I agree that DeFi, in current form, isn't really anything about "banking the unbanked". That job still falls to something like an LN wallet and a supporting economy. It is the "crypto VCs", their close friends and the shill influencers who are getting most of the action. Yet, the concept has just begun to be applied. It cannot be denied that certain communities, not necessarily poor or unbanked, are finding use cases that directly increase their incomes.

I keep seeing these posts by artists on twitter expressing happiness when their art sells in the form of NFTs. The NFT platform just provides an outlet, they provide the original pieces too. When it comes to DeFi, the current scenario is mostly about making mad gains by betting on the next product which will provide an alternate to banking. They are far from replacing banks that can provide loans based on assessment of businesses and property and are dependent on crypto collateral. Yet, the opportunity to just find the next Compound or Uniswap is open to everyone. Poor Zimbabweans aren't gonna cut it but a fillipino and a vietnamese with an old Axie account can.

That is the case for almost everything else in the world. You HAVE to put money to get money. There will always be people who have bigger purses and can become monopolists. In DeFi, with such proliferation of projects, there are just too many scams where people lock up funds and then farm the token to zero. This has always been the bane of crypto. Unregulated, anonymous founders and the ability to drum up a community with low effort marketing on Telegram and Discord.

Just too many third worlders are out there willing to use fake/ farmed twitter and facebook accounts to shill tokens. Its just the bounty mania becoming the DeFi mania. This definitely doesn't mean that the concept of DeFi isn't novel. It is laying the foundations for decentralized lending. How they evolve to actually fulfill the promise of making it easier to have financial access is up to the community to decide.

Its not that there is no path to such a future. Its only that majority is interested in gambles and mad gains, rather than slow, thoughtful building.

Very difficult to point out a few. You can go for the blind hit method and try to mint everything that drops. Its pretty difficult these days as flippers and bots mint most of the supply in minutes.

My approach has always been to stick to something and try to actually be part of the community. When you do that, people will eventually point you to work together and opportunities open up. i am not much of an artist myself but it can be humbling to be part of a creative community and just brainstorm ideas and bring them to shape. If it flies, you are lucky. If it doesn't, then atleast its a good experience.

I would recommend the universe.xyz community to anyone looking to have a good time in this space with a community of artists and like-minded people who are passionate about the future of crypto. Don't accept any shilling and free stuff though. You get what you contribute to. The link universe.xyz will take you to their website and you can join the Discord from there.

Please be mindful that this is not a suggestion to invest. Just a good project where I know the team behind is pretty cool and sincere.

Farming is basically Yield Farming by providing Liquidity for new projects (many of which are simply scams). Basically, you buy a project's own token and an equal amount of an established token like BTC, ETH, USDC. You lock up these into a smart-contract which provides your tokens into a liquidity pool which others can buy from and sell into. This is called Market Making and AMMs like Uniswap, Sushiswap provide platforms for these. In return, you get a portion of the fees as well as the native tokens. Yield farming exposes you to Impermanent Loss.

In staking, all you have to do is buy up tokens of project (thus increasing its value) and then lock them into a staking contract. Locking the tokens means they are not available for trading. This creates scarcity and increases value. In return, you get rewarded with the native tokens itself. Staking is considered safer for newbies if you are lucky enough to find a legitimate project in the beginning. Staking rewards are generally lower than LP/ Farming rewards.

Crypto p2p scams are one thing that you can avoid by not dealing with people you don't have reason to trust. Yet, in case of crypto transactions, there is always this fear of being linked to tainted transactions. Due to the traceability of transactions, it can be assumed that law authorities will continue to follow the dated method of "Follow the money".

A lot of times, proceeds from hacking etc go through exchanges, mixers, betting websites etc. Those may eventually end up as some sort of legitimate proceeds into the wallet of an unsuspecting consumer. As KYC becomes the norm, it becomes pretty easy to link names with those transactions and hold that as evidence. In most non-western countries, or even western ones, law enforcement can sometimes use any little evidence to take action as proof of their effectiveness.

Wonder what people think about this kind of a scenario.

Bitcointalk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1107844
Amount of merits for the last 120 days: 167
BTC Address: bc1q4u8fvk7pn2z9uxlzrn0w0qw62gvpstw8d4fmxs (Will change to P2SH)

Thank you.

The Taliban having access to sources of funding means they will be spending that money in acquiring arms and ammunition, explosives and technologies to strengthen their "terrorist" networks and mount more attacks on western countries and allies. That is how the logic goes for imposing sanctions and blocking funds. From what we have witnessed over the past decades, there is another aspect to it. These countries belong to them and they demand to be left alone. Whether it is the Arabs, the Afghans or the Taliban. Problems arise when the people are manipulated by other countries for their own geo-political interests. Like China manipulating Pakistan and Pakistan manipulating Afghans.

Maybe for once, if they can have unblockable money and they recognize that they have all the needed resources to earn a decent living and improve their own country, maybe then they won't be turning their coming generations into hardened soldiers and suicide bombers in teenage years. As a world, we have seen what happens when "Democracies" sanction "Dictators". (Saddam, Gaddafi, Mullah Omer). Maybe Bitcoin can be the chance to see what happens when they cannot play these games anymore.

