Okay, let's make things simple

You remove your signature and then we continue talking (about being altruistic and all that bullshit). Until then, you sound like a hypocrite. Note that I'm not calling you a hypocrite but it looks exactly like that in my eyes. So I'm giving you the benefit of doubt. What you are going to do with it is up to you to decide. And while we are at it, I also support changes to the better, though our understanding seems to differ a lot as to how it should be done in practice and what it actually comes down to


I'm not defending him as anyone with a half functioning brain can see. It doesn't mean anything but you definitely don't. If a liar tells a truth, it doesn't become a lie and he doesn't stop being a liar

Well, I don't think this is an honest approach

That is, you first stipulate here comes FOMO and then proceed to state that you are talking about the sum of market forces. Indeed, in this particular case (when FOMO has already got the market going), it will be like you describe. But if we consider the situation (like this one) when there is no actual FOMO (yet), we can expect things to develop according to my scenario

Other than that, I agree that a legitimate bull run starts slow. But that's because prices have been either falling or stagnating for some time before that. Thus, plenty of resistance walls have been erected which should be crushed first before the price can start rising in earnest

I don't see where your disagreement applies to my post

Actually, I was telling essentially the same but looked at from another angle. And I specifically mentioned that Bitcoin is not their element where they could easily apply their sophisticated techniques to steal money from common people. That in no case should be understood in the way you (mis)interpreted my words. It is the nature of cryptocurrencies (where you can simply hold coins and wait out hardships) which makes Wall Street types powerless while their schemes useless. You can't dance on nothing (but you can try)

And why are you so happy, I'm sorry?

That people are so frustrated with low prices that they see even the slightest change to the better as a market reversal? I guess what we saw these day should be called grinding as the price had risen some 200 dollars and now is fighting to stay there (but it seems to be losing anyway). Bullrun is intrepid growth with traders being overwhelmed by fear of missing out and losing an opportunity to buy low. If anything, it looks more like a bull trap

How do you actually know that the market is really that big?

What metric are you using exactly? If you are using something like market cap or even trading volumes, these can be misguiding. Market cap is heavily misguiding on its own (even deceiving), while trading volumes are most likely fake (at least, a substantial part of them). Indeed, the market is not like it was in 2010-2011 as back in the day there had been no market at all, strictly speaking, but that alone doesn't automatically make the current market suitable for ETF's

As far as I understand it, many ETF's actually own the underlying (say, gold bullion), so it is not like they can't change anything. Besides, paper markets (like cash-settled futures) may also affect spot markets

It may be impossible for Bitcoin to get down so much via market action alone

That is, because of someone selling, even though it still depends as we basically don't know how much Bitcoin would plummet if Satoshi or someone as big sold their coins into the market all at once (and this is still a possibility that we can't completely discard as inconsequential). However, we shouldn't discard other factors which are not related to price action as such

For example, it could be a serious bug found and taken advantage of, which would instantly wreak havoc in Bitcoin and possibly lead to the necessity of rolling back the blockchain altogether as it had already happened in the past (in 2012 if I'm not mistaken). Needless to say that such events will have a devastating effect on prices, even if only temporarily

Didn't know that

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The most important thing here is a proper understanding of causal relationships

For example, you say (and others say it too) that when Bitcoin price starts to rise, all people will be coming back (and that you are sure of it). This is an example of inferring an incorrect causal relation, which is worth explaining in detail. You assume that people are going to return when Bitcoin rises, but how can it rise if they don't come first?

For Bitcoin to rise, there should be a lot of interest in it but it is not possible without people actually starting buying or using Bitcoin. In other words, it works in exactly reverse order. Basically, you are confusing cause and effect here. People coming back is the cause of prices rising, while Bitcoin rising is the effect of people coming back

That's because people do not trust Bitcoin

As they continue to trust fiat. If they honestly believed in Bitcoin's bright future, they wouldn't sell it for a few percent of profit. In that case they would likely not sell it at all other than to provide for their daily need and necessities. It is noteworthy here that it doesn't matter what people might say or think to the contrary as most if not all of us act on feelings, not solid knowledge

Solid knowledge may provide good reasons for feeling in a certain way (let's call it correct way) but we still act instinctively, especially when we have to act fast and immediately. This is an important factor we should always remember about when planning and analyzing our actions and possible future behavior under certain conditions (for example, under extreme stress of dealing with abrupt market changes)

It is possible to exist without the blockchain

As there are already a bunch of cryptocurrencies which are not following the blockchain paradigm (read, they don't have the blockchain as we understand it). But they are nevertheless called cryptocurrencies, and for a reason. Even without featuring the blockchain, they still make heavy use of cryptography. In this way, the word "cryptocurrency" seems to be the most appropriate and fitting term for what we understand by these currencies


Agreed

I'm not sure that you are correct about gold

Well, technically, industrial use of gold may be small but it looks like by that you actually mean anything other than using gold as a store of value or a vehicle for speculation. And from this perspective, you are not correct as it is only the minor part of gold which is used as non-digital "digital gold" (if I may say so). The major part of total gold supply is used in jewelry (over 50%)

Indeed, you can say that this gold should be counted toward speculative demand on the basis that people can always sell their gold jewelries. But that would be too far-fetched as people can sell virtually anything for that matter, and I don't really expect many to think of their wedding rings as a speculative investment anyway


I wouldn't count on Lightning too much

Is it possible to disable this option today?

