Traditional companies are getting into ICO's simply to grab money from overoptimistic investors as well as boost their stock, just like it happened with that iced tea company not so long ago. But if a company is not doing well on traditional markets, there's no reason it should suddenly perform better because of ICO, this is literally just gathering fund via Ethereum, there's no innovation here that could be worth millions. There's no "blockchain technology" here, they will produce headphones just like before, and the only utility of their token is that it can be exchanged for their stock.

Maybe "crypto" market will die before institutional investors will be able to get in, because the market is full of useless ICO tokens and altcoins with unrealistic hype and no working product. This creates a high chance of massive crash when most of the investors will realize that this is going nowhere. SO instead it might be better to ask when will institutional money get into Bitcoin. To answer that, it might be already slowly happenning, but the big wave can be expected after altcoin bubble bursting, since there's still a lot of people doubting Bitcoin, but after it will survive the crypto extinction, people will judge it by its technology and will realize that it is actually working and useful.

Crap like EOS and Cardano is just marketing hype, they've invested millions in promoting their coins on social media and news sites, as well as pumping the price on exchanges, and tons of newbies and idiots are parroting their marketing buzzwords like "third generation blockchain", but in the end it is most likely to end up just like every other ICO - after the hype there will be nothing, they will be reporting some small progress every few months, the media will be covering it less and less, the price will be steadily declining and after a year or two the project will be declared as failed. Tons of people will lose their money because they are investing in something they don't understand while the people behind these scams will become millionaires.

Nice interview, I didn't know that  Laszlo  the pizza guy was involved in Bitcoin development and mining. I agree with him about Satoshi's anonymity, it's way better for the network this way, otherwise it would be like Ethereum with "benevolent dictator", even if Satoshi would decide to be less active in development, everyone would still be looking up to him. This would mean a giant single point of failure, if something would happen to him or if he would make a mistake, it would negatively affect the whole project. It's great that Bitcoin's development is meritocracy of smaller group of core developers and larger group of contributors, very few cryptocurrencies have such a system.

There are some good examples of big Bitcoin price movements timed with some significant Bitcoin news, but I don't remember a single case of Bitcoin clearly reacting to economic problems in some countries. The fact that Bitcoin is popular in Venezuela and Zimbabwe doesn't mean that citizens of all other countries are rushing to buy Bitcoin every time there are negative events in their economies. Traders also doesn't react to some small local news, they are interested in big players like China and the US.

Those all are good security practices, but the best and the simplest method is to use cold storage - either hardware wallet or dedicated device that is never connected to the Internet to only sign transactions and then broadcast signed transactions from some other device. This is safer because even if you do everything perfectly with your computer, there's always some some chance of getting attacked with some zero-day vulnerability or just doing a mistake, while isolating your private keys from the Internet is extremely secure, airgap-jumping malware is very rare in the wild.

We've already heard many different central banks voicing the same position, they are so used to controlling their country's currency and working with currencies of other nations that they can't just accept the reality that currency is a social phenomenon that can spontaneously emerge when many people decide to use it. It's almost like they are trying to convince people that government is the source of money and the whole economy wouldn't exist without it. But the fact that Bitcoin has got such a huge popularity demonstrates that there are people who don't buy the lies of central banks and understand how the economics actually work.

This is wrong, it's like saying that cars and planes are the same because they both have wheels.

Banks, as well as a lot of other industries are using cryptography for secure communications and user authentication. In Bitcoin it is used for user authentication and establishing consensus in decentralized environment. These systems are too different to simply reduce them to "cryptography".
Also, people are right to doubt cryptocurrencies and blockchain, they are still new and experimental, and only few coins like BTC or LTC can be considered safe. There are many examples of crypto projects having bugs and vulnerabilities that result in severe loses for their users, so being "blockchain" doesn't mean that it's secure and trustworthy.

I don't think that it's correct to say that less people are using Bitcoin now, because less transactions doesn't mean less users, it could mean that users doing less transactions than before. The peak of transactions per day coincides with the recent Bitcoin rally and huge trading volumes, so we can assume that the biggest use-case was trading and that explains why there's less trasnactions now as we are entering slow bearish market. I think hodling also counts as using Bitcoin, and I doubt that the number of hodlers is decreasing, most of the community is still pretty optimistic about the future.

It's a misconception that Mac is safer, in fact it has a lot of security vulnerabilities, and people are writing malware for it all the time. If you want a secure system, check out Qubes OS, it's based on virtualization and you can spawn lots of virtual machines for your tasks that will be isolated from each other and the core. But it's not invulnerable, so you still shouldn't do risky stuff like installing suspicious software or clicking suspicious links. And in general, being extremely careful about everything you do with the computer is much more important for security than choosing an OS or antivirus. Ideally you'd want multiple devices for different purposes like work, entertainment, finance, to minimize the risks and potential damage.

