Fiat currencies are used for everything way more than Bitcoin, so it's really a non-statement to say that fiat is used more for scams, money laundering, etc. Just because this problem exists with fiat, doesn't mean that we should ignore it in Bitcoin. After all, we all dream about a world where Bitcoin is used for everything, so we need to be ready to solve those problems.

Traceability is only one part of it though, immutability is also playing the role here. I believe Bitcoin really did contribute to the growth of ransomware, because most ransoms require Bitcoin or other crypto, and this scheme wouldn't work well with any centralized payment system, as accounts would be very quickly shut down, and large sums of money are hard to move without KYC. This is the cost of having more freedom - some people will use it for bad things. But I believe that the good use cases are much more common than the bad ones.

This is not true, very few countries have banned Bitcoin, and even if you hear some criticism of Bitcoin from single government officials, it's not the same as the entire government wanting to ban Bitcoin. There's even examples of government officials supporting Bitcoin.


This is likely one of the reasons why Bitcoin wasn't banned so far, if criminals make mistakes, it's really easy to catch them. If you ban Bitcoin and other crypto, criminals will have more reasons to move to Monero.

And people still say that blockchain is good because it's more secure than "legacy" systems. Blockchain is just a programming pattern, and programmers who implement it can absolutely screw it all up like it happened many times. Even Bitcoin had some pretty big bugs, but luckily not anymore. In fact, blockchains can in general be less secure, speaking of centralized blockchains, because this field is still new, while classic data systems have decades of experience and best practices.

At this point, it can be safely assuming that anyone who knows the identity of Satoshi is just a liar or a scammer. If someone truly knows who is Satoshi, they either would have told us already or will keep their mouth shut. And the chances of intentionally discovering him are already almost non-existent, because everyone had tried everything already.

They already can if payment companies and banks  would agree to share all data with governments. The problem is, just seeing transactions doesn't allow you to tax people. For example, you see a transaction for $1,000 from Alice t Bob - how can you know anything about the nature of it? Is it a payment, a gift, a loan? You can't expect every single transaction to come with a proof of its purpose. Or someone withdraws money from a crypto exchange - you can't know how much profit they made with trading, because coins could have come from many different sources before being sold.

https://twitter.com/SayBitcoiners/status/1290071693436706817

This tweet summarizes this thing perfectly. People are pulling predictions out of their asses, all these 6-figure predictions have zero basis, it's just a big wild guess. It's not even about whether it will happen or not, it's just the complete lack of any methodology. If someone like that tried to trade stocks by their feelings, they would end up being broke.

- Barely anyone does that, people spend those money to cover their basic needs
- No jobs - no money to buy Bitcoin with. And people generally wouldn't gamble their last money on a speculative investment
- Stock market is booming right now, it's actually on its ATH
- So? Bitcoin isn't correlated to gold
- Maybe it contributed a bit, but not enough to cause a rally. It's not like Bitcoin is not a legal tender or anything
- So what, it's the nature of a risky investment to outperform big stocks when it's bullish
- We don't know how much trust in the US dollar people are really losing, but there aren't any signs of a real mass panic right now

Like o_e_l_e_o pointed earlier, this isn't the first big security incident, and the fact that Twitter got away with it so easy would likely mean that it won't be a wake up call. If Trump's account got hacked and caused something horrible, or if there was some important info stolen from any of those account's DMs, then maybe it would have stirred some change.

I just can't wrap my mind around how can these kids be smart enough to hack Twitter, yet dumb enough to reuse emails and leave trail to their social profiles. It's almost like during this entire thing they not once have though "how do I not get caught"?

And I think we should kinda be glad that the hack was used for a Bitcoin scam, and not for starting a war or crashing the global market.

Lmao, you don't need to be a PhD to understand that the supply of Bitcoin didn't change, it was the rate of supply's increase. And "USD supply dobuled" - what is this bullshit? If it was true, inflation would be insane right now.

Anyway, Bitcoin will only become a store of value when volatility is over. Gold is a store of value because its value never dropped by 50% in one day.

