I'm not exactly sure why that is, since any government-controlled cryptocurrency won't be anything like bitcoin and would only lead to governments having more power than they already do.  Would you really want a completely traceable currency as your country's default form of money?  I can see why China loves this, but those of us in non-communist countries should be wringing our hands with anxiety lest the idea catch on.

And the same goes for coins like Libra (haven't heard much about that one lately, btw).  Any corporation or country that controls a centralized cryptocurrency can view people's financial transactions at will.  That isn't a good thing at all IMO.

I'm wondering that myself.  And even with the cap set at 21 million coins, we still have a long ways to go before we reach that, so bitcoin will technically be becoming less scarce right up until the last bitcoin is mined.  I wish either people would learn what a block reward halving really is or at least stop misstating the facts like OP did.

But hell yeah, upcoming halving!  I don't know what effect if any it's going to have on the market, but the last two seemed to have done good things, at least temporarily--or even permanently (and I hate to use that term here) if you consider that bitcoin is now over $9k and it was far, far below that before the last two halvings.  I'm curious to see what happens in any event.

Wait, what?  From Trezor's response, this has been known about since October of last year (although they apparently just responded now).

Anyway, I'm ignorant as far as technical details go but this stood out to me:

So that tells me that it isn't always possible to hack the Trezor if someone has possession of it.  Someone please correct me if I've interpreted that incorrectly.

This is still very interesting to me, as I've often wondered how easy it would be for someone to get access to a hardware device's private keys.  Till now I had no clue, and I'd assumed that it would have been impossible--oops!  I've never used a Trezor, but now I'm curious as to what it would take to hack a Ledger or any of the other hardware wallets on the market.

Yeah, not always.  What about all of these exchange hacks?  That 7000BTC Binance hack was never solved that I know of.  How about that huge ETH hack that resulted in the fork a couple of years back?  I remember that huge debacle in general if not in specifics, and I don't think the culprit was ever caught. 

The fact is, most crypto crooks get away with it--at least from what I've seen over the years.  This guy was probably caught because he was really young and screwed up and left a trail that led the cops to his door.  Too bad more idiots like him aren't apprehended.

OK, but that is the definition that's generally accepted, is it not?  You were talking about the effect of market forces on the price and seemed to include that in your definition of "real market value".  If that's the case, I don't see why you would do that.

I'll take a look, but I'm not all that interested in doge or its market cap.

Edit:  You did make some good points in that other thread about doge and Bitfinex, but none of that has to do with market cap.

That's the first thing that came to my mind, but unless there's solid proof I would personally refrain from making accusations against him.  And when inactive accounts start applying for signature campaigns, you pretty much know they're alts of somebody.  That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be shitposters, because there are good posters here who have multiple accounts, some of which we likely don't even know about.

OP, what's your motivation with this thread?  Did you not get accepted or something?  Because I don't see this as any great injustice, not to the forum and not to the applicants.  Having said that, if it were shown that Murat has a relationship to any of the accepted members' accounts, that would be different.  Until then it's kind of a non-issue.

I haven't looked at any of the applicants' posts, but if what you say is true then he might suck as a campaign manager--but I would still maintain that no injustice has been done to anyone.  This wouldn't be the first time a campaign manager has chosen shitposters for his campaign.

I'd hold.  Bitcoin doesn't represent a huge portion of my net worth (which isn't much anyway), so I'd prefer to have fun watching the market possibly go upward from $27k than to sell and be out of the game completely.

This prediction was made to keep Tom Lee's name in the news, and that's true for pretty much all of the big names that make these kinds of statements.  But in this case, he might be right.  July is obviously a couple of months after the halving, so it is quite possible for bitcoin to get up as high as $27k.  Don't know where that number came from, but who knows.  And as I've been saying, I'd be more than satisfied if bitcoin "only" went as high as $10k-15k.

Damned if it didn't for a couple of days there--I'm not sure what the exact high for the month was, but it was over $9500 and I would have predicted it could have hit $10k by the end of January.  Alas, bitcoin dropped a couple hundred bucks and it's now at $9247 as I write this and I'm fairly certain it won't break $10k by the end of the day.

Oh well.

