The notion that chaos creates order is not always necessarily true, as seen in some recent forks which are shaded by some sort of politics, ending up in a massive shit-show that the community never asked for. At first, decentralization sprouts genuine and cool ideas, but the moment crypto rakes in a lot of money in the hands of the holders, it is then tainted with greed and politics with only profit in mind without even thinking of the community that might get affected.

I'm believe in anarchy in some way but not to the extent that chaos only breeds chaos.

Depends on which 'reality' you're living in.

Kidding aside, I consider bitcoin as real money, as some stores and services gladly take it as a payment in exchange of what they sell or provide. It holds value, and can be used for real-world purchases and online transactions. As long as people accept something as a form of payment, it can be considered as 'money' and it does not need to be confined on a definition that it has to be 'state-issued' for it to be considered legal.

The 'need' to own bitcoin is often narrowed down to the 'need' to profit and take advantage of the hype, and that is talking about the current mindset for people who are using bitcoin. We don't necessarily need to use cryptocurrencies in paying for whatever it is that needs to get paid--fiat can do just that. What we need from bitcoin is to deviate from the current financial system and save ourselves from the chains of the governments and the banks and their watchful eyes on our finances and everything. Unfortunately though, we only see it as an investment tool nowadays, nothing more.

This is only applicable on the US though, and other countries don't necessarily need to comply with the US sanctions as they have their own say and entirely different jurisdiction for the said matter. This just goes to show how bully the US can be on anything that they think they can get their hands on, and bitcoin is no exception. They can mark any potential 'dangerous' addresses there are but it will make no difference given that at a certain point, the sphere of addresses that can transact with the marked address will only grow, and that might cause problems for people who aren't involved in the case.

A futures market alone could not single-handedly be the reason for such a tremendous crash, though it could have been a major part of it for all we know. In the case of CME, their futures started on Dec. 18, and by then we all know that the price is slowly reaching its final peak, up until the start of the crash in Dec. 22. That time, the price was slowly losing steam and everyone is on the sell mode. I don't believe that CME futures alone have crashed the market; panic sells also chimed in, too. If CME hasn't launched their futures market, we would still see the same crash, too, keep in mind that we had the Gox trustee to start it all.

He isn't wrong on his point, everyone seems to be too obsessed on the price in USD that we tend to forget on enhancing the fundamentals and have focused more on value. As such, we have this wild fluctuations in price leading to profits and losses, and the big guys have seen this as a weakness and have exploited the said weakness up to its core, causing the market to be highly unstable. If we want to move forward, we need to create more platforms, services etc. that's bitcoin-centric (or somewhat focuses more on bitcoin) in order to relieve the notion that most are after USD ultimately, and to have a wider use-case for bitcoin and crypto, not only for speculation.

It is bound to happen, IMO knowing that there are tons of money flowing inside the crypto space everyday. They don't want the money to be restricted and confined into an asset alone; they need to have some share of the pie, too. Also knowing that bitcoin and crypto can be converted into fiat, they feel the need to look over and regulate the space, so as to ensure that the citizens will be 'safe' on the cryptospace.

No matter how hard we empower decentralization, it will always be shut down knowing how powerful the capitalists and the governments are. It hurts their interests for people to deviate from the societal norms, and that is using and spending the money that they introduced, that's why they try so hard to get in to the cryptospace and regulate what they think are hurting what they protect. And also, at the end of the day most people will have to exchange their bitcoins to fiat since using crypto alone won't get you anywhere further in the real world, and in that scenario we are yet again giving in to the power of capitalists and governments.

If I understand, this means that all 21 million bitcoins are mined? Mining wouldn't stop by then as the network still needs to have the transactions confirmed, and no one will processes those transactions if miners and their machines aren't present. They can still get something out of mining by  the tx fee, and in theory, the value of 1 bitcoin will be so high that the fees per block would be sufficient as an incentive for the miners to keep on hashing.

Theymos simply is an early adopter, and a person who knows much about computer science, programming and cryptography in general. It's hard to link him to Satoshi Nakamoto especially since their posting habits, alongside the way they construct their posts is completely different. There had been rumors about that back in 2014-2016 IIRC and theymos just made a good joke about it (can't remember what the post exactly is). If anything though, it seems that Satoshi trusts theymos this much as he handed this forum administration to him.

