If it's a matter of choice between "no 2 step verification" and "2 step verification", then it should obviously be picked. Hacking email would indeed bypass it, but there are many other attacks which can be mitigated with is - XSS, CSRF, session hijacking, phishing, password cracking.

It's better to always look for a services that use 2FA, but if there's no other way, then 2 step verification is better than nothing.

Basically some (a lot) people don't view Bitcoin as money, they think it's some shiny thingy, so their brains just don't have the same response when they encounter something fishy. Also non-bitcoin people are not used to Bitcoin amounts, so they don't immediately understand if, for example, 0.1 BTC is a lot or not. It takes conscious effort to go and check the price and do the calculation, while phrases like "$100" are immediately understood, even to those outside of the US. Plus Bitcoin is still so new and full of strange things (to outsiders), that some might things that maybe someone is giving away a lot of coins.

I hope someone will do this, patent trolls like CWS totally deserve to get trolled back. He'll probably retract his claims about the ownership of Mt Gox addresses, but there's some chance it could lead to another court battle that will be draining his resources. Sadly it seems CWS has a lot of money on his hands, but at list there's an opportunity to waste his time.

I got my first 0.005 BTC from a faucet in 2012, but then I traded them for Dogecoin in 2014 and left the doges on an exchange that pulled exit scam later on. Then in 2016 I found a small job on this forum thus beggining my real BTC journey, because since then I started taking BTC seriously.

I think it's reasonable that nowadays more people with Bitcoin through exchanges rather than earning it, because earning opportunities became more scarce while awareness of Bitcoin as an investment option only grew in the recent years, and even mainstream media report big BTC movements.


Can you make a short summary of the stance of that exchange owner on how centralized exchanges are important for obtaining your first BTC? I don't trust google translate.

There's a lot misconceptions here. Hardware wallet are not immune to elements either, and you'd need a very good fire-proof safe to protect any kind of wallet from those accidents.

Paper or hardware wallets aren't the only methods of storing keys offline, even storing them on a CD, floppy disc or a USB stick still counts as offline storage.

But offline storage alone isn't a guarantee that your keys won't be stolen. Most of the times coins are stolen when you access them, for example when you enter your seed or private key into a fake wallet software, or when you have malware on your computer that logs keystrokes or can steal private keys from RAM. Hardware wallet protects from all that because the key is used in a secure isolated environment. If you want to achieve the same with a paper wallet, you need to make your own cold storage setup.

Bitcoin is leading the market, alts literally can't start a bull run without Bitcoin doing it first, but they can easily die on their own like it happened to thousands of coins already. As it can be seen from the 2017-present trend, alts underperform compared to BTC while having much higher risk. It's really a bad value to try to hold alts long-term now, you could try to make some short-term trades, but it's so prone to volatility and manipulation that you'll likely just lose money.

Recently it was following stock market pretty close. It crashed together with it, rebounded together, now just recently it had a small dip exactly as the stock market was dipping too.

Volatility is the biggest roadblock for Bitcoin's safe haven asset status, safe havens are supposed to predictably react to negative economic events, and with Bitcoin there's no such guarantee, Bitcoin would either crash or will continue doing what it was doing.

And people also google about altcoins when they become interested in them. If most people decide to stop with Bitcoin instead of pursuing alts, that's because Bitcoin is clearly superior. I'm sure everyone who is new to Bitcoin quickly knows that alts exist.


It does, just because correlation isn't super strong, it doesn't mean that it isn't there.


True for ICOs and some new altcoins, but I meant the established coins. I never encountered coins like DASH or EOS in the wild - never saw anyone accepting them or even talking about them outside of crypto community.

Coindesk has the thing that you describe: https://www.coindesk.com/data

It takes various qualities like network size, market benchmark, developers, assigns those values as 100% for Bitcoin and compares altcoins with it. Their methodology is described here: https://www.coindesk.com/data/glossary

I personally think that these rankings can't be very objective, and I would never use them for trading or other serious decisions. Still, it can be fun too look at them if you are bored.

If Bitcoin's google search dominance is at 80% while its market dominance is at 65%, it likely means that alts are overpriced and are bound to drop further, because they lack real users. I think the difference between the most maximalist countries and the average Bitcoin interest isn't that high, so there's not much point to dig deeper as to why Kenya or Brazil are more interested in BTC than alts.

