profits rather soon and crash the rally at barely establishing the new ATH, or in worst case, we won't even cross $20k. Can you say that institutional investors trade significantly differently from retail investors on a volatile and speculative market?

Just the fact that some powerful person is a Bitcoin supporter is not enough to make the world adopt Bitcoin, it's not even enough to trigger adoption domestically. Actually, no matter what a leader of a world power does, it still won't make people to massively adopt Bitcoin, even if they would make it equal to fiat currency, because it won't make Bitcoin's problems like volatility or scalability go away. People in Bitcoin community love to imagine that something in the future will trigger Bitcoin's mass adoption, but history shows that it never happens. Situation like this pandemic, or wars, economic uncertainty, et cetera, were viewed as opportunity for Bitcoin to shine, but still mass adoption never happened.