You are free to use it if you want. Bitcoin doesnt care about governments or bans. But, come on. You are not some rebel visionary "unlocking Bitcoins true potential" or whatever. You are just romanticizing a piece of tech that, frankly, doesnt care about your freedom-fighter fantasies. Bitcoins main purpose? Being a decentralized currency. Thats it. Not a magical banner for overthrowing The Man.

You have to ask yourself: whats the endgame here - street cred on Reddit or Bitcointalk? Seriously, your situation is the only thing that should be on your mind. Getting thrown in jail for a few days or paying a fine? Maybe you think you can handle that. But what if its worse?

I dont think you understood it right. Firstly, I would argue that online wallets or hot wallets make up the majority of cryptocurrency wallets that people use on a daily basis. For instance, Bitcoin Core and Electrum are both examples of very popular online wallets; does that mean they are inherently unsafe?  Secondly, even Btcalysis said that it was better to use an online wallet than a device that was tampered with or compromised. Do you not agree?

If I could remove one thing, it would be the power of willful ignorance. The choice to ignore the facts, and the evidence that proves him wrong.

This is a you problem, not a "strategy" problem.  The reason you mess up your strategy is because you let your emotions get the better of you and you think you can game the system. Then you start trying to outsmart the market, and we all know how that turned out. This isnt "harder than it looks," it's as hard as you make it by trying to be clever.  Just go to a major exchange that has a "recurring buy" or "dollar-cost averaging" option. You tell them how much, when (weekly, monthly, etc.), and you link your bank account, thats it. You are done. You never have to think about it ever again.

Decentralized freelancing platforms are not a new concept, but decentralization does not fix the core problems in freelancing. Your "rigged game" wasnt the platform, it was your lack of experience. Thats probably why you couldnt get any gigs. Other problems with these platforms relate to the quality of the work, reputation, and the relationships between clients and freelancers. But, none of these issues are solved just because of going to a blockchain. Bitcoin is not the future for this. And, decentralization is not some magic bullet for everything. Some platforms simply work better in a classic server/client setup.

AML wasnt invented to stop the government.  It is a system of laws created by them, for them, to control everyone else.  The laws dont apply when they are the ones doing the money laundering.

As far as I know, you can buy almost all hardware wallets directly from the manufacturer.  But then, you are placing your trust in the manufacturer. I dont see that as a big difference from trusting a big retailer. You have to believe they are not shipping a device with a hidden backdoor they can exploit later. This is an especially big risk for wallets that are not fully open source. (The Ledger "recovery" fiasco proved this point: a supposedly secure device was found to have a hidden feature that could compromise your private keys.)

Honestly, market cap for Bitcoin is kinda irrelevant down the line. People keep quoting this number like it means something, but, does it really? They forget that, over time, less and less Bitcoin is actually out there in circulation. Coins get lost, private keys lost or forgotten, folks die and just… poof, those coins are gone for good. No magic "restore" button. So the "real" supply is shrinking, not growing.

And yeah, I get it - saying Bitcoin could hit $100 million per coin sounds nuts right now. But is it, though? The market cap is all built on the idea that every single coin is still in play, when in reality, a fat chunk of that stash is lost forever. Some people estimate we are talking millions of coins already missing. thats a massive hole in the supply side. And guess what? That number will only go up over time.

So, weve got this deflationary thing happening - Bitcoin actually gets more scarce. Compare that to the traditional financial system, where the supply is always ballooning and your money buys less every year (thanks for nothing, inflation). Bitcoin flips the script: 21 million coins, max, and the real number is even lower because of all the lost ones. Scarcity is the whole game here.

So, as more people and companies pile in, and the supply keeps trickling down, what do you think happens to the price? This isnt just about Bitcoin being a currency or a digital gold - its about how rare it is. Thats why the market cap metric kinda misses the point.

Nope, I never said that. You should do whatever you think is right. Its your money, after all. I just gave you my opinion in response to your question.

Nope, not really. That Bitcoin you buy and hold on PayPal? Its kinda like youre just borrowing bragging rights. You dont actually own it, at least not in the old-school, "not your keys, not your coins" sense. PayPal got the keys, they are holding your crypto. You are basically just trusting them to babysit your stuff, which kinda defeats the whole "be your own bank" vibe.

