Voting is not a big problem in most countries, it's not responsible for the "broken" state of politics. Meanwhile, electronic voting itself is highly controversial, as security researches point out that it introduces a huge amount of attack vectors and provide very little improvements over traditional voting.


At this day, every ICO sounds fishy because of their enormous failure and scam rates, so when you add some futuristic ideas that have been only theoretical for so many years, the level of suspicion only increases. And blockchain is still nearly non-existent in production, yet people hype like it's a solid technology that can be used to build anything. I personally would be more excited if instead of building utopias people first provided working proof-of-concepts on a smaller scale and then worked their way up towards bigger and harder solutions.

It makes me think that Bitcoin community is a part of the problem with volatility - everyone is waiting for it to end so merchants and consumers can finally adopt Bitcoin, but then every time Bitcoin goes a few percent up or down, everyone start screaming "to the moon" or "bear market". Such hysteric reactions only contribute to volatility and it would be better if people calmed down, especially the crypto news sites who spit their junk technical analysis articles every day.

Your use of the word "blockchain" only brings confusion. Bitcoin was created pseudonymous, and blockchain was created as a part of Bitcoin's protocol, but later various people ripped it from Bitcoin's protocol and started calling it "blockchain technology" and hyping it as a solution to everything, and at that point pseudonymity was long forgotted, especially with the private and permissioned blockchains.

Next, banks and exchanges are not the only weak points for privacy, literally any other service that knows your identity can try to trace your wallet and then sell this data to interested parties. The solution right now is mixing services and privacy coins, in the future there might be some protocol updates that will improve privacy.

I totally agree with your point that any comparison of Bitcoin with anything else is quite inaccurate because of Bitcoin's key properties, but I think it shouldn't contradict my main point that in the long run volatility will decrease and we won't see instant 10-20% price changes as well as bull runs/crashes as often as we see them now. As an example, in the next 10-15 years most countries should make up their mind about BTC, so there shouldn't be any reasons for panics that we experience now (China ban, ETF rejection).

It's the same as with exchanges holding coins, when we had Bcash/SegWit2x drama last year, almost all exchanges took neutral position and tried their best to give access to both chains for their users, although some exchanges had some questionable way to name potential after-split coins.
So, I wouldn't worry about voting power, it's very unlikely that a regulated entity like ETF would try to do something contentious, unless of course they would support government-backed fork. But even in that scenario the amount of coins is not the main factor during the fork, the main factor is everyday users, that's what important in long term, not the hashrate, not the price.

Generally, people are unfamiliar with online etiquette or don't care about it, so instead of searching they simply create new topics for their questions, and that's how any platform without hardcore moderation ends up clogged with same posts.
As for the second part of your post, you are both right and wrong. People who don't understand the technology are indeed speculating, but some are educated enough to make some good estimations of Bitcoin's actual value, so they can't be compared to gamblers.

These aren't use cases, it's just a bunch of blockchain startups, probably some ICO's. I'm not going to check them, but I'm sure most of them are at early development stages won't be ready for a full release anytime soon. So, they really shouldn't be called "use-cases" if they don't have any substantial amount of real users. Let's just look at this infographic in 2-3 years and see how many projects will still be running.

You're wrong, Bitcoin doesn't stop blockchain adoption, investors are investing in whatever they think will be successful, companies are using whatever they think is going to benefit them. Blockchain is not getting adopted because it's a highly experimental tech, it doesn't actually solve many real world problems, is very hard to implement and has its own flaws. That's why tons of altcoins and ICO's have failed and are going to fail, not because Bitcoin is drawing undeserved attention.

Printing money is not equal to infinite resources, you can only abuse it so much before the whole economy crumbles. And to attack Bitcoin you have to constantly burn electricity, and the only thing you really achieve is denial of service that has no lasting network effects. So, a 51% attack would only cause some short-term panic and inconvenience, which is hardly enough to kill Bitcoin. Also, with Lightning you can keep using Bitcoin even if the blockchain is being attacked by mining empty blocks, because you only need on-chain transactions to open and close channels which shouldn't be needed often.

Maybe it can't be avoided, but its magnitude can and should decrease, simply because the speculation can't continue forever. The price of Bitcoin has been so volatile because people have different opinions on Bitcoin fundamentals, some say it's useless, others believe it's going to change the world, and this is the fuel for speculation. Take gold for example, it's the opposite of Bitcoin - it's boring, people have figured out all major use-cases long ago, nothing changes in its ecosystem. Eventually Bitcoin will become boring too, protocol improvements will become less frequent, adoption will be slow after reaching certain point, and with because of that there will be no reasons for the price to jump/crash, because Bitcoin will be predictable.

