While it is cool that the Navajo have a mining farm on their grounds now, it is hard to know how it'll help those people get to a better future. It is like any other venture that will provide jobs (to only 11 people).

The part about financial inclusion also doesn't seem very convincing if those people don't already haven't been able to get out of poverty despite the existing support. Crypto is all the more self-driven. You have to be above a certain level for it to be able to help you. I am not sure that small, local Indian communities have that kind of access. You know things have blown out when Zuck comes in to claim metaverse.

For those who have taken the time to go through the history of fake prophets in Bitcoin, the malicious lies from Faketoshi, investigations into his fake degrees and the contrast between the Satoshi's communications and Faketoshi's ear-bleed sentences; It is amply clear that CSW is a petty man with a huge ego and a bank balance enough to engage all sorts of lawyers and courts.

The way evidence gets twisted in these court hearings and the courts allow these idiots to misuse law to prop up his claims, all of this just shows what a circus the normal world and its "rules, regulations and court of laws" are, compared to crypto. Signed messages from addresses that Faketoshi claimed as his own in the Tulip fund case have said that CSW is not Satoshi. Nobody seems to mind these slips and the courts just keep accepting the excuses portrayed by his lawyers.

It only goes to show the true nature of power and justice in this world and our society. If you have money, you are the law.

Wow. That is something very interesting to know. Especially the part about armed guards. Although i can accept that they'd have guns, having "rockets" or RPGs is a bit of an exaggeration. Kazakhastan is an impoverished country and Bitcoin mining gear and farms would be valuable investments that warrant protection. If possible, it'd be great to look at some of the pictures that your friend may have clocked over there.

I was hoping that the China ban would result in flooding the market with cheap miners and GPUs. I don't see any of that happening or maybe I haven't looked at the right places. Anybody who knows about this, please do share if there are people trying to sell their mining gear post this so-called exodus.

100X in a year must mean something. I never quite got the hang of it with its multiple confusing wallets and the need to pay SOL to even add tokens to your wallet.

There seems to be a big enough community around it now and most importantly, an ecosystem of locked DeFi money and lending/ borrowing markets. The same thing happened with a lot of others like FTM, AVAX too but none of then showed the same kind of appreciation in price. Those of you who have been following it, what do you think the pump can be attributed to?

From what I can see, they really just encouraged a lot of these staking based allocations in multiple projects launched on the platforms like Raydium. They did all of this at the peak of hype-cycle and a lot of people ended up buying these tokens launched on token platforms. Similar to what BNB did with Pancakeswap. Now its a self-fulfilling prophecy due to the number of people already invested.

While this has worked for these projects during the bullrun, I wonder how things will be once the hype cycle stops. Do you think we'll ever see another crypto-winter like the post-2018?

It is now money in the hands of the richest. Most of the work done on Bitcoin has inspired developers and investors to bet on other uses of blockchain. The market has spoken that it doesn't really care about decentralization. Too much money is ready to jump into these alternate chains. Despite the seemingly positive action, I think all it'll take to bring all of this back to where it belong is something like a Metamask hack or mass malware. The money has flown in but these technologies still don't have a solid footing.

Bitcoin is the solid footing for everything else. Whether it changes the world or not is another question, one thing is sure that nothing else can change anything without Bitcoin.

Illuvium is the game that is hoping to be the first AAA title with blockchain integration. The founder is related to Kain Warwick of Synthetix and is pretty hell-bent on stopping this trend of blockchain games looking just passable in terms of graphics and game mechanics. On the back of those promises, the token ILV has gone almost 12X, which IMO, doesn't justify the actual work that has gone into the game itself. There hasn't been a demo yet. Even then, a lot of people, including few VC-types are counting on them to deliver.

For anyone new in crypto, I'd say just go be part of the discord community and try engaging through discussions and meme competitions. It is much better to earn the tokens/ NFTs from these projects than just downright pay a few 100 dollars to buy a fraction of the tokens.

