Where exactly do most stores accept BTC? Because I have a feeling that it's the opposite and only a tiny minority of businesses accepts BTC.

I think it's foolish to argue that Bitcoin is not widely accepted, but not widely accepted money is still money. Bitcoin has liquidity, fungibility, it's resistant to damage and has a lot of other properties that are desirable in money.

There are no attacks in Bitcoin that target a specific address or wallet. Hackers steal coins by spreading malware across the Internet, hoping that eventually it will reach a crypto holder. Or if they know an identity of a holder, they can send them an email or a message with malware or malicious link.

So it's important to protect your privacy, never interact with anything unsafe and keep your wallets isolated from the Internet.

What is there to think, saving money is always good. Just don't expect to get super rich from a small investment, because you need money to make money. The days of 100x returns in Bitcoin are gone, so the most realistic scenario is that if you'll save a year worth of tv subscription you'll make 3-5 years worth of tv subscriptions if you invest the money in BTC.

This isn't the first time a politician proposes the government to start mining BTC, and it certainly will not be the last, but is there any track record of any politician actually launching such project? It's easy to make proposals and promises, and it can be quite hard to deliver even something as simple as a working Bitcoin mining operation owned or subsidized by the government.

What is even DYOR in crypto? Tehnical analysis? That might not work on heavily manipulated "good projects" aka shitcoins. Fundamental analysis? Anyone with some basic understanding will see that those coins are scams or doomed. So analyzing social media trends is actually a viable DYOR in crypto if you can predict where the hype will flow next, you just shouldn't ever allow yourself to genuinely believe in the coin that you are buying (if it's not BTC).

Buying before doing research is never a good idea, especially not with Bitcoin which has certain common pitfalls like keep coins on exchange, losing the backup, downloading a fake wallet, etc. But the amount of knowledge required to invest in Bitcoin is greatly overestimated. All that people NEED to know is the basics of how to not lose their coins and why they should just hold for long term and wait. That's it, there is no "journey" or "learning", more advanced topics aren't really needed for investors.

That's exactly what we had during the previous halvening. Let's see if the same hype will be able to drive the market up for the second time or not. I have some doubts, but also won't be surprised if it'll work again.


Quite few of them and they don't stand a chance of getting elected. And Bukele got elected back in 2019.


2020 was even more interesting - a global economic recession caused by covid.

Bitcoin in the past demonstrated strong cyclic behavior with bull and bear markets, which makes it simple to suggest investing in bear market. We are currently in the final months of a bear market, according to this pattern, and will be leaving it after the halvening. If you have funds, it's better to put them into BTC now, than to stretch it over some period of time. DCA yields better results if the price keeps going down, but if it goes up, then you'll be getting less coins.

Well, that's kinda my point, in the past 8x was easily doable because the price/marketcap was so low that it didn't require a lot of money to enter Bitcoin to achieve such movement. But adding trillions to marketcap is going to be hard, it would put Bitcoin in the same league as gold, and gold is desired by everyone on this planet, while Bitcoin not so much.

I can imagine the price reaching $500k for a day or two during the peak of a bull run, but it will crash hard after that to $100k.

This doesn't mean that there's an equal proportion between senders and receivers. Most people have their salary as the main source of income, and they get it typically once per month. Most of their transactions are sending - they are paying for goods and services. Meanwhile merchants are receivers, they receive thousands upon thousands of transactions per month, and in comparison send only a little.

I don't expect the growth rates of the past to repeat this time, because back then there was a lot of room for price growth - the price increase of only $100 was doubling the price or increasing it by half. Today $100 increase is just noise, a lot more money is needed to move the market, and I'm not sure that such money is available. So I keep by expectations modest and believe it will take some time to reach the previous ATH and we won't go too far past it. In this model going 10-20% up every month seems too fast.

My experience is pretty similar, and I think most users of banks and payment apps never have to reverse a transaction in their life, but the feeling of safety that comes from knowing that it could theoretically be done could be important to some people, and in that light they could view Bitcoin more negatively if they know that their mistake is nearly impossible to fix.

Bitcoin is not physical money, but it's not real money. Money in PayPal or Visa are also not physical, but no one says they are not real, and they are accepted for any goods just easily as cash


Yes, just like Visa, PayPal, Venmo and so on. In this regard they are same as Bitcoin.


The meme "magic internet money" comes from the difficulty of explaining how it works, so it's jokingly called "magic".

With physical money you will likely be able to talk with the receiver, but with digital money you might accidentally send it to someone you don't know, or the receiver might be unresponsive for some reason.


The average user receives their coins from a "reliable" source - an exchange, their employer, etc. Those are not likely to chargeback if they could.

So I saw this topic about succesfully returned accidental transaction and it provoked some thoughts.

Those that send money generally want to have an option to reverse the transaction if there's a mistake or if they didn't receive what they wanted. Those that receive money want transactions be irreversible to not get scammed by chargebacks.

In our world a lot more people are senders rather than receivers. An average person receives money once or typically a few times per month and then does dozens or hundreds of payments. And since they receive money from an employer, it's unlikely they will get scammed.

So why should the people who almost always send money praise Bitcoin's irreversibility if they personally don't directly benefit from it? Should they hope that merchants will lower the prices because they won't have to deal with chargebacks?


P. S. - this is not a topic about whether Bitcoin's irreversibility is objectively good or bad; it's about the perspective of average person today and what they need from their payment system in their life.

No one has derived any method for that, and no one has ever tried to seriously do it, at least to my knowledge. There are some very naive models, like thinking that Bitcoin's marketcap should be equal to the sum of all wealth, or all fiat currencies, but it's obviously useless.

It's just impossible to put a price tag on the properties that Bitcoin provides - being your own bank, censorship resistance, etc.

And currently Bitcoin is still in speculation phase where a lot of users just buy it to sell later, and this is the main drive behind supply and demand rather than Bitcoin's fundamentals.

Elon Musk brainfarts a lot of stupid things. Fiat currency system has no characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. Early holders of fiat don't benefit from being early, in fact they lost the most. Someone who decided to put $1M into cash 50 years ago is a lot more today than if they put it into real estate or gold or nearly any other asset.

The previous generations didn't benefit from fiat, they benefited from technological progress, post-WW2 rebuilding, urbanization and other things. Nowadays the living space is becoming more saturated, maybe even hitting its limits, and the previous economic growth rates of the boom period can't be repeated.

First, yes - Bitcoin sometimes is used for payments. Not often, but still far from never.

Second - gold is no longer used for payments, but it's still money - it's something that has value, has liquidity, retains its value, and is actually used as a store of value. Bitcoin shares these properties with gold.

Bitcoin could be overpriced because too many investors only buy it to sell later for a profit, but it's still very far from worthless - if Bitcoin's price was constant, it would still be owned by a lot of people who need its properties.

Well it's not like Steam is leaving the region - the players will have to pay with USD, or their local currency will get automatically converted to USD with their banks fees, and the prices will still have regional pricing but in USD. But the costs will definitely rise for the players, unfortunately, partially because there will no be inflation effect, and partially because the store will raise the prices.

This has already been discussed. It's not easy to takeover Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is not only the network and miners but the users too. Without having the majority of everyone onboard - miners, exchanges, businesses, developers, community, holders and so on - this would be nothing but a costly and failed attempt of takeover. Something like what happened with SegWit2x.

And I don't think that Blackrock put that clause with intention of artificially fulfilling it, it's just a contingency for an edge case.