OP, why are you posting a 1-month old article with big statement in it? Are you just trying to spread FUD?

One month ago it was a possibility, because Bitcoin hasn't recovered yet, and this prediction isn't too far from the bottom that was reached during the last crash. But now the market is bullish again and this prediction has extremely low chances of becoming true. I'm sure if Ross was asked about the price today, he wouldn't say $3,200 again.

Nice joke, but I don't think McAfee is too insane or makes his posts because he's under drugs, he is making money and stays relevant to his fanbase for making exactly this kind of statements, so it's nothing surprising that he makes yet another crazy tweet. It would be best if we all took effort to give him less attention, by not creating topics about his actions, and limit it all to just debunking him if some newbies ask about him.

If someone was excited about the halvening thinking that it will send the price to the moon the moment rewards gets cut in half, then such people only set themselves up for a huge disappointment. Everyone with the slightest understanding of crypto understands that halvings are largely priced in due to their predictable nature, and it will take a long time to see their effects. So, what happens next is that the market will be slowly turning more and more bullish until months from now we will break past the current resistance levels and enter a new great bull run.

The reason is simple - they hate Bitcoin because they are supporting one of the shitcoins, and Lightning Network will make nearly all competitors of Bitcoin obsolete. I literally never saw a single Bitcoin supporter who would opposite Lightning Network - almost all of them agree that it's the right way to approach scaling, and at the very least people agree that even if it will fail, it won't affect the Bitcoin protocol, so it's a pretty safe thing to try.

How would you feel if someone started creating forum threads about finding your real name, where you live, what were you doing years ago and how many Bitcoin do you hold? Would be creepy, right? So why it's okay to do so with Satoshi, he's a person just like any of us and he clearly wanted to keep thing as private as possible. And doxxing people just to satisfy your curiosity is against the spirit of Bitcoin, which was created to give freedom to people.

The nodes will remove the second transaction that tries to spend the same input, but it's by no means a guarantee that the first transaction will be included in a block. When it comes to new transaction, full node's task is to propagate them through the network with a goal of eventually reaching all miners, and miners are the ones who actually decide which transaction to include in blocks. Generally they will choose the one with the highest fee. So, in your scenario when you try to get conflicting transaction to propagate through the network, you might have a scenario when when part of the miners know about transaction A and the other part knows about transaction B, but even if some miner knew about both transaction, they would never include both of them in a block, because such block would be invalid and rejected by network.

Ofc it will decrease, but the question is by how much. I personally don't believe it will be anything significant, we had a ton of hashpower when the price was at $3,000 level and it kept growing. Perhaps the price was growing faster than the ASICS were manufactured, so the mining was never fully saturated, and halving won't cut miners in half too.

What you are proposing is not a secret sharing, it's a DIY encryption, which is always a bad idea. Secret sharing schemes create equal shares, and they allow n of m configurations, but in your example one of your "shares" is a key and the other is cyphertext.

I see your key is 128 bit long, but what is the length of your plaintext? If it's bigger than 128 bits and you just use the same key to encrypt all of it, then it's essentially a Vigenere cipher, which can be broken very easily. If your plaintext is exactly 128 bits, then it's more safe, but still it's worse than real encryption. If you are super paranoid about crypto algorithms for some reason, at least use one-time pad generated with strong RNG.

Also, your scheme is not secure against attacks involving pre-computed hashes, if someone would to get your SHARE 1.


"Notably safe applications" don't use some homebrew crypto algorithms, they use the standard ones.

Isn't the ability to short the market actually making it less volatile? If you can't short it and don't have futures, then you can only buy and sell it, so when it's on the rise your only bet is to keep buying to try to sell near the top, which makes the market prone to bubbles. And as for Wall Street, we don't know just how much they are involved with Bitcoin, but my guess that if they do, they do in mainly via the OTC markets.

HD wallet simply means that all the keys/addresses are derived from a seed, which makes it easier to back it up and store. Before HD wallets were created, you could only store your wallet digitally, or create paper wallets for one address only. HD wallet or any other wallet doesn't prevent you from receiving coins to the same address more than once, in fact no wallet can prevent it, because such transaction is always valid in Bitcoin protocol. Some wallets may choose to hide already used addresses to discourage users from reusing them, but it's an implementation detail of individual wallets.

