From what they are supposed to safeguard you? They can't do anything about volatility. They can't stop exchange hacks.

Regulations can make some improvements, but they can't make the market fundamentally safe.


If some of the wallets are bad, people will use the good ones. Bad products exist in every market.

Because people are taking profits, if they bought at $16k or $17k, selling at $24-25k is a pretty good deal, making 50% profit in a few months is a very good performance. This isn't the big bull market that will break past the ATH, such market will come after the halvening, not before. So there's no big risk of missing out if you sell at a profit now, there's still plenty of opportunities to buy before the halvening. Although the safest strategy is to just wait now, but many traders like to perform these short-term trades.

Some DeFi protocols have master keys owned by developers that allow them to interfere with the system. Other DeFi protocols run on centralized blockchains that are not resistant to government pressure. Some DeFi systems might rely on other systems that can be regulated - like centralized stablecoins or banks.

And the word "finance" is too generous when talking about DeFi. It's not an alternative to centralized finance, because it does not offer full spectrum of services. You can't get a business loan through DeFi, or invest in government bonds, or get a stake in a company.

Banning algorithmic stablecoins is a good idea, history has shown that they are extremely fragile so a government wouldn't want their banks and economy engage with them, because in the end it will be government's job to bail out the banks.

And before people say that you can't ban crypto - in this case regulators wouldn't care if someone on darknet uses them, they just need to cut them from fiat economy.

There is no official motto, because Bitcoin doesn't need one, it's not a company or a shitcoin project, so it doesn't need marketing. Bitcoin devs are simply writing code, while shitcoin devs are more focused on promoting their creation before it can even work properly.

If someone tried to push for adopting official Bitcoin motto, I would be very suspicious of them, because it could mean they try to hijack Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is so volatile that it's impossible to say whether it was affected by inflation or not. We have the market data from 2021-2022 which shows that Bitcoin didn't react to inflation. So it's not a traditional hedge against inflation like gold right now. But maybe if not for inflation and the narrative of Bitcoin being digital gold, it wouldn't have gotten to the level we have today.

From this document it's absolutely not clear what kind of blockchain is being proposed. But basically there are two options and both are bad. Either you will create a private network owned and operated by the government, which would lack many of the benefits of decentralized blockchains, like censorship-free transactions; or you will try to put the database on public blockchain like Ethereum, which has problems with scalability and the total censorship resistance can be a downside for your use case, because it would be hard to undo errors or theft.

Blockchain hype has been around for 7 years. 7 years is more than enough time to show real results, real use cases - not talks about potential, pilots, trials, proposals.

I don't care about marketcaps, this market is not rational, people don't invest in cryptocoins like they invest in stocks - no one cares if the tech is actually working, if it's a realistic idea or not, all what people want are to see a big pump, dump at the top and move on to the next coin.

If you want to compare coins, look how many real world entities are using them. How many real businesses are using smart contracts and decentralized applications. And I'm not talking about some crypto casinos or NFT games or decentralized exchanges - those all are not real but merely another part of a "bigger crypto fool" game.

People who got bitcoins could have immediately sold them and people who got USD could have bought bitcoins with them. So I think there's nothing remarkable about Bitcoin transactions of the past.

And some people like to show Bitcoin price 10 years ago and today and then build a case that the same rate of growth will happen over the next 10 years. This is unrealistic, because Bitcoin market is reaching saturation, nowadays most of people have heard about Bitcoin, many have considered investing in it. Large bull markets that are responsible for most of Bitcoin's performance are becoming smaller and smaller if you look at the relative increase of their peaks.

Bitcoin will not increase your wealth by 100 times in a few years, and that's okay.

If that happens, Bitcoin will crash very hard, probably below $1,000. And after that it will become very unstable, there will be hopium-driven bull markets and crashes after new portions of FUD. Most of liquidity will be lost, especially if banks around the world crack down on Bitcoin trade. Miners will move to some small countries that didn't ban it, but those small countries don't have enough electricity to sustain the total hashpower, so Bitcoin will become more vulnerable to 51% attack, which will also contribute to price decline.

