This is an interesting article. I like the fact that we are approaching the Infrastructure phase, with the deployment of the Lightning Network. Can't wait for further Layer 2 developments to become online.

I really think bitcoin will be the new internet, but we are such an early stage that we can't begin to grasp the magnitude of the changes to come.

Well this assertion is just that, an assertion. I don't think reality proved anything. People still use Bitcoin in everyday transactions, the network fees started to drop, the congestion is gone, Lightning network is just around the corner. So it seems nothing was proven beyond any doubt. It's just a rant from your part.

Of course you are free to believe that Bitcoin will not succeed and will somehow be dumped as a currency in favor of something better. But that is just an entrepreneurial bet on your behalf, just as those who believe in Bitcoin bet that it will become money (universally accepted means of payment). So until the price of it drops to 0 or close to it, I don't think anything was proven yet.

The night is still young

As many of the people pointed out before me, selling them as soon as you get them may not be the best strategy. For ERC20 tokens for example you have to pay the gas to send the tokens from your wallet to an exchange and then pay the fee again to receive the ETH or BTC or what you sold them for. If the price you receive from the tokens is larger than the cost of doing so, then it would make sense to do just that.

But since you payed nothing to receive the airdropped tokens, I think it would be best to hold them, because holding bears no cost for you, except the opportunity cost. Even if 90% of them are shitcoins and the team behind them will do nothing, there are still 10% that could see their utility value increase once the team finishes the project and would make more sense to keep them to use them yourself or sell when there is actual demand for the tokens.

This is the best advice. Time in the market is better than timing the market.

I think there are two types of users of Bitcoin: Those who see the value of the technology and buy it now and plan to use it in the long term as an alternative to the fiat system and those who hope Bitcoin is a get-rich-quick scheme. One type of users is spreading FUD because they got burned by the price correction and the other one is here for the long haul.

I personally don't think the price matters that much as the adoption of the technology and the development of second layer protocols.

If somebody thinks that it's OK to give something back to their country, they are free to make a donation to the Treasury and support the government. But this has nothing to do with supporting coercion of other people to pay for stuff that you feel good about. Because there is no difference between taxes and robbery.

And since we see bitcoin as a currency (even if the government still doesn't recognizes it as such), do you agree to pay taxes because your dollars are now worth more than they used to do a few years back? (Actually the dollar is worth less every year, his value dropping each and every year because of inflation).

So Hell no, I don't think you should pay taxes for you crypto gains.

Look at the bright side: If bitcoin plunges in value, more people will be able to buy and use bitcoin as a currency, so it's better for the overall bitcoin ecosystem. There should be a time when everybody has some bitcoins and casually use them to purchase coffee, gas or houses. And it's not so long in the future.

This drop in Bitcoin's price is an awesome opportunity to buy some more. The things that are brewing just under the surface are huge and once they hit stable release the adoption rate of bitcoin will skyrocket. I am talking about Lightning network mainly, and all the other things guys and girls are working on to improve the bitcoin protocol. So have patience and HODL!

One of the best videos explaining how bitcoin work is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx9zgZCMqXE. It's technical, but allows you to understand a lot about how it works.

Regarding the pay for the mining, there are two sources of income: First are the bitcoins that are rewarded for each new block discovered, but this reward is going to vanish in a few years because the amount given as a reward is halved every 210,000 blocks. So around 2100 there will be no reward left, because the number of bitcoin that will appear is limited to 21 million.

The second source of income for the miners is the fee payed by those who want their transaction added to the blockchain.

Let's consider the following scenario: The world is 2100, everyone is using bitcoin as a global money and all prices will be expressed in bitcoins. It seems obvious that in a scenario like this there will be just a few things that will be priced in bitcoin and have a value of 1 BTC. Most of the goods and services that will be sold then will use maybe satoshi as the currency that they will be priced in. And there could even be the need to go even lower, and price things in milisathosi's.

But being a digital money, there could be a protocol upgrade to support more than 8 decimals, so that you could buy a cup of coffee or something. If such an upgrade occurs, isn't it akin to an increase in the money supply by a factor of ten (in the case of one more decimal)? And continuing our train of thought, in another 50 years when the economy will be even more productive, you will need another decimal for small transactions. And so you can basically inflate the money supply ad infinitum, based on the "needs of commerce".

So, to sum up, being able to divide the bitcoin in ever smaller denominations, isn't this a way to inflate the money supply?