To the early birds, it might be just that they simply never saw Bitcoin going where it is today - or the lack of information regarding cold storage and wallet safety. Most early Bitcoiners played with the currency just for fun. I've lost my passwords to some of my older accounts as well. To some of them it was because I did not care, to others it was because I simply forgot about their existence and others were just too complex for me to remember.

If people care, they spend their time securing their funds. But too many people trust their devices way more than they should.

I'd choose Trezor. Unless you want to store Monero as well, I'd go for the Model One. It's fully open source and has a very long community history with audits and lots of tests. The closest competitor is Ledger, which is only partially open-source and that is popping up a pretty large question mark for me.

USD is only one of the many reasons BTC's price is moving. The USD getting stronger isn't really a sign BTC is going to drop. Especially as we're 1 year post halving, which is usually a very bullish year.. things may go unexpectedly wild soon, who knows..

To be honest, nothing would stop the government from issuing another executive order exactly like the one from OP but for Bitcoin instead of gold. In fact, it might be easier to find out who is using Bitcoin and who isn't rather than finding out who owns gold. One of them is on the unforgivable internet, the other is offline.

Gold is decentralized but as mentioned above, weight is an issue. You have to carry a specific, identifiable material in order to move around your wealth. Bitcoin lets you even print your seed on a t-shirt label and move to another country without suspecting a single thing. They are comparable and not at the same time, both having advantages and disadvantages vs the other simultaneously as well..

Its usage as a currency will decrease as years go by. The more a Bitcoin will cost, the higher the no. of owners it will be and the higher the no. of customers, the more congested the mempool will be. All in all, I don't see daily usage as a selling point of Bitcoin since as far as it looks, the situation of Bitcoin payments is only getting worse in time.

Banks are quite oppressive to cryptos anyway. On one hand, if I think about it, allowing BTC usage only off-banks sounds good, lol. The less we use banks, the better.

It does probably sound confusing to the avg person indeed. If banks are bound to close all accounts trading crypto, it means most txs will go offline. I'm quite sure a government would rather have txs they can control (banks are perfect for that) than barter and offline p2p ones. I guess they're going to come out at one point and clarify their statements, because this sounds quite weird coming from a gov..

Pretty hard to introduce someone to Bitcoin when they already have some certain thoughts and beliefs impregnated in their mind. When you realize they simply don't want to be even a little bit curious about BTC and only care about what they've been told, you want to give up any kind of hope that you have left...

Congrats for introducing others to BTC, but I still think that it's only a matter of time before a very large amount of people will start researching BTC themselves. The world's economy is crippling. They'll look after decentralized currencies.

I don't see LN as a permanent solution to the scaling issue though. LN has its disadvantages and over the long term, it would not be enough either.

Bitcoin needs to scale without a secondary layer. Until then, it'll remain an issue for many. Since Bitcoin itself is barely adopted, I can't imagine LN having that much of a success tbh.

I have yet to hear someone say they've entered crypto because Binance exists. You've been around for more than 6 months - it's almost impossible not to learn how Electrum works. In fact, Electrum is almost as simple as it can be. A newbie-friendly wallet is a wallet that has just the very basic Bitcoin functions such as spending and receiving. We could have a very basic Electrum version for newbies, but that would remove a lot of the features Bitcoin exists for.

Binance was here after crypto. They do some good when it comes to adoption, but on the other hand they hurt the environment by letting P&Ds and trying to monopolize the industry in their hands.

Create your "fair" coin and let us be. I'd bet anything it'd turn into a failure.

Everyone mints at the same rate, right? When people sell, who buys their coins? If after one year you still get 1 coin per minute and someone accumulated a million coins while still earning 1 coin per minute, they will ALWAYS be in advantage.

Fairness is almost impossible unless you want to launch some communist-like currency. And where there's extremism, there's no more freedom. So this is completely contradictory to what we're trying to achieve with Bitcoin's existence.

As long as there is a way to profit and take advantage, there will be no equality.

Binance, Coinbase and many other major CEXs are making similar moves, intentionally or not. And I believe it's unfortunately intentional. If you can manipulate markets to your advantage by crashing your own service, why not?

