I know the idea of Web5 is still brand new (I think maybe the first one or two Web5 apps came out recently or are about to come out), but being based on Bitcoin and other decentralized technology I think it seems like a much more firm basis to build a "web 3.0" crypto economy than the token/gambling focus of Web3.


Anybody on here looked into the Web5 concept a bunch? What are your thoughts?

I think Web3 is looking more and more like a failure. As it has ended up just focusing on silly useless NFT pictures and an endless creation of token gambling projects. The idea of Web5 seems to be more about actually building a decentralized app economy with Bitcoin as its currency, rather than the hodgepodge of endless fads and investment schemes that make up Web3. The idea of tokens I think is what will end up killing off the smart contract chains and Web3 - because instead of building useful things it just draws everyone (creators and consumers) into get-rich-quick money making schemes which ultimately fall apart because there is no substance to them. That's not how you build a sustainable economy. Crypto tokens makes the focus on money making schemes, rather than actual businesses. I'm not totally informed on Web5 but it seems to be the idea of making actual decentralized apps with decentralized identity and data storage with decentralized payments with Bitcoin.

The state house of North Carolina just passed a bill to study the idea of the state holding Bitcoin (as well as Gold).

https://cointelegraph.com/news/north-carolina-house-passes-bill-to-study-bitcoin-hodling


If this bill gets passed, and North Carolina does indeed start holding Bitcoin, that will be the start of what I see as inevitable - states/nations eventually holding bitcoin in reserve just as nations hold large amounts of gold in reserve. Hopefully they become the first state in the US to do this and others follow their lead. El Salvador of course has led the way for the world, but its good to see a US state starting to think about holding Bitcoin. States and nations will eventually join the race to accumulate bitcoin along with 'retail investors', the wealthy, financial firms, banks, and corporations.

Just a couple cool shares from this past week.
I was on vacation in Maui the past week and I saw this cool Bitcoin Bull in the window of a fine art metal shop.




Also went on a snorkeling boat tour and after it was over the guys running it asked for tips and named several ways they take tips including Bitcoin! First time I've ever personally experienced someone saying they take Bitcoin for payment (it was just for the tip, but still cool).

Just for fun, since this is the Speculation forum, when do you think Bitcoin will hit $1 million USD for the first time?


Presumably this will happen during a bull run and then it'll fall back below $1 million for a couple years, but what year do you think will be the first time we see $1 million bitcoin?

Personally I think it'll be during the 2036/2037 bull run, assuming the four year market cycles are still going on at that point. Though the 4 year cycle may have largely faded away by then, but somewhere around those years feels about right.

Do you all consider Bitcoin the best asset in the world or do you think there are other assets with as much potential for safe long term appreciation?

By best asset I mean potential for long term return on investment versus potential for risk. Return vs risk.

Just curious to see what people think.


Personally I think Bitcoin is easily the best asset in the world. Ethereum is probably the second best asset in the world but it is far riskier due to centralization and lack of clear purpose or utility and lots of possible future competition form other L1s and I think its days of growing significantly faster in price appreciation than Bitcoin are mostly over so the growth possibilities compared to the much greater risk I think leaves it far below Bitcoin when considering which is a better financial asset. I guess the one benefit it now has is income through staking but that isn't nearly enough to make up for the other disadvantages.

And beyond that I can't think of anything else that would even be in the conversation for best asset outside of like owning a really good rental property in a booming city but that is very specific and requires good financing and a fair bit of luck and work to accomplish.

Think of it this way, if you had to put all your money in a single asset, would you put it in anything but Bitcoin? I already made that decision years ago by putting just about all my money in Bitcoin. But how about you all? Where do you land on this question?

Bitcoin was easy to earn originally, you just had to have your PC run the mining software.

It is no longer easy because you have to spend thousands of dollars to buy a single ASIC miner to mine Bitcoin. That was the inevitable outcome of the economic competition that PoW creates.



