There is no denying the fact that banking crisis or banking failures has become an easy to milk solution for corrupt businessmen, politicians and regulators around the world. The banking crisis like that of 2008 is something that everybody in the world hears. Yet, if someone were to keep a record of the number of times banks writeoff losses around the world, it'd emerge that most of the times, the beneficiaries of this risk-taking are somehow hands-in-glove with policymakers.

Nobody questions this because banks act in an opaque, un-auditable way. They are their own auditors, their own rating agency.

The traditional banking system is necessary for the service that it was actually meant to provide. Doing manual due diligence to ensure that worthy enterprises and individuals have access to funds. Under the opaque, centralized systems where you can always bail out your friends, this system has ceased to work. What we need is an overhaul where the banks accept that they are here to serve humanity, not otherwise. That message has to go loud and clear to down-the-line policymakers and politicians. Bitcoin is the tool that people have access to, in order to do something in this direction.

This isn't really that much though. 616 BTC or nearly 30 million is pretty much a drop in the ocean in today's crypto sphere of billions of TVL and trading volumes.

Let us talk about it when its atleast a few 100 million or a billion. The only exciting thing about is that the owner decided to move the funds. It will be very interesting to follow through to what an OG decides to do in these very changed times compared to when the bitcoin were first acquired. Would he lock them into some lending platform, going to buy some million dollar NFTs or just plain deciding to cash out and retire.

I doubt it'll be possible to trace or identify where the funds end up but that would tell anybody a lot about what is going to be the next big thing in crypto.

Rsk of a code based attack or a hack of the Bitcoin network seems a far off possibility now with so many different teams involved and core devs having a lot of upside in terms of funding and incentives. The kind of attacks that people like faketoshi, Ver or Calvin can do, generally find takers during a bear market or during long sideways movements.

In the bullrun, everyone is too busy flipping NFTs and tokens to care about their shenanigans. Everyone knows what Bitcoin is. In terms of social attack vector, i think now that Bitcoin has withstood an onslaught of negativity from the likes of Elon Musk, there is hardly anything that can shake its position as the de-facto reserve currency of the Web 3 economy. The only uncertainty that remains to play out is SEC and other forms of US legislation

Everyone in this thread is calling the kidnappers idiots or noob, as if we are the experts..

What always seems inexplicable to me is how do people come to the conclusion that they should kidnap someone they know will have money. In almost all societies, having the image that you have money is pretty dangerous. There are all sorts of desperate people who will attempt such criminal acts if they think they can get some money out of it. This is one of the biggest reasons to always maintain anonymity in the world of crypto.

Nobody has the money that people will assume you have if they associate you with "Bitcoin". Like, what the hell were those thieves thinking to demand 10 Cr? Had this been a normal, professional extortion; the kidnappers would have known that a dentist cannot give you 10 Cr cash. Jokes aside, it is good that they found the doctor safe and only a little "dazed".

The concept of NFTs has evolved from the initial intention of linking with real world assets or as representation of a real-world commodity. NFTs now are basically jpegs on blockchain that can boast of some form of uniqueness or specialty owing to the community or owing to its history. It is becoming more of a culture thing that can be shared and flaunted as a means of identity or privilege.

Lot of people consider them to be useless but that is like throwing the baby out of bathwater. The strength of NFTs in associating them with communities and events and actions cannot be understated. The problem is the proliferation and zero curation. They aren't unique enough with these drops which are solely meant for flipping and comprise of a lot of insider trading on opensea. Once these platforms evolve and become more decentralized, there certainly is hope.

Don't take this as financial advice but if you want to be part of something really cool which is at the building stage, do check universe.xyz

Join the discord and be part of the community. A lot of upcoming drops and DAO based curation are promising aspects of this project.

A lot of mainstream interest in crypto is still continuing to build. In almost all the previous bullruns, the new millionaires that were minted were either BTC or ETH Hodlers. This time it is a much more diversified group that includes artists and amateur traders. It'd be safe to assume that a lot of them have solidified their gains in the form of BTC or cash. Yet, with the way SEC been acting, a bear market seems inevitable.