This is all just a hope though. Bitcoin liquidity and ease of exchange would be nowhere near the kind of money that "terrorists" need as an organization. Your usual suspects like the CIA, CCP, KGB etc are far more efficient at funneling those funds than bitcoin.

The article suggests that there Dad is a former Wall street banker and he took out a loan to fund all that equipment. 90K for the GPUs and 10K for the other setup means that he probably took a loan of 100K. I am guessing that the Dad just made best use of the fact that the kids are smart and willing to understand the nuances of running a business and making a profit. (The kid has a patented hat and they lined up at BestBuy).

This is clearly a case of a Rich Dad (from the Rich Dad, Poor Dad) guiding his progeny towards an entrepreneurial future. So, while in the foreground you hear this seemingly heartwarming tale of a 14 year old making 32K in ETH, the ringmaster is the father, Mr. Manish Raj.

ETH is going to move to PoS though and soon enough this mining revenue will go to zero. They still have time to break even but nobody should take this as an inspiration to dump 100K worth of loan money into GPU mining. If you do, you are much safer and covered for the long run with ASICs and BTC mining.

More than pure lending against collateral, it is the function of investing for which banks will continue to remain relevant. An investment banks "creates" capital by funding projects that are judged to be credit-worthy. There is no equivalent function in crypto. It has proven a very crude and scam-filled method of judging the credit worthiness of projects and teams.

Purely lending against collateral can have a path towards crypto-transformation once there are sufficient technology integration to tokenize property.

This by itself cannot pose a threat to banks. Then again, when people talk about bitcoin posing threat to banks, its not really the banking service providers per se, it is generally the central banks, particularly the US federal reserve which has an unlimited capacity to print the world' reserve currency. This gives it power over deciding who fails and who gets to survive in case of crashes like 2008. It also concentrates power and perpetuates the kind of decision making that leads to such crisis.

Bitcoins monetary policy is a threat to powerful central banks. This has gradually been generalized to be seen as "crypto is a threat to banks". Its more like a competitor.

Indian scammers have become experts in this kind of reverse Psy-ops. The website didn't load and I did not try too much. It is one of the examples where people are getting scammed because of the greed of high returns.

I looked at the telegram with its invoices of payments. There were even pictures of people buying lakhs of tokens while posing with their kids and the sellers. It does seem that the people who are selling these have their identities out in the open. The contract is simply a basic ICO contract on Ethereum. There are videos of people dancing to "balle balle" tunes in auditoriums hoping that they will get back 60 months worth of payments. "Bitconnnnnnect" vibes.

At least the people involved are not anonymous so if the people lose money, it'll just be a bunch of fools being parted from their money, who will then know who to blame.

This has become such a sure shot way of fleecing investors in India. There are probably just less than 50 of us here in the forum who are interested in telling people that they shouldn't be giving up their money to random coins. Very unfortunate that people are still falling for the same tricks that the promoters of MLM schemes and fake coins used 4 years ago in small towns and cities.

This time around though there are quite a few profitable entities like WazirX and other platforms that should have an interest in not letting people give money to scammers. There can be advertisement campaigns to make people aware of these ponzi promoters and telling people to not rely on word of mouth for crypto investments. This can lead to people being defrauded and cryptocurrencies getting a bad name unnecessarily. Could you share where did you notice these seminars taking place?

The move seems to have been triggered by the drying up of revenue sources after Trump's sanctions. The government possibly wants a piece of the remittances pouring into the country in the form of cryptos, as @Hydrogen pointed out. They would provide recognition to crypto, making it easier for people to use crypto for there basic needs, in return for tax revenue.

This would be an interesting experiment. The central authority wants a piece of your payments, which they otherwise cannot regulate. It is upto the people that how long they choose to be submissive and continue to share the knowledge of their payments. The people could still choose to go on receiving payments and using them in a P2P way, which they are probably doing at present.

Puts the element of choice into the hands of people. It seems that the US people would be much better off if the US Govt decides to fully support bitcoin. It may turn out to be a far better method of spreading democracy than tanks and guns and hellfire missiles.

This is what happens when you trust vaporware peddlers and scammers with so much money. They never really ignored marketing and promotion. In fact, that is the ONLY thing they did. They had a slick looking website and a lot of conferences and advertisements. Yet, having all of that money meant they never needed to work another day.

Block.one, the private corporation that raised all of that money has comfortably sat on all the Bitcoin and cash and calls itself a holding company now. What this means is that a bunch of idiots who believed that a DPoS chain with "21 block producers" (centralized as fuck), could become an actual congregation point for developers to put their efforst, collectively funded a private investment corporation which is now free to use their money the way they want. Its all donations now while the EOS chain itself is a Chinese CCP chain.

EOS is a prime example of how PoS can never actually work. That is why, all of this DeFi and NFT boom notwithstanding, it'll all crash with ETH moving to PoS. This is when you have to be bullish on the initiatives like TBD from Twitter and other smart contracting initiatives native to Bitcoin.

Increase in revenue is due to their acquisition of another mining operator and power agreements to fuel those rigs. I am not sure if that should mean anything by itself.

