Democracy continues to be undermined across the world. Unfettered capitalism produces ever-greater inequality, leading to huge sections of the population feeling disenfranchised and disempowered. People want someone to blame, and right-wing populists are enjoying huge success by appealing to people's baser prejudices. They create some arbitrary scapegoat, often 'foreigners', and then instead of coherent policy they employ effective soundbites (and increasingly social media) to rail against this imagined opposition. It is being replicated across the western world. Where the US leads, others follow.

I hope Trump doesn't win, but I have a horrible suspicion that he will.

I understand the point that the high ETH price in 2017 was due in part to the ICO fever, but the fact remains that ETH is still the top altcoin in market cap, and plenty of altcoins have ETH as their primary (or only) trading pair.
A surge in ETH price would cause an apparent surge in dollar price of the ERC20 coins too. I think it is fair to say that an ETH price surge could pull up the whole alt market.
I wouldn't discount ETH just yet. Smart contracts have an almost assured future, and ETH is still the top smart contract coin by some distance.

UK here.

Cons:

• Short-termism. Government is only interested in quick fix rather than any long-term planning.
• The elite. Government (and BBC the main TV channel) is packed out with people who went to Eton private school, and live in a privileged bubble.
• Vampirism. (not the Dracula/bats/dinner suit stuff, that would be cool) Government either beholden to or in league with corporate sector, privatising everything and bleeding the country dry. National Health Service is under siege.
• Arrogance. Widespread delusion that Britain still rules the world and is better than everyone else, as manifested in the idiocy of Brexit from the EU.
• "Democracy" has been debased by exploiting the fact that people are idiots. Any rabid tabloid newspaper headline can get half the country baying for blood.
• Fox Hunting and bloodsports. WTF?

Pros:

• We are fortunate geographically, safe from earthquakes, tornados, temperature extremes, and invading armies
• Our dubious historical legacy means half the world speaks English, which can be convenient.

I think what we are seeing in the world is that the economy increasingly transcends borders. We hear a lot about globalisation, and we do live in a globalised world, effectively run by huge multinational companies. A downside to having individual nations is that these companies are free to pick and choose in which jurisdictions they base themselves, to take advantage of differing tax laws and legislative climates.

We also have increasing inequality, which leads to a generalised sense of disempowerment and disenfranchisement, which helps to foster secessionist movements everywhere, be it the Basque region from Spain, Scotland from the UK, Texas from US, etc.

So my position is that the point is moot. I don't believe that nations run everything any more. We are even seeing private enterprise breaking into traditionally national sectors like space exploration. We already have private security forces, and I don't think it's a stretch to see this extending to private armies. Arguably the US/UK forces in the Gulf Wars were proxy armies for the oil industry.

I would argue that the US is no longer independent, no nation is independent. People are pushing back against the concept of nations in the hope of reacquiring their lost power, but it's not nations they should be pushing against, it's corporations.

There isn't one if it stays stable.

One interesting point though is that these stablecoins are never 100% stable, they oscillate around the dollar peg. So technically you can make money by buying a load of USDT (or whatever) at $0.97 and then selling it all at $1.03.

The problem here being that:
If it's a bull market, and you go BTC->USDT->BTC then you'll end up with less BTC even though you've sold your USDT for a dollar gain, as BTC has risen more.
If it's a bear market, you'd just keep your money in USDT anyway so long as it is close enough to the dollar peg, and most of your gains will be in shorting BTC.
If the markets are absolutely flat, then your USDT gain would be worthwhile - but if the markets are flat it's unlkely USDT would move from the dollar anyway as there would be no sell or buy pressure on it.

I think it's a great coin, but alts got absolutely hammered during the bear market. Almost every alt is a fraction of its ATH dollar value and also a fraction of its ATH Bitcoin value. I keep expecting alts to take over the bull market as BTC has slowed down, but alts have slowed down too. Even ETH, the top alt - when the market was coming down at BTC fell through $8k, ETH was vastly higher than it is now as the markets rise and BTC pushes up through $8k.
I don't know when it will happen, but top alts really are overdue a big rise.

Gold is valuable because everyone agrees that it is valuable. And because it has been valuable through all of recorded history, the consensus is that it will retain that value for the future. That's it. There's nothing intrinsic to gold itself that makes it valuable, it's just the consensus. Many other things are stores of value, despite having no intrinsic worth. Fine art, for example. People don't buy a Van Gogh because it's a good painting, but because it's a good investment.

So is Bitcoin a better store of value than gold? Well the answer is that it depends on what people want to do with a store of value item. If all they want to do is lock it in a vault, then gold is probably good enough. But if they actually want to use it, to transfer it, and to be 100% confident in the maximum possible supply, then Bitcoin is far far superior. All that remains, however difficult that might be, is for this to become the consensus opinion.

Facebook's coin will be a stable coin. The purpose of it (as I keep insisting to anyone who will listen) is to gather user data which they can then use as yet another data source for behavioural profiling, which they will then a) sell to advertisers, and potentially b) use to modify our behaviour (pushing people into voting for a certain party is only the start).

The only upside I can see from the FB coin is that it might pique interest from outside crypto and so be a step on the road to mainstream adoption.

I think it's a valid comparison; I can see why the two can be linked.
I much prefer a decentralised system.
I suppose with religion, in the binary opposition I'm an atheist rather than a theist, in that I don't believe that a God exists... but my stance is more that even if a God exists and can be proven to exist, I don't think they should be worshipped. To worship something, anything, is to relinquish your own identity as a sentient being. We have a responsibility to question everything and not take anything for granted. We shouldn't just defer all of our ideas and decisions to a higher power, whether hypothetical or not.