It'll only take a few stern announcements from the SEC to bring the prices crashing for a lot of memecoins, NFTs, algorithmic stablecoins etc etc. In the Alt-coin segment, ETH and BNB will possibly not fall beyond 50%. The rest will meet the fate that Alt-coins inevitably do. That being said, there is a possibility that those that will survive this bear run will become settled and accepted players in the crypto-economy.

It is hard to predict when SEC will come out with regulations. Of course the insiders will know and dump it all on retail just a few hours before whenever SEC decides to invalidate some of the businesses around crypto.

KIN used to be a group chatting app that had all sorts of weird groups made up of 50/ 100 people. Those were some weird times. I have no idea why they launched a cryptocurrency and then failed so spectacularly. Despite an already established user base, KIN has never really found traction. The founders have always had a lot of pre-mine.

project like these more often than not are just a method of milking the crypto market by such founders. KIN is in that sweet spot where it isn't really mainstream but still has enough users to form a tight echo-chamber. If enough people buy it, the founders can always keep selling their pre-mine and continue to raise free money. Couple this with the humungous max supply to make it seem cheap, KIN is like the original meme-shitcoin.

LOL. Definitely this..

No matter how well you try to explain crypto to someone, the most that people hear about is from memes, strange youtube shilling, a history of scams and what not. It may seem that those who are early in crypto are doing it intentionally to keep the serious money out of it. In case of developing countries, the distrust for crypto is much higher. This is also due to the scammers who go to businessmen with lot of money but little sophistication to say for it. They sell them fake tokens for thousands of dollars that give huge returns (which can never be cashed) and then one fine day, when the Ponzi dies, that unsophisticated business-man may well be out looking for people who shilled him crypto.

You don't want to be one of the go-to guys because the said unsophisticated businessman will not think twice before equating anyone who knows about crypto as the guy who knows the guys who scammed him.

There is too much misinformation amongst the common people and only the most well-versed people can see the opportunities amidst the madness. And madness it clearly is. Just look at the 10K NFT drops happening all the time and people inviting you to discord, minting for 0.1 ETH and then selling for 0.05 if they cannot flip it within the first 10 hours. There is so much insider trading and shady shit going on that it really is hard to tell anybody that you think there is hope for this to become the next big thing in terms of business and utility.

I cannot help but agree. The stupid arguments between Schiff and McCormack/ Udi on crypt-twitter have become cringe. Gold is just that, Gold. You can never have a great portion of your invested assets in Gold because of the simple fact that it is not very useful to keep and does not appreciate well against inflation. People still continue to keep it for the aesthetic value and that will always remain the "pull factor" of gold. People just cannot have enough of it.

A lot of us feel the same way about BTC and other things crypto. They seem valuable to us and we want to accumulate and be able to use them more. In terms of pure utility, Gold is clearly nowhere near Bitcoin or other cryptos. Yet, this approach of somehow pitting Gold against BTC is just Schiff's way of garnering attention. Gold and BTC are two very distinct things. In the next 10 years, if you have all the normal assets (stock, real estate, cash) but don't have Gold, you won't be in a losing spot. The most difference it'll make is that you would want to buy some of it just to balance.

On the other hand, ten years from now if you don't have multiple digital assets and a safe, sound holding of Bitcoin and associated usage experience, you will have clearly missed the opportunity of our generation.

This application isn't really about investing in "Bitcoin" as the topic says. Bitcoin has only been mentioned once in the whole offering and that too to make the distinction that it is not the only Digital asset.

The company basically wants to be able to invest in all the Digital assets that are taking shape. Most investments in these areas are currently VC investments or former crypto millionaires backing other projects. The more these "Investment funds" strive to invest in the Digital assets, the clearer it becomes that crypto is going mainstream. Bitcoin is still at the base of it all but it is definitely not the only thing. Whether this survives long term or not is the million dollar question.

