People who have 5000 merit don't care about merit, they are passionate about Bitcoin, and that makes them receive merit for almost every post, because they don't force themselves to post. Simply earning a lot of merit is such a pointless goal in life. Like 500-1000 merit is enough to join any signature campaign. And no one outside of this forum knows or cares what merit is.


You can't earn 5k merit by trying to earn 5k merit, you need to have deep understanding of Bitcoin and many related topics and apply them in new contexts, like discussing fresh development in Bitcoin ecosystem.

Microstrategy is in no way an indicator of anything or a significant enough force to control the market, so I see no reasons to care about what it is doing. They have been buying when the bear market only started, and it didn't help to reverse the course or stop the fall.

The last market cycle was driven by institutional adoption hype, somehow I doubt the next cycle will have the same hype, because people will look back and say "that didn't work in the end".

There's no way to reliably predict the price. If there was, there would be millionaires and billionaires who got rich from speculative trading. There are no such people known to the public. Warren Buffet got rich from investing, but his method is based on analyzing businesses and markets. This is not applicable to Bitcoin and crypto. If you tried to do it, you'd reach the same conclusion as Buffet - that crypto is useless. Most of the people who got rich through crypto are just those who held for a long time and enjoyed the recent rides.

I wouldn't interpret it as bullish, mining has always been profitable, the price could drop by a lot, maybe to $10k or less, and it would still be profitable. Buying new mining equipment is a good way to increase your profit margins and make sure you won't be forced out of the market in the future.  And 162M doesn't sound like a big deal.

Out of the 4 categories that you listed, it's easily the Bitcoin noobs.

The developers don't care that much about the price, they are focused on making Bitcoin better because it's their passion. The miners and institutions are first of all focused on profits. They don't need Bitcoin to go up and up to profit, they just need it to not crash too hard. As long as the price is not too low, they will be collecting fees and making profit.

So, only noobs here are the most interested in Bitcoin going up, because that's their whole strategy - getting rich quick.

For Bitcoin to become a viable alternative, it needs to overcome three major obstacles.

First it must solve its technical limitations. Transaction capacity, fees, wallet management. Lightning network solves some of the problems, though even it can't provide the transaction capacity level necessary for global scale, because mainnet will still be limited, and you need it to open channels.

Then the second problem is price volatility. There's no mechanism that says more adoption brings down volatility. It's unclear how volatility will Bitcoin be in the future.

Third problem is simply convincing the people to switch to Bitcoin. Even if the first two obstacles are removed, the people might just keep ignoring Bitcoin, because they are satisfied with banks and fiat and don't feel the pressure to change their way of handling money.

There is nothing special about $100k or any other price level, other than that we are used to base 10 so it's a nice psychological milestone. Bitcoin is bought by people who believe that its value will go up or at least won't go down. A few years ago it was unimaginable that Bitcoin will be stable above $20k, because $20k was the peak of 2017 market. Maybe the history will repeat and there will be new highs conquered and secured. Or maybe indeed Bitcoin will reach a maximum and struggle to find more buyers. No one can predict how it will play out.

They actually very easily could. Just block all transactions from crypto exchanges and monitor p2p transfers. But what would they gain from fighting Bitcoin? Bitcoin is not taking away their business. People are not paying with Bitcoin in stores. People are not using Bitcoin for loans. It's more profitable to take their share of Bitcoin pie by processing Bitcoin-related transactions.

Some overly cautious banks were banning Bitcoin-related transactions because they were afraid of dirty money. But it was just their miscalculation.

Not true, simply sending coins from one address to another even many-many times  would be very easy to trace. Even if you try splitting and using many addresses, it would still be detected by specialized algorithms. Bitcoin mixing provided by specialized services uses coins of many individuals at the same time and they make algorithms for tangling their transactions specifically to counter the tracking algorithms.

But mixing doesn't make coins anonymous, it breaks the connection between the coins that you sent to a mixer and the ones that you received. You can still screw up and break your anonymity, for example by using the mixed coins as input together with non-mixed coins that are connected to you.

That's what people were saying 10-15 years ago. And Bitcoin showed little progress in becoming a popular currency. Its price has skyrocketed and tens if not hundreds of millions own it, yet it's not used as a currency. The main use is being an investment, because it showed great performance in the past. But if for some reason it will stop growing fast, it won't be popular even as investment.

What will change in 10-15 years? A new generation? The current youth is already viewing Bitcoin and crypto only as a method for getting rich quick, they don't care about inflation of fiat currency or financial freedom.

