I have created an auto-updated leaderboard page for this competition - https://tiramisu77.github.io/bct-game-leaderboard/

It takes the entries from the second post of this thread, calculated the delta - how close the prediction is to the current price, then sorts the whole list and displays it, with each predictions delta added as a second column.

"Bitcoin goes down because of holidays" is a myth, it doesn't make sense, what kind of investor sells their assets just because it's holiday? Have you ever seen this happening with other markets, like gold or stocks? No, it doesn't happen with them, so why should it happen with Bitcoin? It's true that we have more retail investors than on traditional markets, but retail investors don't go 100% on Bitcoin to the point when they have to liquidate some coins when they need to spend money.

The word (hard) fork has two meanings in crypto - a software upgrade without backwards compatibility or a chain split and creation of new coin as the result. You are talking about the latter, while the article is focused on the former - the cost of frequent software upgrades, the risks associated with them, etc, all these things annoy both the users and especially the service providers.

Seems like the price has mostly recovered today, so the recent crash was just a panic and manipulation rather than something fundamental - and it would have been really surprising if some Chinese Ponzi could have influenced the price for a longer period of time. The lesson here is as usual - do not let sensational news affect your trades, look at the long term.

You can't, you'd need trusted human input for that. At best your project could be a decentralized alternative for archiving sites, but I'm sure someone has already tried it, so you may want to do some research and check if they succeed or not, and what's the current state of such projects.

As for fakes, I believe that they can be combated with the same technology that creates them - machine learning. If you can teach neural network to imitate something, you can also teach it to spot all those artifacts and other patterns that are present in fake photos and videos. As for articles, there's also neural networks that do sentiment analysis and can spot manipulative articles with some accuracy.

Because Bitcoin is decentralized, it's harder to regulate, and since it's not well-regulated, it's more volatile/speculative. This is why the SEC rejects Bitcoin ETF's - they believe that the market is not well regulated to prevent manipulation. But if Bitcoin was just a company - imagine if Satoshi patented it and had a company that manages it and maintains the price, has KYC, etc., then it wouldn't be so speculative, people would threat it more like a stock and try to calculate it's profitability rather than speculate on it.

Exactly, there's no special significance of December, it's just fresh memory from 2017 causing people to develop bias towards this months now. If you look at 2019, the most important month was April, since during that time the price exploded and had a bullish rally. And in September the market turned bearish with a big crash. What we are having now is really small compared to those months, so it's useless to make comparisons with December 2017 just because it's also a December.

Pathetic attempt at FUD/trolling from a bought account. It's not even an argument, just a stupid strawman argument that Bitcoin is "just ones and zeroes" and that it's being manipulated without any real proofs. You are just hoping that people will panic because the price is going down, and they will listen to any stupid argument because of their emotions.

The fact that Bitcoin is speculative doesn't really hinder it's usability as decentralized payment system - in fact Bitcoin is speculative because it's decentralized - if it was something like a stablecoin managed by a company, it would be very centralized and tightly regulated, so there won't be any free market.

Why are you bringing attention to him? Everyone knows that CSW is a scammer who presents himself as Satoshi and he calls his shitcoin BSV the real Bitcoin. There's no need to give him publicity, even if it's negative publicity, it's better if everyone just ignored him so he could be forgotten. Because while almost everyone sees that he is just a con artist, there's always a small minority of people who buy into their story and lose their money as the result. Let's not help him get those people scammed.

Use Bitcoin and Lightning Network, it's perfect for microstransactions like faucets, and your visitors won't have to deal with converting alts to BTC, which can cause a lot of fees that will make faucets rewards unclaimeable. Plus, you will help increase LN's adoption, and as an early adopter yourself, you will have advantage over other faucets that use older withdrawal methods.

What are you talking about, crypto was never dominant, it was never even close to being noticeable, there's nothing to take over.

And as for regulations, the users can choose to ignore them at their own risk, they can't stop Bitcoin's protocol, and they will never be able to, and I'm sure they won't even try to do it, since it would be just a waste of resources.

And what are you going to do when someone hacks your wallet and steals your assets? Or if you lose your wallet backups? If your answer is "nothing", then no government ever would approve such system, and without governments approval these blockchain assets won't have any legal power. And if you'll try to solve those problems, you will end up introducing those third parties right back.

This just begs to become another use case for Bitcoin, and not because it's electronic but because it's electronic cash - it can be used to avoid taxes just like cash, although some precautions are needed, since transaction history is public and permanent. Greeks could start asking to pay a part of their salary in Bitcoin and then spend Bitcoin directly, so that the government and banks wouldn't know about those money. But just like with other theoretical use cases, only time will show if it will happen or not.

Are they though? I think it's more of Visa/Mastercard being cut out rather than banks, banks can easily integrate with stablecoins and act as custodians and provide the same options for loans and deposits as they do with fiat. And people who want to use stablecoins aren't known for deeply caring about privacy or control over their money, so I totally can see them using stablecoins with banks.

From the point of view of people from the past, we currently have unimaginable computing power, when you can crack old crypto systems on your home computer in seconds, but it really doesn't mean much, because crypto systems evolve to match new challenges. Quantum computers are still extremely theoretical/experimental, but we already have algorithms that can resist them. And algorithms will keep improving in the future, so I'm sure the will have an upper hand over quantum computers.

You don't need any crazy ROI to beat inflation, since inflation is just a few percent per year. A since high ROI means high risk, Bitcoin is actually far from being the best asset to beat inflation. Investors who want to only negate inflation seek small and predictable returns, and they would be very uncomfortable with Bitcoin's volatility.

If countries are waging war on cash, it's a bad sign for crypto adoption there, because crypto and cash have very similar properties like privacy and decentralization, and they are the reason why governments are against cash. So, it's likely that they will restrict use of crypto in the same way they restrict cash, they just don't do it now because crypto is so small at the moment.

What's in it for the end users? Are they supposed to be buying drugs with these shittokens? Why not just buy them directly with crypto? I always viewed these platform tokens as just a fairy tale for the investors that will never be implemented on practice, since a lot of people would rather for an alternative service than bother with exchanging coins for tokens, installing wallets, etc.

It's not irrelevant, wallet file + password allow you to access your coins, so it's a really bad idea to be careless about it. As for seeds, not all wallets have them, Bitcoin Core doesn't use them and will not use them in close future. If we are talking about wallet files from early days, there's almost no chance that those wallets have seeds, so finding or cracking password is the only way to access the coins again.