Sorry for your loss. I hope you learned your lesson about greed. It is a tough thing to have to face something like this as a newbie. But the forum is filled with people who had similar experiences but are comfortably placed today.

Just soak in all the knowledge by reading and lurking. You will be good to go in no time.

Damn these youtube scams are becoming sophisticated. Just another example that when you talk about Social media and all these "free" products, you, as a consumer, are the product.

This sounds attractive enough but it has a glaring problem. I'd increase the BTC part to > 50%.

ETH is alright because it has a huge community of developers behind it. It will continue to attract investments.

BNB is mostly centralized and has a figurehead called CZ from Binance. He is a Chinese businessman with no qualms about crypto having a soul. His only motive is profit and he takes shrewd steps to ensure that. Essentially, it is the biggest corporate-linked crypto you can buy today.

Do not know much about THETA and CARDANO.

As far as the timing is concerned, please consider that we are in a bull run right now supported by corporates buying into BTC and DeFi run on ETH/ BNB. This is not the time to go all-in. Invest a part of it now and wait for the next crypto-winter to buy up some more.

Not financial advice. DYOR. This is a VERYYY mercenary space. People will shill you their Alts so that their own bags can pump. On Youtube, you will find videos about "New bull run coming, retail investors coming". You are the "retail investor" these people have been waiting for 3 years. So, please beware.

If OPs comparison is to the ban on Gold by the US Govt, isn't it much easier to implement with Bitcoin? With Gold, they simply ordered people to submit their gold. I believe a lot of people would have hid them in ways that the authorities wouldn't find out. Of course the same can be done with crypto.

Hiding BTC or the involvement in crypto in the same way would be far more difficult depending on what level of user one is. Good luck to the coinbase users, for example. The Govt cannot force anyone to stop using BTC individually, but they surely can make it worthless or own all of it through legislation if they want to.

Will they do it though? Not so sure. With crypto becoming one of the few islands of innovation and prosperity, why would they want to stop it?

The block validators in most of these chains are generally OG participants with huge shares of pre-mines allotted to them. Sometimes they are run by the promoter themselves, as in the case of BSC. The ultimate motive is to create FOMO by getting more and more people onboard in the name of free transactions.

Once enough people are onboard and liquidity on the exchanges grow, you will see these huge sell-offs from old wallets and the TG plus Discord admins will start talking about "We cannot control what whales do, We have built the product, the market decides".

These projects are the best possible cash cow that any solidity developer can milk with good enough UI skills and with the right choice of words. You can be anonymous and keep milking the community with zero repercussions.

Price rise and devaluation of our wages as well as savings has been on an uptick ever since the pandemic. Even before the pandemic this was in full swing but with trillions of dollars out in the wild, the specter of private investment firms and mercenary hedge funds gaining billions in managed funds has come back. This could easily lead to one of those spectacular crashes similar to 2008.

The last time it was sub-prime lending. Will it be over-exposure to over-valued stocks of Pharma companies this time??

I don't know where you got this idea from that there will be a "One World Govt" and Bitcoin will be the "One world currency". Those are fantastical ideas which should never really materialize. Such an order would never be beneficial for anyone. Judging from the natural world, one can easily see that diversity is the precursor of prosperity. Homogeneity always leads to the death of ecosystems.

The idea with Bitcoin which gained some traction was that of Bitcoin becoming the world's reserve currency in place of the dollar or the IMF's system of SDRs. As Bitcoin is limited and public, this would potentially take away the power to manipulate currency issuance and sponsoring of wars/ sanctions unilaterally by the developed world.

GTFO you braindead XRP Shill-shitter

The Altcoin Discussion section could be so much better if it was not for people holding bags of XRP shit and trying to pump it with these useless posts. During the 2017 bullrun, most of the shittiest noobs boarded the XRP train. This was because XRP's only promise was "to the moon". It had zero connection to the ideals of cryptocurrency but it was shamelessly shilled by its, by then rich, promoters. Lot of the greedy noobs loved the slick presentations and the claims of replacing banks. These people now have a deep, opportunistic relation with the success of XRP.

Thus they keep shilling despite XRP having the shittiest turnover in terms of their contribution to the Dapp space or open development despite being around since forever. Projects envisaged and launch much later have done way better than them.

