The effect of ETF/Gemini et al. is greatly overestimated, in my opinion. It's not these things that bring no real benefit to the usability of bitcoins, that bring really no innovation to the field that will catapult bitcoin to mainstream.

Besides, we already know about these things.


What will really make bitcoin succeed are the projects we don't currently know about, projects we currently aren't paying attention to. Who knew that clash of clans will become so popular when it's really just a clone of so many other similar games? We don't really know when something will breakout like that. Or what it will be.

If I had a rice cooker, I could use it to make bread. Just because something is made with a certain purpose in mind, doesn't mean it has to be used for that purpose. It doesn't even necessarily have to remain as the primary purpose.

It's the same for bitcoin. If bitcoin was meant to be a currency, that doesn't mean it works best as a currency. Certainly it doesn't work very well right now, because the infrastructure is not there. I can possibly imagine a day when bitcoin will work well as a currency, but it is far behind fiat in pretty much every single way currently. There's no point having a fast international transfer confirmation when it can't really be used on the other side, or would take days to have it converted back to fiat at some cost.

There's no real point in forcing bitcoin to be a currency right now. It can do that when the infrastructure is more mature, and it gets better at doing that. For now, it is good as a speculative asset, and I think the key is to get people to recognize the potential of this technology, rather than to try to force them to subscribe to some political ideology.

This isn't necessarily true. When it's very small, people will pass it off as a scam. Once it gets to a certain size, it kind of brings a sense of legitimacy to it. The difficulty would look somewhat like a parabola, which begins off extremely difficult, then becomes easier, and then gets harder again as it gets too big.

I wouldn't know at which point the parabola inflects, but it's really not necessarily true that it's easier to increase the less it costs.

See, the point is, both fiat AND bitcoin are a part of your wealth. You can sell your gold bars, house, and whatever else for bitcoin as well. So that's why what you said is a fallacy. You can only compare fiat and bitcoin, bringing wealth into the picture doesn't work.

Even if bitcoin replaced all fiat, there will still be people with houses, with cars, with planes, with patents, with stocks. And they can sell those for bitcoins. Personally I'd rather have a mansion than bitcoins.

distribution of wealth != distribution of fiat. That is a logical fallacy.

Is this the "try to relate two things that have nothing to do with each other" game? I know how to play too.

Can oranges make airplanes smarter?

Seriously. Bitcoin isn't god, it can't suddenly solve all of the world's problems, and it wasn't meant to in the first place.

It's really too simple. Nothing happens then people lose interest.

Yeah, let's not delete this thread so we can laugh at the hypocrisy of it. Let's unite (centralize) against centralization!

I imagine the chances of it making you a millionaire is quite high, at some POINT before 2020. But it might fluctuate a lot still, and perhaps you won't remain a millionaire.

In fact, I believe that if you trade smartly (luckily) you can probably become a multi-millionaire (maybe even a low-decamillionaire) by 2020.

You can't just take 1995 money for 2015. As an example, people in China made maybe 100-200 yuan per month in 1995. Nowadays, the same people make anywhere from 5,000-50,000 yuan per month. It's not just inflation, people are getting richer in an absolute sense as well.

So I think if we take everything into consideration, we're no where near the importance of the internet for VCs in 1995 yet. I like what Cryddit said though, and I'm in absolute agreement. I didn't hear about bitcoin as early as he did, but I don't regret not getting in when it was only drug money, and I really feel that bitcoin needs "normal" people, those who are not lawless anarchists or extremely tech savvy nerds. And these people, like me, are slowly coming into this field.

Well, it depends... I wouldn't move to syria if they made bitcoin their official currency.

There wouldn't be a rally, there would be a huge crash across the board and chaos everywhere as everyone panics about a potential alien invasion

This is why you missed the whale who dumped 100,000BTC for $1 each as an April fool's joke for a few minutes before they were all bought out.

^Exactly.

To people that don't "get" statistics and probability intuitively: don't listen to ANY strategy. They're all losing ones, and there's no way you can find a winning strategy. If there was one, it would be common knowledge, and would be discovered by a statistician, not by someone who isn't very good at math.

If you want to play for fun, go ahead. Don't think you can win with any strategy, though. More people lose than win with any strategy.

Thanks man. You answered exactly what I was looking for. I hate how some people always try to be extremely vague and avoid answering the question. You're awesome.

Did you have a derp moment

Satoshi anticipated that they'd be on farms, not in warehouses. So that's why he needed to change the algorithm, so people would start farming instead of mining.

The real reason is to rebrand bitcoin as BTC2.0. With all the crypto "2.0" projects, Satoshi is afraid they will outbrand bitcoin and make his 1 million btc worthless. Besides, Vitalik is actually his evil triplet brother, so he can't lose to Etherium.

For your information, the third triplet is fake grimlock.

Also, they are already planning for the development and release of BTC 6.9 and BTC 666 in the near future. Look forward to it.

Nope. Completely wrong. 99.99+% of people are content with their national currency. There is absolutely 0 benefit to using bitcoin currently. Any potential discount is completely offset by the difficulty in obtaining bitcoins, and the transaction + exchange costs associated with it.

It's clear that the bitcoin of today is no where near as versatile, as useful, and as easy to use as USD, chinese yuan, japanese yen, euro, or any other major currency. Bitcoin fails on pretty much every point for the average person.

The bitcoin of today is about as useful to the average joe as the first computers were. Or the first airplanes. Or the internet in 1990. It simply is NOT useful yet.

Even if the action of sending bitcoins from one address to another is not particularly difficult, that is only a small part of the whole process, as it is. Showing people how to do that doesn't help. Even if they think, okay, that's not too difficult, when they look for an exchange and see how hard it is to actually obtain bitcoins, they'll give up right away.

But let me ask you this. If I had this card, and I show you how it works (say it works exactly like a credit card, except it's accepted at 1/10000th the number of stores visa/mastercard is accepted at) and you see it's not too difficult to use, what motive do you have to suddenly start using my card? None. There's no benefit to it. So you're not going to use it.

It's really that simple. The reason you guys might want to use it is because you're motivated by a particular interest, whether it's in technology or some political agenda. But the vast majority of people in the world don't have that motive. They need to see actual, real benefits to THEM. They don't care if this technology succeeds or not. So they have no reason to use bitcoin.

Again, the selling point of bitcoin is in its promise as a TECHNOLOGY. Perhaps it will ONE DAY be feasible as a currency, once the foundations have been set, and disruptive businesses have been built on and around it. Once it's easy to use, and is beneficial for the average person. Currently, that's just not the case, and to "force" it into a currency won't help at all.

People are pretty skeptical these days. Words such as "digital money, virtual currency" only give people red lights, and make them think it's an elaborate scam. Especially when you tell them that this "money" essentially came out of thin air. The fact that fiat came from thin air as well doesn't even matter, because people are hypocritical, people are irrational like that. They're used to fiat, they're not used to this new thing, and they'll be skeptical.

I think we should avoid bringing up those words. Especially when you're talking with someone who's never heard of bitcoin before. If they've heard of it, don't stress that point. Rather, stress it's amazing potential as a technology, how it might be used to build business that was not possible before, how innovative it is, and how it'll continue to improve as more and more people build on top of it. I think people will be less skeptical, and less defensive like that.

Are you making money yet? I highly doubt it. It seems you invested quite a bit into this though.

I think right now you need to improve the UX, and make the website look a lot better. Otherwise people are going to close the window right away, even if they decide to check it out.