If we'll filter out all those scam ICO's that only maintain their github repositories to trick investors into thinking that they are developing something, we'd still be left with a lot of genuine projects that have failed. I believe that the reason for that is the fact that blockchain technology can't be easily applied to everything, because it's very inefficient and sophisticated so it simply doesn't work in many cases. Bitcoin succeeded because it is based on game theory in a form of its mining, so if a blockchain project can't have something similar to secure its ledger, it loses all benefits of blockchain and is left with all the downsides.

I'm seen the same situation - majority of my referrals are not playing or playing a bit with faucets, but a few of them wagered quite a big sums, so I got a very nice referral commission. It seems like the best way to get referrals is to post in on your own personal site with big traffic, especially if it's a site about gambling - last year, when BTC was at $400-600 some owners of casino reviewing sites reported earning a few BTC per year through referral commission. But amount of referrals is not the only goal of signature campaign, the much bigger effect of it is that it raises brand awareness so when people are regularly exposed to ads they know the names of different casinos and are more likely to visit them in the future manually.

This is a good example of why decentralization is the key feature of Bitcoin and we must do everything we can to keep Bitcoin as decentralized as possible. Online wallets like Coinbase are not much different from banks, since they have power to dictate their users what to do with their money, which is exactly why Bitcoin was created at the first place. The only correct way to use Bitcoin is to run a full node and be your own banks - and this is why people like Craig Wright who want Bitcoin's network to have 10 or 20 nodes are wrong and malicious.

Tokenization is not really that revolutionary, as digitalization of assets in centralized manner has been done for years already. But what is revolutionary in cryptoeconomics is the fact that those systems are working completely without any central organ. Even economists from Austrian school didn't predict that there will ever be decentralized money - they were advocating for money issued by private parties. Bitcoin would also interest those who study game theory, because game theory lies in its foundation. Right now we see that some economists call Bitcoin a bubble because they've been living in a world of stocks and assets for their whole life, so they refuse to understand how Bitcoin can have any value if its not creating any profit. So, we'll definitely see some additions to economic theory that will study Bitcoin - the only question is if they would eventually get accepted into mainstream or not.

There is already a cryptocurrency like that, it's called Raiblocks and it's "mined" by human workers who solve captcha and claim coins from a centralized faucet server. You can come up with your own ideas how to implement a human-based PoW, but it will just be an experiement with almost zero chance of becoming an actual widespread currency. Value exists when there are people who are willing to buy it, and buyers don't really care how it was produced, they only care about its property. So, even if you'll take many people and make them work hard on creating a currency, the market can easily decide that its value is lower than amount of work spent on creating it.

There may be some similarities, but there are also many differences between dotcom bubble and cryptocurrency growing.

Stocks of dotcom companies were traded institutionally while cryptocurrencies are traded on their own specialized exchanges, meaning that it's less likely that unknowledgeable  people are investing in cryptocurrencies. They have not yet gone fully mainstream, so it's different from the dotcom bubble.

Also, cryptocurrencies had their starting value at near zero prices, so it's less extreme to see them growing dozens and thousands of times than seeing the same with companies that are supposed to have their stocks reflect the profitability of the company.

And lets not forget that some companies have survived the bubble and now prosper, so even if many altcoins will die, like many experts are expecting, Bitcoin will survive and keep growing in the long run.

Lets just hope that those who are losing money with BCH are only pump organizers like Roger Ver, and average Bitcoin users who have claimed their airdrop are the ones who will profit from it the most. It would be very sad if it will turn out that sites like Bitcoin.com managed to convince some people that BCH is "the real Bitcoin" and made them to buy and hodl it. Because BCH has no future, it will be used simply as a tool for attacking BTC until the attackers will decide to stop.

Have you heard about casino bankroll investing? I've been doing this for more than a year on two different sites, in short you deposit your money into casino so they can become a part of their bankroll and used to pay winning players. When I've just started, the returns were quite high sometimes, you could get 5-10% at some months, but now many people have invested their coins, so the profits are more dilluted and are around 0.5-2% per month. This is probably one of the safest way to get additional profit from your BTC, since it's  legitimate business and not some hyip or ponzi, but you still have to do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose - there's always a risk of hacking or scamming.

Mining was introduced with only one simple goal - to prevent double spending. In Bitcoin's network costs of double spending attack outweigh potential gains from this attack, making it unprofitable, thus discouraging people from doing it. In the future, when Bitcoin's value will be very high, it might be more attractive than today to try to make a double spending attack, so it's important that the network has to always be secured by enough hashpower. But again, there will be a new self-regulating mechanism for it - if Bitcoin's value will be high because of interest from users, the total amount of fees per block will also be high, so more hashpower will be working on securing the network. If the interest and price will be low, than double spending attack will also be less profitable, and less hashpower will be needed.

