How can it possibly be an ultimate goal?

Okay, you can of course make it your personal credo to get as many bitcoins as possible and that would essentially be your goal. But I don't think that even Warren Buffett sets similar goals for himself even if he is said to be money married, i.e. making money for the sole purpose of making even more money. In fact, it may be a good strategy as it allows you to focus on one thing, but not in the way of making it your life purpose, of course

Regarding your question, it is up to you to decide whether you are considering it a worthy purpose. If that is your goal, I'm okay with it, but personally, I'm more interested in using crypto as a tool for exploring other areas of life, so speculation, ultimately, is purely utilitarian for me, even though I definitely like the thrill of it. Other than that, I agree that there is not much in the way an average Joe can "utilize" their coins

Nonsense aside, are you bullish or bearish now?

Personally, I don't see a lot of upward momentum now, and the way I see money being poured into altcoins (Litecoin, more specifically, as of recent) tells me there is not much to hope for with Bitcoin in the coming months. And as I have said earlier (with the market seeming to confirm my assumption), we will likely see more action in a few "selected" altcoins in the nearest future. In this way, yes, it pretty much comes down to "a never ending tight range" (as much as I don't believe in it myself)

And how is that going to prevent manipulation?

The only way to prevent exchanges from manipulating the Bitcoin price is to dry their orderbooks completely. It is possible only in one case (if we discard the possibility of an exchange itself delisiting a coin) when Bitcoin adoption is so high that most bitcoins leave exchanges essentially leaving them with nothing to dance on. You would likely have higher prices then, but just high prices on their own are not a guarantee of any kind in this regard

I basically agree with this part

Moreover, I've been telling folks here essentially the same thing about the hash war as it was likely only the trigger that started an avalanche of sell-offs which brought the prices to their current levels. However, we don't see a lot of action today as well as we didn't see a lot of action before the Bitcoin Cash split

This somehow makes you question the whole validity of your point. In other words, if someone sells a couple (thousand) bitcoins now and the price plummets below 3k, it will most likely remain there. Would it count as an organic drop? But if he didn't sell, the price would remain where it is now. Would that count as an artificial drop?

Some of your concerns are valid while others not so much

Bitcoin wallets get hacked because Bitcoin is worth something. But what's the purpose of stealing your voting key if you won't be able to use it anyway? Say you steal it from someone and then vote with it. Now we see what could be loosely interpreted as a double spend. Obviously, both votes are then declared invalid, while the legitimate owner receives the right to cast a new vote with a new key (or is obliged to vote in "manual" mode if he is not able to provide enough security for his keys). We could use hardware encryption and that would solve the problem of hacking

Regarding technical details how it should work in practice, I guess this system should begin as Bitcoin itself had started, i.e. without any help or assistance from the government (at least, not public). In this way, if enough people will be using such a system for voting on their issues (think of it as a consensus), it will escalate quickly until the government can no longer be considered legitimate if it refuses to accept the results of such a vote. All in all, we just need a new Satoshi Nakamoto, with a voting system in mind

I don't care about how corrupt and destructive Wall Street is

It is enough for me to know that they can't corrupt Bitcoin, and that (as I explained above) is likely one of the reasons (if not the sole reason) why they have been staying away from it for so long. In this way, you may continue to make noise (like "it would take a few books to explain it to you"), but it still won't make Bitcoin more corruptible or destructible. Bitcoin is not gold (in this regard), and all your actions with it are public and can be pretty much considered set in stone (e.g. who paid whom and how much)

Bitcoin is also legal in the United States

And in a couple of them it can even be rightfully and legitimately considered legal tender, though at a local level only (and as a commodity at a federal level). But that's not my point. Simply put, you can't ban what you can't prevent. Bitcoin is like gravity in this respect. Technically, you can pass a law or proclaim a court ruling that would ban gravity for good but will such an order have any effect on it?

This is what happened in the past

Say, in early 2017 when there were two massive but rather short-lived corrections which turned out to be good entry points with fortunes made soon thereafter. But we are not taking into account that back in the day there was enough demand to drive prices up no matter what. Today this is no longer the case

So if we crash lower in the coming weeks or months (for example, to 2k), the rebound may be small and pathetic just like it was when the price had crashed from 6k to 3k. Technically, it was a postponed dead cat's bounce, and nothing in particular has changed since the last crash

There should be some form of hype without doubt

And the recent spike in Litecoin's value was likely caused by this, i.e. pricing in the next halving. But we should also remember that you can't price in the real effects of halving before the actual event, i.e. market supply decreasing due to block reward having been diminished

And while hype comes and goes, this decrease in supply will be permanent, even though it may take some time until its effect kicks in for real (as it happened with Bitcoin in the second half of 2016)

Yeah, I remember how it started

As I had been sticking around when it happened. At first the faucet was showing a lot of ads, and people were discussing how long it would last till Google banned the site as it seemed that the owner had been violating some of their rules (this was only an assumption, I don't know if it really was so). Then I come back and see no ads any more. Looks like Google finally banned the faucet (just kidding)


That was meant to be a joke, sorry for the confusion it caused


He obviously meant exchanging reward points for satoshi

But why were you doing that?

