I don't see any direct connection between creation of altcoins and public interest in cryptocurrency. I think if altcoins were never created, Bitcoin would still be as popular as it is now. Bitcoin is still by far the most popular cryptocurrency, if you ask random people on the street to name cryptocurrencies that they know, I'm sure most people will only name 1 coin - Bitcoin. I doubt there's any signifcant number of crypto enthusiasts who first learned about some altcoin and only then discovered Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is an open-source project, and it's hard to put a backdoor into an open-source project with thousands of contributors, thousands of interested people, so this is highly unlikely. Backdoors usually happen with some shitcoins that no one cares to audit, or closed-source projects where the owner can do it without anyone knowing.

That would be very bad for me, because Bitcoin is a large share of my net worth, well over 50%. But I used the profits from the last bull market to buy other assets, so it wouldn't be a complete disaster for me. I hope to see at least one bull market with prices over $50k to get more money out of Bitcoin and into other assets to further diversify my portfolio.

This is irrelevant to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is not a widely used currency, so whether people HODL it or dump it, there will be no macroeconomic effects.

If we imagine that bitcoiners just decided to never sell their coins, the price would skyrocket, and so will the temptation to sell at a huge profit. But it's just an unrealistic scenario, so I don't see any point thinking about it.

When you are dealing with global statistics it's important to consider that prices are different in different countries. A house in the US costs $400,000. In developing countries this can be 10 times less. So a poor person in the US who owns their own house is automatically much more richer than a poor person from a developing country who also owns their house. And even just owning a house increases someone's networth substantially, even if they earn very little and don't have savings.

So, I'm pretty sure that most people on this forum belong to the upper 20%.

If Bitcoin was such a fantastic invention, everyone in the world would be using it. But when people see that no one around them uses it, it becomes very easy to dismiss it as a ponzi scheme or some other FUD narrative.

So instead of focusing on countering attacks on Bitcoin, it would be more productive to focus on convincing people to adopt it. And using old narratives that "it's a revolution", "it will replace all banks" is not going to work, people have been hearing it for years. Better show them how it can improve their lives here and now.

If they won't unbank Coinbase and Binance, Bitcoin will be fine. If they do, the price will instantly plummet, adoption will either slow down significantly or turn negative. But it seems like the chance of them doing the latter are very low, since this is a very unofficial rumored crackdown on smaller businesses rather than a total ban on crypto.

The reality of crypto markets is that when there's a Bitcoin bull market, it's easy to make profit, because shitcoins follow Bitcoin and grow too. Then the bear market comes and it's better to pull of out crypto than to look for a coin that will perform well in bear market. But many market participants don't see this pattern, they naively expect a bull run only 6 months or a year after the ATH, they hold their bags in bear market waiting for the reversal any day now.

I don't think that solutions like BlueWallet are popular just because they are technically simpler. People don't run their own nodes because it's already resource and effort-comsuing with the current blocksize. Running your own LN node is not harder than running a Bitcoin Core node. If you can read instructions on a site and follow them, and google problems if they arise, you can do both.

I don't think it's bullish because if shitcoin investors will lose opportunity to invest in shitcoins, they'll likely switch to something other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not exciting enough for them, because bull markets happen once in 4 years, and they want to get rich in a year or less.

In my experience few things in this world are actually bullish or bearish for Bitcoin. In my 7 years in Bitcoin community I've seen so many "this is bullish/bearish" predictions and almost none of them materialized.

Maybe in some distant future I will own a bit of precious metals, but my #1 investment goal is establishing some cash flow, like owning real estate or a business. I don't have enough wealth to live the rest of my life off it, so my assets should work for me instead of simply being a store of value against inflation.

Why are you saying that alternatives to blocksize increase are increasing Bitcoin complexity? If a user can run a full node, they can run an LN channel. And if they can't run a full node because they are bad with technology, then they won't do it, regardless if blocksize is big or small.