Well. None of this should be financial advice to anyone and these are just opinions. I don't think Elon needs to make profit from Dogecoin. He is genuinely amused by the attention from the community and the jokes around DOGE. He just chose to engage with it on his twitter. That made a lot of people a lot of profit is just their good luck. Elon likes memes and DOGE had always been about memes (Now its about greed).

Right now, Musk seems to be busy with his real world and far more serious ventures. The lawsuits from Bezos are also keeping him busy and I don't think he'd like the argument from Bezos's lawyers if they quote his mercurial temperament and childish DOGE pumps as a reason to not be solely entrusted with NASA's moon-return program. He can ill-afford to sound like a little child buying up currencies that his current overlords don't approve of.

So although he seems to be genuinely having fun while playing with begging, hopeful and cringe DOGE memers on Twitter; he won't be coming out in the open about it too frequently anymore. This means a slow and steady decline for DOGE as people move onto other projects which have far more going for them.

Vitalik gets most of the attention for Ethereum but its not like the concept of smart-contracts was anything new. What played for him was his presentation skills and the image of the impoverished 17-year old technology geek.

As far as smart-contracts are concerned, There are several "greats" like him, AVAX, SOL, Now even ADA is offering smart-contracts and people are actually using them because of the ridiculous fee on Ethereum. There is not one original thing that Vitalik accomplished. People started using Solidity and that is his biggest achievement. Apart from that, there are many like him.

Only a fool who cannot comprehend the difference between "Success" and "Greatness" will compare him to Satoshi.

Correct. Its the people who bear the brunt of inflation the most. Politicians, businessmen, officials, they all take it as part of their journey but the wage earners have to struggle with deprecation of the value of their assets while stock prices continue to rise. This is one of the reasons though that in a capitalist setup, you must be part of the market by owning balanced stock and equities.

All of that money eventually finds its way to the market and if you have a stake in it, however minor, it'll go up over time. Investment and financial access remains the only way for people to safeguard themselves in the long term. This is one of the reasons that I find Bitcoin and crypto to be a good thing. Learning about these gives you unhindered access to knowledge and information. Though this may soon change with whatever plans SEC seems to have.

If we all only ever made food, we'd still be living as an agrarian society and would never have even realized that there is 'Cosmic matter" out there. It is only our striving to be able to do more and reach higher that makes us an industrialized society. Sure it comes with conflict and wars, but who is to say there won't be any wars if we only grew food.

There was conflict even in agrarian societies. Brutal and violent battles were as much a feature of those so-called "simpler" times. Conflict is also an essence of life. What we need is not to use energy to make food (LOL) but find ways to have access to cheap, clean, unlimited energy. If there was enough energy to go around, there won't be that many conflicts.

This is difficult to accept but quite right. The Democrats wanted to appear so distant to anything that Trump supported that they took an overly coddled view on lockdowns and the need for supporting people. In a lot of other countries, life slowly hobbled back as people took precautions and tried to solve COVID within communities and families. The US welfare state made it a country-wide problem even when it was not, just to appear to be "correcting" Trump's wrongs.

This lack of balanced approach means that the money printing was far beyond what would have been prudent. Now you never know that whether this was a mistake or an intentional action. US governments have used wars as excuse to raise money, maybe this time it was the pandemic. What is quite clear is that with all that money, almost every economy in the world has an influx of investment money looking for returns. If the economies can continue to perform, that money will be well spent and certain parts of the world as well as parts of the US may receive benefits. But can you defy the economic cycle set into motion with high inflation?

You probably can. High inflation is generally a push for investments. US has led the world into most of the technological revolutions, which have inevitably been money-fuelled. With the shift towards Electric, Automation, Space (even Mars exploration), this can well again be a time of high growth for the world's largest economy.

For once, i wish that Americans would stop being the bickering pussies they have become since 9/11. Its like these little effeminate kids bickering about Al-qaeda, bickering about their leaders, bickering about China and never really being able to come together to show the character they showed at the times of WW-II, Apollo missions and the computer revolution. From being inventors, explorers and go-getters, they have turned into these little bunch of teenagers stuck between old men like Biden and Trump. For the sake of everyone, Americans really should stop throwing airs and heroic CGIs in the form of DC/ Marvel universe and actually go back to figure out what actually made that country great. And make no mistakes, the USA IS a great nation. Its just that it has never had so many bickering pussies calling the shots at the same time. Blame youtube, facebook or whatever, but those people really need to dig deep and find their ideals back. Or else be pushed back to the status of being the largest producers of porn and stupid Tiktoks on Chinese apps.