Most of the time it's true, but still there are some examples of the market very likely reacting to news. And it's not necessarily noobs with weak hands who are selling, I think it was mostly speculators who were doing it simply because they believed that the rest of the speculators will also do it, even if they themselves believed in long term success of Bitcoin. Those guys don't just HODL, they actively trade to get profit from volatility. In the last year I remember the crash when China banned ICO's, the crash before the end of SegWit signalling period and the crash after ETF was rejected. I think it's not too far-fetched to think that those crashes were directly caused by those events, since they were pretty important.






Altcoins are in general very bad for hodling, they tend to decrease in their BTC value in the long run, they are much more likely to suddenly crash or even die.

Somewhere between late 2019 and mid-2020. It's a common knowledge that markets have bullish and bearish phases, and the recent ATH and crash now look like a conclusion of a long, almost 2 year bull run, so by the logic now is the time for bear market that should last at least a year. The price shouldn't necessary fall to the ground during this period, but it will be slowly declining, then stagnating until a new rally will start.

When the market quickly jumped from ~7k to 9k, I wasn't very enthusiastic about it, because it happened so quickly without any clear reason, and the market was bearish for only a few months after the ATH. I expected the bear market to last way longer, and maybe right now we are returning to it. People tried to bring back the hype by claiming that Bitcoin will go to $50k or higher within a few years, and maybe it will happen, but I feel like now is too early for a bull run. On the other hand, this can be just a reaction to bad news, we've seen it happening with "China bans Bitcoin" last year, when the price crashed quickly, but then rebounded in a few weeks.

Bitcoin fees are driven by open market, they get high when there's a huge demand for transactions, and they get extremely cheap when the demand is low, like for example today. SegWit is not a hack, it's an upgrade that fixed malleability vulnerability, which allows developers to now work on awesome new features. Lightning Network is getting closer and closer to official release, and there's already thousands of nodes on mainnet. People who are working on it are making sure that it's absolutely stable, they don't want to release half-baked software with bugs that can cost millions, like it happens with altcoins. There's no way Bitcoin will ever reach $1000 again.

Most of that profit generated from gambling is concentrated in hands of owners, investors and top management, you don't need to have many employees to run a casino. So, the positive effect of gambling industry is relatively small, comparing with the amounts of money flowing through it. But the biggest problem is that it has a negative impact of making poor people poorer and ruining lives of those who develop addiction - this is clearly a negative social and economic impact of gambling.

People are wrong for stigmatizing it, because it makes the problem worse, what is needed is better education, teachers should be covering gambling in schools when they teach probability at math classes. Cryptocurrency casinos are also better from economic point of view, because they offer investment opportunity to broader public, instead of making few rich people richer.

There's no chance this statue is going to actually get installed, so far it's just some few activists presenting their project, it would need to get approved by officials, and this is where it will stop. Maybe it could get installed in some remote location, but these guys want to install it on one of the main streets of the city, so there's no way officials would allow to place a statue of someone in their mind so insignificant (they'll probably hear the name "Satoshi Nakamoto" for the first time when they'll hear this proposition). Journalists really like to post news about some awesome things that are going to happen, but so often it's just promises and ideas that never become a reality.

Ripple at least pretends to be a decentralized cryptocurrency, and since most newbies are not able to analyze the technology by themselves, they easily believe this manipulation. But government-owned "cryptocurrencies" are obviously centralized, they will have monopolized mining, nodes, maybe even mutable blockchain - it would be very hard to form any hype around it when it's the opposite of everything cryptocurrencies claim to be - decentralized, permissionless, open-source, free. Petro has failed, and this Russian coin will fail too.

ICO's will dramatically reduce in their popularity, because most of the time there's no reason to issue any tokens, they are there to just lure greedy investors who expect quick returns. With crowdfunding people get the product instead of shares or stocks, so again, there's no need for tokens.

I don't thing that there's some huge need for decentralization for crowdfunding, the platforms are not a problem most of the time, the biggest problem in crowdfunding is the lack of responsibility, there are tons of scammers grabbing money and not delivering their promises or setting up unrealistic goals in the first place. Decentralization would actually make it worse, because there will be no centralized moderation, so people will have to rely on community and their own judgement, and this doesn't always work well - ICO's are a great example to it.

Bitcoin haven't revolutionized the scamming and other activities, there are way more scams and ponzi schemes featuring bank payments than those that are focused around Bitcoin. People who are aware of them understand that it's not a problem exclusive to Bitcoin, so Bitcoin's reputation does not suffer here. Those who are pointing out scams to criticize Bitcoin are usually already prejudiced against it, so it doesn't matter much.

It's probably starting with a phone call, but then they convince victims to continue communication via email and then give them instructions how to buy cryptocurrencies on exchange and send them to scammers. But I don't think that this scam can become widespread, because scammers prey on naive and technologically inexperienced people, usually the elderly, and using cryptocurencies would probably be very hard for them, so scammers would have to put a lot of time and effort. It also makes their story less sound when they tell people to purchase some "bitcoin" rather than just pay them directly form bank account. So, overall they are reducing their chance to succeed in order to gain some degree of protection against prosecution if they will manage to hide their transactions.