That last paragraph and the title show that the author has no clue and that cointelegraph is just clickbait.

You are, for example, assigning the average for the first 30 days to the 30th day in the graph. It works better if you assign it to the 15th day instead. Try it and you will see the graphs line up nicely instead of the SMA graph having a 15 day lag.

That's a common myth. The halving does not decrease the supply. The supply is always increasing until it reaches 21 million. You assume that the demand will continue to increase, but that is not guaranteed.

If you look closely, you will see that all your moving average graphs are shifted to the right slightly. That is because you assign the average value for a period to the end of the period instead of to the middle of the period. It doesn't make a big difference when looking at the graph all by itself, but it creates false impressions when comparing it directly to other graphs.

That's called unrealistic expectations and wishful thinking, which are the primary fuels for a bubble. It's one thing to ask "what if?", but it is a bubble when people start believing it is certain.

When people don't want to consider that this ridiculous run-up in price could be a bubble, then it is probably a bubble.

What do people think will happen? Do they think it will continue rising at this pace and then just level off? It doesn't work like that!

If you really care about the concept of stateless currency, then what does it matter which currency (or currencies)? Perhaps, you really care mostly about making a profit on your investment in Bitcoin.

That paragraph is wrong in many ways

The reason for the concern over the value of the block reward as the subsidy goes to 0 is that the security of Bitcoin depends directly on the value of the block reward. The value of the block reward determines the cost of a 51% attack.

Fees alone may not keep all miners today still in the mining business, but it will be enough for the miners that remain. The purpose of the block reward is not to keep miners in business. The efficient ones will remain. The inefficient ones will quit. It is not clear if this will result in more centralization of mining.

Furthermore, the subsidy will not abruptly drop to 0 at any point. It will be 1 satoshi for 4 years before dropping to 0, and it will be 3 satoshis for 4 years prior to that. The subsidy will drop below 1 bitcoin in about 13 years, but it will be another 100 years before it finally reaches 0.

Finally, the size and efficiency of mining chips have no effect on the cost of mining. If chips are cheaper and more efficient, then the difficulty will increase accordingly, making it just as expensive in the end. Overall, the total  cost of mining is primarily determined the value of the block reward and little else.

As an example, look what happened in the switch from GPU mining to ASIC mining. An ASIC device is 10000 times more efficient than a GPU, yet the amount of energy expended and the cost of mining have continued to rise.

The fact that they used Bitcoin to pay for the credit card numbers doesn't make it "Bitcoin Credit Card Fraud". If they used dollars, would it be "Dollar Credit Card Fraud"?

Market cap is a measure of adoption that is comparable across all currencies.

It will never work.

Authority?  That is the problem that Bitcoin solves. Somebody dictating what goes into Bitcoin Core? If I don't like it, I'll just use something else.

1. There is little chance of losing your coins as long as you send them to the correct address provided by the Ledger wallet and you ensure that the Ledger's seed is securely backed up.

There is an extremely small chance (¹/_4294967296) of losing your coins due to mistyping the address. It is more likely that you might send to the wrong address.

2. Same as #1. Though, there is a chance that the exchange will lose your bitcoins, which is why you have the Ledger.

3. The price cannot reach $100k if nobody is willing to buy at such exorbitant prices. But realistically, you can buy fractions of a bitcoin so the price of a full bitcoin is not a factor.

4. The cost of a transaction is not related to the value of the transaction. It is related to the number of bytes in the transaction. On the other hand, if the price of a bitcoin reaches $100k, then it would indicate that using bitcoin is extremely valuable and that people would be willing to pay a very high fee.

Unfortunately, people mistakenly use "public key" when they mean "Bitcoin address". Here are simple definitions:

• seed - Used by a wallet to generate private keys. Keep this secret because anyone with this can generate your private keys and spend your bitcoins.
• private key - Necessary to spend bitcoins. Keep this secret because anyone with your private keys can spend your bitcoins.
• public key - Derived from a private key.
• Bitcoin address - Derived from a public key. In very simple terms, bitcoins are sent to a Bitcoin address.
• wallet - Tracks balances. Creates transactions. A wallet holds typically holds a seed, but may also (or instead) hold private keys.
• passphrase - used to encrypt a seed, wallet file, or private key. It is not a seed.

Transactions are not encrypted. The private key is used to sign a transaction. The signature and public key (which are included in the transaction) prove that you have the private key that corresponds to the bitcoin address of the bitcoins being spent and that the transaction has not been tampered with.

Your description of an online wallet is not quite accurate. The reality is that the site (Coinbase, for example) has a wallet. You do not have a wallet, you have an account. If bitcoins are sent to your deposit address (in their wallet), your account is credited. If you want to spend bitcoins, they send bitcoins from their wallet to the address you specify and debit your account. Also, if you send bitcoins to someone else on the site, the proper accounts are credited and debited and there is no transaction on the block chain.

Bitcoin has wallets that don't require you to download the entire block chain. Most currencies don't, so you will have to download the block chain or store your coins in somebody else's wallet.

Not Bitcoin. You are referring to Ethereum.

It is a sad fact that people have bought physical bitcoins in order to redeem them.

That seems like a crazy conspiracy theory to me. Do you have information on who is "spamming the network", and why they are willing to pay so much money to increase fees for everyone else?

The fees are high because so many people are willing to pay a lot to make a bitcoin transaction. It is not a matter of rich or poor. It is a matter of what the transaction is worth to you.

The solutions are to make transactions smaller, enable off-chain transaction layers, and make room for more transactions, or perhaps to make Bitcoin less useful.


The fee is not set by anyone. "They" cannot adjust the fee. If you want your transaction to go through, you will have to push out another transaction by paying a higher fee than it. It is that simple.


The problem with the Lightning Network solution is that it is another payment system that people will have to adopt. It has taken Bitcoin 8 years to get this far, so we should expect adoption of LN to take just as long. A bigger block solution is necessary in the meantime.

The metal is brass. The value is in the desire to own one of the first physical bitcoins ever made. If you aren't a collector, then there wouldn't be much value in that for you.

Sarcasm at its most extreme, for sure. But this will be prophetic:

I would stay away from the contract option. Most sites are scams, and the ones that are not will not make you a profit. I don't know much about the lease option, but like cloud mining, it makes little business sense, so I would not expect it to be profitable.