The Internet in its early days was rapidly changing - the speed was increasing, subscription costs were decreasing, web was rapidly evolving, and then mobile Internet emerged. Bitcoin and Ethereum, so-called blockchain technology and all of the crypto sphere is now showing similar rate of progress. Bitcoin today is not too different from Bitcoin at launch -and same goes for Ethereum and its ecosystem. If the Internet was as slow and clunky as it was at the time of its inception, it would have never became mass adopted.

Newbies think that if a rich guy put a lot of money in Bitcoin, it means his predictions will be true, because obviously rich people are very smart.

Experienced people know that if someone invests so much money into a single asset, they will be very desperate to pump it. Saylor has little room for maneuver, he needs to constantly praise Bitcoin if he wants to not go bust.

Becoming a Bitcoin expert is not a career path, you can't reliably make money from it. Being a Bitcoin enthusiast is a hobby and it requires a lot of time and effort to understand Bitcoin on a deep technical level, without any guarantee that you will earn money through your expertise. Companies don't hire Bitcoin experts, they hire programmers who are faimilar with Bitcoin software. Websites don't hire Bitcoin experts, they hire writers with knowledge of Bitcoin.

If your goal is to join a signature campaign, then say it out loud.

Problem number one - these colors are not standard, a fixed number of non-standard colors used together is already an easy to spot pattern. There more people use this method, the more hackers will look for this pattern. It's even trivial to write an algorithm that will analyze colors and find sets of these random colors and convert them back to seed.

Problem number two - colors can get corrupted. You draw a picture with these colors, save it in a lossy format, upload it somewhere and it might shift colors and render the seed unrecoverable.

I'm sure there's a lot of problems with this, like the most basic rule that there's no security by obscurity.

zero


lost a small sum to an ICO scam


because it was a small loss



"fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me". There's a high chance that such person will get hacked a third time, because they clearly failed to learn from the first time. It's best for them to stay away from Bitcoin, it's not like this is the only investment option in the world.

And I don't think it will improve with future generations. Using smartphones many hours per day is not increasing people's tech literacy if they just scroll a few apps and never bother to learn about safety. Managing passwords is also not something most people do, because they can always just  reset them via email. And people still download files from the first results of google search, which can often contain malware.

This isn't very realistic, the amount that you plan to sell must coincide with the amount you plan to spend, at the timing must coincide too. For most investors this will not be the case and they will just sell BTC for a liquid asset - fiat.


The difficulties of being your own bank - key management and irreversibility of transactions are not correlated with the levels of adoption. Maybe in the future someone will release a more idiot-proof wallet software for mass use, but for some reason no one made such wallet in all these years.

Volatility also won't be gone completely with mainstream adoption. The biggest factor of Bitcoin volatility is that there's no mathematical formula for estimating Bitcon's "objective" value, so it's all just based on pure guess of traders.

You assume that all mistakes come from the lack of knowledge or experience. But there's a wide variety of other reasons that can force someone to make a mistake, like being tired, sleep-deprived, distracted, etc. I don't see anything strange about a supposedly experienced a wealthy user making such mistake.

If anything, it shows how dangerous Bitcoin can be, because it allows such things to happen. So this should be a reminder that with Bitcoin you are your own bank, meaning you are responsible for checking your transactions and no one else.

This is just survivorship bias. People who encounter problem write a negative review or share their story on social media, while those who don't have any problems have no reason to voice their opinion. I've been using online banking and credit cards for years and haven't encountered any restrictions not even once. All the people that I know in real life also never encountered anything like that. If bank account freezes were a major problem, I would have likely encountered it by now.

If most people don't run into problems with banks, they have no reasons to look at Bitcoin, especially if you consider just how many trade-offs Bitcoin has.

Can you blame the outsiders for mixing Bitcoin and altcoins and thinking that they are only for speculative trading when this speculative trading is the largest use case for both Bitcoin and altcoins and even inside this community most of the discussions are about the price.


Scams and failures are normal when it comes to new inventions, what is not normal is complete lack of actual use cases years after the tech got introduced. There are not web3 apps that are used because they are good, it's always just a new iteration of crypto tulip bulbs, like Cryptokitties and NFTs.

ETH was introduced 7 years ago, at this point there should have been hundreds of millions of people buying goods and services through smart contracts, putting legal contracts on blockchain, doing decentralized computing and so on - instead it's just a platform for investment scams.