People who think that XRP ever has a chance of dethroning BTC are probably just braindead. If i had moderator rights, I'd probably just outright ban these XRP shill noobs.

The "American Dream" of a suburban house with a lawn, a dog, a smiling wife, car and children was basically an invention to motivate the working classes. This image was reinforced with patriotism and the spectre of a communist takeover of the world during the cold war. America never really recovered from the values established in that time. Ayn Rand's individualism combined with the desire to always project an image of the success of free-market has pushed the American society where it is now.

The situation is different in different countries and is determined by their historical involvements in wars etc. European nations, for example, are in a much better state where patriotism is not on incessant display. America is unique in the way that corporates exploit the consumers there. Whether it is the arms sellers, survival gear markets, Self-help market, Yoga and rejuvenation market. The American corporates have a panache to take something good and turn it into a product which is then exploited to the maximum possible extent.

This is why the culture of modern slavery is applicable to Americans more than anyone else in the world.

Well if the 400K prediction comes true, my biggest regret would be not having a full bitcoin even after being here since 2017. So for purely selfish reasons, I would want the mega bulls to actually just hold for another year or so.

Considering that we have already reached and been stable at 50-60K, it is easy to see that the usage and adoption of BTC as a form of investment plus dividend bearing instrument is firmly getting established. Decentralized lending and all the fancy options on top are ensuring that holding BTC is going to be instrumental in this rapidly evolving paradigm. 400K isn't really that far fetched.

THIS IS BULLISH AF!

Imagine, what would miners gain from dumping Bitcoin's price at a time when everyone from Investment bankers to technologists like Musk are talking about it? They'd in fact be losing the most if they plan for such a short term dump.

So to speculate in the glass half-filled manner, What if the miners are being contacted directly by OTC desks representing huge companies that want to acquire major stake in single deals? They don't want the average Joe's DCAing but just an agreement based sale. The companies would also want to get their hands on virgin bitcoin and not the UTXOs that have gone through all the grinding and mixing and trickle down as small Satoshis in our hands. The miners would need to HODL for that right??

So that's a bull prediction to 100K right there..!

High speed, globe spanning, always live internet services like Musk's Starlink project would result in quite a lot of changes. I had no idea that such a use-case could also exist. If it gets affordable enough, what stops the biggest traders from launching their own constellations. The space debris and junk though.

You cannot have all the exchanges at the same place for sure. This is about arbitrage opportunities between geographically separated exchanges. Though a constellation of micro-satellites could very well act like your own guys sitting at 100m from every exchange.

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The idea about the application to Bitcoin surely makes sense as far as relaying transactions is concerned. Yet they'll have to be mined here on farms at earth so I don't see how that benefits. Still, with so much of the stock market activities and products being mirrored on crypto now, the logical thing could be to have such a network for Bitcoin and then out-trade these HFT's with synthetic stocks on the blockchain. Then again, Due to the mining and smart-contract execution delays, price settlement will be far slower compared to the centralized clearing houses of the exchanges.

 

About the charity. The article says that he donated $20Mn and avoided paying capital gain taxes on an investment in Amazon stocks. So can someone explain how does this work? If he donated 20Mn of his own money to the charity and then got a rebate against that, then isn't that how this works everywhere?

I mean he did give away 20 Mn to charity right? Or does all of that money somehow plows back to the donor? Almost all of these rich Americans donate to charity. So isn't that a philanthropic thing? How do they benefit out of it as some of you seem to suggest?

Also, those "Total return swaps" mentioned in the article sound a whole like Wall street's version of Schnorr Signature transactions. Hiding the amounts and still allowing you to take huge leveraged stakes.

Ethereum fees are high because of the transaction throughput as well as the mining being decentralized. BSC is run on nodes operated by Binance exclusively for the purpose. It is almost centralized settlement so the speed will never be an issue. The big money has come from Bitcoin to Ethereum because of the trustlessness. When Ethereum moves to L2 and Bitcoin based DeFi initiatives start gaining traction, a lot of that money will move back to Bitcoin.

As far as BSC is concerned, i feel it has cemented its place as the harbor for shrimps and the degen whales. These people really just love to play around with their crypto fortunes. Paying a 100 USD fee every time along with slow settlements can get boring. Hence, BSC will always have a place. CZ has actually been pretty good at marketing and making all of this reachable to the smallest player. The same cannot be said of Bitcoin due to its decentralized and OG elite nature.