There's a lot of gold hidden in the ground and in the oceans, or even in asteroids, but it's all very expensive to mine. This means that this gold will be slowly increasing the supply on the market and won't crash the price.

Always remember that the price is a function of supply and demand. Bitcoin total supply is well known, but supply available on the market is unknown. Any day someone can decide to dump hundreds of coins that they were holding for years. It's even worse with demand - it's unclear whether people buy it with intention to hold for years no matter what, or if they are just speculator who want to make quick profit and then wait for a new low to repeat the process.

I have a feeling that on this forum there's a very common opinion that all regulations are bad, and if society gets rid of them and the government, everyone will get rich and the economy will be booming.

As for Bitcoin, it itself is impossible to regulate, and I don't think there has ever been any attempts to do so by pressuring devs, miners and full node operators. But Bitcoin ecosystem absolutely should be regulated, exchanges need to prove solvency; hyips, cloud mining and other scams need to be prosecuted; mining needs to be regulated to not cause disruptions to energy grid and to not contribute to environment pollution.

If you have been reading the news lately, you would know the story about OceanGate submarine that failed and killed all people onboard. The cause of this tragic incident is that the creator of the submarine chose to ignore regulations. He believed that they are only in place to stifle innovation and that he knows better than the others and can't be wrong.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush said in 2021 he knew he'd 'broken some rules' by making the Titanic submersible out of carbon fiber and not pure metal: 'You're remembered for the rules you break'l

This should be a cautionary tale to people who dream about society without government and its regulations. Imagine if someone makes an "experimental and innovative" nuclear reactor that explodes and gives radiation sickness + cancer to hundreds of thousands. Or someone makes an "experimental and innovative" dam that collapses and floods houses. Invisible hand of the market won't be able to undo the damage or prevent it in the future from repeating again.

It's more efficient to buy Bitcoin than to earn it, because all the earning opportunities in the world are in fiat, and only a few are in Bitcoin, with a lot of competition. And doing faucets, bounties, trading is a really bad earning method, compared to running a small business or just finding a job. But you are right, the people who just bought Bitcoin need to first of all learn all security best practices.

Bitcoin is so volatile the year to year comparison will often show it either as the best investment or as a total failure. People who bought it as $69,000 don't think that it's the best investment.

And Bitcoin is so young, that it's hard to talk about its future with any certainty. Clearly the performance of the past, when it was increasing in value by 10 times will not be replicated, because conditions are different - there is mass awareness, there's no euphoria about financial revolution.

When I joined this forum there was no merit system yet, so I became a Hero member by just posting whatever came to mind, and I didn't have a goal of joining signature campaign, my main motivation of checking the forum was looking for jobs and altcoin bounties, so I was only making a few posts per day to keep increasing the activity score. As I earned more bitcoins, I became very interested in how Bitcoin works and what awaits it in the future, I started participating in discussions and started earning merit for my posts.

So my advice to newbies is to not force yourself doing something that you don't want to do.

Fiat payment system have fees, but they are paid by merchants rather than the buyers. In turn merchants have to rise the prices.

Which system is more expensive depends on a typical transaction size. Bitcoin fees don't care about the monetary value of transaction, so when the fees are high, small transactions become unviable. But for large transactions Bitcoin can be cheaper, because 1% from $5,000 would be higher than a typical Bitcoin fee.

But without Lightning Network Bitcoin is not viable for commerce, simply because it's limited to ~300k transactions per day, while there are 8 billion people on Earth.

A good way to start would be to apply your real world expertise that can be related to Bitcoin. If you know about economics, post about the relationship between the economy and Bitcoin. If you know about cybersecurity, discuss threats to Bitcoin users.

However, I think your question has a flaw. If you already know what to post, you wouldn't ask it. And if you don't know, then it means you have nothing to say to this forum. If you are forcing yourself to write posts, then you are wasting your time.

I was mildly surprised when I checked the price today and say it jump by almost $2k. Of course in Bitcoin it's a normal occurrence, but this recovery feels quite quick, I suspected that the $26k range will last for a lot longer. But I wouldn't be surprised by more gains, because everyone expects a bull run in next year after the halvening, so it would be logical to start accumulating now, which could be causing these price spikes when some big buyers do it. But then the price is knocked down a bit by short-term speculators who take their short-term profits.

A global economic crisis will reveal whether Bitcoin market participants view Bitcoin as a reliable store of value like many say they do, or if they merely view it as a speculative investment. If it's the latter, then Bitcoin will crash, because an economic crisis is not a good time to put your money into risky investments, it's a time to put your money into safe havens.

I think it's impossible to say whether Bitcoin is a safe haven or not without putting it to the test.