Most altcoins have inherently unsecure or centralized designs, like PoS, masternodes and big blocks; they have centralized ecosystems when developers can do whatever they want and community will always follow; almost every new altcoin is profit-driven; they are prone to hacking and critical bugs because they have little number of devs; their markets are heavily manipulated because there's very little activity, so it's hard to use them on practice as money; altcons lack adoption because the world doesn't care about the problems that they solve.

If a coin is fundamentally centralized, it doesn't matter if it surpasses Bitcoin.

I'm not seeing a lot of comments about Bitcoin being a tool for bad people, or some get rich quick scheme, but I do see opinions that Bitcoin is useless, that it's a failed experiment, that Bitcoiners are just crazy libertarians and so on.

I think the fact that Bitcoin is alive, traded for such a high price, and has so many people in its community  and even used by some merchants easily proves that it's not useless. Maybe it didn't bring the global financial revolution like early bitcoiners have hoped, but some adoption is better than no adoption at all.

You sound like a typical beginner who gets hyped by altcoin advertisements and declares that Bitcoin is dead. This has been going on for a while, there are countless coins that claim to be Bitcoin killers, and there's a ton of coins that claim to be Ethereum killers. But guess what, Bitcoin is not only #1, but its dominance keeps growing, because smart investors understand that alts come with a big load of flaws and issues, that they solve problems that no one cares about, that they are insanely centralized.

So, go ahead and sell you BTC, but you will regret it later when alts will keep dying and underperforming while BTC reaches new highs.

Crypto scams will exist for as long as crypto exists. And it's not because crypto is inherently bad, the same happens in other fields too - tech support scams, Nigerian prince scams, Ponzi schemes and so on - they exist for decades with no signs of disappearing. Maybe tech companies will utilize algorithms like machine learning to detect scams and remove them, but scammers will adapt and find ways to bypass them. No matter how you try to educate people, there will always be those who get scammed easily.

1. Never transfer or digitally store raw private keys. Use end-to-end encryption if you really-really have to send someone a raw private key. Ask them for their PGP key and encrypt the private key with it before sending.

2. Always triple check that the address that the address that you submitted is the same as the one you copied from the wallet. Clipboard swap can happen due to malware or be a part of the communication platform, like in OP's case.

Yeah, I phrased my words a bit poorly, what I wanted to say is that Coinbase was never a good place to do any operations with crypto, be it storing, buying or trading, because of their long history of doing anti-consumer moves. Coinbase and other exchanges that have similar track record should be avoided like a plague. I recommend that people try to find some decent local exchange if possible, they'll likely be much more user-friendly than those giants.

Dude is pulling numbers out of his ass. Especially the $9,000 ETH - that's just lol.

I highly doubt that such high prices will be reached anytime soon, because crypto now doesn't have the "novel investment/fad" factor. After the 2017 crash almost everyone is aware of crypto, and they have the impression that it is risky and volatile, so they'll be unlikely to jump on this train. The next bull run will be mostly driven by investors who know Bitcoin well, or were looking at it for some time, so it won't be as irrational as the previous rallies.

Why do you need crypto for that? You can make a script that uses bank API to send money to workers at specified intervals. And maybe it will be happening soon.

You can use ETH blockchain as a public ledger of completed work and payouts, but you can't use it to verify that the job was done without human input, unless you create some mechanism for automated verification, which might not always be possible. For example, you can't check the quality of programming or translation automatically.

You can practice using Bitcoin without buying it by using Bitcoin's testnet. It's even better because you don't risk any real money.
Also, this statement is just redundant, because of course almost every Bitcoin enthusiast owns Bitcoin, and if they don't they must have some reason.


Democratizing means making something more democratic. What you are talking about is spreading the word about Bitcoin. It's a good thing to do, but it's also dangerous, because criminals can target Bitcoin users, so be careful who you are talking with, and never tell how many coins you have.

It's more of a synbolic victory rather than some tangible win, because JPMorgan is still a centralized entity that works with other centralized entities like Coinbase, and ideally we shouldn't be using them, because they oppose the principles of Bitcoin.

We are still far from point when ignoring Bitcoin is an objectively bad investment decision, so I wouldn't say that JPMorgan are afraid of missing out, it's more like they see that they already can make profit from crypto, and the risk is tolerable.