Honestly, I don't remember where I can disable lottery. I would happily receive reward points instead of lottery tickets. If this feature has been disabled, it doesn't look like a good idea. If people refuse to accept lottery tickets, there'll be less of them and the chances of winning will increase for those buying or receiving tickets. Right now, when I see like 100M tickets participating in the lottery, I'm discouraged from buying or receiving them even if someone may win the lottery with a small number of tickets

It looks and works like that

Though I don't agree that common people should follow types like John McAfee as role models. Even if Warren Buffett himself is a good example to follow on his own, we should be critical of his thoughts and ideas at all times (and of everyone else's, for that matter), in a constructive way, naturally. However, if you fail to live up to people's expectations (or just fail miserably), you may quickly become a toxic "asset", so to speak, with people going from admiring you to hating you at the end of the day (and there's no way back)

I did in fact mean something like that at first

But if we don't need to propagate the whole blockchain every time a new block is found or a significant chunk of it (as we obviously don't have to do that), then storing only a few recent blocks on the client side should do the trick. And in this case you are right, we don't need to do that at the protocol level as it simply makes no sense then because technically, the blockchain as a continuous whole doesn't even exist at that level, i.e. the rules for how you should store it are not specified there

What do you mean by gambling with the house money?

Who is actually going to gamble with i? Yes, I heard about binary options which are mostly fraudulent schemes aimed at stealing the money from guileless people (though you can call them "traders" if you please). And honestly, I don't see a lot of "growing interaction between trading and gambling". Well, maybe, my understanding of trading is a little bit different from yours, but in my opinion trading has little to do with gambling in the sense it is meant here (though we can consider trading a type of gambling on its own but that's an entirely different story)

Yes, and this is one such fundamental metric

Which I for one consider a genuine fundamental as it actually determines the price (which I came close to explaining in my previous post). It can be summarized as people's interest in Bitcoin. For example, in 2017 people were highly interested in cryptocurrencies (the exact reasons for this interest are not important here)

Today it doesn't look like that anymore, i.e. there is not much interest in cryptocurrencies. So the fundamentals look bleak, which can be seen in pathetic daily volumes over the course of the last couple months

Yes, I'm talking about full nodes

That is, the nodes which actually support the network and which (if my understanding is correct) have to keep the whole blockchain in their local storage. Thus pruning the blockchain will make the life easier for them as they won't have to keep all this information that they may never need. Well, I don't actually know how much they need but I assume that they don't need it all (for the purposes of processing and propagating transactions)

So if we hope for an explosive growth in Bitcoin mass adoption, we should also understand at which cost it will come. To actually understand what it might look like, recall how it happened in the past when the mempools were congested with an insane number of transactions and you have to pay exorbitant fees to have them confirmed. Now multiply that by 10 (or even by 100). This is not about miners here but hopefully you get the point

I think I can explain that thing to you in simple words

As it is definitely not about the technological barrier (whatever you might mean by this) or anything similar. The Wall Street types are wolves and sharks, they won't engage in an activity (read, speculation) unless they will the ones earning profits. But Bitcoin is not their element as there are no futures and options, and all other derivative financial instruments which would allow them to use their sophisticated techniques to strip the regular trading crowd off of its money

Well, technically, there are Bitcoin futures, but I rather mean the market here like gold or crude oil (in terms of trading volume and money circulating). In simple terms, they don't want to be bagholders, and that's a rational decision on their part to stay away from Bitcoin for the time being. They will enter the market after it gets filled with money

For regular bros that's not simple

Not everyone can easily ride volatility as this is what your advice basically comes down to, especially if we haven't recently seen a lot of volatility anyway (apart from the last couple of days, obviously). In most cases wannabe traders will end up buying high while selling low and not in a constructive way, i.e. when you sell low to buy even lower. And I'm not speaking of using shorts

If Bitcoin is to evolve, this issue should be addressed

Even if you employ compression, that will likely allow you to squeeze, say, 10x more transactions into the same space as now. But if Bitcoin really grows to the level of fiat payment systems like Visa, MasterCard, etc, that won't be enough (even though it may ease things a lot in the short term). Regarding Lightning Network, it may be a good solution but it is still a solution to the "wrong" problem, i.e. a problem which shouldn't be there in the first place

And as such it will always remain a crutch unless we are going to change the "underlying" (let's call it undies) one day and make it run on bare metal, so to speak. Pruning the blockchain will come naturally then