You could just go along with importing private keys without actually moving your coins anywhere. After you are done, you can then collect all your coins in one address (if this is what you are looking for, of course). Since you seem to care about fees so much, it looks like you don't have a lot of bitcoins, then why all the fuss really? It just doesn't look like a very smart idea to shuffle your coins around

Did you change your stance too?

You are the second poster here who I remember having recently changed their mind in respect to future price action. I recall you were way more optimistic not so long ago. Or did you really expect the last rally to continue up and beyond 4k? I think we should scale down our expectations as well as our perspective on future price. The current range (say, 3-4k) may become our new home for months to come (if not years)

That's the point I never forget to mention

Which is that we now have to cope with a lot of let's call them "legacy" shortcomings, which were basically trade-offs back in the day (so they were justified, to a degree). But now they have grown into real roadblocks and obstacles as they weren't disposed of later in due course. And the worst thing is that we will see our problems multiplied in the future unless we efficiently get rid of them before it is too late

And the Bitcoin blockchain growth is one such potential mine. Indeed, if Bitcoin continues as before, i.e. without any real adoption, that is unlikely to become a real problem in the foreseeable future. But we all expect it to become something else, right? So why do we shut our eyes to these future problems? As they say, prevention is better than cure (and I totally agree with that)

And which are those assets, really?

I'm extremely interested in learning about such assets, so could you name a few? Other than Bitcoin (and Litecoin, I have to admit), I don't know any cryptocurrency in particular or a cryptoasset in general (though I don't know what the latter could be apart from a token) which would count as one "with better use cases". All use cases we have seen so far amounted to speculation in the end. But I would be happy to admit being wrong here

Typically, it works the other way around

After the easy money is gone, people come to understanding that they have been not just wasting that money ("easy come, easy go"), which is not actually the worst thing when you think over it, but rather wasting their entire lives (well, some part thereof). If it didn't last for long (say, only a couple of years), it may be not a big deal after all, but if it lasted the best years of your life, this is pretty much it. But then it's too late to cry

Technically, you may be right after all

If we use such broad metrics as duration and scale of the drop. But I think we should pay closer attention to details, i.e. how market performs. If you do, you will start to notice major differences between now and then  In 2015 there was a lot of both demand and supply so the market was alive. Today it looks mostly dead, apart from irregular and sporadic bursts of activity, up to a point where we can call them convulsions and agony

In fact, nothing makes me think so

If you were reading my posts here carefully, I never mentioned the transfer of keys to the owners of bitcoins (Bitcoin certificates, more specifically). I meant that the funds should be interested in convincing people that they actually own the bitcoins they claim they have. If they do, then they wouldn't be able to create more paper bitcoins then there are real ones. On the other hand, if they fail to do that, investors will stay away from such funds

I don't think either there are many weak hands left in the market

Which we can clearly see in stagnating prices and low trading volumes (read, there is as little supply as demand). But we still should not dismiss lightly the possibility of just one big whale selling out like it happened in the first half of 2018 (in January and February if I'm not mistaken) with Mt. Gox coins which were sold right into the market and crashed the prices massively. This is still possible, i.e. big chunks of coins being thrown into the market and bringing prices down at the end of the day

The purpose is to have a thorough discussion of the topic

So do you have anything constructive to say on the questions raised? And it is not about me tagging Litecoin so and so. Just in case, I'm not tagging anything (or anyone, for that matter). Regardless, if Litecoin (or any other "more advanced shitcoin" in your speak) becomes a means of payment as well as a vehicle for speculation (let it be so) while Bitcoin becomes a store of value (the proverbial digital gold), that will be a great combination if you ask me and I would be okay with it. And many other users would be fine too, I think

How is that fundamentally against the principle of running a blockchain?

Care to explain? When I suggest that some transactions can be made reversible (please note, I don't speak about all transactions), people start telling that it is against the idea of blockchain (and I conceptually agree with them). But when I start talking about making older transactions completely irreversible (via checkpoints or otherwise), other people (though I wouldn't be in the least surprised if they turned out to be the same people actually) start telling me that it is against the principle of running a blockchain. That doesn't feel quite right, does it?