I think it's fine if most users run SPV wallets, if casual users use custodial wallets, and only enthusiasts run full nodes. Yes, they won't get all the benefits of being your own bank and "don't trust, verify", but most people don't need them. Just owning and using Bitcoin in sufficiently secure manner is enough.

Bitcoin market participants, especially the short-term traders, have noticed that Bitcoin wasn't strongly reacting to news that don't directly concern it, so they also don't react to them in the future. The cause and the effect are reinforcing each other.

I believe that right now the halvening cycles are the biggest factor for Bitcoin's price, and even years after the halvening the price fluctuation are the ripples of the previous rally and crash. But in 3-4 cycles halvenings will play smaller and smaller role, so maybe in 12-20 years Bitcoin will start having a different price pattern, like actually reacting to macroeconomic events.

Compared to banks USDT has lower chance of getting frozen, and you can send transactions to anywhere in the world relatively quick. The fees may be lower compared to banks, may be higher in the case of Ethereum which tends to have fee spikes.

So you could say that USDT is a middleground between Bitcoin and banks. You have more control and more freedom but not full freedom.

That's why I said it's a reason and not the reason, because the slowness of Bitcoin adoption is a complex issue. But I doubt that mainstream media is playing any serious role, because if you track mainstream news, you know that they only mention Bitcoin when there's big price action and they simply report it. And if you read some economic news and analysis, you can find a lot of pro-Bitcoin takes, because there are institutional investors who are invested in Bitcoin. And they don't view Bitcoin as a financial revolution, to them it's just an asset that brings investment opportunity.

First, check this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBX-KulgJ1o, it's a social experiment where the guy offers random people on the street to take a bet where they have a decent advantage, and almost all people refuse it. Why? Because they don't know math and can't calculate that the expected value of such bet is big and positive. Instead they are being guided by psychology - human mind feels negative emotions more strongly than the positive, and negative memories are stronger than the positive. Fear of losing is stronger than the desire to profit.

This is one of the reasons why Bitcoin adoption is so low. Everyone is aware of volatility, of big rallies and big crashes. Avoiding big risks is the default course of action for most people, even if big risks have positive expected value.

You are 10 years late. Bitcoin awareness is very high globally. Telling people how great Bitcoin is is not going to significantly improve adoption. People see that not a lot of people around them use Bitcoin so they don't have a lot of interest in it. They don't see incentive to use Bitcoin because there's no huge discounts offered by their favorite sellers if they use Bitcoin. And they know that Bitcoin has a potential to crash very fast, and this fear is bigger than the hope of increasing the value during bull market.

I don't think it's about the sheer number of coins. The main competitors of Bitcoin in terms of attracting investment are the large coins like ETH or DOGE. Some fresh shitcoin that was created 3 days ago will only attract thousands of dollars in investment, while the big shitcoins attract hundreds of millions.

Shitcoins will remain popular because Bitcoin became too boring for trading addicts, they want more volatility and more opportunities to get rich quick. Perhaps many of such investors wouldn't invest in Bitcoin anyway, and would go for some other high risk assets like penny stocks or derivatives.

Bitcoin is an experimental technology that struggles to get widely adopted. You can be fairly confident that Bitcoin will still exist in 20-30 years because of its highly resilient architecture, but whether it will retain its value - that's not very clear. There are reasons to be optimistic, like extrapolating the current price history or hoping for more adoption; but also reasons to be worried - 20-30 years is a long period, a lot can change, the adoption dynamic could reverse, confidence in Bitcoin could degrade over time.

Here's the source since OP didn't bother to provide it -=https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1623459203150131201 https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1623459203150131201

I view it as a good thing, PoS, web3 and other crypto inventions are just scams, and SEC is doing what it's supposed to do by shielding inexperienced investors from them. It's not like they plan to ban PoS coins, they just don't let exchanges that legally operate in the US to provide staking services. Crypto gambling addicts will still be able to gamble with shitcoins if they want to.

And most importantly, Bitcoin is not affected. And Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that matters.