To me it looks like the Iranian regime is grasping at straws. Using Bitcoin won't allow them to circumvent sanctions, which seems to be their goal, because the point of sanctions is to prevent your own companies and companies of your allies from trading with the target of sanctions. Western companies that would try to deal with Iran through Bitcoin would have to somehow explain to auditors where do bitcoins go/come from, so it just becomes a question of money laundering, and I seriously doubt that many would want to risk doing that. And as for trading between Iran and other rogue nations - who cares, sanctions or not, they were always be able to do that. Bitcoin brings nothing new here.

The hardest part about crypto is that there's too much garbage around. There's a ton of shitcoins that sound good to unqualified people, there's a lot of crappy news sites that produce low value articles every few minutes, there's too much bloggers and wannabe educators/influencers who don't understand themselves and just spread misconception or shill for some shitcoins. Crypto at its core isn't that hard, at least the basics of it, reading one good book, like Mastering Bitcoin, would already put you far ahead of an average "crypto enthusiast".

Bitcoin is the most secure network because it doesn't have smart contracts. Bitcoin's script language is on purpose very limited to prevent bugs, and as we know from practice, smart contracts often lead to hacks or bugs that make users lose money. There has been many hacks of DeFi since its introduction, so I believe Bitcoin shouldn't be a coin that chases hyped features, it should wait as long as needed, and only incorporate some features if they are truly useful and don't harm its decentralization.

Gambling is a game of fixed and well-known probabilities, where players, often regardless of their skill, are almost always at a disadvantage. You can't say that Bitcoin is gambling, because the probabilities of it going up or down aren't really known to anyone, and there's no "other side" that benefits from someone's lose all the time.

Being risky does not equal to gambling, after all, no serious person would call stock or commodity markets "gambling".

I'm pretty sure that PayPal doesn't allow its users to send billions of dollars, and that no one in PayPal's system even holds anything close to such large sum. PayPal was created for average consumer transactions on the Internet, not for billionaires.


In case you didn't know, Bitcoin fees aren't tied to the amount of bitcoins send, they depend on how much data you use, so the amount of inputs and outputs you use, and address type. If you have all 88,857 BTC sitting on one address and you send to only one address, the fee will be minimal.


That's a pretty bad selling point for mass adoption, regular people don't send billions to each other.

Actually Bitcoin didn't benefit from the growth of e-commerce so far. Bitcoin still has problems with high fees and volatility, and some smaller problems like hard user experience, so it's still not a payment method that can be quickly mass adopted, even if some circumstances make it more desirable. And in this case of pandemic, Bitcoin's competitors like PayPal have benefited more, so there's no silver lining for it here.

There's nothing that can be done to prevent onchain fees from getting high. You can use SegWit bech32 addresses, choosing manually the most optimal fee, and consolidating inputs to reduce your fees as much as possible. But on-chain fees will always be a thing, and LN won't make them go away. You fundamentally can't have very low on chain fees and be decentralized at the same time, because Bitcoin is only decentralized thanks to limited block space.

Pokemon cards have utility - you can play with them. Bitcoin's only utility is ability to send it to other people. Bitcoin has no uses aside from being money, if we of course ignore some rare attempts to embed some data in its blockchain, or the coming smart contracts.

Just because it's no a popular form of money doesn't disqualify it from being money. And people shouldn't underestimate Bitcoin's liquidity, if in 10-15 minutes you can convert your coins into fiat currency, anywhere and at any time, that's already much more useful than physical gold, which is much harder to liquidate.

It shocks you because you probably assumed that if coins weren't moved for 10 years, then they are lost. But in Bitcoin, there's actually no way to tell if a coin is lost or no, so you can never be certain if a coin is lost or not. I don't see anything suspicious with lots of early coins being moved, after all, Bitcoin exists to be transacted, not to sit there forever.

You are making a typical mistake of a newbie - worrying about the wrong things. "What if two people generate the same key", "what if someone bruteforces a privatekey", "what if quantum computers", "what if all bitcoins are mined" - these things aren't going to affect Bitcoin in the nearest future or even ever. What you should personally be focusing on is avoiding any malware in your system, avoiding phishing, verifying digital signatures on all software you install, maintaining your privacy to avoid physical robbery.

