A lot of investors also know that Satoshi (probably) owns 1 million coins and isn't active since the early days, so it can be assumed that those coins won't wake up. And it's also a pretty common knowledge that around 3.3 million coins are assumed lost.

But market capitalization is a metric that rarely gets used for something productive, most of the time it's just pointless comparing for this value between different assets. It's especially bad when people compare between different classes, like saying "Bitcoin's marketcap is bigger than PayPal".

I seriously doubt that there's anyone today who can solo-mine even one block. It would probably take years for a single farm to find a block. And you're wrong that it gives better privacy, in fact I would say it's worse privacy, because you can't hide a mining farm, all mining equipment sales are monitored on border, mining draws a ton of electricity, so if someone would really want to find out the owner of some solo-mined coins, they could make a list of potential miners and go from there. Also this "privacy" only lasts for 1 transaction, then it's just like the regular transaction chain.

"Virgin bitcoins" is a thing, but not because of privacy - some investors want them because it gives them a guarantee that there's nothing shady in their coin's history that might lead to attention from officials in the future.

If this is true, then it's quite sad that people in position of power are making such hasty judgements about things that they don't even understand. I guess power really does blind people.

I wonder if Trump's accounts got hacked (though it likely couldn't have, because as the article says, it has additional security), then would be call for a ban on Bitcoin? He already made some negative tweets about it last year, and generally his behavior seems exactly the same type as this state attorney's.

I bought a game on GoG yesterday, the destination of payment was Poland and I live in a neighboring country. The moment I clicked "confirm", the payment was successfully processed and I could start downloading the game right immediately. I generally can't remember any time I had to wait more than a few minutes with my bank, even if I need to do wait for an SMS for confirmation.

Until Lightning is widely adopted, Bitcoin is in a bad spot for consumer payments, waiting 10 minutes at best is not enough to compete with banks.

Yeah, hardware wallet is better than something like an online wallet, but like I said - it's not perfect. It's a tradeoff between some little bit of trust and ease of use with decent security. But making your own cold storage isn't hard, and most people should have access to some old PCs or laptops, everyone is doing upgrades every few years.


I trust Tails or other Linux distributions more than "super secure mobile OSs". And Internet connection is a problem, you can never be sure if your phone is truly disconnected or not.

True, but just because it wasn't correct the last time, doesn't necessarily mean it won't be correct this time. In 2013 barely few people outside of crypto knew about the bubble, but in 2017 the late stage of the bubble was covered by all mainstream media, even national television. Awareness about Bitcoin, and its reputation as a volatile, bubble-prone investment is much stronger now.

$300K-$400K is a really cool scenario, but I think hoping for it is more likely to make people miss out on decent profits or just cause losses for those who enter later.


To me S-curve always sounded like a justification to have this extremely slow adoption that we have now. There's no evidence that Bitcoin follows this curve or any other.

This time a lot of people have a memory of the 2017 bubble, either as participants or as observers, and the lesson of that bull run was that you should dump your coins when the price goes vertical, or you'll regret it for years. So, it's likely that this time the height won't be as big as some hodlers expect - I personally believe it will only go to $30k, maximum $40k. This exponential growth, where every ATH is 20 times higher than the last ATH isn't sustainable, and I think this bull market will be the one to break this trend.

Bitcoin is not just a use-case of "blockchain technology. Imagine one person invented a car, then some other person took the steering wheel, started calling it "steering wheel technology' and said that it can be applied to other inventions, and that a car is just an early example of "steering wheel technology". With the same success you could say that Bitcoin is a "cryptography technology" or "peer-to-peer technology".

The reason why we see this happening is because people are making money off "blockchain technology" hype. If it wasn't possible to making so much money with it, no one would really care.

I think the phrase "paper wallet" is very misleading, because paper is just a method of storing the private key. You can't use paper to send Bitcoin or create a new address. You'll always end up using a software or hardware wallet to use the coins stored on paper. So, there's really only 2 kinds of wallets - software and hardware. "Paper wallets" can be created with both kinds.

"Paper wallets" also have some downsides, especially for newbies - a lot of them are offered via websites, and websites can't be audited as well as open source software from a repository. This is why one of the sites that offers paper wallet creation is malicious and steals users funds, but it was hard to prove.

If there really is no such site, I can easily make one and post it on github pages. If you haven't patented the idea, of course The site can use coingecko or coinmarketcap api to provide the freshest data without the need to update it on backend. And then some client-side cashing will be required to keep the site responsive.