This is beautiful. So they used the vented emission, which is otherwise wasted, to power "11" Bitcoin mining data centers. Wonder how many miners each of them hold?? And this is with the base year of 2019 so they are doing it for almost 2 years now. 11 Bitcoin mining setups with only 6% reduction in emissions. That must be a lot of power.

It is pretty wasteful to vent all that natural gas but if there was a safe way to do it, the companies would have probably done it. Making it safe would require a much larger investment. If that energy is used to mine Bitcoin, that could offset some of the costs of initial setup too. Utilizing Vented emissions is a small industry in itself. Almost every equipment, plant and process that generates or uses Natural gas, will inevitably vent methane from valves, tanks, compressors. The aim is to utilize those emissions in a better way. It is good that running a miner becomes one of the motivations to improve these processes and technologies resulting in profitability as well as GHG reduction.

I don't think any of these mainstream crypto publications are trustworthy enough. They are just sources of news and one should make ones own conclusion. Coindesk regularly publishes articles for HYIP tokens too whose sole purpose is to find a new buyer. Even in case of the original article, the headline was misleading but the article clearly mentions that they have selectively authorized 6 companies for trading and mining.

What makes me happy about this stuff is though the other information that they have formed groups to study and find ways for incorporating Bitcoin. It is heartening that this is a financial decision in which smaller, less powerful nations don't necessarily have to take the lead of the bigger countries. They are in fact leading the path which is difficult but promising. Hoping for the best for the people there.

As @stompix pointed out, the people themselves may have reason to dislike their president who has a lot of admirers in the Bitcoin world. Adopting Bitcoin as legal tender is a progressive move but the president will need a plan to make people realize the benefits or even to bring them those benefits.

Those people are not a forum or a shitcoin discord/ Telegram. They are a real country with real problems and flipping a few NFTs for profit cannot be the answer for a whole country. It must be accepted that the people are probably too tech-illiterate to make good use of the opportunities with crypto.

If this is meant to be a banking replacement for them, this should also be explicitly communicated. Launching a wallet and then airdropping everyone some Satoshis is a marketing move, not a long term plan. Have we heard of any long term vision from the president on how Bitcoin will benefit his impoverished nation?

Haha..This was funny.

I'd not go as far as calling LTC  a shitcoin though. EOS is definitely a scam coin whose founder raised money and has now completely shrugged away any responsibility while they use the raised BTC for a fund of their own. Good for them though. The joke is on the idiots who thought a PoS chain could actually be the answer.

LTC is more like the model of the house you may build before going for the actual things or like your garage to try out some new fittings.


I mostly agree with this. Bitcoin is the foundation for all things crypto. This will become more and more pronounced as the US regulators tighten the regulations around all of the companies that are working from a US jurisdiction. This is going to be a watershed moment for crypto. Few will survive and those who do, will probably flourish beyond imagination. Just put at least 60% of your crypto worth into BTC and make your bets with the rest.

What do you mean? You should probably elaborate if you want to mount a defense of Solana's consensus mechanism.

The network was stuck as a particular block number for hours. Generation of new blocks needs consensus between a majority of nodes about the global state of transactions. In every consensus mechanism, it happens by prioritizing transactions and putting them into blocks. If a chain simply stops producing new blocks, it means that the consensus mechanism has weaknesses that are not letting it scale.

I am sure the devs will come up with some patch to fix the issue and "restart" the network. Yet, it only goes to show that there is a huge difference between writing a whitepaper and making a network work in actual network conditions. What "network critical TXs" are you talking about btw? Please do share. IMO, If a particular type of transactions is network critical then isn't that itself a bottleneck and a vulnerability?