I don't think that its SpaceX that has their info public. Tesla has open-sourced some of its patents in Battery and Battery management systems. Elon has always insisted that Tesla's main motive was to prove that electric vehicles can actually replace ICE cars. He also wanted to kickstart a technological race amongst the traditional car manufacturers as they had the resources to do all the research. The initial bootstrapping with costlier models served that purpose.

Its another story that Tesla has emerged as the most valuable car manufacturer within a very short time.

I bought for the first time in 2017. Nothing fancy and it was actually to convert to ETH on changelly and use the ETH to buy into ICOs. I first came to know about crypto through an ICO advertisement. Then went to the Ethereum website and the tech enthusiast inside me was all fascinated by these astonishing ideas.

I did not understand software development well enough to judge whether those promises were actually deliverable. It was just a wild world which promised gains of 10-100X because i stumbled upon it by accident. So I went on this streak of putting 0.1 ETH on whatever ICO caught my attention. Now, none of them did anything close to a 10X or 100X. Slowly i realized that I had wasted around 0.5 BTC (It was around 7000 USD around that point). Over the years I have kept putting small amounts in Alt-coins but I make sure not to touch the Sats anymore. So although I am still a long way off from regaining the 0.5 BTC but it has been a fun ride of wild hope, FOMOing and sleepless worrying about missing the next opportunity. I am proud to say that I have been frighteningly consistent in missing them time and again..

While installing an app from a store is common-place. Don't such applications ask or atleast mention the permissions that the user have to give to the app. I haven't used an Iphone but it apps on android specify the permissions they are asking for.
Even though it is hard to keep track of these, Isn't it obvious that those who allow apps to be whitelisted or hosted on the platform would atleast match the behavior of app in reality in comparison to what it claims to have access for the first time.

Somebody better versed in app development and security should comment on this? If its a cryptocurrency app, the only permission it should probably have is to use the camera for scanning address QR codes.

The problem is not the capability of the chain but the enthusiasm and willingness of the community to do such a thing. The Ethereum and Alt-coin communities have taken a much more welcoming and open approach towards appreciating what is built on Ethereum. Ethereum also has an application centered approach. For most people, the idea of making an application is much fancier than the protocol level work that Bitcoin community values.
This is why stuff like NFTs and meme-coins is getting traction on Ethereum and not in Bitcoin. Quite simply, to an outside observer or a newbie, Eth space is far more fun than Bitcoin. Hence the proliferation of NFT, Art and so on. Finally, way more resources and communities are available if someone chooses to devote their time and energy to solidity.

Is this a shill masked as a genuine question?

BEP20 token on the Binance Smart chain have low fees and fast transaction because of the centralized architecture. The settlements are basically just what a centralized database would do but in the form of a blockchain data structure.

There is no point in calling such a topic SOLUTION to bitcoin because then there are almost 4000 SOLUTIONS (and growing) that get touted on CMC and others. Most of these "tokens" are really just applications whose success depends on the quality of developers and the pace of development. There is no point in talking about decentralization in those cases. Many of these projects end up swallowing your money while it'll seem completely innocent to you as a buyer. There is inherent risk in these and identifying the short term devs from the actual product is the challenge which will get you money.

Trustwallet works fine. ETH is only for the whales and the early holders who do not worry about the dollar denominated value of their ETH. This is why you will often hear the platitude about "Don't translate gas fees to USD". These folks conveniently skip the fact that even the nominal gas for a slow transaction is over >120 for the last several months. This used to be ~30ish normally and is ~10 on BSC.

Of course one should continue to stack and hold sats. Still, when it comes to taking your chance on that moonshot or just passively increasing your stack, ETH is no longer the place for that for shrimps and other small creatures.

I like how you are always open to opinions TP. I need to add that for all the hate that is reserved for "shitcoins", the only thing related to Bitcoin that has actually made the "poor" better off in the last few years is this forum. That again is not because the forum introduces people to bitcoin but because it introduces them to crazy alt-coins and blockchain games where you can farm crypto.
 
With the airdrop season on Ethereum and other chains, people who have been engaged have gotten fair rewards compared to those who just stuck to bitcoin. Those who ventured past gained better understanding and are earning better. The maximalist position of denial has really been shitty for those who believe in it.