We don't need to hit exactly 21 million coins to start seeing effects of shrinking supply, one of the reason why Bitcoin's price is growing is because we had a halving last year. And there are a few more big havlings left until we'll hit 98-99% of total supply, which means there still a lot of space for price increase for this supply shrinking effect. But as Bitcoin's supply will be approaching it's limit, demand will turn into the main force behind Bitcoin's price. Also, Bitcoin's supply could be viewed as negative, because from time to time people will be losing their private keys, thus leading to a permanent removal of corresponding coins from economy, but this effect would only be noticeable in a very long run.

The second one can be described as trading, and while it's much more profitable than just hodling, when executed perfectly, it comes with a risk of losing your money - i.e. you can sell and it will only go higher, or you can buy and it will crash shortly after. In general, it's better to just hodl, because to succeed in trading you have to spend all your time on it doing different researches - for most people it's better to just work their job and use their salary to buy more BTC, or simply put some portion of their saving one time and wait for long term gains.

Day trading can be viewed as very close to gambling when it comes to Expected Value (EV) and the fact that they both are zero sum games (someone has to lose in order for others to win). There are people who have an edge in trading by having access to yet unknown publicly information, or by having huge amounts of money to dictate the price. So, for a newbie day trading can easily have negative EV, meaning they will be losing more than they earn. It's also hard to apply traditional trading theory to Bitcoin, because it's very different from traditional assets, for which those theories were developed.

Everyone has heard how some people claim that Bitcoin doesn't scale because it's blocks are too small, but the real reason for that problem is that our Internet connection doesn't have enough bandwidth to allow average users to process thousands of transactions per second. So, what does that have to do with privacy coins? Well, their transactions tend to weight much more than those of traditional coins, because of all those complex signature algorithms that create that privacy - hence, privacy coins are even less scalable than Bitcoin. Of course you could increase their block size, but it would cause node centralization, which would quickly defeat any privacy. So, private coins right now can't become a widespread currency, they can only serve as store of value.

I've noticed that sometimes there's a pattern when Bitcoin tends to rapidly increase in price when it overcomes some obstacle - recently it was August 1st with potential split due to UASF and BCH hardfork, then it was Chinese ban on exchanges, and a huge pump for BCH spiced with massive shill raiding. So, instead of damaging Bitcoin all those negative events actually strengthen it - they have showed us on practice how resilient Bitcoin is, so people are less scared that it can crash because of some fork or other attack.

I think one of the big reasons for this psychological effect is that "Bitcoin" is both the name for the network and it's main unit of currency, which makes people more focused on a value of one whole coin. Also, many people who are not familiar with Bitcoin may think that it can't be split into smaller units - they are used to fiat money where basic units like dollar or euro can usually be split into 100 small coins. But I don't think that it's a problem for Bitcoin, because anyone who gets interested in it quickly learns about how it works, so only a small amount of people gets discouraged from entering because of price.

I'm sure that he is just a paid troll who spreads FUD for people like Roger Ver and Jihan Wu when they want to pump their BCH. Genuine newbies are usually very unsure about everything while this guy was pretty confident that Bitcoin is dead. And it's really important that we, as Bitcoin community, oppose those shills on every media to not let their lies misguide newbies and lose their money by investing in worthless altcoins that has no other purpose than to damage Bitcoin.

I believe that this is nothing more than a bluff - it's a basic rule of economics that companies are following their customers, and not vice versa. They may offer their customers additional options by featuring altcoins, while still keeping Bitcoin as their main focus - but if they will simply leave Bitcoin behind and force all their users to switch to altcoins, this could easily destroy their company, because their customers will simply refuse to accept it. If people haven't switched to altcoins during all these years on their own, than any efforts of companies and miners can't force them to do so.

Bitcoin is based on a big assumption that people behave rationally - they do things to maximize their profit while avoiding operating at a loss. But what has been happening recently is that some people are willing to take losses - in a form of spending their money to pump and promote Bitcoin forks, for a long term chance to take control over Bitcoin. For them it's like a risky investment, so to defend ourselves against it we should make it as unprofitable as possible - we should never buy any forks, only sell them, we should also educate others about how forks are just fake coins. Lastly, there's always an option to switch PoW if majority of miners will go completely rogue.

Bitcoin is not going to die because of some temporary disruptions caused by manipulations with BCH's mining profitability via pumping it's price and having broken difficulty adjustment system. It already happened once, when BCH got slightly more hashpower for a brief moment, and we had spam attacks many times that caused the same disruption - and guess what, Bitcoin's price was never affected and Bitcoin grew to the current level regardless of those attacks and FUD. This is because altcoins don't really solve the scaling problem - they simply trade security for a small bump to capacity, which is not enough to become a widespread currency, no matter how big your blocks are.

The truth is, Bitcoin is the king not only because of the network effect, but because it is actually the best cryptocurrency out there - it has the longest development history, it has the highest number of developers and most of them are professionals, Bitcoin is the safest network out of all cryptocurrencies - only Bitcoin can be entrusted with hundreds of billions worth of value. Altcoins often promise some flashy features, but at the same time they are buggy and have to go through official hard forks often - this is why people aren't actually adopting them as a currency. With money people want stability and security first, and that's exactly what Bitcoin gives them.