Apart from this, The game Lost Relics on Enjin has been actively developed for quite a longtime now. They will make the switch to Polkadot with Enjin's platform and remains a contender for becoming a good dungeon crawler with blockchain items.

I had been part of the Enjin signature campaign when it started on Bitcointalk. Over last 3 years, I bought and sold ENJ which of course, I should have just held..LOL..

Back then I had quite a few of their ERC-1155 NFTs. Several game developers sold them for funding their indie games. I stopped paying attention to it a long time ago as Enjin didn't really make it into the NFT marketplace. The recent storm in NFTs has not been specific to any one project and its simply independent artists making NFTs directly on Ethereum or in some cases on other blockchains. Suffice to say that I missed this train too and have only recently bought some Fantasy Sports NFTs called as NFTeams. It aims to have tournaments and merchandise etc. They sold out 10K NFTs. I have no idea what the teams would be worth but just the fact that it makes you part of this community of people intrested in sports with 400 ETH to spend is nice.

Its like everyone commonly contributes and tries to make it into something interesting that has real world effects. For example, the dev of the project sent beer crates to winners of a giveaway. I see NFTs more as such identities. The few hundred bucks i paid for it seem like a subscription fee to a very novel service.

Is it a good sign to have when people start making the "I love Bitcoin" merit-farming posts in the Indian sub. I'd say its not really a problem and would be willing to merit these posts if they consisted of an actual experience rather than generic statements about "Bitcoin is king". There is so much to share truthfully if you have actually been into Bitcoin.

You can talk about your efforts to get merit, experience of accessing using your private keys, what kind of wallets you used, what communities you were part of, what mistakes you made. Coming up with these sorry statements only makes you appear more scammy. You can even write Hinglish if you prefer. But the language should make sense and have content that tells of your honest experiences.

Paying 40 on transacting 100 is pretty much stupid. You either used a centralized service or don't know how to set fees on your desktop/ mobile wallet. When the fees are high, it is never cool to transact and this is why the Lightning Network was proposed. It is slowly growing into adoption. Maybe try that out and let us know how it makes you feel. You can tag people on twitter who will send you a few sats to check the LN if you provide them an address. Search for @Lord Fusitua of the Republic of Tonga.

There is nothing "pioneering" about buying a shit-memecoin on Binance's private chain. It is just gambling your money on things that have no utility. The most "utility" they'll have is staking or some other sort of tail-eating property. That is not to discard the fact that a lot of Indian devs and startups have been an integral part of the crypto-industry right from the beginning. If it wasn't for that stupid ban by RBI oldies, we could have had a lot more interest and a lot more unicorns by now.

Like Pakhi pointed out, the prevalence of cheap internet and smartphones has a lot to do with this. Another huge set of new entrants in the past few months have been the stock investors. Reputed websites like ET and Moneycontrol now have articles about trading with crypto, buying it safely etc. The usage till now had been mostly limited to the hustler sorts from the hinterlands who are generally only looking for ways to earn. The real investors will be coming if crypto gets popularized like Stocks.

If the Evil Orb only ever sees your Iris, there maybe a case to say that it is just a unique identifier of yours which cannot be connected to your real identity. Unfortunately, with how prevalent biometric technology is (for example if you have a passport, their is a "secure" database that has everything), it'll be very easy to connect the two. This means that whatever purported benefit of "reliable identity" the company may flaunt, is false.

Also, why the hell do they need iris scans to distribute a currency? And imagine if this coin becomes huge in value, what comes next. Eye-collectors who use the Iris scans to get more of the "airdrop" by using their victims' eyeballs?

This is just a really stupid, lazy, expensive and ultimately pointless method of bootstrapping a network.

The platform and the community matters when you are minting NFTs. Polygon may flaunt the low fees for all they want but there is already plenty of art NFTs minted on polygon which fetch pennies.

Go with Ethereum if you want to but not before creating a marketing hype or story about why somebody should be in possession of the "masterpiece". You can carry the usual promise of "Each NFT comes with the original piece, shipped directly to address of user's choice".