So my opinion really is that decentralisation maps not so much to a lack of belief in God, as to a belief that there should not be an overarching central power (whether it exists or not).

It's because you are looking at the chart over all time. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/

The reason it looks flat is because of the huge dump at the start, which makes everything else small by comparison. All you need to do to get a better picture of the trend against BTC is to remove that initial dump from the display, so for example just look at the 1yr chart instead of all time.

It's difficult to see which way it will go with Kin. On the one hand, when there is bad news then prices often become more enticing for buyers, but that is obviously conditional on them riding out the bad news and recovering quickly. The thing with Kin is that this scandal is particularly bad and involves the SEC. This has the potential to bring down the whole company. So the Kin price looks more and more appealing at the same time that it looks more and more of a gamble.

I think there's a distinction to be made here between individual (personal rights/freedom) and state (economic control/freedom), and that the traditional left/right distinction as a single axis isn't really sufficient.

I do favour a lot of personal freedom, but also a strong state that can act as a check on the excesses of capitalism.

I suppose looking at the traditional left/right spectrum I would be firmly on the left for most things, but one element of the left where I disagree somewhat is its overly lenient response to criminal activity. Whilst I'm certainly not in favour of the death penalty or pointless punitive and retributive responses, and I fully appreciate the role of mitigating circumstances such as upbringing etc, I do feel strongly that as sentient beings we each need to take at least a measure of responsibility for our own actions. Someone I know a little, a friend of a friend, has been arrested literally hundreds of times for different instances of shoplifting. The reason they habitually re-offend is because there is no deterrent.

For those who are interested, and haven't seen it, it might be worth watching Michael Moore's 'Sicko'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicko

"The movie compares the profiteering, non-universal U.S. system with the non-profit universal health care systems of Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Cuba"

It might be 10 years old, but is still largely valid.

Another point of interest might be how health provision is changing in my country, the UK. We are gradually moving from an almost French system towards an American system as our fascination with privatisation takes a greater and greater hold. Services are suffering as money gets sucked out by private companies.

I won't deny that nationalised industries can suffer from inefficiency and bloat, but equally it is impossible to deny that once something is privatised, the whole purpose switches from quality of service provision to share price and shareholder dividends.

The response to the banking crisis of 10 years ago was in my opinion quite disgusting. They got bailed out and effectively got away with it, whilst causing severe damage to the economy in the process. The fixes that have been put in place to prevent recurrence are sticking plasters at best. It is the same in banking as it is throughout the commercial sector in western economies - the basic philosophy is to privatise profit and socialise risk. Frankly it's a scandal, and I see nothing to prevent it happening again. The people in charge aren't interested in what's best for the long-term. They are only ever in office for a few years, they cover over the cracks and then move off out of politics to lucrative positions in business. And then when it all collapses again, it will be someone else's fault.

We need to bear in mind that so much with Cardano is potential rather than actual product that has been tested in the live market. Undeniably it looks great in theory, but judgement should be reserved at the moment. The price is almost entirely speculative with little of substance really to back it up.

However now is certainly a better entry point than when it was at ATH. So if you are going to buy in, I'd say do so sooner rather than later. On balance there is probably more chance of it surging upwards than plummeting downwards.

Congratulations and thanks for posting. It is good to hear these inspirational threads from time to time as well as those who bought at 2017 ATH and have big losses.
It is important to remember both, and know that nothing in crypto is certain. But these sorts of huge gains might still be possible if we look to the long-term. Maybe we can't get the same % increase on the biggest coins, but thee are plenty of smaller ones that could see the same % gain... it's a case of balancing risk against potential reward.

I understand, but I disagree. These companies are insatiable, and Facebook and Google lead the way. The ultimate aim is to gather all data from the real world and develop perfect prediction and, beyond that, powerful means of influencing us. It's a phenomenally lucrative industry. I believe they will exploit any opportunity available to gather more and more data on us. Whether its purchasing and browsing data, whether its biometric data from wearable tech, whether its pinpoint location data from your phone... the list is almost endless, and they will stop at nothing. More data leads to better predictions which leads to increased revenue.

I'd be very surprised if 2019  has the same percentage price increases as 2017 had. The best we can hope for in the remainder of the year I think is that prices will continue to rise back towards the 2017 ATHs, and this time maintain the price instead of falling rapidly back down.

Although 2019 started low, it still started so much higher than 2017 did... so it's difficult to envisage the same scale of gains. We are probably talking over $100k for BTC if that happens.

I think EOS does probably have a good future. This is just one article and one opinion. Certainly we have heard plenty about how good the tech is with EOS. What we are starting to see now is questions being raised as it becomes more prominent. There are probably plenty more to go. It's not as old and battle-hardened as ETH, so this is why ETH is so much higher in cap - it has already proven itself repeatedly, whereas EOS is just at the start of that journey.

They're not scams, it's just that you were unfortunate to enter the market at what turned out to be a huge price peak. But don't give up and don't sell at a loss - Bitcoin and ETH are the two strongest coins out there, and I expect both to have a great future, and reach new all-time highs. Just be patient if you can, and don't sell yet. Go away from crypto if you have to, but come back in a few years and you'll likely see big increases for those two coins.