It's not just small investors, anyone who is holding alts will likely lose their Bitcoin value in the future, because alts tend to perform worse than Bitcoin ever since the 2017 bubble has popped. Some people still hope to see alt season, but there's no fundamental reason for it to happen, no one is genuinely excited for alts anymore, there's only bagholders who hope to see big pump.

Years of data show that the correlation between hashrate and price is not very strong, there's a lot of wiggle room, and it's mostly the price that influences the hashrate and not vice versa, so there's no feedback loops like you are describing. "Mining death spiral" is like the oldest FUD in Bitcoin, and it was debunked on practice many times.

Smart contracts are really not as good as people think they are. You can't sell a house or a car with smart contracts without having trusted third parties, basically your escrows. Smart contracts only really work when you have digital goods on blockchain, like other coins or tokens.

Also, I wouldn't count escrows as centralization, at least not in the same manner as banks are. With banks you have only single third party and no way to avoid it, other than changing your bank, while with escrows you can choose among many people. And you aren't even forced to do it 100% of the time, unlike with banks or some marketplace platforms. If your counterparty has a good reputation and a transaction is small, it's okay to trust.

Yes, I would say it's a pretty good result, it's a big boost compared to the last lows like $3,500 and $3,800 and $6,500. I know that people can't wait for $200,000 or above one million, but I personally doubt those price will be achieved, at least not in this new decade, so I will be happy for as long as Bitcoin is steadily growing. And comparing to traditional markets, even doubling its price is a big deal already.

Out of those millions of fans, maybe 0.01% will decide to google about Bitcoin, and only 0.01% of those people will then decide to buy it. And at this point almost any person that uses the Internet or even just watches news on TV is aware of Bitcoin, so such events can't possibly create noticeable spikes of Bitcoin adoption. It's all about reminding people that Bitcoin exists and bringing attention to it. The more exposure Bitcoin gets, the higher the adoption will be in the long run.

You need to already be a good software developer to be able to become a blockchain developer, so you can't become a blockchain developer from scratch. It's also only worth learning if you have a solid safety net, because this is a very risky industry, it can easily disappear in a few years, and there are already signs that it is not doing well, because all these years brought no big results and companies start to realize that it's not working.

Security is very hard to get right, and blockchain isn't making everything magically more secure, if developers are bad, then their blockchain will be bad too. There has been a lot of hacks of blockchain systems - DAO, attacks on dapps, critical bugs in coins. And if you have some centralized blockchain, it's inherently more vulnerable, because it can often be not immutable and lacks solid consensus mechanisms. And from the point of users, a huge portion of security responsibility is shifted towards them, there's zero safeguards because they would require centralization.

Some altcoins had 51% attack (in the form of reversing transaction) successfully executed against them and they barely dropped in price. Of course if it happened with Bitcoin it would cause some panic, but Bitcoin is built on strong game theory fundamentals - you need to keep spending money to attack it, so even if such attack happened, users would understand that it cannot last long, and their confidence won't be shattered.

You also need to understand that 51% doesn't give you some sort of total control over the network, it just gives you a control over which valid transactions to include in next blocks.

Never. More and more people begin to understand that all alts are shitcoins, during 2017 people were promised a brand new economic paradigm, decentralized revolution and other loud words, now 3 years later there's almost no achievements to show. Almost all ICO's ended up being scams or failed in the long term. So far alts just follow Bitcoin because they are traded against it, so even if Bitcoin will continue rising, this won't count as alt season, because alt season implies that alts will greatly outperform Bitcoin. Basically, alt season is a fairly tale created to sell the bags.

Not really surprising, it was known for years that Ripple employs bots, and they were always known for their aggressive marketing, which is a bad sign for any cryptocurrency - cryptos are supposed to be decentralized open-source projects that rely on real communities instead of having a multi-million company doing everything. And this whole idea of partnering with banks was never meant to happen, banks already have systems like Visa and SWIFT to work with, which by the way don't stay in one place, so why would they choose some new unproven solution.