This sounds good in theory, but on practice beginners and even more experienced traders don't have the skills needed to perform a good market analysis. Most people simply read some articles, that very easily can be paid shilling, Looking at charts isn't very useful either, simply buying at the bottom isn't a guarantee for profit. Checking fundamentals is hard for beginners too, because they don't have a deep knowledge of technology, so they are easily misled by buzzwords.

It's better to simply ignore altcoins, investing in Bitcoin is already highly profitable, why take big and unnecessary risks?

All these homebrew schemes are likely to backfire and cause the user to lose access to their coins. Special ink might degrade over time, you might forget in which book or on which pages the seed is hidden, which can really screw you over if you have an emergency that requires you to take your seed.

This isn't logical at all. Wars happen when countries get strong and their economies can support the war effort. War also requires some political stability at home, because otherwise the opposition would be making anti-war protests that could paralyze the country.

When people get hungry, they don't go to war, they sit down and die - history knows lots of famines, and barely any were they driving force behind a war.

And you seem to be forgetting that we live at the times of nuclear weapons - WW3 would wipe the humanity out.

You'd need to spend millions to actually make the difference in terms of adoption. Now ask yourself, who would be giving away Bitcoins for free just to promote them? In the early days people did that with faucets, but the amounts that were given away were worth fractions of a penny at the time. Would someone go treasure hunting for such "treasure"? You'd need to bump that to dozens or hundreds of dollars.

I like this, Bitcoin used to be a "bubble", "ponzi", "tulip bulb", "rat poison", "commodity" and now it's fiat money. At this rate the mainstream will proclaim it a global reserve currency in a few years 

But seriously, let's look at Wikipedia:


So, Bitcoin is clearly fiat under this definition. Bitcoin has no other use aside from being money, so it has no intrinsic value. It's just that in Bitcoin community the word "fiat" became synonymous with "centralized inflationary money", which isn't correct because as per definition fiat money is much wider than just national currencies.

Even then the seed might be seized by the government if for example they will decide to outlaw crypto and will have a suspicion that this is a Bitcoin private key, and while they wouldn't take your coins if the encryption is strong, you might be locked out of your coins if it's the only copy. If you want to be even more safe and store coins in bank for decades, it would be better to first use steganography to hide the encrypted seed in some innocent files, like family photos, and then optionally encrypt the photos. So, in case something like what I described will happen, you'll have plausible deniability and might even avoid raising any suspicion.

Yep, DEfI is when a bunch of shitcoins and tokens gathered together and decided to create some sort of brand. A lot of these products are not as interesting as it sounds. Collaterized crypto loans will never replace fiat credit and loans. Flash loans are useless to anyone except some traders. And when hacks occur, suddenly the devs are able to intervene in a completely centralized manner with their master keys, totally undoing the "De" in DeFi. Now ask yourself what will happen if the government knocks on their doors and ask them to give them the copy of their keys.

There were periods when blocks were full throughout the whole year, not just at the peak of the bubble.


The charts only show that the fees follow the price, which is logical because higher price -> more people sending coins to exchanges to sell.


Why would people dump Bitcoin just because the fees are high? Most of the complaining came from bounty hunters and microinvestors who usually deal with double digit amounts. These people don't have any big influence on the market. People who held multiple coins didn't mind paying a $30 fee to cash out their 10000% profits.


Going from $200 to $20k is already a miracle, higher numbers were just impossible with all the selling pressure that we had.

A blockchain is not a competitor to Bitcoin just because it's a blockchain. Bitcoin is a currency, so only altcoins that aim to be a currency are Bitcoin's true competitors. These blockchain that the survey talks about are just some centralized databases with a few nodes that put their data in blocks and hash it. It's not revolutionary, it's not game-changing, it's not interesting. Most if not all of these blockchains are just trials that will be killed when it will become clear that they don't improve anything.

We know from Stackoverflow's last survey that engineers don't believe in blockchain, which is far more important than executives playing with new ideas.

Bitcoin is money. Why would you want to mix database and money? Do you want to add random pictures to your PayPal transactions?


Wrong. Bitcoin crashed because it was a speculative bubble. The $20,000 price mark existed for some minutes, and above $13k existed for only days. There's nothing strange with it crashing the way it did. The fees started getting high long before the price reached it's peak, so fees were definitely not the factor. No one was thinking "wait a second, with such high fees Bitcoin is not suitable to be a currency, sell, sell, sell", it was all pure speculation - buy low, sell high, get out.

