The price of a coin alone doesn't mean anything. You need to consider number of coins in circulation as well - this is why everyone looks at market cap.

If a coin has a price of $1,000 and the supply is 1,000,000 coins, this is exactly the same as if the coin has a price of $1,000,000 and the supply is 1,000 coins. the two situations are identical. The coin in the second scenario isn't any better or worse than the one in the first scenario, the price of $1,000 or $1,000,000 is meaningless unless supply is also considered.

The other point about religion, that I forgot to add, is that if your religion tells you to act in a certain way that you think is morally good, then there's no way to separate out whether you are doing that act because it is inherently good to do so, or whether you are doing it in expectation of future reward from your religion.

For example, if Christianity defines something as good behaviour, and further says that after death only good people get to go to heaven whereas bad people suffer eternal torment in hell, then are you performing the act because it is good, or because you want to go to heaven and avoid hell? This is why a religious person can't be good - it's too tied-in to expectation of future personal reward/punishment.

But if you don't follow a religion, then you stand on your own, and you act without expectation of any future positive or negative impact on yourself.

I wish this was true, but I'm from the UK and I don't see this at all. Boris Johnson is our version of Donald Trump, a populist strongman and moral vacuum who conducts his premiership almost exclusively through emotive soundbites. And huge numbers of people fall for it; his party has a big lead in the opinion polls, and his popularity is growing.

So many people here in the UK are so f***ing stupid, and far too lazy to do any actual thinking for themselves. Their opinions aren't their own at all, they just think what they are told to think by mass-media, Facebook echo chambers, and people like Boris. I've ranted about this at far greater length in another thread ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5186866.msg52602553#msg52602553 ) , but TL;DR: as I see it, we are moving further towards government by idiots, not away from it.

My opinion is that no act committed in the name of religion can be morally "good".

What I mean is that if you follow a religion, then you obey the dictates of that religion without question, and you act according to the rules of that religion, again without question. If a religion tells you to be kind to strangers, then the reason you are kind to strangers is not because you think it is a morally good act, rather you are doing it because the religion tells you to do it.

I suppose there's a distinction in there in that if you choose to follow a religion specifically because of its moral code, then the point doesn't really apply. But generally that isn't the case, people tend to follow a religion because they have been born into it.

It's the 'question everything' approach really. If you do not constantly critique and evaluate your own behaviour, then you can't perform a morally good act. If you don't take responsibility for your own actions, and instead defer all meaning to your religion and your god, then any act isn't really 'your' act at all.

The best time to sell alts? It depends if you are selling for BTC or for fiat.

1) In a bear market, sell for fiat or a stablecoin, and the best time to do this is generally just before the price peak. If you sell right at the peak you run the risk of being too late and selling once a price crash has started.

2) In a stable or bull market, sell when the price vs BTC looks high against historic levels.

#2 is easier than #1 of course - it is very hard to predict exactly when a price crash vs fiat will start, which is why it is better to sell early rather than sell late.

The key thing for me I think is market confidence. Alts only surge when confidence is really high, such as the back end of 2017. If confidence is lower, then people hedge their bets and buy BTC as the safest and least volatile crypto. The long bear market may have ebnded, but it still casts a long shadow in terms of the effect on investor confidence. It may be some time before confidence returns to really high levels and creates an alt surge. But BTC price impacts this, too. As BTC price goes up, confidence grows, and the higher it goes the more the alts look undervalued and more of a bargain. So I think an alt surge is largely confidence-driven, but BTC price is the main thing that impacts this confidence level.

I'm not sure how much impact it will have, as crypto is already hugely popular in South Korea.

I remember this stat that over 7% of South Koreans (of those surveyed) own some crypto: https://cointelegraph.com/news/south-koreans-invest-an-average-6-000-in-cryptocurrency-says-new-survey

But even if it doesn't have much effect, whatever effect it does have will surely be positive and is another welcome step on the long and bumpy road towards the integration of crypto into mainstream society.

I prefer staking to non-staking principally because PoS is a more sustainable mechanism than PoW.

PoW is fine for small coins, but as crypto evolves and chains become longer and demand becomes higher, we start to see coins with power requirements not dissimilar to small countries. PoW can't be the answer long-term, and is also an obstacle to mainstream adoption as we see increasing focus on green policies and environmental impacts.

So I don't think price performance is the most important difference between staking and non-staking.

In dollar terms, it looks like ETH might have hit bottom, so now might be a good time to buy.
However the price vs bitcoin I think is clearer. Bitcoin dominance is huge right now, and ETH looks an absolute bargain.

I would say if you are thinking about buying ETH with fiat, now may be good. If you are thinking of buying ETH with BTC, then yes, go for it.

For me the question "Does God exist?" is not the important one. We can't prove it either way, and so we'll never settle any arguments or change any opinions based on answers to this question.

I think the more pertinent question is: "If we assume that God exists, then should (s)he be worshipped?"

I am an atheist, but even if it could be proven that God exists, I would still argue that they shouldn't be worshipped. Why? Because to do so is to deny our own freedom and our own responsibility for our own actions. If every murderer could say 'God designed me to be a murderer,' then no-one has any accountability. It is like being a child. Everything is always someone else's fault. But if instead we say 'I am an individual with free will, every action I take or do not take is a result of my own decisions,' then I just think that is a better and more honest way to live.

