All these new ATH before end of they year predictions sound completely crazy to me, it's not 2011 anymore when market cycles were  short. Are people really that scared to admit the fact that we have entered bear market and that it will be long, or are there just trying to slow down the fall with their moon promises? This might even do more harm than good, because people who took these predictions too seriously will get really disappointed when there will be no rally by the end of this year, this might even make some to sell.

What are you talking about? This isn't some convoy of armored trucks that can change its course, it's the Internet. Are you proposing for exchanges to constantly change their codebase? If so, that would introduce 1000 times more bugs.


Hackers are only scaring ignorant noobs, which might be good, because noobs are bad hodlers, they easily panic. Smart investors don't hold their coins on exchange and don't panic when some crappy exchange gets hacked, just like people don't rush liquidating their fiat whenever a bank gets robbed in their country.

Bitcoin offers different kind of globalization, it offers free, decentralized, anarchistic globalization, which is very different from this "the world united under one government" type of thing. Bitcoin simply brings freedom to send money to anyone in the world, and it is doing this right now - you don't need to change the world, topple governments or do anything to make it work, it's not an utopia, it's a reality. And Bitcoin doesn't require you to abandon other currencies, including your own national currency, it simply doesn't care.

Lightning is mostly already priced in, and some part of the last year's growth can be attributed to SegWit and Lightning progress, as they demonstrate that Bitcoin keeps improving, despite the false claims of altcoiners that it's "outdated" and "broken". Lightning's development is a pretty public process, so some very savvy investors will be buying more and more as Lightning gets closer and closer to official release, so don't expect a huge price surge during the event, it will most likely be just a small bump, like it happened with the halvening. After that the growth of LN and its user will be contributing to the price growth, but it will be a slow and steady process.

Governments are fine with tax evasion and money laundering when some high profile officials get their cut. Bankers and said officials hate Bitcoin because they don't want average joe to do those things, without him the whole system would crash. So, they ask economists to write FUD against Bitcoin in exchange for grants or bribes or whatever.

But maybe most governments don't ban Bitcoin because they see how robust it is. Historically they have failed to stop people from taking drugs, including drinking, or downloading pirated content and so on, so instead of banning Bitcoin they hope to discourage people from using it while keeping an eye on those who do by regulating exchanges and requiring KYC. So far it works because a lot of users don't care about their privacy and keep using those exchanges and avoid privacy-related practices like mixing.

Those people are barking at the hands that feed them, without Bitcoin there would be no "blockchain technology" or even if there were, it would just be a boring database only discussed among some few engineers. All their profits are only possible because Bitcoin went from cents to hundreds and later thousands, and they have found a way to convince investors that the same level of returns can be repeated with "blockchain technology".

Crypto news have been the same for years: a coin goes up a few percent - "bulls are taking over", "big rally ahead", etc.; a coin goes a few percent down - "bear market ahead", "deeper fall possible", "support broken". Same with countless new threads spawned by newbies.

People need to understand that on volatile markets such changes mean nothing, even bigger swings can be totally mitigated in weeks, like it happened in the last year when Bitcoin crashed many times but then returned to its course.

Lightning Network fees are of magnitude of satoshis and even fractions of satoshi's. This is virtually zero-fee transactions. Because Lightning Network is built directly on top of Bitcoin's blockchain, it is theoretically just as secure as on-chain transactions (this is not the case now, because the project is still in beta and there might be bugs/vulnerabilities). All the altcoins that currently promise free transactions and huge scalability are insanely centralized, so I wouldn't even call them cryptocurrencies.

This is probably something that you are looking for: https://programmingblockchain.gitbooks.io/programmingblockchain/content/

The book is rather short, but full of code examples, so it's a good way to start learning some blockchain programming. I'd also recommend you to get a strong grasp of cryptography, because without it you might seriously screw up something: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2818388.0

Also, keep in mind that blockchain is a very experimental technology, so learn it at your own risk.

In the early days of Bitcoin there was like a few thousands enthusiasts and Bitcoin was more of a hobby, an interesting project for coders and social activists. You have to realize that times have changed and a lot of people are here today just to grab some quick money. If the hype will die, the things will start resembling the early days, with people being more interested in technology and actual use than the price. This doesn't mean that the price need to crash, all we need is just lower volatility and less "get rich quick" schemes like ICO's and bounties. Eventually it will happen in the future, because the hype can't last forever, so don't worry too much about it.

I think the real reason is that China is scared of capital flight, which has been a problem for them for a long time. Imagine some Chinese millionaire converting a huge portion of his wealth into Bitcoin and then going on vacation to Europe, except he carries flash drives with his private keys, or tiny pieces of paper, or he just memorized his wallet seed  - if correctly prepared, it's impossible for border control to stop the movement of Bitcoins.