Your question is to vague, so here's a vague answer for you - practice. There's a rule/myth that you need 10,000 hours to master a skill. Even if the number is wrong, the idea behind it isn't - you need to put a lot of hours and effort, and also be smart about your learning.

If you want to understand Bitcoin better, you need to start with reading Bitcoin books, then you can read some quality blog posts or discussions to gain even deeper language. You also will need to learn fundamentals of cryptography, computer science and networking to truly understand Bitcoin.

There already are countless services that help sex workers to connect with audience over the Internet. Crypto isn't competitive here as long as fiat payments are as popular as they are - when users don't care about privacy, there's really no more upsides to crypto payments that could justify going through all the inconveniences of managing wallets, exchange accounts, etc.

 There were so many attempts to make "X but with crypto", and most of them failed. The places where it succeeded are gambling and darknet markets. So maybe NSFW services can succeed if they target countries where they are illegal, to ensure safety for both the workers and the clients.

This sounds like some cyberpunk antiutopia where you sell your body to a company with a binding contract. But luckily we don't have the laws to support that, so legally speaking the "investors" won't be actually able to force a person to do anything. And then there's a problem with identity - scammers might use stolen data to make contracts on behalf of other people, but without verification anyone could ask for funds and then disappear.

o_e_l_e_o said that most altcoins don't have a functioning blockchain or working product, which isn't true for "established" coins, since they are officially launched and have at least some of the advertised features enabled. But this only makes things worse, since they fail to attract users with features that they have. Many of them can be given a status of zombie-coin - their devs make it seem like there's a lot of activity going on with development, but on practice it moves nowhere.

When banks are robbed these days, it happens with small local branches and robbers only take cash. No one does those heists that you see in movies when they break into storage room, and even if it somehow happened, no one would care about personal deposit boxes, where you'd store a seed. The danger of bank is that it's a their party custodian and they can seize your coins, if the private key isn't encrypted.


This is an example of security by obscurity, which is generally regarded as a bad things. Thieves and police officers know how to quickly search a house for hidden things, so if someone know what to look for, in this case a piece of paper or a USB stick, then they will likely find it.

No method is perfect, if you store seed in plaintext, you're risking your coins getting stolen, if you encrypt it, you risk locking yourself out of your coins if you lose the password.

Alts are tied to Bitcoin because they are mostly traded against Bitcoin. So, for this decoupling to happen they should start to be traded against fiat more. This is hard to achieve, because well-regulated exchanges aren't too keen to list unpopular altcoins, and even if this happens, traders prefer to trade on less regulated exchanges. So, only the biggest altcoins stand a chance to become more independent from Bitcoin. But they need to have good fundamentals to do so, so that there is some legitimate interest from investors, and so far this isn't happening - altcoins simply don't do much, they like to make some noise, but practice shows that they severely lack real-world use.

It depends on what kind of business are you running. If it's a legitimate by-the-book business, then a stablecoin would make more sense, but if you are peddling weed on the darknet, you would want an altcoin with strong privacy features, because stablecoins are quite centralized and could demand KYC from you and freeze your address. And some types of businesses might benefit from smart contracts, so they could use an altcoin like Ethereum.

Things are already dangerous, yet Bitcoin didn't react to it at all, which is another example of Bitcoin not showing any correlation to events that aren't related to it. It's also not guaranteed that Bitcoin will rise in case the conflict would escalate - many Bitcoiners are waiting for negative events because they believe Bitcoin to be a hedge, but the opposite reaction is probably too, for example if China will start allocating more resources to it's military at the expense of other industries, like for example mining. Or the global market might yet again take a dive and take Bitcoin with it like it happened with covid-19.

This is true, especially applying it to this:


because there are people from very poor countries who save $100-200 to buy a new PC, so paying even $10-50 is out of the question for them. For them the best advice would be to research how to minimize the risks of pirated software by utilizing virtualization and checking reputation of crackers/repackers.

A better advice is to use free and open source alternatives to paid software. If you're not a professional and only use the software occasionally, a free alternative will cover all your needs. Security-wise it's even better than paid software, because even those are known to sometimes sneak spyware on user's machine.

Torrent sites aren't inherently malicious, they are just file sharing platforms. Not every torrent has malware.


It can work, but it's still risky, if you share files between computers in some way, you can infect your work computer, or your router can be hacked. It's better to make an isolated vm on your piracy-dedicated machine and never let it interact with other devices. And if you decide to pirate, do it smart - don't click on the first link, but do research about cracking groups with good reputation, and make sure you download their release.