What an ignorant statement.

Bitcoin is the most adopted cryptocurrency, it has more users than all other coins combined, it has hundred and thousand times more transaction activity than most other coins. Do you think that it is thanks to some "non-maximalists"?

A lot of highly valuable members of Bitcoin community are maximalists - Peter Todd, Jameson Lopp, Lightning developers and so on. They have contributed to Bitcoin's adoption much more than some crypto-noob who "believes in technology" yet doesn't understand even the most basic things and sits on a bag of shitcoins that will die in the next few years.

Maybe the so-called cryptocurrency community should start listening to Bitcoin maximalists and finally realize that consensus protocol is the heart of any coin, and if it fails, it doesn't matter how good and innovative your coin is, it's doomed. Hodling altcoins long-term becomes a very risky and stupid thing, they are all under threat of getting attacked in a similar fashion, and the chances that they will skyrocket are astronomically low, because their developers just fake activity to keep selling their stash continuously. In the next few years we'll probably see similar attacks on PoS protocols.

Smart contracts are just small computer programs, and computers programs tend to have bugs or generally be limited. Smart contracts might be useful in cases that allow truly decentralized automation, but I've seen cases when smart contracts require trust or third parties, which is the opposite of what is promised.

Smart contracts will never replace lawyers, and they will never replace traditional contracts. It's better to think about them as a decentralized proxy between service providers and customers.

When you get too big, you start attracting attention, and then it's the matter of time till they take you down.

I've been telling people here for a while that Bitcoin will not save countries from sanctions, back when this board was flooded with articles about Russia/Iran/Venezuela leaders discussing how they can use crypto to fool the West.

Well, the market is clearly not bullish, so it must still be bearish. Maybe we've passed the bottom, or a still very close to it, but a crazy bull rally is still far ahead, because the recovery will be slow and full of bull traps. But this only means that now is a great time to slowly accumulate, instead of trying to catch the bottom it's better to buy over a longer period of time.

Apple had $1T marketcap recently, then it crashed by 40% and guess what, the world didn't end, and even American economy didn't suffer from it. And crypto has low liquidity compared to stocks, so marketcap is even more meaningless in this case.

Crypto will not be able to threaten global economy and banks, because it doesn't have enough users. Bitcoin exists for 10 years and since the beginning people though that mass adoption is coming soon and the revolution will begin, but there's no signs of it coming. It's time to open your eyes and realize that crypto is a niche product that is not suitable for everyone and that majority of the population doesn't care about freedom or privacy.

The wikipedia article on Bitcoin Core has a Bitcoin footer, inside which there's a people section which has all the mentioned people as well as others, like Mark Karpeles or Andreas Antonopoulos. So, google just pulled this list from that article, trying to be smart. It's a very well known problem with google when it shows wrong photos and unrelated people, thinking that they are relevant to the search.
Just recently I've been reading an article about woman who shares a name with a dead woman, and Google mixed up their photos in the search results, so now people think that she is dead.

That's a good one 

People still don't understand that for Facebook they are the product, and that Facebook will keep selling their data until it dies. If somehow they'll manage to make blockchain work, it won't be an improvement for users, it would be the opposite, because Facebook will be able to harvest and organize user data more efficiently.

It happened already, the movie Paranormal Activity had a $15,000 budget  and a $193.4 million box office. The authors sold the movie to Paramount Pictures for $300,000. If they had access to a decentralized content distribution system like the one described in the OP, they would net much more money, but probably less than those 193 millions (because Paramount Pictures dropped $10 millions on advertisement).

There are probably more cases like that, but they are rather exceptions than the rule. You can produce world-class music at home these days, but digital content like movies and games still costs millions of dollars to produce, and I don't see how those amounts can be achieved via crowdfunding in the near future.

And this is why I'm so skeptical about many blockchain projects, they so often end up having some centralized body in its core that connects their blockchain with real world, thus defeating the whole purpose of the blockchain. After that the only good thing left is publicity and immutability, but those things are not always great - publicity means no privacy, which is bad in many cases, and immutability means that errors are permanent. This again means that blockchain has many limits and can't be slapped onto everything in this world.

It's strange for a guy like Peterson, who claims to be fighting for freedom, to cry about censorship when a private company doesn't want to have business with him. Youtube and Patreon don't have any obligations before him, they aren't government companies and they can't be counter as public space.

