Just a typical "blockchain is the future" feel-good kinda talk. This has been going on for years, but there's very little real adoption, both by end users and by companies. Also, while it's true that Bticoin achieved a lot in terms of decentralized systems, this doesn't mean that it can easily be replicated. PoW is one of the cornerstones of Bitcoin, take it away and this blockchain technology is suddenly not so secure and decentralized.

Is it really bad that the growth of industry which was 99% about scams was stifled? And even now, with IEO and other variants, all these offerings are still mostly scams, they just became a bit smarter and put more effort, so instead of exit scamming they fake some activity to not be too obvious. If DeFi will repeat the history of ICO, it's better for regulators to step in, so that less damage is done to crypto ecosystem.

If someone was actually blackmailing you, they'd show you the blackmailing materials immediately instead of saying "yeah I totally have it, don't even try to ask for proof". They'd also refer to you by your name, though this alone is not enough, cause many people have public profiles with their real names, and during database breaches this info gets stolen. Even if you will receive a real blackmailing email, it's better to contact authorities rather than immediately complying with criminal's demands.

There's no such thing as stable price, there's only less volatile prices and more volatile prices. The reason why Bitcoin is volatile is because there's no central authority to stabilize its price, and no one knows how to objectively calculate its value, so everyone is just guessing. And then speculation just creates more speculation, if Bitcoin's price wasn't stable in the past, market participant don't expect it to stabilize, and they view even smaller moves as the beggining of a bullish or bearish trend.

Bitcoin is the fastest blockchain out there. 1 Bitcoin confirmation is worth hundreds or even thousands of shitcoin confirmations. Ethereum classic got 51% attacked how many times already? With days of transactions being reversed. Fast transaction times are deceptive, because just because the blockchain says your transaction is confirmed, it doesn't mean it's secure, and the faster transaction times are, the less secure each individual confirmation is. This is why many services accept 1 confirmation for Bitcoin, but require dozens of confirmations for altcoins.

If you just want to learn about crypto, starting a live project where you put your money at stake is not the best idea, you might get hacked or exploited by bots, or your business model might be faulty, or you'll just lose in competition vs established faucets. In any case, you'll probably lose your money - can you afford that? You can deploy your project on testnet though, and you won't be making any money with it, but it will be a good practice for making Bitcoin applications.

No politician truly supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin was created to remove centralization in economy, which if achieved would put many politicians out of their jobs. Even those who say that they support it actually want to regulate it and maybe even control it. The best support a politician can give to Bitcoin is to just ignore it.


None, Bitcoin community and developers don't care that much about what politicians say or do regarding Bitcoin.

No way they would compensate $150m, where would they get such funds? I wonder if this might even be the end of this exchange. Or will they just try to shrug it off, give some small consolation funds to investors to at least try to appease them and then continue like nothing happened.

The frequency of exchange hacks means that traders need to account for it in their calculations - if they make 5% profit per month, but risk all their crypto actives in the process, is it really worth it?

Russia and other countries always propose some laws, some of which can be pretty impactful, but until it has actually passed, it's just a proposal, and regarding Bitcoin, there has been countless proposals that remained proposals, so this might be just another one. Though there's no doubt that the Russian government is generally anti-crypto, it's just not clear yet how far they will go in terms of making things hard for crypto users.

Remember how people were hoping that Russia will officially adopt Bitcoin to circumvent the sanctions? People who were seriously thinking this just don't know Russia well, Russian government is super paranoid and loves to control anything that they view as a threat to their rule. Roskomnadzor was banning sites left and right all these years, at one point they even banned reddit and other big platforms. Crypto can be used to fund their opposition, and it can be enough argument to ban it to them.

Not everyone has 2FA, and SMS 2FA can easily be bypassed. 2FA shouldn't make you think that you're now immune to hacks, all other security best practices still apply.

You actually can't bruteforce a private key, if the key was generated randomly. The only time when this happens if when users try to create a private key themselves, a so-called brainwallet - because humans are poor source of entropy, they can be cracked rather effectively.

Maybe they would love to have influence over Bitcoin, but they realize they can't do anything to it, even if they try to pressure the developers. But they can pretty effectively regulate Bitcoin's ecosystem if they regulate exchanges and other centralized services, since 95% of traffic comes through them, while decentralized alternatives are still not popular, and they gain users very slowly. If people keep using Bitcoin like they use fiat money - by giving it to trusted third parties, then Bitcoin really doesn't challenge governments or banks.

People consider toilet paper and canned food and hand sanitizers a safe haven in times of pandemic. Bitcoin is just a risky, speculative investment to anyone who isn't thinking that Bitcoin will replace banks anytime soon, which most don't do. You can see by how it started following the stock market during the initial shock from the pandemic. All what we have is just one big company saying that the believe that Bitcoin is a hedge, and that's all.

What is exactly the point of these "what ifs"? You can also start thinking "what if 15 min ago I made a move on <insert market here> with x1000 leverage and became a millionare in an instant", but it won't actually work if you try it, because past performance doesn't guarantee future performance. Conditions change, and who knows for how long Bitcoin will still be growing? It can easily even enter into long bearish periods, because why not? Bitcoin is not a safe investment, and it doesn't matter how you invest - $1 every day, or $1,000 once. either way you can be in a loss.

It's not sending any message, this is all just a big game of cat and mouse, darknet markets and criminal organizations get taken down every year, but new ones always emerge to take their empty spot. Of course crypto, especially Bitcoin, won't allow them to remain uncaught 100% of the time, all technologies that are used by criminals have some flaws that can lead to them being exposed, especially if criminals themselves make mistakes, which they often do because they aren't the brightest people.

This is why LN is still not out of beta officially, and it's a good thing - if there was more mainchain adoption, there would also be more frustration and negative rep due to these bugs. Bitcoin's mainnet shouldn't be a playground for experimenting with features, like many altcoins have, it should be as safe as possible, because people will rely on it. So far Bitcoin has great track record, as since the early days there weren't any major bugs that lead to serious attacks, and I hope there will never be.

The point of Bitcoin is to have money that can't be seized by some third party for whatever reason, and so that centralized companies won't be able to sell or share all your transaction history to whomever asks them. If these things don't concern you, or if you think that it's worth trading them for cheaper transactions, then sure, you're better off using banks. Right now Bitcoin can't compete with banks in everything, but it has its own niche.

Though I'm not quite enthusiastic about Kraken or exchanges becoming banks, still this is some positive news, because Bitcoin-related business was allowed to work under better conditions, so it's a sign that at least the US won't be banning Bitcoin anytime soon, and hopefully they won't overregulate it either.

This isn't because Bitcoin is pure and inherently repels criminals from it, it's because it's generally not well adopted, even among criminals. Plus, privacy is far from perfect now, so moving large amounts of money and not getting detected later would be quite hard. But Bitcoin has privacy improvements in its roadmap, so if we imagine that Bitcoin would one day be as popular as banks, than all the criminals will switch to it too. And if Bitcoin will not get more popular, than there's really no point to be happy about banks helping criminals.

Private keys can be stored in different formats, and there are different types of private keys corresponding to different addresses, like segwit or multisig or p2sh and so on. So, it can be possible that the user provides incorrect type of private key, or the wallet just can't understand a given private key, especially if the wallet is outdated. But if everything is correct, than a private key can not "simply" no work.