That wasn't a bad prediction IMO, but it still doesn't make it anything other than a guess.  Plus in the end it was wrong.  Sometimes I find the Speculation section entertaining, but I don't take any of these prognostications seriously--even if they're right.  Some of them have to be, but that doesn't mean anyone knows more than the rest of us. 

This is going to sound ignorant, but I never did the math and was surprised to read this:


That would be something significant, even though I don't care much about market capitalization when it comes to bitcoin.  The only importance it has in my mind is that if it rises high enough the better chance it'll have to become a global currency that everyone can use with ease.  It would also allow institutional investors to buy bitcoin outright instead of using options to get exposure to the market.  That can't happen if the sum total of all bitcoins is worth $168 billion--or at least not easily and not without affecting the price when buying or selling.

I stopped reading the article after the above prediction, and I'd be more in favor of the first one, i.e., that bitcoin might hit $20k.  If that's as high as it got in 2020, I'd be elated.  $50k?  Bitcoin might not be able to sustain that price, especially if it got there too quickly.

OP, I'm not following you here.  I understand what would happen if everyone dumped their bitcoin on the market all at once, but what relevance does that have to the definition of market cap?  None.  That's why the definition is the same in the stock market, and nobody takes into account the market reaction to any buying or selling forces.  Or maybe I'm just missing your point here.

In any case, I do think people put way, waaay too much emphasis on market cap when comparing cryptocurrencies, and those rankings on coinmarketcap are misleading at best.  Dogecoin has got to be one of the worst investments in crypto (even if it is a popular coin), but it has a high ranking in terms of market cap simply because of how many coins are in circulation--billions, as compared to bitcoin's millions.  Market cap tells you absolutely nothing about popularity, strength of community, utility, or whether a coin is a good bargain or a good investment.  Nothing whatsoever.

Where's o_e_l_e_o when you need him?  I'd like to hear his opinion about this, as I strongly suspect that this whole thing is being blown way out of proportion, just like SARS, swine flu, H1N1, and whatever other bugs have made the news in recent years.  Yes, they all can be deadly--but so can the regular flu virus. 

There's not just one corona virus, by the way.  It's a whole family of viruses, and they're nothing new at all.  One of the strains just happens to be a bit more deadly than previous versions, and even then it hasn't killed that many people.  I don't know the numbers, but I'd like to see a comparison of the death toll from this new corona virus with that of traffic accidents.

I also don't think any of this has much to do with the stock market, bitcoin, or any other investment unless you consider some pharmaceutical company stocks.  Whoever is working on a vaccine will probably see a bump in their stock, though it'll be temporary I'm sure.

Some people never learn any of that stuff in the OP, regardless of whether they attend college, finish high school, or dropped out of grade school.  I'd rather have an education and take my chances with everything else than to not have one, but that's just me.

I do think that most college students study fairly useless subjects, ones that don't prepare them for anything in the real world.  And if you're a student that likes to party instead of study, that makes the situation so much worse.  It's no wonder why so many of the younger generation are complaining about tuition costs and subsequent debt after they graduate.  If they'd studied useful subjects (like engineering, nursing, accounting, etc.) then they'd at least have a marketable skill right after they graduate.  If you're majoring in psychology or history or gender studies, good luck trying to find work in any field related to those things.

I would also point out that learning should be a lifetime activity, not just something that ends with a diploma.  I wouldn't dissuade anyone from getting that diploma, however, because I do think education is very important. 

It's like paying for cigarettes at a convenience store and telling the cashier your wallet forgot to bring your debit card.  That's the level Schiff is operating on here, and no doubt he doesn't care what kind of ridicule he gets if he's got millions in the bank.

How the hell did this guy earn his money, anyway?  I've always suspected gold permabulls to care far more about fiat than they do about gold, because the whole time they're telling you how great an investment gold is, they're actually trying to sell it to you....for fiat.  That's why sites like coinflation.com with all of their articles that keep repeating the same thing over and over drive me nuts--gold is real money, it's scarce, blah blah blah.

Schiff will never live this one down, at least not in the crypto world.  I'm sure most of his goldbug followers won't see the problem, though there's enough of a crossover between interest in bitcoin and gold that some of them will realize what a tool he was during this debacle.

