Well, think about it, why would people switch from their current centralized methods to Bitcoin? Because they want privacy? Some small percentage does, but most people don't bother with that, they post their whole life on Facebook. Because people don't trust government and banks? No, they don't even think about economics, until it starts to bite them.  Just like people haven't moved from Windows to Linux, most of the population won't move from Visa to Bitcoin. But that's okay, because some people will move, or will use both, and Bitcoin will have its own ecosystem.

Are those problems with centralized exchanges the reason why Bitcoin and other coins haven't made "largest economic expansion is history yet"? I seriously doubt that. For an average user, they can just move money it, get coins out and 99.9% of the time there won't be any problems.

Decentralized exchanges would be nice, but they too are not perfect, banks and payment companies control fiat, if they would want, they can disrupt the work of decentralized exchanges. Plus, they might be not able to compete with centralized exchanges in terms of fees - banks have something like 0.5-1% fees, that's pretty bad for trading.

If governments will continue with their anti-cash policies, Bitcoin is very likely to become cash 2.0 - a payment method of choice for people who currently have some sort of cash-only business. People will start using Bitcoin as currency more when they'll realize that it's one of the best ways for them. It might not be now, or maybe people just don't think about it too much, but it's very likely to change in the future, although I don't expect it to be too massive.

That's exactly the reason why Bitcoin is so volatile and why we have these big bull and bear markets - people bet money on and against Bitcoin (sometimes even the same people), but until we witness it succreding as a currency/asset/commodity, etc., both scenarios are possible. It's also kinda subjective - some people see that Bitcoin hasn't reached mass adoption yet and take it as a negative sign, others think that Bitcoin has already achieved a lot.

Bitcoin was relatively stable in 2015 because of the post-bear market stagnation, we might see more periods like that in the future. Perhaps we'll experience something like that very soon, if $6,000 is the bottom of the current bear market.

But if you are asking when will Bitcoin be truly stable, the answer is not soon, the speculation needs to shrink. Currently the market is speculative because people aren't sure about Bitcoin's fundamentals, some bet that it will succeed, others bet against it. With time it will become more clear who was right, so there will be less reasons for speculation.

I don't see how exactly Bitcoin would help to install a 4 day work week. Fiat has problems with inflation, in electronic form it has problems with trust, but in general it's functionally very similar to Bitcoin - both are money that can be used to pay people. Is the amount of work hours somehow related to payment methods or what?
Besides, the work week comes from government intervention, so it's generally not good for economy. Workers should negotiate with employers on their own.

Of course cryptocurrency job market is exploding since the crypto market has been growing like crazy, and even though we're in bear market there's still a ton of activity.

But I don't see it as an entirely positive thing, because the market seriously lacks in fundamentals - a lot of money were poured in, and yet there is very little working products, very little users who use coins besides investing. The market will very likely crash, and almost all those crypto jobs will be gone, and the bad part is that people who have spent their money and time getting blockchain-related certificates will be in a loss.

People knowingly invest in scams on a premise that majority of other investors don't understand that it's a scam (otherwise it wouldn't be profitable). The ICO market is even better case than cloud mining, tons of people understand that ICO's are either scams or crap, still they invest and trade because it can be so profitable. With hyips more people understand that they are investing in scams, they just assume that they are early investors.

It's a good argument against credit cards, but sadly it doesn't apply to most people, because they actually view the ability to charge your bank account as a useful feature that saves them time of doing every payment manually. Today people prefer to outsource everything, even their finance, and this trend might also apply to Bitcoin - people are using custodians like Coinbase, businesses also don't run their own nodes and wallets and trust third-party services, ultra-rich store their coins in underground vaults, and some investors wait for ETF's or other instruments. Not everyone wants to be their own bank.

It's simply not true that people these days work more, all the actual research data suggests otherwise. Today's generation is having it way easier than people 100 years ago, people used to work full day to barely make a living, now they have a good amount of money left after covering their all basic needs. Of course there are a lot of poor people now, but there used to be even more, and problems like hunger and illness afflict less people than before.

Homeless people and amazon workers are two different groups of people, so what does giving $2 billion to one has to do with the other? It's not like he's getting a green light to do whatever he wants from now on, and he certainly won't stop paying taxes because of his charity. I just don't get this hostility towards rich people - whatever they do, the crowd always hates them.