My strategy is to sell when there's a huge bull market that comes after the halvening, and I do it when it's clear that the market is very hot but starts running out of momentum. So selling now would be bad, because this is a small bull market that can go unpredictably.

And I never sell all my coins, I only take out enough to diversify my portfolio or achieve some goals. The rest are there for the long run. I also plan to reinvest some of my future Bitcoin gains back into Bitcoin when it will crash after the big bull run.

Remember that Bitcoin is unpredictable. Today it's $24k, but tomorrow it can crash to $18k. If your friends fell for FOMO, they can also easily fall for FUD, especially since they already did that when they dismissed Bitcoin earlier. So make sure to explain to them the importance of having a strategy, being prepared to hold at a loss, explain to them the nature of Bitcoin cycles and how the halvenings bring big bull markets. Because if you fail to educate them properly, you will be doing them a disservice.

That's interesting, I thought Bitcoin Core would be more efficient and effortlessly check new transactions in both mempool and new blocks for the addresses in the wallet with some fast search structure.

Those servers run by hackers who snatch coins that are sent to known private keys must have databases of many millions of addresses, I wonder if they run custom code that is much faster than Core because of its more narrow purpose.

$450 is a very small investment these days. By some very optimistic scenarios Bitcoin will reach ~$200,000 during the next cycle, so a ~x10 increase from the current price level. Will having $4,500 instead of $450 radically chance your life? Don't think so. If you bought 1 Bitcoin for $450 seven years ago, and held till now, that could have been life-changing. This is not to make you feel any regrets, but to illustrate that the market is no longer as fast growing as it used to be.

Should the value of backed stablecoins count as value of cryptocurrency or as value of US dollar? Or as no value at all? Because we just take billions of US dollars out of circulation in their cash/bank form and put them into crypto form. But no new wealth was created, unlike with Bitcoin. That's over 20% of crypto market cap we are talking about.

So, Keanu joined some NFT shitcoin project and now shills for cryto and NFT. That's a bit sad, because Keanu has a reputation of being a very kind and genuine person.

But frankly I don't care what Keanu says about crypto. He's not an economist, cryptographer, mathematician, programmer, social scientist. He's just a famous actor. His opinion on crypto is as valuable as opinion of Kim Kardashian.

And I pity the people who invest in something that got promoted by a celebrity.

There's no AI that you are talking about. What people call today AI is just a digital parrot that copies certain skill without understanding what is it doing. Neural network can't write any sort of sophisticated code, it can't solve complex tasks. "AI hacking Bitcoin Core" is a complete nonsense. It's not even worth discussing.

A wise person knows the balance between enjoy life today and saving for the future. And to find this balance one should also take into account their current wealth. If you are a millionaire, you can easily treat yourself to some luxury item that costs thousands of dollars occasionally. Or spend dozens of dollars on some premium good every day. But if you aren't rich, but just have some savings, like $100,000 or so, it wouldn't be wise to chase such luxury just because you can. Because if you will be spending like a millionaire, you will become broke rather fast.

What this means for Bitcoiners is that they should take some profits during bull markets and enjoy life. You are not breaking your HODL if you sold 0.5% of your coins to make a gift for yourself if that gift will greatly improve your life, like a new phone or a new PC.

Answers provided by AI have no value, they are just some sort of average of answers given by humans on the public segment of the Internet. There is no original though, no conscious effort, no intelligence. Often times if you read carefully what AI produces, it's just nonsense, but it's got to a level where it's grammatically correct, so at first glance it looks impressive.

We heard this song in 2021-2022, turns out the main use case of NFT was selling them to bigger fools, and after that market crashed, everyone lost interest in them. Like it's always happening with blockchain and crypto, it's all hype, no result.

I view the rise of Bitcoin NFT as a spam attack that will test how resilient Bitcoin is. Worst case scenario is it will make the fees more expensive for real users who transfer money and not participate in a new type of ponzi scheme.