Honestly OP, thats just stupid. Who in their right mind would trust their memory with a Bitcoin seed phrase? That things supposed to be your backup, not floating around in your head like your grocery list. If you forget it or mess it up - poof, goodbye bitcoin.  So seah, good luck with that.

Just write it down somewhere safe, for crying out loud.

$1M? Thats an old story. My actual target is 1 satoshi = 1 USD.

This means I believe Bitcoin could reach a value of $100 million per coin. Is that realistic? It is highly unlikely to happen in the short term, but not impossible over a longer timeline.

it kind of depends where you are looking to buy Bitcoin. The price you see across news sites and google? Thats more like an average price of Bitcoin, not what you will actually pay. Once you jump onto a specific exchange, thats where the real fun (or pain) begins.

Every exchange is its own little universe with its own supply and demand, so prices can bounce around a bit. And dont forget the spread - the gap between what people are willing to buy and sell for. Basically, if you are buying, you will always pay a bit more than you would get if you turned around and sold instantly. Oh, and those instant-buy services? Their fees can be way higher than the regular exchanges. So yeah, watch your back, and double-check where you are about to drop your cash.

People love to run wild with the idea that Bitcoin is just gonna steamroll over banks and make them obsolete. Thats not really how it works, though.

You said it right, banks do way more than just hold your cash. Stuff like loans, mortgages, or handling business accounts... Yeah, good luck doing all that with Bitcoin alone right now. You still need some trusted middleman for those things, at least for the next, I dunno, few decades? If anything, Bitcoin is more like a complementary technology to the current system, not some magic bullet thats gonna wipe banks off the map. Not yet, anyway.

You need to give us some context. Why these questions? Who says otherwise?

Honestly, Bitcoin back then was basically an internet science experiment. The supply was tiny, nobody was really trading it, and there werent any real exchanges. You couldnt just click "Buy" on your phone and watch the numbers go up. Most coins lived in the wallets of a handful of nerds - miners and devs. So yeah, sure, it sounds easy in hindsight, but actually pulling it off? Well, not really.

Exactly how?

Yeah, so, you are right about decentralization being important, cant argue there. But the idea that a 51% attack means someone literally "owns" most of the Bitcoin? Nah, thats not it. What actually happens is a group ends up controlling more than half of the network computing muscle (the hashrate, if you wanna get nerdy about it). Owning 10.71 million BTC or whatever is totally unrelated to pulling off a 51% attack.  The danger comes from controlling the network, not hoarding coins.  Thats a big difference.

OP, I dont know what exactly you are referring to by crypto services, but there are a lot of darknet marketplaces  that have been shut down and seized by the government.  After the most infamous case with the Silk Road, some of the more popular marketplaces that were eventually seized by the government were Agora marketplace, Silk Road 2.0, AlphaBay, Hansa market, Hydra, etc.

Yeah, Bitcoin has hung on through a lot of rough patches and is still kicking. What does the future hold? Nobody knows for sure, but I have a few possible outcomes in my head.

The first scenario is that Bitcoin evolves into a true digital gold, and people decide to just hold onto some over the long term. This seems to be the most common theory. Bitcoin is being bought by institutions and people are holding Bitcoin for years, rather than flipping it. If Bitcoin moves toward that outcome, it would likely still be very volatile, but on the whole will trend upward over a longer period.

The second outcome could be that Bitcoin evolves into a global settlement layer. Maybe it would never be used for your daily coffee, but Bitcoins network architecture could be used as the settlement engine for large, global transactions. The Lightning Network is a good example of how this could work.

What about self-hosted open-source block explorers? When you run your own instance of some software like BTC RPC Explorer or Mempool, you can own your data and only you can access the server logs and visitor data.  theres no third party to worry about.

Wait, what "inflationary trends"? Thats kinda missing the whole point of Bitcoin, honestly. The entire thing is built to be deflationary - hard cap at 21 million coins. And the mining of new coins is halved every four years. Thats basically what gives Bitcoin its mojo in the first place.

As for the rest of your points, yes, its growing acceptance by institutions and its potential to become a mainstream asset are widely discussed. The long-term value argument often hinges on its limited supply and status as a hedge against the inflationary policies of traditional currencies. But, lets be real, nothing is set in stone.