How would you design a blockchain system that would prioritize ease of earning newly minted coins love the long term, rather than prioritizing the economic competition that Bitcoin's PoW does?




So the goal is that even after your theoretical cryptocurrency is very popular some years after it is introduced and lots of people are interested in earning coins through whatever system you set up, you need that system to allow them to do it easily/cheaply. Your average Joe should be able to reasonably participate in earning newly issued coins without large time or capital expenditure, including capital expenditure on investing which makes PoS not satisfy the requirement. Okay, go!

This thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5445086.0) about needing fiat to on-ramp into the Bitcoin ecosystem got me thinking.


What's the best way to remove the necessity of needing that fiat in-ramp (banks) to get into Bitcoin?

There's like in person p2p transactions but that is a hassle and can be dangerous. Since everyone's money is fiat generally we need fiat onramps to get into Bitcoin. But that is looking like it could be a potential weakness with govts trying to debank the crypto world a bit.

Specifically I was thinking about how a crypto altcoin could be designed that would allow people to own it without buying it. Basically an altcoin that is easy to earn, and is perhaps tied to identities or mobile devices, in which the whole point would just be to easily on-ramp people into crypto without fiat. This onramp altcoin could then be used on decentralized bitcoin exchanges to buy Bitcoin, all without ever relying on fiat/banks. The purpose of such an altcoin wouldn't necessarily be to accrue a lot of value in itself, but to at least have some reasonable value in the market to provide no only a reason to get it in the first place but to enable the liquidity of that value to be used by the people to buy bitcoin.

I was just thinking this would seem to be the best way to onramp people into Bitcoin without relying on fiat/bank onramps. Obviously such a crypto token would have to be designed in such a way that it couldn't be easily exploited, because the design would be to spread tokens easily to anyone in the public, but obviously have some sort of limiting way to get them so people can't just pick up tons of tokens, as in, they need to be limited enough that they have some sort of worth.




Anyway, for anyone interested in this though expirement, how would you go about designing such a crypto token?

The crucial things being:

1. Anyone can accumulate some of these tokens without needing to buy them, but there must be some sort of way to limit the accumulation, and stop the issuance mechanism from being hacked/spammed by interested parties.

2. It should take some sort of actual work, though it should be easy enough for anyone to do, this isn't an airdrop. There needs to be something done to promote an actual value here rather than just a free token.

3. How would the network be secured? It doesn't have to be all super decentralized, its okay if its a "centralized s**tcoin" because the point is just to easily onramp people into crypto without having to buy crypto. But the network needs to be secure enough so that it stays operational and afloat.

What sort of Bitcoin services would you like to see get built out? And what do you think is required for mass adoption, let's say onboarding the first billion people?


Bitcoin DEXs
I think we need large liquidity Bitcoin decentralized exchanges. DEXs are popular in the Ethereum ecosystem, but Bitcoin DEXs are very low volume and illiquid and therefore the prices are awful. We need to start seeing Bitcoin DEXs with many millions of dollars in volume per day and prices near market price to allow people to easily pick up bitcoin privately, rather than getting tracked by centralized exchanges.

Bitcoin-first online merchants
We also need a Bitcoin-first popular website. Someone needs to create Amazon for Bitcoin. Yes it'll be great when the already established e-commerce websites start accepting Bitcoin at naturally that is needed for mass adoption and acceptance of Bitcoin as a currency, but that could be many years off. In the meantime I'd like to see a successful bitcoin-first online shop open up so that it actually becomes easy for anyone to buy things online with bitcoin. I'm sure there are bitcoin online shops but there's no Amazon for bitcoin where people are like oh you want to buy things with Bitcoin just go here!

