I don't think that this paper uncovered something new, all these game-theoretic possibilities were discussed by Bitcoin enthusiasts since early days.
I think the author misses the fact that Bitcoin is more than just its hashing power, its main part is the community. Bitcoin community have already successfully defended itself against major attacks by miners and big companies - SegWit2x, Bcash and earlier forks. Maybe in the future banks and governments will try to launch 51% attack and mine empty blocks for a few days to scare users, but they can't keep it up forever, because it would cost millions every day, but users on the other hand will just have to wait, and with LN they won't be even bothered, since they will rarely need on-chain transactions.

I hope that when EOS will crash and burn, it will also drag all the other shitcoins like XRP, IOTA, Cardano and tons of other coins that popped up in the last few years. This is the result of crypto community not learning the science behind cryptocurrency protocols and being blinded by greed. Decentralization and security were always the main values of Bitcoin, but today people just don't understand how important and fragile they are, and they'll have to learn it the hard way when their portfolios full of altcoins will become worthless.

I don't think that the huge fees that we had last year were solely caused by attacks, because the trading volume was huge, people were massively buying and selling coins and moving them between exchanges, and at those prices $50 fee is quite reasonable for someone who is moving 5-6 figures. This is not to say that there was no attacks at all, there is some correlation with Bitcoin's mempool/fees and Bcash volume/prices, which suggests an attack.

I think there's only one big reason why cryptos haven't gone mainstream - most people are simply satisfied with banks, they don't experience any problems that are big enough to make them start looking for alternatives, people like the option of chargeback, since it gives them a feeling of safety when they do online purchases, and the last time people got angry at banks was more than 10 years ago, before Bitcoin was launched, and people in general seem to have very short memory. For an average citizen, cryptocurrencies have worse user experience and don't provide benefits for them, as people don't care about privacy and independence.

The current state of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in Ukraine is not that different from many other countries - so parliament members want to legalize it, each with different proposed regulations, some officials would want to ban or restrict it, National Bank doesn't want to recognize it as a currency, and in the end nothing changes, because majority of the government doesn't really care about it, it's not massively adopted to the point it would be making any difference, so the parliament just ignores all the Bitcoin bills. Try to pay less attention to news like these, they mean very little in the long run, only pay attention to when some laws regarding crypto get successfully passed.

I'm not a fan of Ethereum, but this article sounds really manipulative, because last summer was ETH's ATH in BTC price - 0.156 BTC per ETH. After that it had a huge crash - as BTC was rallying, ETH was staying in place, so it reached the last years low of 0.025 BTC per ETH - 6 times lower than ATH. Now it has recovered and trades at 0.07 - something in-between last years high and low. As for USD price, during last summer it was $371, now it's $458 - I wouldn't call this "bear market" that is specific to Ethereum, it actually seems to perform fine.

It's a bad idea to attribute small price changes to some events during that timeframe, because Bitcoin is so volatile that it's most likely just a coincidence. People need to distinguish small, unimpactful news from something that can really move the crypto markets. It's no longer 2011, the volume is huge, and expectations are much higher, so the news the news that could move crypto market have to be really huge - some official announcements from governments, integration by huge companies, etc.

Blockchain, blockchain, blockchain...
For 2 years already we hear this buzzword almost every day, and every time it's in context of someone telling how beautiful it is, how it will change everything in the world, and that critics are wrong, because the Internet was also criticized in its early days. But there's one big problem - there's still no working blockchain produtcs, no success stories, startups are grabbing hundreds of millions and still haven't delivered anything, huge companies, governments and banks are saying that they will explore it, and still nothing. Maybe blockchain technology isn't as fundamental as its proponents describe it, and maybe people should be more focused on cryptocurrencies as working examples of blockchain and working on expanding their functionality rather than creating thousands of unsecured blockchains.

On a protocol level, everyone decides for themselves which branch to follow after a fork, Bitcoin is not a democracy, it's pure voluntaryism. On a social level, it's pretty complex, because lots of factors are in play - hashrate, community support, node count, developer support, opinions of prominent people, exchange stance, etc. And even then it's kinda subjective, since there's already Bcash people who seriously believe that their coin is the real Bitcoin, and there's nothing that can change their mind.