Robinhood sucks. But since most would do something to profit off such as crashing their own website even if it's at the expense of their own customers, unless we go decentralized we cannot guarantee some CEX will not do something like that sometimes in the near or far future. So best thing we can do is just abolish those exchanges and go decentralized.

Weird seeing people regret not purchasing BTC at $10k when I know I've been there when BTC was worth 100x less than that. I think we've all had moments during which we regretted not taking another decision than we did, but at the end of the day this is how we learn. Through mistakes.

A lot of people are questioning new stuff, especially when you have not been mentally programmed to accept it. Movies usually mentally program us to already accept new tech without being skeptical about it. Since MSM has already impregnated the idea that BTC is bad in our minds, chances are someone will question or even refuse Bitcoin from the start rather than check it out.

We don't currently have a decentralized currency besides cryptos. Fiat is fully centralized.

Satoshi wanted to create something to help us move away from the criminal system that pushes us through various less or more harsh recessions. Bitcoin has launched during the 2008 crisis. We needed something separate from our system.

He likely did not plan to create something to make people rich though. The number of OG Bitcoiners that are rich today is negligible. The only advantage we have is that we're early in the crypto industry. The more people join, the more likely it is that our reward will be higher.

At the end of the day, the rich are still going to be in advantage. But overall, the thing that matters the most is that we have a system that cannot be manipulated and controlled by governments or any other third party.

The exchange only knows the address you have withdrawn your Moneros to. If you have a personal XMR address and you move your exchange funds to it, they'll know. But as soon as you move away your funds from your personal XMR address towards another one, things will go dark. All the exchange knows now aboht you is your withdrawal and that's it.

If you're looking for as much anonymity and privacy as possible, Monero might be a better solution for you instead. With Bitcoin, the smallest mistake you make could always turn into the reveal of your entire financial history.

Here's how I'd do it:

1. Purchase Bitcoin through an ATM or an exchange and mixing/CoinJoining the purchased funds. Main disadvantage of this option is that you risk having your face screenshotted by the ATM machine and the exchange will hold identifiable information of you.
2. Purchase BTC through Bisq. Main disadvantage is the little bit high fees.
3. Purchase BTC p2p face-to-face. Main disadvantage is personal safety. Also, for large sums, I would consider the person I'm conducting business with might be authority personnel.

If I had to choose among the 3 above, I'd opt for the 2nd or 3rd option. Using third parties means sharing personal information with them (and other parties) and I don't want to comply with that.

It just doesn't work that easy to scam so many people and it likely gets less probable to find new victims the more your scam is running. Roger probably found out the BCH community is already larger than he imagined it'd be and so he had to pull back and allow BTC to be placed in front once again.

At the end of the day, people are looking on his site for the real BTC. He's losing a substantial amount of visitors and potential customers he could've made a fortune out of, without having to deceive anybody.

From the governmental side, there are many on the frontline. Whoever feels threatened by Bitcoin's existence is going to try fighting against it. I don't think there's any specific governmental body that works against cryptos. From the Bitcoin side, devs are the frontline, followed by us.

The thing is, it seems like in Bitcoin's case, lines of code have more power than a government does. This seems insane but it's how it is.

I cannot get how some people still defend this issue when such problems come up. From both outside and inside, it looks like Bitcoin is flawed. Imagine having to pay $7-8 for every single bill you have inside your wallet.

We just havr to accept the idea that Bitcoin cannot scale. The rich are under advantage once again. Unless it gets the ability to scale, it might all turn into a big failure.

When has it been found though? I mean, models based on historical data are all accurate and cool but how "battle-proven" are they really?

There are so many metrics it's almost impossible for at least one of them not to be accurate enough to be considered "a good prediction". This is why I almost never take all those advices for granted. There are too many different ones, and someone will almost certainly get it right.

Well, if you don't like the idea that brought up Bitcoin to existence then why would it even be an interest of yours? Nobody forces you personally to use crypto either. But forcing an artificial centralization of the Bitcoin supply (or mining hashrate) is an idea I certainly don't like. Let's just not include the criminal banks even here into discussion.