It's not exactly a new thing, platforms like Kickstarter were around for many years already. Sadly, they have their own problems, like scammers who blatantly scam their backers (just like in ICO's), or projects who fail to keep their promises (check out Star Citizen). Also, there's no precedent of successful crowdfunding of an AAA game or a Hollywood-quality movie yet. Crowdfunding is always the risk for consumers, because they are blindly buying something that doesn't exist.


The problem with todays content-creators is that they are too greedy, they all try to create their own platform, which makes it very inconvenient for consumers. Disney and many other producers have pulled their content out of Netflix, for example. So, in many cases people pirate not because they can't afford the price, but because they don't want to deal with all the obstacles.

It will definitely take years. I believe the reason why regulators are so slow is the same why businesses, institutions and users aren't jumping on the crypto train - people still not sure if it's a legit thing or just a bubble. Maybe regulators think that the hype around ICO's and tokens will die on its own, so it's a waste of time to work on it now.

As for the questions of the article, they are so broad that the answer to them depends on the specific details.


Some (many?) decentralized exchanged are not completely decentralized.


There are tons of blockchain systems.

I doubt that the SEC is happy about it, and they will sooner or later find a way to shut it down, even though it's outside of the US and supposedly decentralized. And overall it resembles stablecoins - you can't put some item on blockchain without having a trusted third party, so this blockchain exchange will probably suffer from the similar problems that surround stablecoins.

Also, how investors are going to receive their dividends?

If you look at the charts, it's pretty common for Bitcoin to get stuck in certain ranged and only fluctuate by some 5-10%. So, $3.5k is indeed one of those ranged, just because it has been more than a month in here already. It's still not clear if this is the bottom or not, so the next big price change might be either a drop to below $3k or a jump to $5k. And we can't even know when exactly it will happen, it can easily last for months, because stagnation also happens on Bitcoin markets, or maybe we'll see a change very soon. Nothing is clear at this moment.

You're contradicting yourself because OP's data is the long-term performance, it shows that on a scale of multiple years Bitcoin growth dramatically. It's very likely that someday people will envy those who bought at $18,000 and didn't sell, just like we today might envy those who bought at the top of 2013 bubble, because the price is 3.8 times higher today. And there's nothing cherry-picked about this data, it simply takes the lows of every year. You can even notice that there was no growth between 2013 and 2014 because of the bear market. But it only means that Bitcoin rewards the patient, which is the point of OP's post.

Bitcoin still has its own weaknesses. It remains very new and experimental compared to gold which was around for thousands of years. There's no guarantee that Bitcoin won't get replaced, that there aren't any hidden major flaws (just in the last year a dangerous bug was found, we just got lucky that the good guys did it first), that the underlying cryptography is 100% secure. And being digital is a disadvantage in scenarios like nuclear war.

But overall, volatility remains the biggest weakness, if not for it, Bitcoin would be very competitive with gold, because all the factors that I've mentioned are very unlikely to happen.

Here's why I think that blockchain adoption is nowhere near as high as various surveys report (20% or 40%).

1. If you look at google trends, AI is always 3-4 times more popular than blockchain, yet this survey suggests that they have similar rates of adoption.

2. On stackoverflow, there are 5000 questions with "artificial-intelligence" tag vs 2300 questions with "blockchain" tag. Meanwhile questions about popular programming languages have over 1 million questions.

3. Artificial intelligence has its own stackexchange site, blockchain doesn't.

So, overall it feels like there's no as much developer activity as you would expect for a widely adopted technology.

One of the reasons for this event is to test the solvency of those third party wallets. But I dunno how realistic it is, even if the event had gathered much more users.



There are some reasons, for example daytrading. Or, like in my case, investing. I'm willingly risking with the amount I can afford to lose to get some profit. There are probably other cases that require holding coins in third-party wallets.

Pretty much everyone expects some sort of price growth around the next halving, and also most people have noted the cyclicity of Bitcoin's price. This might even turn into some sort of self-fulfilling prophesy when those patterns will hold true because most people will believe that they will hold true, and will act accordingly, thus fulfilling them.

However, I have some doubts that we'll have such a big magnitude (6 figures) in the next cycle. The more mature the market is, the less volatility there will be.