I guess this is why theymos didn't implement the 'tag' feature for the forum, as he would certainly get a lot of it day by day

Regulation IMO is what actually invited some of the players around bitcoin, and completely removing that, alongside exchanges that facilitates some of the trades for fiat-crypto would impair the price by a huge bit. Not that I'm all-in for crazy regulations and such but I see them as somewhat a necessary part of the economy because it helps people buy things in a fast and smooth manner. At this point, only institutional investors actually coming in the market can create a massive push and ignite a new FOMO that happened in 2017.

This is not a new phenomenon and everyday, huge sums of money are being transacted in the blockchain. If anything, this is actually good, as the owner of the coins is moving his/her funds on a bech32 address, a Segwit address that has improved security over the legacy P2SH Segwit outputs, and could just be making a point. It could simply be an exchange or just some random rich dude moving funds here and there, and that does not necessarily translate to a dump immediately.

I think I have read this somewhere before

Anyway though, everybody starts to care for the environment when we talk about bitcoin, crypto and the machines that are being used to mint them but we don't bother to mention the amount of countries still lacking the initiative to switch to cleaner and greener energy source. We make numbers on bitcoin a huge deal but in other industries that harm the environment more, we set a blind eye to. Priorities and bigger money/payroll is what matters most, I guess, and most of these economists/environmentalists who condemn the cryptocurrency scene for the use of too much electricity are the ones who have other interests differing from what bitcoin and cryptos has.

Blame the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, I guess.

I wouldn't bank too much on this one though, seeing that institutional investors are still wary of the scene even though the big names are already setting plans for bitcoin come next year. Also, ICOs are indeed dead, given how strict governments are on these so-called "startups" after they have noticed that most are in it only for the quick money-grab and not actual innovation--not to mention the rise of ICO scams that were perpetrated in 2017 alone. As for the ETFs, if Bakkt would prove successful, I guess it will draw a line directly towards ETF approvals which has proved elusive for the past year no matter how viable and good the proposals are.

Well you can just create a new receiving address everytime you take a payment, and it's not that hard to automate that either. You can then transfer the funds into several other addresses to mask the trail/taint if you don't want anyone to get snooping all over your balances, and it wouldn't be hard to that as well. This is what major players and other small stores online do when they accept bitcoin, so it's not really that hard to implement and there are also loads of repositories of how to do that online.

I partly agree. Whenever the price rises, everyone's attention is only centered on the potential gains/profits rather than developments that could help the community grow and move forward as one. Whenever there are price crashes, we rarely see any news regarding new platforms, new development etc. as everyone is focused on analyzing the current market situation. I'm not against price rises but then it blinds the community's aspirations and goals and are rather driven by profit instead of making bitcoin and the community a better place/system.

What does Bloomberg Analysts and the halt of buying BTC with credit cards have to do with the recent crash/collapse? Also, a lot of coins have already been offloaded and up for grabs, if you know how to check the market at least. This is not failure to grasp on basic concepts on my part but you overexaggerating the current situation to spread fear. I agree that it takes time before the market recovers, and crashes occur not overnight for bitcoin but for months or years, but we're down 80% from $19000 already and historically 80-90% drop from a previous ATH is what's happening before it meets its floor, and we're nearing that level now.

Ask for the customer to always place a label/description when paying you, or put a tag on your address so as to let them know that it's you. This is doable in Electrum and other wallets AFAIK. The hash number and timestamp IMO are already sufficient to use as a receipt, and the blockchain itself is already a giant ledger that you can rely on for proof of transactions. You wouldn't have a hard time issuing receipts if the blockchain already does half of the job for you.

Remember bitconnect? The founder of the said coin was nothing but just a con-man dressed in suits, and a lot of people actually believe what he's saying, resulting into a lot of tears and torn wallets along the way. It is within the nature of people that when they're promised riches, they'll believe anything that anyone says, no matter how uneducated or clueless the person is. Celebs, too, knowing that they have a fanbase that will believe anything they say as long as it comes from the mouths of their idols. Having said that, it's not rare to see people believing in celebrities to make financial decisions, and crypto isn't an exception to that.

This is just another page for the books, and will be buried in piles of other useless news in the coming weeks. Banks would continue to be an avenue for money laundering and illegal activities knowing how easy it is for the government to forgive and forget all the misconducts banks made (and will make). Even though the public has already seen the worst side of these institutions, this will still not be a case for bitcoin and crypto knowing that it too can be used for illegal activities and such, though cryptocurrencies are far more transparent and open than what the banks are.

This issue will be forgotten soon after a fine has been slapped. People will carry on as if nothing happened, as the government cannot issue a closure of DB since they know they will need it in the future.