Also, Bitcoin has libertarian roots, so in some way it is anti-government and anti-tax. It certainly doesn't have thinking about the poor as one of its core values.

Bitcoin will continue getting more adoption, and factors like better user experience, protocol improvements and lowered volatility will certainly help, but there are some fundamental problems. People often like to stick to one product and ignore alternatives for a really long time, they just don't see the point in trying new things if old things work fine. I feel like the same will happen with Bitcoin - most people will ignore it because they are satisfied with banks.

Labor theory of value is insanely flawed and has absolutely nothing to do with Bitcoin's Proof of Work.

All value is subjective because it only exists in our minds, all people value the same things differently, and the price is just a consensus between the seller and the buyer. Labor theory of value treats value as some sort of objective physical property, and it fails to describe the reality because it totally ignores how economy actually works.

It completely fails in the case of Bitcoin, because the total network hashrate is driven by the price, not vice versa. Miners add more ASICS because they see big profitability, they never add ASICS hoping that this will drive the price higher. This is because the market doesn't see PoW value as linear, if the network is already secure, the security gains will start to diminish (even though the cost of attack scales linearly).

Labor alone is not the source of value, other people need to view it as useful in order to create value, and this is not a binary value, it's a scale. Bitcoin price increased so much since it's launch because more people became aware of it, more people started to want it, while the supply was decreasing.

I'm pretty sure that Satoshi was familiar with Austrian economics and maybe was even inspired by them, because PoW is based on supply and demand, not labor theory. If Bitcoin was based on Marxist ideas, it would have constant difficulty and constant reward and fixed fees (or no fees).

Satoshi started working on Bitcoin in 2007, he actually said that he wrote whitepaper after he developed the software. Also, Bitcoin had many predecessors from the previous years, so the movement for decentralized money was there long before the Lehman Brothers collapse and the 2008 crisis. The philosophy of decentralized money is not about simply distrusting the government and banks, it's about not trusting anyone with your money. It's probably just a coincidence that Bitcoin was launched during the crisis.

No, people should stop misusing the term "AI", and we definitely shouldn't confuse the public by telling that Bitcoin has AI in it's protocol. Leave these tricks to altcoiners, they love to use tech buzzwords to lure investors, Bitcoin should be better than that.

Currently by AI people usually mean adaptive algorithms like neural networks, but Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment is just a few "if" statements. PoW consensus as a whole is indeed a great invention, but it's hard or even impossible to apply it to non-cryptocurrency blockchains. We should focus attention on Bitcoin as a whole instead of disassembling it into parts and then thinking how to apply them elsewhere.

What's the goal of this change? It won't fix the biggest current problem of Ethereum - scalability, fees will still be high because blocks will be full, regardless in what form they are paid. I think it will be a good change because users won't have to keep track of how much Ether they have if they only want to use some tokens, but I don't see any benefits beyond that.

My bad, made a typo.


Nowadays adoption happens really fast, nearly everyone moved from cellphones to smartphones, Facebook has 2 billion users and so on. People pick up new things quickly if those things are useful, but Bitcoin isn't exactly new to most people, it's electronic money and they already have that. The benefits of being your own bank don't sound good for them. Something needs to change for adoption to come, otherwise we'll see only small gains.

This infographic is not based on existing blockchain projects, it's based on the words of ICO's and companies that only promised how blockchain will be used in those cases. I'll believe that blockchain is useful when there will be blockchain products with millions of users. The fact that we haven't seen any successful applications since the beginning of blockchain hype can be a sign that the tech is overhyped.  It's not correct to compare it even with the dotcom bubble, because during that bubble the Internet already had users and there were solid companies around like Microsoft.

There's no fallacy here, usually those people don't say that money is nothing, they understand that it's very hard to be poor, what they are actually saying is that not everything in this world is about money, there are things that can not be bought with them. Sometimes money can even be a burden because some people will want to be around only because of your money (another reason why privacy is important). There are many poor people who are actually happier than some of the rich, that's the point of the phrase "money is not everything".

1. The problem with socialism and other centralized systems is that innovators are at mercy of government officials, while under capitalism they have as money chances to convince investors as they want, or even find other ways of funding like crowdfunding or self-funding or loans.

2. The motivation argument is actually applied to workers. If you start giving away free stuff, a significant amount of population will just relax engage in leisure activities. This is why it was illegal in Soviet Union and other socialist countries to be unemployed.