I am surprised at the "surprise" you guys are expressing here. NFTs have been selling for crazy amounts for pretty long. 200K is nothing. There are collections like the cryptopunks, BAYC etc that have been selling for millions at a time. This is really just all the money floating around in the form of Ethereum. Much like ICOs, It ultimately benefits a lot of closed anonymous groups with established pedigree who hype projects of their choices and then sell them for millions. Some benefit does accrue to the artist community too and a lot of luck ones have become Made men.

I agree.

The problems of media aren't monopolies anymore. Its the same issue that you have with politicians. You get the leaders that the society produces. So you get the reporters and media houses that the society produces.

This is truly a big problem that needs to be solved. Being as it is for the greater good and not necessarily for profit-motive, there is no reason to believe that something like this can attract the money and talent pool needed to fulfill this. For example, nothing stops someone from training an AI to differentiate between fake videos, old videos being spread as new events, photoshopped images etc. These are just the very basic and recognizable methods. Nobody is spending on the tech to do that. The much harder issue that you propose to address using something of a blockchain is of trolls and social engineering with paid bots and accounts. That can never be done because a bunch of people and parties whose full-time job is to create narratives will always succeed in doing so.

You need IoT level of solutions where everything from the recording to the production of a media report is monitored and recorded for correctness of procedure using a blockchain. All such systems can be imagined and even implemented. But why would someone do that when they are already earning enough by creating narratives and manipulating public opinion.

Despite the pessimism expressed in my reply and by other posters, I still feel that creating a truly verifiable source of news is indeed possible. All it needs is money. Maybe the Bitcoin rich would do something about it. But judging how wealth corrupts almost everyone, we'd be foolish to pin such hopes and anybody else but our own selves.

Its not like that PoS doesn't take any energy. So while it may not be a PMM, they surely are centralized when it comes to being crypto. All of this talk about "validators" happens because ultimately, you need computing power to bundle transactions into blocks and propagate them. That is why all the so-called "PoS nodes" have requirements like 64 GB RAM, Multi-core processors etc etc. A lot of them are even permissioned in the sense that you have to contact some central authority to run the nodes.

I see them not as cryptocurrencies but simple blockchain based databases that are run by certain corporations. Whenever transactions rise, the corporation simply buys up more cloud servers or just set up dedicated hardware of their own. Quite clearly, the people who want to use smart-contracts for lending and borrowing don't mind this as long as they get returns fuelled by speculation and Bitcoin's bullrun.

PoS has a market now and i think it'll have a purpose until regulation reins them in and only Banks can run these services. Bitcoin's PoW ensures that it just remains to be money and the only truly uncensorable exchange medium on the internet.

0.02 btc may seems like a small amount to you few lucky dogs here, lol. For me, it is still quite a big amount even though I have been on the forum since end of 2017. It was partly because of the fact that I stopped accumulating during a year long ban in our country and then missed a lot of initial spots in Sig Campaigns by a margin. Came close to CM once but then real life took over and had to be away from the forum.

I wonder how many people of my type would be there who haven't made it despite being in the space for 4 years now. I am almost ashamed to admit this at times, LOL. Thanks to my present campaign though, I have stacked some Sats. Not worried about it though. The space has still given me a lot and whatever shortcomings i have, they are my own.

I am with Bitcoin and i am sure WAGMI...LoL..I never really liked Iphones anyway. Now if its a foldable Note with a sexy stylus, I'd pause and feel bad for a minute..

While I want a similar result but like you said, people are spending money on almost anything. I think Facebook putting itself behind a crypto wallet and then starting up all kind of platforms on their own blockchain has the potential to find a lot of takers.

People have gone ahead and chosen plenty of corporate chains in the last year from Solana, Avax etc. If FB starts investing seriously and is able to lure away enough developers, they can easily trick millions of users to invest into their platforms. I doubt that most people are sensitive enough to the difference between a corporation like Facebook and the kind of DAO structures that these additional platforms have launched. As far as Bitcoin is concerned, Diem stands no chance of course.