Bitcoin fees tend to get high when there's a lot of trading activity, especially when the price goes up, because some people send their coins to exchanges to sell, other withdraw their newly-bought coins, and some traders move coins between exchanges for arbitrage opportunities. When we'll see the $20k for the next time, it will likely be the result of quick price jump, so the fees will get higher.
But when after many years the $20k range will be a norm, the fees won't be really high. In this year, when the price was above $9,000, we saw fees as low as a few cents per transactions, just like when Bitcoin was trading for only hundreds of dollars.

Pools have absolutely zero say in LN adoption. LN doesn't even require any updates to Bitcoin Core, so miners wouldn't be able to refuse to update their nodes. LN can already be used, and there already are users who use it on mainnet.

But it's wrong to think that LN will make onchain transactions obsolete, some users will like the extra security of onchain transactions, and LN is limited in maximum amounts, so big transactions would still happen on chain.

You can never live comfy when there's a hyperinflation in your country, things like crime and other negative effects will be through the roof. Many businesses will close, so you'll have hard time getting all the goods you used to get, and with the same quality. This is the reason why tourists rarely go to countries like Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

What you could ask is how many bitcoins do you need to survive in a country with hyperinflation, but this would depend on the starting economic situation and how long the crisis would last.

Digital Yuan won't mean anything if it won't be sufficiently adopted. Stablecoins aren't well adopted in real world, and this central bank coin can fail too, even if it will get support from the government, like making it a payment method for government services. Right now there's a huge competition between payment solutions - there's giants like Visa and Mastercard, Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo, lot's of smaller payment methods, often integrated with some platforms, and of course crypto. How can government compete with all of them, because as we know, governments lose to private companies almost all the time.

There's no such thing as "the mempool", each node has its own mempool, and its entirely up to them how to manage it. There's no guarantee that a transaction will get or will not get dropped after a certain time, so what happens on practice, is that if you go to different explorers to check your long-stuck transactions, some will tell you that such transaction doesn't exist, while others will still see it. This unconfirmed transaction might start reappearing at any point, as some nodes that still keep it in their mempool will broadcast it again.

1. Lightning Network is still not out of beta yet, the developers don't recommend using it on mainnet.

2. Even after it will be officially released, it will take time for people and especially services to adopt it. Don't expect it to immediately solve the problem with fees.

3. Lightning Network wasn't created to take all transactions away from the blockchain, and with limited space the demand for them will always be high.

What are you basing these statements on? Did you conduct a research and questioned hundreds of people to gather enough data? Cause it's very rare, especially among those who haven't tried Bitcoin yet, to question Satoshi's decisions. And Satoshi hasn't been around for so long that no one is actually thinking that they can answer him a question, so the amount of people who don't adopt Bitcoin because they want answers from Satoshi might be literally zero.

In the early days there was much less altcoins around, and many of the altcoins were actually a honest attempt to build something using the foundation that Bitcoin has settled. It's only later, when crypto prices started skyrocketing, the scammers came in masse and start releasing, pumping and dumping shitcoins for their own profit.

However, just having good intentions is not enough. Take Litecoin, one of the earliest altcoins - it always performed rather poorly, as it was always just following Bitcoin, and it failed to bring any true innovation and achieve mass adoption. Lightning Network will make obsolete any altcoin that claims lower fees/faster times as its main benefits.

Think about this - every day, each person on Earth misses countless of "golden opportunities". Maybe if you left your home 5 minutes earlier, you would have found the love of your life, or if you bought a lottery ticket at the right time, you would have won a jackpot. And if you knew the perfect trades, you could have become a billionaire by trading on any market with high leverage. Bitcoin in early days is just one out of hundreds of thousands of golden opportunities, there's no reason to be sad about missing it, at this point this is just an unnecessary regret. Focus on the future instead.

My relatives know that own some amount of coins, and they know that Bitcoin is worth a lot. They will find my wallet seed when they will go through my stuff, so the big question is whether they will able to claim it safely. Worst case scenario is that they will try to do it on their unsecure computers, that might be full of malware, or that they will download a fake wallet. Since they will be googling about how to use Bitcoin, they would likely to get some phishing or malicious results at the top.

But I don't want to teach my family how to get my bitcoins, because I don't really care what happens after I die, and teaching them now would introduce a point of trust, and trust is always a risk.