The incentive is that you eventually is going to die, so why hoard money your whole life? But before you die, you're get old and your quality of life will substantially decrease and you won't be able to enjoy spending your money, so you might as well spend them why you are still young/middle aged. Just ask someone if they want to have $1,000 now or $10,000 in 50 years.

Different people have different needs, and all wealth-storing methods have their pros and cons.

If we compare the long term value, gold and foreign currencies are likely to be stable or change their price by only a few percents in a year. Bitcoin can and most likely will go up and down by a lot, so it's more of an investment than store of value. Some people simply can't afford to risk or wait for a bear market to pass.

However, Bitcoin can be more secure to store if done properly, because the government can seize your gold/cash/bank account easily.

This ETF drama doesn't seem too important in the grand scheme of things, I don't expect either resolution to have a big impact on Bitcoin's price, but I look forward to seeing some new dynamic in Bitcoin's price, so far we mostly had boom/bust cycles with parabolic ATH's. A slow but steady growth could positively affect adoption and in turn reduce volatility even more. So, maybe we won't have any crazy bubbles anymore because Bitcoin is getting more mature and people are realizing that both the FUDers and the mooners were wrong and there are no fundamental reasons for Bitcoin's price to move so fast.

So far there is no clear example of Bitcoin growing as the result of some economic disaster. People expect that Bitcoin will be used as a hedge, but they forget that Bitcoin is highly volatile and immature, so those who want to preserve their money are more likely to use safer options like gold or foreign currency. Turkey's economy is also too small to have significant effect on Bitcoin, if we had a crisis in EU or the US, that would be more likely to boost Bitcoin's price, but I doubt it would be enough to trigger a true bull run.

It was dumb to predict linear growth for Bitcoin, the market was volatile and still is volatile, and the only way to know that it has matured is when we'll have a relatively stable price for many years. But the current prediction on the site predicts another bubble in 2020-2022, which makes sense, because of the next halvening, but also it seems like they are just extrapolating the patterns of the two recent bubbles, and who knows, maybe the pattern will change, especially if too many people are relying on it, maybe the bull run will start long before the halvening and will end shortly after it.

And how exactly are we going to avoid them? If they really want to get in, they'd influence the SEC to approve an ETF, and our opinion wouldn't matter. Also, if Bitcoin is so weak that it can get rekt by price manipulation from it's opponents (banksters, elites), than the whole idea was flawed from the beginning, because there's nothing we can do about it, we can't close exchanges or censor transactions we don't like. But I don't think that it's the case, Bitcoin can not be destroyed by price manipulation, and those who will try will fail and lose money, just like those who tried to spam the network.

So, the system was designed for cases when blocks reach 100% capacity and users start adding huge fees for their urgent transactions, but how would this system behave in those cases? It seems like you'd have to spend a lot of time trying to submit transaction while the fees are growing with each block, and ultimately it will be decided by luck, because all recent transactions will have the same value. This can negatively affect user experience in scenarios that require fast confirmations, like during some hot ICO's or in certain dapps.



This would require cooperation between majority of miners, if a small miner would try to do this, they would risk losing their own fees if other miners mine those blocks. But depending on how full the blocks are, the threshold for this attack might be quite low.

Did the author just glanced at the chart and decided that the score for "bitcoin price" is the same as it was 3 years ago? Because I just went to Google trends and checked it, today the score is 9, while in 2015 it was 1 for the whole year. This means that "bitcoin price" is still googled 9 times more than in 2015. So, either the author doesn't know how to look at charts, or they are deliberately spreading FUD.
Also, interesting to note that the searches now are close to where they were in Q1-Q3 2017, so during this bear market Bitcoin is as popular as it was during last year's bull market.

Solar energy is improving rapidly, but it's still expensive, and also has the highest carbon footprint among all green technologies. What really sucks is that some countries are closing their nuclear stations, because despite all the FUD, nuclear energy is quite clean and is very efficient.


That's only because we are still in block reward phase so mining is crazy profitable, but as rewards keep halvening, miners will have to rely on transaction fees, so Bitcoin's energy consumption will be more dependent on the amount of Bitcoin users. Also we'll have Lightning, so one onchain transaction will represent thousands of LN transactions.

The world could have saved a lot of Bitcoin's electricity if Satoshi had premined all the coins, but then Bitcoin wouldn't be trustless and decentralized. But he still made it so a big portion of coins were mined in the early days. Imagine if the supply curve was linear or parabolic, the energy consumption would be much higher in those cases.

20 years ago the Internet was more decentralized because there were no big sites. Today Google, Facebook, Twitter have a huge share of Internet users. And when information becomes centralized, it's easier to control it.
Also, those private blockchains aren't meant for consumers, they are used internally and between companies. Coins like Ripple and EOS are not centralized private blockchains, they are centralized public blockchains, which is more dangerous, because they try to compete with Bitcoin and try to hide from users that they are centralized.