It is still fascinating that several individuals and companies take the risk to go into Bitcoin mining which is a long term commitment once you invest so much. It takes courage and conviction to back a technology in a regulatory environment so full of uncertainties. From the way things have moved in the past few months with Dorsey, Saylor, Musk and others coming out in support of Bitcoin, its clear that USA will once again lead the way in technology adoption.

Additionally, with the Chinese pivoting to CBDCs and kicking out miners, the path for a truly free-market adoption of Bitcoin is clearer. More power to these miners, these individuals and corporations.

Good that the answer is qualified with "Maximum". Now that we have a figure about a hyperbitcoinization scenario where every other type of "money" is replaced by Bitcoin, how about a realistic one??

The current form of money is outdated and even the economists recognize that there is something wrong with the trend of ever increasing debt. The need for a new money is real. BIS playing with CBDCs is proof of this. Bitcoin can truly be a decentralized option to be the "people's money" with its own economy whose monetary policy is not controlled by any one country or by organizatons like IMF or BIS.

So realistically, what percentage of the "money market" share could bitcoin have?

100%? With fiat currencies, Gold and all the tanks and guns in picture, pretty much impossible.
 
50%? The top 1% own a much greater share than 50%. Highly unlikely.

10%? Inter-planetary corporations with Mars colonization and mining at the moon can result in a situation where this is likely.

So, based on your valuation of USD 276M for a 100% takeover, a 10% realistic takeover would put the value at around USD 27M, in about 50-80 years from now. Even a 1% share would mean 2.7 Million.

This isn't financial advice. Its an assessment based on the optimism that things eventually meander towards the most efficient and correct path. Bitcoin is just the right thing to do.

Yeah, I am dumb like that, you know..Gosh I knew I am not worthy of Roobet's graciousness. Thanks for reminding me the painful truth dude..

To clarify though, its the first time this happened to my signature on a chrome (which is possibly not updated) and Windows. Its probably just the BB code thing that @coinfinger mentioned. As its not affecting anyone else, its not a biggie i guess. Lets leave it at that..Thanks for your inputs.

I am glad that made you Rolling-OFL. And no, I am not a clown. Not yet.

These interactions tell me that us Roo-bots should have a place to chill. If anyone is up to open a "Roobot's Chillout" topic in the off-section board, I'll be happy to merit it. (Not that too many Roo-bots need them, for most earn good merits by themselves) I feel that we have all been in this campaign for long enough to maybe have a chill place or even a discord. It never hurts to get to know people I guess.

@Hhampuz, seems like the new signature is getting cropped.

Is it just the case for my browser or some parts are cutoff for everyone else too??

Whether you are rich or poor, just keep >50% of your crypto net-worth in Bitcoin. You may miss some gains but compared to the downside risk, it is nothing. It is not new for these fads to crash just like they rise. Those NFTs people hold in their wallet will be worth a lot less when a bear market comes along.

As long as BTC is stable, everything is cool. When that changes, the "poor" get no clue that their favorite DeFi token or NFT is going to be worth zero. Just during this last fall, a lot of these DeFi farms, memecoins went to zero. They'll keep rising till you have mercenary capital rushing for gains. (Like the recent AVAX rush). The huge investors simply park money in stables. This encourages the noobs to start betting on all kind of coins. That is good for a while but if you don't time it well, you can easily lose all your networth.

So to be safe, always keep a significant part in Bitcoin. It is the sole truly decentralized money that no court or financial institution can deny in true faith and following natural justice. For everything else, whenever those questions start coming, the crashes will be quicker than you might expect.

Yeah, COVID has been crazy. Everyone has limited time and it is totally a return versus investment calculation when it comes to allocating your time. The forum will always remain the best source of information on bitcoin and developments. So, IMO it is always good to work and establish a symbiotic relationship with the forum.

So, are you now the original owner? Because this account has been inactive for 4 years already. Once an account has been trust marked, it is not possible to get it over. Especially if its from Lauda, as he is retired from the forum now.

Also, I checked your posting history and it is quite clear that your account didn't get "hacked" but you just stopped using it. Both @Lauda and @Yahoo62278 were exemplary judges in such cases. Anyways, I have no idea if you've bought this account or just decided to login after 4 years. You were at the forum since 2014 so I am pretty sure you made bank. Hopefully, you have learned your lessons and leading a honest, happy online life now.

So what was your best experience back from 2014?

Ideas. Well, last year a lot of us brainstormed quite a few and that is where the idea for a raffle came up which @Heisenberg_Uncertainty organizes. I think engagement begets engagement. We could start with users like yourself coming up and posting more.

When new people post more, it becomes an exciting opportunity for those of us who have been here for a while to have a chance at an engaging community. I agree about the fact that the signature campaigns not counting local posts can be a net negative. Yet, thanks to Roobet and @Hhampuz, I again have incentive to post in the local sub. I personally will be happy to engage with and merit young users for useful posts on the Indian sub.

When i started this thread, merit were limited but now that is not an issue. Hopefully, we can have more Indians sharing their legit experiences and knowledge out here.