Why worry about whales dumping their stash if you can't even tell for sure if whales are moving the market or not? Most of the "whale" addresses belong to exchanges and other organizations, the consolidate coins and move them to cold storage, but the popular twitter account Whale alert reports every such movement, which causes panic among the newbies.

What I'm saying is that without any factual evidence, speculation about whales is worthless. It shouldn't impact your trading decisions.

"The whales" is mostly just a conspiracy theory. People know that some individuals hold a lot of coins, so they now blame every price movement that goes against their expectations of whales. Price falls? Whales are dumping. Price rises? Whales are pumping. Price goes sideways? Whales are manipulating.

You say that whales are elusive, but what it actually means is that no one has any good proof of who these whales are and when they are actually manipulating the market. We know a few concrete examples, like the bearwhale, which by the way nicely demonstrates that whales aren't as powerful as people believe.

I think speculating about whales without bringing no evidence of their activity is just a waste of time. Just like saying "Bitcoin will reach X" without any backing to your statement. This is just a pure guess.

Scams are already here, and it will only get worse from now on. Hopefully, it won't be as bad as it was with ICOs, because anyone could launch and ICO, while DeFi is more like a loose club of tokens and platforms. It's crucial for anyone who gets involved with this market to learn to analyze if a project is actually recognized as DeFi by others, or is it just a scam that gave this title to itself. We'll also likely see "DeFi review' sites to start popping up, but just as with ICOs, a lot of them will be shilling for scams. So, do very careful research, pay attention to the big names of the industry, and don't invest if anything seem suspicious.

I can tell from your post that you never wrote any code in your life, because if you did, you'd know that this "problem" of yours is trivial and has been solved since the early days of Bitcoin. Today merchants can use tools like BTCPayserver to take care of receiving payments without any pains of hosting their own full node or dealing with third parties, but even in the past it was easy to hook into an SPV wallet and handle incoming transactions.

People have been saying "just buy a hardware wallet" for a long time, but it has always been less than a perfect solution, because some centralization and trust has always been involved, and now it was abused. Now potential burglars and kidnappers have a list of people who own some bitcoins, and something like this will never happen with a software wallet, because it doesn't ask you for your personal information during installation.

IMO and old PC with live OS like Tails is the best cold storage you can get.

Irreversible transactions is only a part of the deal, these "services"  might claim that they can trace thieves and then get the money back. But tracing is easier said than done, it would require access to specialized tools of chainanalysis companies, which will probably be not worth it for small-scale scams. And then the final problem - even after the thieves are found, it might be hard to make them return the money - they could have already spent them, or hid them, or what is quite likely, the local authorities might now want to cooperate.

To me, it looks like such extensions have more coins than pros. First, they create a false sense of security, as users might think that they are perfectly safe when they use them, while in reality they can only prevent some scams, usually the biggest and oldest. Next, they might be spying on users or do other malicious things - it's the best practice to always try to minimize the number of extensions and only install what is absolutely necessary.

It's better to learn to distinguish phishing sites manually, so you won't ever have to rely on third parties to do it.

Cash is trash up until we have a moment like the recent covid-caused mass panic across all markets, when no investment is safe, and even gold tanks. Wise investors don't shit on whole asset classes, they understand that everything has its use depending on the mood of the market. It's better to never be a fanboy of some type of investment and always adapt to the trends of the market. Sutbbornly clinging to crypto or stocks or gold means missing opportunities on the other end. But people do this because they just don't want to admit that they are missing out on something.

Casino is not a place where you make money, it's a place where you spend money. If you are in a desperate financial situation, going to casino is the worst thing you can do, because you'll very likely lose whatever you have.

Most of the games in casinos are unwinnable, and if there's a true game of skill, you'll likely be playing against much stronger opponents. There is no quick and easy ways to make money in this world.

Tether is a stablecoin, aside from some daytrading, people don't invest in it, they use it as an instrument for other trades. It can take even the #1 spot, it still won't have any big consequences on the crypto market. Plus, Tether exists on Ethereum's blockchain, so it might be still viewed as a "win" for Ethereum.

In the past XRP flipped ETH, and ETH didn't die or fall into a bear market. Crypto ranking isn't very important, aside from the first place. If ETH even briefly flipped Bitcoin in 2017, maybe ETH would have had slightly better position for the rest of its time.