This is because many of the "projects" are pulling soft-scams - they don't disappear with users funds and keep imitating development activity for years, so that no one can say that they don't do anything. They even might release some half-assed version of their promised product. But in the end of the day, they are putting investors money in their own pockets with no intention of delivering on their promises. So, it takes much more than checking teams to successfully avoid scams.

No big deal, just a correction on a bullish trend, this was to be expected. The market actually handled it very well, we haven't dropped much of our gains, which might mean that the bullishness will continue and the $12k resistance will be retested again, hopefully successfully this time.

There's no way of knowing it, because assembling a block is not a blockchain operation. It's done by a miner privately and there's no need to share it with anyone. Technically, miners could make an API for communicating this data, but what's the point? You would need to connect to all major pools with this API in order to more or less reliably know if your transaction might be mined in the next block or not.

If you are worried about your confirmations, you should learn how to pick the fee manually instead of relying on what wallets recommend.

Have you ever paid for games with bank account? On platforms like Steam or Gog, you just save your credit card number and when you do a purchase, you just need to make a quick confirmation and then it's instant. Or alternatively, you might go to your online bank site and easily send money to your game store wallet. It's really not much harder from sending Bitcoin.

On mobile platforms, there are also payment methods that make paying just as comfortable as possible.

So, since paying is not much of a problem, people won't see a reason to own such heavily volatile currency just to save a few seconds during their payments. And don't forget about 10+ minutes confirmation time, vs instant payments via banks.

I haven't faced any difficulties so far, but I always have these worries that if I'll try to withdrawing a large sum to my bank account, it will get frozen and I'll be asked to explain where do the money come from. And then I'm thinking, they won't like my response that I'm a crypto investor, they'll immediately suspect money laundering, etc. This is why I haven't mixed my coins, I have a feeling that it will make my coins too suspicious. And I don't want to risk with p2p trading for cash, the chance of getting scammed or robbed is too high.

I don't really expect anything, because I was hoping for a large bull run in the next year, but if the current trend continues, I'd expect to see $13-14k as a new base level. We'll probably see a lot of sideways trading or stability, because those things seem to become the new normal. But if the market will for some reason be more bearish, we might see $7-8k instead. The global market is so strange right now, we have a pandemic crisis, yet stocks and gold hit ATH. This can easily lead to a crash that can even drag Bitcoin with it again.

When the market is bullish, people regret selling or not buying, when the market is bearish, people regret not selling. It's very easy to get frustrated, because few people make perfect trades, so it's better to not think about it and be happy with the profit that you have made.

Also, this thinking can lead to FOMO, and FOMO can lead to losses if you recklessly buy in bull  market and fail to sell because you get too greedy. Trading is about making profit consistently rather than maximizing profits every single time.

If this fund would be unregulated, there would be a huge opportunity for scaming. Any sort of unregulated investment program attracts scammers, ICO is a clear example of this. But even without scammers, you'd be crazy to gamble your retirement on crypto, it might easily not exist in 30-40 years, or be worth a fraction of its ATH. Crypto is high risk - high reward, and pensions are supposed to be extremely low risk - low reward, they make profit because of the decades of investment.

Webwallets should be avoided like a plague. They are custodial and/or leave too much attack surface compared to software, hardware and cold storage wallets.

Now, OP, if you still want to have a paper wallet after reading this thread, consider creating an Electrum wallet in offline and isolated environment and write down the seed on paper. For receiving addresses, you'll have a few options - you can take them right after creating the wallet and save on your online machine or print out, or you can take you master public key, and use it on your online machine to have a watch-only wallet. This is known as a cold storage setup, it gives you all the benefits of paper wallet while avoiding many of the negative sides.

Is there any KYC required to use the free tier? And what are the capabilities of it?

I currently use Heroku free tier, I can have 1 web server running 24/7 and there's a free database limited to 10k rows (this sucks). Does AWS offer something similar or better?

Also, Github has free hosting for static pages (sites that don't require server-side logic), this can be pretty good for beginners too.