Web3: World-changing tech or just a scam?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist who runs a popular science channel where she not only talks about her field of physics, but also about science and technology in general. She tries to make unbiased summaries with opinions from different sources. I think this video is a good look at crypto from the point of view of an intelligent outsider.

Her own personal opinion is that web3 is "a case of a software enthusiast who lost perspective. An average user wants an app just to work...". But my personal opinion is that crypto devs didn't lose perspective, it's just their users are not he people who will actually use the token, but the investors. Everything is done to just lure investors and dump the premine, that how the devs make profit, they don't need any users at all.

I doubt that government tries to intentionally avoid everything connected to Bitcoin, a much likelier explanation is that they don't know about it and don't care about accidental association. That's even more depressing than the government trying to fight Bitcoin, because it shows how insignificant it is in the grand scheme of things.

I bought an apartment with my profits from the last bull run. But I have been holding for a long time, I don't think such returns are feasible anymore for investors that start with small capital and don't use huge leverage (and remember leverage = gambling).

I don't think that there should be some goals tied to Bitcoin investment, this can be really counterproductive if it makes you miss out on profits to wait for this "goal". Better just make as much money as you can with Bitcoin and then see how you can spend it.

El Salvador is not going to benefit from their Bitcoin holding until they sell their coins. So if during the next bull run they will at some point have two times higher value but fail to take the profit, it will all mean nothing. But if Bukele will do it, it will be a very bad look for him - it would look like he doesn't believe in Bitcoin.

Also, a far more interesting statistic is the number of Bitcoin payments per day in El Salvador, or amount held by individuals. Because that's what adoption is about.

People always find ways to screw up a good idea. With DCA some people advocate to buy during the bull market, like Microstrategy and Bukele did, and now they sit on an investment that still didn't break even. But if they bought earlier, dumped at the top, rebought at the bottom and got ready to dump during next bull run - they would make serious profits. Of course they can't do that publicly, because they need to maintain a reputation of true Bitcoin believers, but you don't have to do that. Your goal should be profit first of all. And buying during bear market and then selling during bull market is a better strategy than the version of DCA that tells to always buy no matter the price.

Bear markets happen when supply expands (holders put their coins for sale) or demand collapses (people with $$ don't put buy orders). It is actually a combination of both factors in different proportions.

Holders moving coins to cold wallets is not changing the supply, because they can send the coins back to an exchange quickly. Even if they will vow to only use DEX, it's still a connected global market and price will change quickly.

Pitchforks are only for those who demand blocksize increase today, especially an unrealistically huge increase.  I think it's pretty much a conensus among everyone that there will be an increase at some point, when storage will be much more affordable. It could be in 10 years or 20 years or even more, but technology will surely progress. But this doesn't cancel the fact that on-chain capacity will always be small, compared to transaction volumes of even a small country.

Looking at the past halvenings, there's no immediate hashrate drop due to miners switching off after becoming unprofitable because of the halvening. This is probably because a lot of miners have high enough profit margins that even after halvening they are making profits. Plus the price growth will help to compensate for halvening.

The problems might start arise when the price will become more stable and there will be no more post-halvening bull runs. If mining will become more saturated and profit margins will become lower, then halvenings could have big effects, although at that point transaction fees might start playing bigger role.

It's just polls, personal opinions, and predictions. There's no hard real world data of blockchain use today in actual economy. It's always just empty talks about the bright future, and this has been going on for years, starting from 2016. 7 years of hype, no results, and billions of dollars lost to scams.

If blockchain was such a great thing, it would have been used already. But it's not.

This problem will start arising in our lifetime, especially if after a few halvening cycles the price growth will start failing to compensate for them.


Blocksize increase will definitely happen sometime in the future, and it might result in higher block rewards because more tx per block = more fees. But would it alone make mining more sustainable? Probably not.


LN is still in beta so people are reluctant to adopt it. And the fees are not painful enough to force people to start looking at LN. 10-15 sat/vB is not that much right now. If the minimum fee will consistently be $5 or more, than LN will start looking more attractive.

LN can justify $50 on chain fees, because they will be like a fee for opening and maintaining a payment card with instant zero fee transactions. If the channel will last for a year or two, that's not a bad deal.

But the worst possible scenario is low Bitcoin adoption with low on-chain activity and as the result low fee rewards in blocks - together with halvenings it would indeed knock a lot of miners out of the game and make the network less protected. Our last line of defense will be treating low confirmation counts as unreliable. If right now 1-3 confs is enough, 10-20 might become the new default requirement.