Miner is a role unique to cryptocurrencies, all other roles can be encountered in other fields. Miner is also the most interesting role, because essentially it is entrepreneurship but it is also the thing that makes the backbone of a blockchain.

Bounty hunter is an interesting role too, because it's a very low skilled worker that does tasks for a promise of coins/tokens that might be worth something in the future. In real world people rarely work for anything other than real money or at least some useful commodity.

The population declines that are observable now are very small in relation to the whole population, it's usually 0.1-1%. Population is declining the fastest in the lower class, so not much value is being inherited, and it shouldn't cause a price inflation because it also lowers the demand for goods.

But inflation isn't the only thing that you should be worried about, and population decline can have other negative or maybe even positive consequences (opinions of economists here can vary).

They did run an unregistered security sale, and that's illegal. If they tried to fight it, they'd very likely ended up with a much higher fine and some lawyer fees on top of it. You may consider it not immoral to run an ICO, but it is against the current laws.

And from my point of view, you don't need $1.2 billion to make a token, a million or two should be more than enough, and Telegram, being a big company, could have easily afforded that.

There's a big difference between publicly traded companies and an anonymous guy asking for irreversible transactions from people all over the world. The former are subject to regulations and as the result your chance of encountering fraud is small, but it still can happen, while the latter is just a perfect opportunity for a scammer - there's no chance for prosecution unless the scam growth truly giant.

This guy needs support, and explaining how investors view such opportunities counts as support too.


A cow farm won't be generating a 25-100x profit, so there's no way it would compensate for the inherent risk of using Bitcoin for overseas investment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_currency

Legally speaking, a virtual currency is a currency not backed by a government, but still used as an actual currency by people. So technically in-game currency isn't a virtual currency in this sense because it's not used outside of a game. But on practice the terms "virtual currency" and "digital currency" are used interchangeably by everyone, including bloggers, government officials and academics, so I wouldn't be too bothered if someone calls Bitcoin a virtual currency.

When they say "shitcoin" different people may put different meaning into this word, to some it's only the lowest coins that are obviously bad, to others it's nearly or literally all altcoins, including the top coins like Ethereum. I personally would rather advice beginners to be wary of altcoins rather than shitcoins, because of this ambiguity of the latter word, because it's easy for a newbie to mislead themselves into thinking that the coin they are about to invest into isn't a shitcoin because it has good review on some blog or news site.

There are Bitcoin ATM's that allow you to buy coins for cash. I once saw an exchange that allowed customers to come to their office and trade for cash. Then there are many non-bank payment methods, even something like PayPal, but effectively they are centralized middlemen with many of the downsides of the banks - KYC, limits and other regulations, potential account freezes, etc.

There's also p2p trading, but it can be risky because there's always a chance you'll get robbed instead, there's plenty examples of it.

I don't see anything revolutionary about it, it's just a custodian that holds your gold, and crypto exists to remove the middleman, so bringing them back just defeats the purpose of crypto. We already see how companies that manage stablecoins demand KYC from certain users and block accounts, if a big company was managing gold-backed tokens, they would be doing exactly the same. You are saying that regulation is necessary, but regulation would make this gold-backed token no different from traditional ownership of gold. Blockchain doesn't magically make everything decentralized or secure, every other aspect of the system must be decentralized too.

Ethereum can do without Vitalik, there's plenty of good developers who work on the protocol, but right now Vitalik has a lot of say when it comes to important decisions, he decides when Ethereum forks, the development course, he decides when to revert old blocks to undo hacks.  I think Ethereum would be better if Vitalik played a much smaller role and the key decisions were made by community and developers together like it's done in Bitcoin.

Yeah, scams aren't exclusive to crypto and they still happen in traditional finance. My favorite example is the ponzi scheme epidemic in 90's Albania, when ponzi schemes wrecked  the economy that was transitioning to capitalism.


But I don't agree that the fact that such large fraud happens with fiat money somehow means that crypto is legit - there's no connection here and crypto should be judged for its own merit. And we all know that nearly every ICO is a scam, and almost all alts are shitcoins.

We already experienced a stock market crash and Bitcoin followed it. An then Bitcoin recovered simultaneously with stocks. If we'll have a true economic crisis, people won't be buying Bitcoin, they will be selling their assets, including Bitcoin, to buy toilet paper, figuratively speaking. People want Bitcoin to be digital gold and a hedge against global economy, but it can't become such thing as long as it is a volatile speculative investment.

But these easy-to-spot scams aren't the only scams, there are also scams that look quite legit at the first glance. For example, there are exchange services that process smaller transactions without problem, and as the result they get real positive reviews - but then some unfortunate user makes a big transaction and the exchange scams them. Or take exit scams - when a legitimate business suddenly disappears with all the user's deposits. Or exchanges that can scam users by pretending to be hacked.

Didn't India already ban Bitcoin and then unbanned it? It gets so tedious to track countries like China, Russia and now India, they constantly send mixed signals to the point when it's hard to remember what was their last stance and what's Bitcoin's current legal status. And crypto journalists make it worse by using words like "X government" when it's really just one lonely MP with no power to change anything.

Can someone with a good knowledge summarize the history of Bitcoin legislation in India? I'd much appreciate it.

https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html


If Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to be distributed equally, he'd design something other than PoW, because PoW rewards those who have the most resources. Even with CPU or GPU mining people build farms if mining is profitable, to the point where regular consumers find it harder to buy that hardware for its direct purpose.

Satoshi was perfectly aware that mining farms and ASICs will emerge, and he didn't view it as a problem, because Bitcoin never had a goal of making 1 CPU = 1 vote or distributing coins equally. Saotshi knew that those things are harmful because they create vulnerabilities, and PoW is a better system because it's backed by game theory.

A currency doesn't need to be distributed to people intentionally, if its good people would exchange their old currency for it. This is how it happened with banks, PayPal, paper money, metal money and all the other types.

There's no strong foundation, they just gave him some land that was otherwise unused. Senegal is an extremely poor country, and they are glad to grasp at any chance to attract more economic activity to their country. Unfortunately, they choose to deal with a typical ICO scam, and I hope they don't plan to put their resources in this doomed project, as it would only worsen their already difficult situation. Senegal might be the first government that got involved in a crypto scam.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use the same underlying cryptography as banks, the Internet and other modern forms of communication. If a quantum computer could crack Bitcoin, we would have much bigger problems, because it would also crack banks, military communications, government secrets and so on. If cryptographic community isn't worried about these quantum computer developments, then neither should you.

If someone approaches you, and offers you to make money by investing your money, it's 100% a scam. Con artists will do anything to convince you to send them money - they'll offer you trading signals, high returns of investment, fixed gambling opportunities and so on - but the moment you send them your money, you won't see them ever again.

Every time you are about to send someone your coins, make sure to carefully verify their reputation, and keep in mind that user reviews can be faked too.

Bitcoin does follow real world events, it just doesn't follow every single event, this only happens with the biggest events, like the recent stock market crash, when Bitcoin crashed simultaneously. And the price is organic, all the talk about whales and manipulators who tightly control the price is just a conspiracy theory.

As for your title - no, Bitcoin didn't benefit from the coronavirus, it caused a market crash and provided no benefits, for example Bitcoin didn't see an increase in merchant use.

If it's a real blockchain, that you can't alter it because it would break the integrity check in the form of hash linking. But what you are describing has nothing to do with it, if the devs control the majority of nodes, or if there's some backdoor in the node code, they could be throttling the syncing of their competitors and get most of the rewards for themselves. At this age if a coin looks even a little shady, it's better to drop it immediately, because even coins with seemingly good reputation end up being scams.