No one hides cash under their beds anymore, people save money by putting them in funds or investing in stocks/commodities on their own, or they do both. Their minimum goal is to beat the inflation, but often they make quite good additional income in the long run (unless they are autistic gamblers who blow their money on day trading).

I sometimes see newbies trying to farm merit by writing guides or educational posts, but because they are newbies, they either beat a dead horse or involuntarily spread misconceptions. So, if you think that you can earn merit by creating useful threads, make sure that you are creating a unique content and that you perfectly understand what you are writing about, and not just copypasting material from some shitty crypto blogs and news sites.

I don't think games are a good tool for educating adults about new concepts, they are time-consuming and distracting. You could use them to teach kids, but why would you want to teach kids about Bitcoin in the first place, it's not like they will be using it till they grow up.

Adults play games to relax and have fun, and educational games generally have poor gameplay, so I can't imagine such game being popular.

How dumb do you have to be to store $45M on exchange and not take all possible measures to protect your online accounts? I'd also blame the exchange here for allowing to withdraw such large sums without triggering any safeguards. People like to complain about banks requesting additional checks for large transactions, but they make things like this hard if not impossible.

How do you imagine the funding of terrorism is happening? You think regular citizens who sympathize with the terrorists send them some money? Because usually it's not the case, terrorists get funded by states or wealthy individuals, in this specific case Hamas is mainly funded by Iran and its allies. And it's not like they just send some money to the terrorists, they often supply them directly with goods, weapons, food, etc. Terrorism existed  long before Bitcoin was created, and Bitcoin's emergence didn't change anything.

Does is matter how much bitcoins a person choose to invest? Why should we pressure people to hold at least X bitcoins, we are forgetting the most important rule of investing - invest only what you can afford to lose. Also, pressuring people into investing "buy now until it's too late, it's your last chance to become a millionaire" will only make Bitcoin look suspicious to outsiders, since its the kind of thing that scammers often say.

99% of altcoins have achieved nothing, they are just useless forks with no real development. So, even if you take all their developers and make them work on a single project, it wouldn't yield much results. As for the productive part of crypto, more developers doesn't mean significantly faster development. When it comes to cutting edge research and development, things tend to move slowly even with enough resources.

And development doesn't hold crypto back from mass adoption, it's already very much usable, but for other reasons people choose not to adopt it yet.

For a long time I was thinking that [fiat] online casinos are required to run licensed software just to ensure the players that they don't cheat, but then I understood that there's another side to it - casinos are traditionally a good spot for money laundering, so the government needs to be sure that the house doesn't create fake winnings for some players. As you know, the provably fair system guarantees that neither the player nor the house cheat, but when both the player and the house are the same entity, they know the result of the bet before it is made and can alter it.

Do you think it's possible to create a system where a third party can verify that the outcome of the bet wasn't known to any of the parties ahead of the time?

I've read the whole article and still have no idea "what" exactly the US is planning to do about Bitcoin. So I guess there's nothing significant actually happening, and this is yet another case of smoke without fire. And people who think that Bitcoin or national stablecoin will undermine the US dollar don't understand economics - the US dollar is a dominant currency because the US' economy is huge. So either US economy has to crash, or its competitors have to grow to the same level in order to replace the dollar.

"A lot" is a strong word here. I don't see companies like Steam, EA, Blizzard ever talking about blockchain technology or cryptocurrency. Steam even abandoned Bitcoin payments because the fees were too high. You are showing some obscure games that no one in gaming community ever heard about and say that it's a proof of blockchain's success, but it actually shows that blockchain and crypto are light years away from mainstream adoption in gaming.

People seriously misunderstand energy consumption of Proof of Work, it's not like an engine that does X amount of work while burning Y amount of energy, spending energy is the goal itself, and the more you spend, the more secure a cryptocurrency is. And since the hashpower follows the price, the more valuable coin will also be more secure. So it's not correct to compare energy consumption between different coins without realizing that they have different amounts of security.

I don't see it happening anytime soon on any big scale - there's way too many problems for merchants. Price volatility, security requirements, managing wallets, dealing with regulations, unwanted attention from AML bodies - and if only few customers pay with crypto, it can be unprofitable to support it. So maybe these centralized processors can help services transiton to crypto payments more smoothly. Though there is a risk that they will choose to stay with them indefinitely.

Which is why it's a bit unfair to point out that Bitcoin is better than those things, because Bitcoin is not a DeFi, it's a cryptocurrency. What's actually important is that Bitcoin is a far better cryptocurrency than Ethereum, and sacrificing decentralization to achieve more features or scalability is unacceptable, especially if features like smart contracts are still yet to prove their real world usefulness.

One year ago the price was skyrocketing and it all seemed so bullish, analysts were saying at least 20k by the end of the year, and then suddenly it all went down and the market turned bearish for the rest of the year. There's no guarantee that what we are heaving now is the "true" bull market that will repeat the pattern of 2017. In Bitcoin nothing is ever off the table, since it's so volatile and mainly driven by speculation.

We still need middlemen in Bitcoin, the fact that even on this forum lots of transactions are done via escrow only proves it. You may ask - then why bother with Bitcoin at all? The problem is - banks are the ultimate middleman, all transactions are done through them whether you want it or not, there are only 2 ways to opt out of this system - cash and BTC, and cash is limited to physical transactions. Bitcoin removes the one middleman that is unnecessary.

Think about it from investors point of view - why should they give their bitcoins to strangers, even if they present some very good business plan, if there's always a huge risk that it's just a scam? Banks have legal power to take back what is owed to them, but in Bitcoin there's no such opportunity. If banks don't give you loans, seek angel investors or VC, try some fiat crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter.

Also, there's a board on this forum for pitching your projects to potential investors, you can try your luck there.

Since you seem to talk about altcoins, I'd say keep them on exchange and use stop loss orders, because the risk of a coin crashing is much higher than your account getting hacked. Just make sure to use 2FA and password manager with truly random password for both your account and email, and never install any risky software on your device to avoid getting malware.

If it's Bitcoin, or some not completely bad altcoin like Ethereum, and we are talking about big amounts, then you should use cold storage.

It won't be a real usable currency, it's a collectible token, like a cryptokitten or something. So, they aren't violating the EU laws. So, cointelegraf isn't lying, it's just the user who posted about it is either confused or didn't read the article that they posted.

To this day Petro is the only coin that was actually launched, and as we can see, it's largely dead despite Maduro's hardest attempt to impose it on his people and trade partners. Now other countries would think twice before launching a government-backed coin.

Older coins would have more pages then newer coins, so if you want to use this metric, you'll have to normalize it for time, by dividing it by the number of months since the thread was created. It can also be important to look at the recent posting activity instead of all posts.

But overall it isn't a good metric, a lot of shitcoins incentivize posting in their ANN thread or just hire shills. Try to look at the quality of conversations in those threads - if its full of comments like "good project" and "i hope this project will soon rise", instead of more technical discussion, then it's a good sign that you are looking at a shitcoin.

There are secret-splitting schemes that allow you to create shares in a way that doesn't compromise the security of your secret. Shamir's Secret Sharing is the most famous such scheme, and Ian Coleman has an online tool for it on his site - https://iancoleman.io/shamir/

So, why settle for a fraction of security if you can keep full security?