Government by idiots is the natural outcome of a democracy that is embedded in a modern capitalist society.

This I think is due to the move to a globalised economy. The rich in any society have always been the most powerful. However, in the past, governments have been able to restrain the excesses of inequality in order to support the poor and reduce the possibility of civil unrest. What happens nowadays is that governments have lost a lot of their power to big multinational corporations. Governments fight amongst themselves to offer the most lucrative terms and tax systems in order to pull in these multinationals. In this way the system works to make the rich richer, the obvious consequence of which is that it also makes the poor poorer, and so increases inequality.

So now we have a system where inequality is growing continuously. The poor feel increasingly disenfrachised. This is exacerbated by the pervasive nature of modern media, TV on demand, 24 hour news, Facebook etc. The population is bombarded by images of successful rich people, whilst they themselves are often struggling, working multiple low-paid insecure jobs in order to scrape together enough money to rent (forget buy) a small house.

The result is that a large section of the population feels cheated, and that they are exploited by a system that is set up to benefit only the rich. It looks and feels corrupt because it is.

So who do these poor people vote for? Logically they should vote for the Bernie Sanders / Jeremy Corbyn type figure who genuinely has their best interests at heart and will work tirelessly to reduce inequality.

In practice, the media are run by rich people. It is very easy for them to demonise their opponents (Sanders, Corbyn, or anyone who would constrain the rich).

And so finally we reach a point where many people feel cheated, and they can't vote for the establishment who have cheated them, and they refuse to vote for the left-wing politicians who they are told by the papers and TV channels are little better than demons in human form.

This large section of the population then have no-one to vote for, no-one who they think will represent their interests. We have a political void, into which steps that common figure nowadays... the populist strongman.

There are plenty of these strongmen about: Trump, Boris Johnson, etc, rich people who are already part of the corrupt elite, but who set themselves up as anti-establishment heroes-of-the-people and ride into power by sucking up the votes of the disenfranchised masses. Once in power, they govern largely by a series of aggressive and meaningless soundbites. Their actual policies don't matter, they only need to be seen to matter, that's all that is required for them to stay in power.

They can give a huge tax break to the 1% and on the same day give a furious speech about how the rich are corrupt and need to be stopped. It's the speech that gets reported on the news, not the tax cut.

This I think is why democracy doesn't work in late capitalist societies. It is very simple to fool people into voting against their own best interests.

Two reasons for more reports of crypto crimes:

Crypto is bigger news now than it used to be, which means that a crypto crime now is more likely to get reported than say 5 years ago.
Prices are so much higher than they used to be, which makes crypto more valuable and so a bigger target.

What can be done to reduce this? Well, we are already seeing the first stirrings of regulation in the crypto industry. This will help to weed out scam projects. Other types of crime, phishing etc, aren't crypto-specific, and other than regulation can only really be combated by increasing user awareness and adding extra security steps.

The market conditions just aren't right for that now. In order for something to have that sort of price increase in 2019, it would have to start as something ultra-low cap, which generally won't happen if it's a good project. Then it will need to quickly demonstrate huge potential that nobody noticed previously.

I'm skeptical this can happen in today's market. A few years ago, sure. Not really today though, it seems highly unlikely.

I think the bear market has been over for a while now. We've seen steady price recovery for the last 6 months or so. Now we've had a dip over the last week, but I don't think that's a long-term trend. Long-term I think the bear has ended and we are moving towards a bull market.

I think everything will increase in USD price in the near future; this dip should be short-lived as there wasn't really any earth-shattering news to cause it. Probably bakkt triggered it, but there wasn't reason enough there for a sustained price drop.
Having said that everything should increase, BTC dominance is still huge, so I would say that good quality alts represent a better deal than BTC at the moment.

I do think the bakkt launch is at least part of the reason for the market-wide price drops. It seems like an over-reaction however. Perhaps it caused a slight dip which was then made worse by people jumping in and panic-selling. Whatever, it doesn't seem like the news should be sufficient to trigger the scale of fall that we've seen. I expect that we will see a recovery soon.

I hope there's a chance that inequality can be reduced, but trends suggest that it has been worsening dramatically over the last few decades. There's a good book about this, 'Capital in the 21st Century' by Thomas Piketty. There's a brief summary with a few key charts here: https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts

Also the World Inequality Database provides a lot of good information: https://wid.world/

Here's a good example. It's slightly exaggerated (because the axis doesn't start at 0%), but the trend is clear.

I would say give it time, and alts will rise again. This seems like a sudden market reaction of the sort that can quickly reverse. Being optimistic, there is a chance that alts recover quickly from this and that upwards momentum carries us forward into a real alt bull run. I don't think thee's much to be worried about at the moment.

It has been quite severe, but I do think that prices will recover soon. We do seem to have stabilised a bit now. Of course I could quite easily be wrong, but I think the drops were an over-reaction to the bakkt performance, causing an temporary hit to confidence.

I would imagine that BAKKT was the trigger. Anything that performs worse than market expectation can cause a price drop. It's early days however, and when we see this sort of sudden drastic movement, whether up or down, it tends to overshoot and then we see at least a partial recovery quite quickly. I would think that's what will happen here. It looks like a market over-reaction leading to some panic selling.