The US is actually doing really well (bad for users though) in tracking crypto activity and taxing them. They're even employing the services of firms like Chainanalysis to make sure they get their due. The only way you can really escape them is by not touching KYC exchanges, which is starting to become more difficult by the day.


They don't decide what the tax bill is. Crypto is taxed in the US like property, so the tax rate is corresponds to pre-existing laws.

I'm not too worried. If the success of Bitcoin hinged on just a handful of people, then it's not nearly as decentralized as advertised. I'm very grateful to our developers and I acknowledge their hard work and talent, but they're meant to be replaceable. Heck, even Satoshi ghosted everyone and Bitcoin still thrived.

This model has worked about as well as it could for as long as it has existed, and I have no reason to believe Bitcoin would be any different.

Aren't a lot of them volunteers? I don't think they're in it for the money. Either way, it's still an open source project, meaning we shouldn't get a shortage of talent for as long as there are people who care for the well being of Bitcoin.

You must be confused about the fork (you basically create a copy of the coin, and you can change whatever you want to change in the protocol) that happened. People were encouraged to move their BTC (Bitcoin) to a wallet they actually control, so they can claim an equal number of BCH (Bitcoin Cash) when the fork happens. This has already happened so there's nothing you can do anymore, but if you had any BTC in any wallet you own the private keys of prior to August 1, 2017, you may be able to claim an equal number of BCH.

The others have already highlighted that they're different, but it's worth noting that they have no affiliations with each other at all (one can die while the other lives, their prices and supply are completely independent, etc.). I personally believe your money is much safer with BTC.

What do you mean by seriousness? I mean, I'm sure you could find a handful of ridiculous news pieces about pretty much every subject. Even time traveler predictions are not new at all: check out John Titor. They're not targeting the Bitcoin market specifically; they're in sports (see: NBA free agency predictions), entertainment (celebrity gossip), science (flat earthers, conspiracy theories, etc.), and everywhere else.

Either way, outside complete censorship, there's nothing we can really do to stop these guys. It's ultimately still up to readers' due diligence if they're going to end up getting swayed by sensationalist clickbait pieces.

Lol, one dude even bought $26 worth (5000 BTC!!!) for his thesis, forgot about them, and eventually came back finding that the value has exploded to buy an apartment with them:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/bitcoin-forgotten-currency-norway-oslo-home

I imagine life would be a lot different if I had been interested in the (really) early days.

Alt rallies are fine, but I think OP was specifically talking about coins with explosive growth, which could be a lot more tempting to newbies. They could be getting in between pump and dump schemes, which they'll almost certainly lose money from.

I was always under the same impression. I thought all you could do with your connected email is lock your account when a hacker tries to change its password and/or email? Was this changed along with the streamlined account recovery process?

They might not even get the chance to take out their profit. Plenty of these pumps and dumps are executed in a matter of hours. By the time you see the price peak, it would probably already be too late to sell as it's going to go down rapidly, possibly before your sell order is executed.

If you're talking about regular alts that are experiencing some growth and not alts that are being, targeted by dedicated pump and dump groups, then yeah, it's probably a good idea to dump them for BTC now, and reenter (if you truly care about it) once the alt market stops riding along the BTC waves.

Not just yet. I know people love talking about the blockchain's potential, but the reality is that there are very few use cases for it at the moment. Its only mainstream (and I use the term loosely) use thus far is serving as the backbone of cryptocurrencies. That doesn't make it any less revolutionary, just that it hasn't been explored enough yet.

Fair assumption, but I would like to point out that we haven't seen this happen in any large scale yet. Even Venezuela's case, which is what most people typically point to, seems to be overblown:


I do expect an uptick in demand, but I'm not so sure about the price to the moon part.

Even if we assume that this happened and that the USD value tanks (which isn't necessarily a given), Bitcoin should still trade for the same general fiat value, maybe higher on USD and lower on EUR but still according to the two currency's exchange rate with each other. I don't see it affecting Bitcoin's value in any signifcant way, so why does it matter?

This seems like the most likely scenario considering he apparently put it in an outlook email and this happened a few months prior:

https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-email-hack-outlook-hotmail-customer-support/

The gap in time between the email hack and the movement of funds may be explained by the hacker trying to brute force the proper order of words. Either way, he broke the rule of not keeping a copy of his seed online, and he sadly paid a lot for it. I hope people out there who still do this despite all the warnings can learn from his mistake.

It's good news because they don't have to play by US regulations anymore? Couldn't they just restrict what's available to US residents to comply and do whatever they want for other jurisdictions, or am I missing something?

I also think it's more likely for the companies who pulled out to be pressured into being compliant rather than the US government being pressured to put out clear regulations lol. The void left by the non-compliant companies will eventually be filled by entities wanting to strike while the iron is hot.

Lol well yeah, their block explorer is fine, but you're not really risking anything using it. It's a bit lacking, since like their wallet, it doesn't seem to support Segwit yet. I wouldn't recommend anyone to use their explorer, much less their wallet, since they're so behind the times -- maybe even delibarately.

I personally wouldn't hold my breath on this. Bitcoin dominance has been trending up since last year, and that may mean that people have smarted up and realized that a lot of alts are just pumps and dumps. The market has matured in a sense that the big names have been established and have rendered a lot of alts technologically obsolete. Bitcoin has also reached the mainstream's attention, seemingly for good this time, while alts' only market are niche traders. I seriously doubt that any alt will be able to keep up with Bitcoin's growth going forward.

Yeah, this is exactly what I was talking about. Pretty much all the noise you see around social media involves prices one way or another, but you can tell that nearly all of them are also invested in the tech and utility behind it. I don't doubt that there will be people who will buy and just watch until it's time to sell for a loss or a profit, but those same people probably won't be at all interested otherwise anyway.

I do agree that it's misleading to market Bitcoin as a money making scheme though, to be fair. I just think it could still lead to positive results every now and then.

I assume you're selling your stuff in a website? If so, wouldn't it be possible to simply use an API to fetch the current Bitcoin price and use that to convert your fiat price to BTC? Something like this perhaps?

I don't think speculators are all bad for real adoption. I'm sure speculators still spend here and there, and that's literally infinitely better than nothing. This is completely anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who are into crypto came for the money and stayed for the technology and ideology. You never know who might stick around, so you might as well give everyone some exposure.

This should work in theory, but in this scenario you're basically expecting Bitcoin to continue to keep grow indefinitely to be able to offset the continuously halving block rewards. Once that stops being true, we risk hashrate dropping and compromising the network's security.

I would really prefer for fees to be negligible or even zero, but that poses problems to the economics behind the system.