Commerce with Bitcoin is going to be:
Very large transactions on-chain.
"Everyday" small transactions on 2nd layer like LN or on centralized subnetworks in the ecosystem built by companies like PayPal, Venmo, Coinbase, banks, Binance, etc

While I agree partly that in the current reality in early 2024 "investment" (aka speculation) is the main goal most people follow when they buy Bitcoin, I disagree that there is some hard technical limitation which makes Bitcoin qualify as an investment asset only, forever. This only applies to on-chain Bitcoin transactions.

There are challenges in the scaling issue, yes, but there are also solutions. Lightning is struggling a bit with adoption currently, but there is finally some movement with sidechains (ZK rollups etc.) and other L2 solutions, where slowly more decentralized concepts appear. As on Ethereum there is already more variety, and the concept seems viable and popular, I don't see why this shouldn't be achievable with Bitcoin too.

If you were right this would actually be a quite pessimistic stance. As an "investment" vehicle alone, Bitcoin would not have any real value. Bitcoin has USPs like censorship resistance and worldwide availability. While these characteristics can also appeal to "investors", if they "invest" using their own wallet, investing in a Bitcoin ETF or "exchange bitcoin" does actually not make use of them.

IMO you're seeing the crypto world a bit black and white. Some of your forum contributions are interesting and valid but others are not.

(And if you want to direct the focus to altcoins: all cryptocurrencies face the same challenge between node decentralization and on-chain throughput. If there was any breakthrough there, Bitcoin could adopt it.)

Bitcoin has come back lately, not because of Biden, but because people are expecting a Trump win, and they are preparing for it. Notice that when Tucker Carlson announced and aired his Putin video - a Trump-style free enterprise interview video - that's when Bitcoin jumped $10,000 in two weeks - from the $42-thousands to the $52-thousands.

Bitcoin has leveled off because the big Bitcoin controllers are watching how the public is reacting to Trump-style freedom. So far, more and more people are siding with Trump, even though the Deep State monkeys are doing their utmost this side of assassinating him to stop him.

I'm not in the US so I'm looking at how all of it goes sitting comfortably in the EU.

To those of you who say Trump is the worst candidate, would you rather have Biden? I'm not a Trump lover, but from a bitcoiner's perspective Biden has been the worst. He gave free reign to attack bitcoin because he doesn't understand it and his friend Elizabeth Warren is working hard to tell lies about bitcoin like the one about it being used to finance Islamic terrorism.

I'd support either Rob Kennedy, or Vivek, but if it came down to Trump vs Biden, I'd vote for Trump. I don't agree with him on a few things, for instance I think that the US should continue to support Ukraine, but I'd hate myself if I helped Biden win. I'd vote for Trump, or not at all.

Effectively, people are trading dollars in for a digital piece of paper that says you own x amount of Bitcoin and the only positive side is that they do not have to worry about losing any private keys because someone else is buying and hodling the real Bitcoin for them. The good thing for Bitcoiners is that this creates an increased demand for the buying of actual Bitcoin. But that's as far as it goes when it comes to the question of how much influence do ETFs have over Bitcoin.

And just like with CEXs buying up huge amounts of Bitcoin, all the ETFs do is speed up the demand and adoption of Bitcoin. Something which would happen without them anyway. Just much slower.

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ETF's are fake Bitcoin. The worst that these CEXes can do is manipulate the price of Bitcoin by selling/buying.

Since Ukraine is essentially Russia and Russian, the best way to stand with Ukraine is to oust Zelensky, and to formally make peace with Putin. Putin would gladly help Ukraine if they did this; he is helping people of other nations... unlike Biden who is off making wars around the world, to the detriment of the American people.

Why cant people create something that will be really interesting. I mean there have been some interesting projects back then and the dev abandoned it. Now there are new and new projects coming out that cease to exist after few months if not weeks. What is the point of it? I have idea that might work. But I cant find a skilled dev who is not traing to scam in the beggining.

So yeah, Common Gary L. He's always painted bitcoin in a precarious spot ever since he stepped into the throne. I don't like how he's painting bitcoin to be when millions of people around the planet had benefited from it and none of this would've happened in the first place if bitcoin's unreliable and centralized. Let that sink in.

Ever since the break-up of the USSR in 1991, Russia has been trying to join the USDollar world economy. They even requested to join NATO, but were turned down by the US.

NATO is a has-been organization. Time to shut her down and move into the modern world. Don't simply try to conquer Russia and steal her lands. Rather, make her a partner with us all, and gain access to everything she has the easy way.

Does America have good alternatives? Is it a better idea to choose Trump? A person who says that he'd encourage Russia to attack NATO countries who don't pay? Both of them are such a bad decision that I think, anarchy will be a better idea. There is a man who doesn't remember anything and has no idea what's happening but on another hand there is a man who is a crazy.

I could be Trump simply acting on his instincts, to be honest. He may have not thought much about the consequences of asking for their Republicans companions to reject the immigration law, he simply thought that, since the border is pretty much one of his main campaign topics, he cannot allow the problem to be solved before his presidency, assuming he wins.
Though, it is obvious New York has been a city of immigrants, almost the beginning, the phenomenon we are seeing nowadays is different from what we have seen before in terms of volume of people and the funding available for them.

The situation is already being used by pro Republican media, pointing out how schools and hotels are being used to house immigrants and how they are given thousands of dollars in gift cards, so they can get food and other necessities. That would certainly feel many people in the United States (who are struggling) uncomfortable, specially with the whole homelessness problem going on in big cities of the country, like those in the state of California.

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I guess that Gensler is mistaking decentralization with redistribution.
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The large amount of bitcoins held at CEX like Binance or etfs like IBIT are not owned by one entity. They are their customers funds. So what you are saying doesn’t apply.

When it comes to decentralization I think the way the hash power is distributed is more important. I remember back in the early days there was over 51% of hashpower in a single pool. We don’t have that problem anymore. China has less hashpower than before and it’s more distributed throughout the planet.

In my opinion, the Democrat party is underestimating the importance of the southern border of the United States and the influx of immigrants into the country. At first, what the governor of Texas (Greg Abbot) was doing with sending immigrants to sanctuary cities like New York was perceived as a political stunt, something which was not supposed to be taken seriously, but the governor has managed to prove his point on immigration and making the State of New York to feel the pressure of having thousands of new people to take care of there. It won't make New York to be one a red State not it could certainly make the American public opinion to flip against Biden inaction on the issue. I have seen reports about the authorities of those cities to feel abandoned by the federal government, since they do not have enough funding by their own to take care of that quantity of immigrants, many coming from Venezuela, by the way.

When most of immigrants were on Texas, Arizona and California, it was difficult for the people of New York to image the dramatic situation Republicans usually talked about on Television and on social media, now that New York is slowly but steadily becoming a "border city" some new yorkers will start to feel what people from Texas have felt for a long time and pay more attention to what both sides of the political spectrum have to say in this matter, whether the Republican solution makes more sense than the Democrat will depend on the political leaning of each one of those open to solutions. Democrats need to be careful on the issue, otherwise, it will become a strong point to rally for Trump, regardless he opposed to fix the problem before or not. Maga does not care about that fact.

[...]
Biden is not perfect, he could indeed manage the immigration crisis in a better way and the response to the Hamas attack and the war unleashed in the middle east could have been better to avoid the risks of escalation, but if you take a look at the economy, it seems to be doing good under Biden: record low unemployment, stock market in All Time Highs, inflation going down and the interest rates have been decelerating. If Biden was younger and did not have so many cognitive moments in front of the cameras and off the record, then Trump would be in trouble to defeat him next November. Just my opinion, of course.