That's the problem with the lesser-known hardware wallets, i.e., the lack of a track record.  Most of the members who frequent this section of the forum will only recommend the Ledger or Trezor to anyone looking for a hardware wallet, and I definitely understand why.  And OP, I would suggest not buying anything but those two unless you can make absolutely certain another one is secure and that you can recover your coins if the manufacturer goes out of business and/or the device breaks.

I'm not a techie and I would be unable to review any code for these wallets, so when I decided to buy one I relied on the recommendations of people here.  I've been more than happy with my Ledger Nano S, and I suspect if you get any more opinions in this thread, most of them are going to tell you to buy that or the Nano X (or a Trezor).  Good luck.

My short answer to that is yes, it is.  There are plenty of motivational speakers and lecturers who provide stuff that's much less useful than what you probably are, and you know damn well they get paid plenty.  There's no requirement for you to volunteer to spread your knowledge of crypto.  Having said that, if I were you I would keep your fees reasonable just so you have the chance of attracting a larger audience.

I agree with that, and if people are willing to pay for what you're offering....what's the problem?

I don't know if I buy your reasoning as to why this recent price increase is "artificial" or not.  Perhaps I don't understand the jargon you use, but it sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook to me with buzzwords like dump and FOMO thrown in to make it very clear you're probably reading all of the wrong stuff. 

On the other hand, it isn't hard to get the feeling that bitcoin might correct when it starts rocketing upward.  I haven't done the math and so don't know how much bitcoin gained percentage-wise, but it has been significant.  It's up probably more than $2k in the past week, and that's more than 20%.  So just going by what's happened in the past I do get the sense that there's probably going to be a selloff eventually, but the only question in my mind is how high bitcoin will get before that happens.

I've always had the opinion that people should really stop using that word to describe bitcoin's price movement.  Since bitcoin is not a pump & dump scheme, you'll never catch me describing a crash, correction, or selloff as a "dump".

I agree, and it's unfortunate that some exchanges do this.  Coinbase is notorious for closing customers' accounts if coins are sent to gambling sites and probably other ones as well.  I'm not sure if they're required to do this by their government regulators or if they're doing it as a precaution, so they don't get linked to criminal/shady activities themselves.  Regardless, it sucks.

Never heard of Paxos, but I'd definitely avoid them if I were looking for any services they offer.  Most exchanges don't do what Paxos and Coinbase do as far as I know.  I've never heard stories of Kucoin, Binance, or any of the bigger exchanges tracing where their customers' funds are going once they're withdrawn. 

OP, this is an awesome summary and I sure as hell wasn't aware that there were this many forks.  I knew about the big ones, of course, but I haven't even heard of most of these--and I only claimed forked coins once, which turned out to be pennies worth of BCH if I remember correctly and then I swore off claiming any of that "free crypto" in the future unless there was a decent amount of it for me to get (which there usually isn't, since I don't own a lot of bitcoin, BCH, or whatever else that got forked).

Ditto.  Not that I understand much of the technical aspects of bitcoin, but I know enough that I recognize that Segwit isn't a fork.

Right on, bro.  I'm not entirely sure the self-policing always works, but it's better than the alternative IMO, which is to have Theymos crack the whip or offer very specific guidance about how the trust system ought to be used--and he probably wouldn't enforce it anyway unless things got way out of hand.

I had to check to make sure TOAA didn't post in this thread, and he didn't.  I'm really wondering if he's going to keep to his word that he's done with this forum.  It's been a nice respite so far, but who knows.

You know, that's kind of all I think this is.  That growth rate of bitcoin ATMs is quite astonishing, though, and I wouldn't have expected that many new ones to pop up because I'm not sure how many people are actually using them and how much of a demand there are for them.

The big problem with these machines is the fees, as has been mentioned.  I'd love the convenience of a nearby ATM where I could buy bitcoin if only they didn't charge so much--and I don't even mind the KYC documents I'd have to provide either.  It's just that it costs so damn much over the market price that it really isn't worth it.  I can usually get preev 1:1 deals on this forum, so why would I waste money?

Wow X 2.  That's impressive, but as I said I wonder how much use these ATMs are getting.  I'd really like to see some hard data on that.