I am pretty sure that ETH will survive. Cardano and its community throw around an air of importance around themselves but they have only proven to be a lot of hot air till now. I would much rather bet on Polkadot and Avax.

Also, if you are gonna shitcoin then Solana deserves a place in there too. Your guess is as good as mine in all of these cases. Nobody can predict they'll survive for 5 years. What is for sure is that this portfolio that supposedly has zero percent BTC is guaranteed to be a loser in the long run. This should be like 50% BTC and then just halve all the other allocations for a better chance at survivability.

This is not financial advice and investing in crypto is almost always about staying updated and being agile with your allocations. This is something i suck at which is why I only buy BTC when its my own money. Making a portfolio out of one-time investments and not keeping BTC is pretty immature, IMO.

EDIT: That portfolio also seems to be 110%, so.....

Facebook backed Novi Wallet has launched with the exclusive use-case of transferring USDP, which seems to be the US-backed stablecoin they are starting with.

Everybody knows that Zuckerberg hijacked a previous interest and idea of Winklevoss brothers. He seems to have put the same touch of "waitlisting" in case of this wallet too. Making it available only in the USA and Guatemala is a clever way of marketing it as a "remittance-assitance" like what President Nayib has done for El Salvador but straight up with Bitcoin.

This just goes to show the marketing acumen of all the people dedicated to making money at corporations like Facebook. First it'll be the wallet and once they get going, it'll be everything else from ERC-20 cryptos to NFTs to DeFi. This is a clear indication that Facebook is on its way to become the first major competition for all the relative novices, (except Square), trying to gain foothold in the crypto-economy.

We may dislike facebook but people don't give a damn about centralization for before spending on NFTs. They won't give a damn if its facebook. All that matters is a great UI/UX and little bit of utility/ fun. Both things that companies like facebook excel at while the incumbents clearly suck at. It would be foolish to bet against them or "Diem" unless some government entity again decides to shut them down (for which i am pretty sure they have lawyered up this time).

Tether has a circulating supply of 69 Billion. Bitcoin has a market cap of 1.2 Trillion at current prices. USDT is too small compared to the whole market for there to be any real issue of inflating Bitcoin price. There is this twitter account Bitfinex'd that keeps tweeting about USDT. Yet, does it even matter with so many other stablecoins in the offering.

What would Bitfinex gain by printing USDT and inflating BTC? Its not like they are the sole suppliers of BTC who will benefit from increasing price. The price increase is simply an effect of supply and demand. Any news about mainstreaming or supportive regulation makes the fence-sitters FOMO. The hodlers aren't much interested in selling as a lot of BTC hardly ever moves from its safe confines of cold-storage. This is what leads to these price rallies. Tether printing USDT when governments themselves are printing trillions in a span of a few months is hardly a problem that media/ public should focus on.

What kind of turnkey facilities are you talking about OP?

I had someone PM me on the forum about something like this back in 2018. They had this plan of crowd-funding for mining facilities by buying miners on behalf of people. They would run on their facility and they would take a service fee from the earned BTC. The rest of the BTC was supposed to be transferred back to you. The idea never materialized for the people.

The scenario has indeed changed a lot since then and it wouldn't be surprising if mining companies have such offerings. Hope you can get that 0% credit and share the experience if this indeed happens.

I recently saw this documentary about the research on Mushrooms and Mycelium done in the US after the first world war to see the healing effects of mushroom, especially psilocybin mushrooms or magic mushrooms. The group of scientists who worked on them describe promising results in stress management and letting people live happy lives. The problems arose with the 60s when the US needed young people to go to work or go to war and they were instead going in droves to explore spirituality and explore their true selves under the effect of these "drugs".

It lead to a mass campaign about the ill effects of recreational drugs, especially the magic mushrooms. That culture clash has never really ended. Especially when the Anti-drug lobby is the major drug companies themselves.

This is not to say that there are no ill effects of drugs. Yet, the general increase in crime and associated degeneracy is more a reflection of the society itself, rather than purely mental effects that drugs can have on a person.