He's totally right, except that blockchain technology is nowhere near as impactful as the Internet. It's been so many years, and there's still no use-cases aside from Bitcoin, only promises from altcoin and ICO people that they will deliver their products soon. But fundamentally blockchain is a very specialized technology, it was designed to work in environment where participants don't trust each other, it requires sophisticated setup with consensus protocol and nodes. Internet on the other hand allowed instant and global communication, so it was pretty easy to apply all sorts of ideas. After the dotcom bubble thousands of new and successful companies have emerged, but I doubt that there will be that many successful projects after the crypto bubble will burst, serious developers will focus their attention on strong coins that will survive, rather than creating their own coin from scratch.

I don't see any problems with people running multiple nodes, there are some benefits to running more than one node, it makes a user more resistant to certain attacks that involve Sybil nodes that try to isolate the victim from the rest of the network. And your argument with corporations is taking it to the extreme, I feel like the network with 12,000 nodes were every user has 4 nodes is slightly more secure than the network with 3,000 nodes with one node per user, as long as majority of users are honest, because it would be harder to attack the bigger network.

Very interesting find!

In sci-fi currency backed by energy, or in the form of energy itself, is a pretty popular trope, so maybe the last quote was influenced by it. But I wouldn't say that Bitcoin is backed by energy or hash power, because PoW is "wasted" in the process, you can't get it back like you could have exchanged banknote for gold. So, Bitcoin and other coins are secured by PoW, but not backed.  There are projects like Storj and Gridcoin that actually try to make coins backed by storage space and computing power, but so far they were not as successful as PoW coins, and there's a lot of criticism towards their security, which I think is valid.

I believe it will last for at least the rest of this year, and very likely the first half of the next year too.  In the early days the market cycles were 30-50 weeks long, because it wasn't very known, but since the 2013 rally Bitcoin came under the spotlights of institutional investors, analysts and mainstream media, so things have slowed down because now there's so much more volume. Also, the memories of the huge crash from $20k to $6k are still very fresh, so people are quite pessimistic or careful for now. If the price will remain stable for long periods of time, confidence will return to the market.

A lot of businesses that claim to accept Bitcoin actually use services of companies like BitPay that receive BTC on their behalf and immediately convert it into fiat for the merchant. So, it's like they instantly sell. I heard that some companies keep certain percentage of BTC that they receive, but those companies are crypto-based in the first place, so it's not surprising that they have more faith in BTC than non-crypto vendors.

If gold's price was only based on its physical properties, it would cost around the same as copper or tin. But this "intrinsic value" reasoning fails to explain why certain things become store of value or speculation and investment vehicle. The answer is simple - value is psychological phenomena, it can't be precisely calculated as if it was some physical property, because the price that we see on exchanges is the product of personal opinions of millions of people. So, it really doesn't matter that Bitcoin has no uses aside from monetary, because how good it is as money in eyes of the people is what determines its price.

I guess they are afraid of ICO's because officials often later treat them as securities, so Facebook doesn't want to risk getting into trouble. After ICO, most common crypto advertisement is probably exchanges and casinos. But after that, there's a lot of scams like cloud mining, malicious wallets, and sadly all these tech giants don't care about hosting malicious ads, because they are never held responsible for them.

And this is why I think there will never be a massive switch from fiat to crypto - most people are perfectly fine with centralization, they trust banks and governments and they are afraid of technologies like Bitcoin where users have so many responsibilities. Banks are like Windows, everyone use them even though there are many problems with it, and everyone is afraid or find it too inconvenient to switch to Linux. But I think it's fine, because Bitcoin will be, and already becomes the backbone of global grey/black market economy.

This is just survivorship bias, people are making tons of predictions in their lives, but they only pay attention and remember those that came true, and this leads them to thinking that they are geniuses that can predict future. You can try to point out how many times they were wrong, like in this case, if they were telling you to sell when the price was way lower than the current price ($1,000, 2,500, etc.). You can also remind them in the future, when BTC will reach new ATH, that they were ridiculing you after this crash. Also, tell them how rich would they have been if they've just invested at the bottom.

I think it's a bit harder than that, because governments don't like fixed supply, so they want to have centralized emission, meaning centralized mining, but they wouldn't want to just spent tons of resources on controlling the PoW, they would need to make masternodes. Also, even though people say that Bitcoin is not anonymous, chain analysis ain't free and easy, so governments would need to add some anti-privacy features and turn addresses into accounts that need to be registered.

Indeed, we haven't had a major economic crisis in this era of cryptocurrencies so we don't know how would they perform, most people think about them as a hedge against fiat, especially due to Bitcoin's fixed supply, but it's quite possible that cryptocurrencies would suffer from the global recession too, as people would be less willing to take risks with investments. I think Bitcoin would have better chances than any other coin, because it's the most secure and reliable coin, and these are good traits to have during crisis.