Some people have never trusted hardware wallets and used spare PC's and laptops as cold storage. Perhaps the chance of big hardware wallets going rogue is very low now, but for users with huge amounts of coins it's a risk they can not afford. But in theory every hardware can have backdoors, if Intel have placed crap like ME in their CPU's, it's totally possible that they might place some backdoors that will target cryptocurrency users if NSA would ask them. So, the future of cold wallets will be interesting, especially when the stakes will get higher.

This type of Bounty hunting that surrounds ICO's has no future, it's completely based on the hype around ICO's and even now the golden days of bounty hunting are gone. I remember how in 2016 and 2017 you could make a some dozens or even hundreds of dollars by wearing a signature here for a few weeks and retweeting some tweets, and very often you got paid with BTC and ETH, but even if not you could easily sell your bounty coins for BTC, even with the most shitty coins, because some exchanges listed almost anything for a small fee. It's drastically different today, because all the ICO's now are just Ethereum tokens that very rarely hit exchanges, so bounty hunters end up with nothing but hope that one day they'll be able to sell their tokens. But in the future it will only get worse, no one will trust ICO's and people who fully relied on them will go back to poverty.

That's just a FUD or lack of understanding how LN works, because LN transactions are actually the same transactions that we use on-chain, but they are not broadcasted to mainnet nodes, instead only LN nodes that are connected by a channel keep track of them, and this what makes LN scalable - nodes no longer need to store transactions of the whole network. So, LN funds are not some IOU's, or banknotes, or other abstractions that rely on some party to honor the agreement, they are real Bitcoins that can be claimed on mainnet by closing the channel, which means broadcasting the latest transaction of a channel. IMO this solution is so much better than all these centralized coins with a handful of big nodes that need to be trusted.

Hell no, do you remember what happened when ETH guys have tasked blockchain with running a company? It gave all the money to the thief because of some mistake made by programmer. Just imagine the disaster that would be caused by bugs if AI, blockchain and other buzzwords replaced the government.

Also, we have not even started working on AI that most people think about, aka General Intelligence - that thing that is called AI now is just an algorithm for solving some very specific tasks. People of the last century though we'll have flying cars and space colonies now, but instead we have the Internet and smartphones. People are really bad at predicting technology in long term.

I feel like Bitcoin is going to jump back and forth in this narrow range around $6,000 for quite a while, the bears don't want to sell too much because the overall sentiment still bullish, but the bulls don't want to buy now because the last ATH was only a year ago and it's too risky to hope for a new run so quickly. So, the most likely scenario for Bitcoin now is stagnation - there shouldn't be any truly big price movements for at least a few months, but probably till the end of a year or even longer. Maybe we'll see a gradual decline to $5,000, maybe we'll see some flash crashes caused by big FUD (happens from time to time), but most importantly there's still a lot of time till the next rally, which should be used to accumulate more coins.

If it is indeed damaging, it's only a little bit. People are jumping on altcoin and ICO trains because they believe that they have missed their opportunity to invest in Bitcoin, and altcoin marketers are playing on this sentiment by telling everyone that their coin is destined to become number one. So, this type of investors would probably not invest in Bitcoin if we imagine the situation when there's no alts on the market at all. Also, this flood of coins is just a byproduct of having an unregulated market, and I think it's better than having just Bitcoin and a few alts, but with tons of obstacles for average person.

I'm currently enjoying the fact that my country doesn't care much about cryptocurrencies, aside from a few MP's occasionally proposing bills, so my exchange doesn't report anything to authorities for now. But I have a feeling that by the time I'll decide to sell a big portion of my coins, the laws will be there - no country is going to ignore it forever, it would be too big of a loophole. So, there are three options left to avoid taxes on our precious profits in the future: avoid exchanges and trade p2p, which has huge risks of getting robbed/scammed; hope that BTC will be used as currency so we wouldn't have to sell it; or find a country without huge taxes.

At the current moment, when the mempool is very small, it's relatively safe to accept small 0-conf transactions, but this doesn't mean that in the long run Bitcoin can scale like that - during the periods of high fees low-fee transactions can stay unconfirmed for weeks and months, and when nodes start evicting them from their mempools, it becomes easier to broadcast double-spending transactions. Lightning is absolutely needed in the long run, like it or not.

I would target the worldwide demographic of people who don't have good acess to banking services or where those services are too expensive and also encourage employers, especially those that hire people for online work to use Bitcoin due to being more straightforward and cheaper alternative to the current payment channels. Also I'd promote Bitcoin in countries with weak economies and countries that are struggling through economic crisis, because Bitcoin can help people preserve their wealth.