Decentralized Bitcoin lending
Probably also a decentralized collateralized lending platform. The lending platforms have gone out of business because they have been centralized companies. Non-collaterized lending with Bitcoin won't work because that requires legal enforcement, but collateralized works because that already involves financial enforcement (you don't get your more valuable Bitcoin back if you don't pay off the loan). I'd like to see a decentralized bitcoin lending protocol start giving people with much of their money in bitcoin options to leverage that wealth without getting rid of it and without risking it on a company that might fail.


What do you think? What other basic services do you think are needed in the Bitcoin ecosystem to make it better, more usable, and more ready to enable mass adoption?

Interesting question about the future. Bitcoin is humanity's money for the digital age. It's secure, decentralized, sovereign, global, open and hard money. There's nothing like it in the world and it is so hard to make something like this that after countless attempts the rest of the crypto world simply gave up on trying to be like Bitcoin and gave up on trying to be money and had to go the route of smart contracts/apps/tokens instead.


But, given that the digital age is just beginning, and presumably will last for the rest of humanity, do you think there could ever be a technology, whether in 50 years or 200 years or 5000 years or whatever, that could be better and more powerful money than Bitcoin and potentially replace Bitcoin?

Now I know there's gonna be people who say don't worry Bitcoin is good lol I'm not asking if Bitcoin is in trouble I'm asking how likely do you think it could ever be superceded. Gold lasted as the best money for all of humanity until we moved from metals to paper and to digital. Presumably there isn't something beyond digital technology but given that we are just at the start of the digital age what do you think? Would even a technically superior digital money be able to displace the network effects of Bitcoin? It would likely have to be far superior to Bitcoin to even have a chance, like the motto goes you have to be 10x better to beat the current competition. Would it even be possible for a later digital money technology to be THAT much better than Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself could certainly be better in a few ways, and of course is upgradable. But to make something better from scratch and no network would be something else.


What do you all think? Is Bitcoin the final money solution for humanity or do you think there is some possibility in the near or far distance future that there will be another 'bitcoin-like' moment in history where someone will revolutionize money all over again and create something so much better than Bitcoin that it overcomes Bitcoin's network effects?

If you could design Bitcoin from scratch today, how would you design it? What changes would you make?

Obviously Bitcoin is anchored into previous decisions by the effort to keep it immutably perfect hard money. So keeping that in mind, designing it to be immutable from today forward, building it from scratch today, what design changes would you make today?

We all know about the Lightning Network. And while it is great for handling enormous loads of transactions nearly instantly and at very low cost, it also has some tradeoffs like you can't take receive more Bitcoin than you've sent at any given state of your node, liquidity could sometimes be a problem at least until LN expands more, money can only be sent if the receiver's node is online, and the whole idea of needing watchtowers and needing to keep the current state of your channels so that your channel partners can't act in bad faith and try to steal from you.


LN is great but its not a perfect solution and in an ideal world for Bitcoin I figure there would be more L2 options for Bitcoin with different or maybe even fewer tradeoffs.


So I'm wondering are there any other L2 solutions for Bitcoin that are being worked on or have been proposed? I read in the Fall someone talking about rollups I think on Bitcoin, though I'm not clear about what rollups actually are, I think I just know of them because I've heard about them as L2 used on Ethereum. Lightning is the only L2 blockchain solution that I actually know how it works so I don't know what other sorts of L2 solutions have been invented and which ones could work on Bitcoin and which ones are possibly being worked on for Bitcoin.

You all know of anything besides Lightning?

Alright folks, unless there is another major crypto company/protocol collapse, the bottom is almost certainly in and there is a good chance Bitcoin will start rising out of this bottom range in a few months.

So now is the time to accumulate if you haven't started yet!



Who's gonna be DCA'ing into Bitcoin this Winter and Spring while prices are still super low?

I managed to pick up 0.5 BTC last year but I started a bit early before LUNA even collapsed so I had an average buy-in in the $24,000s.
But now Bitcoin has been sitting solidly in the mid-teens for a while so super cheap Bitcoin is ripe for the picking!

I just picked up 0.1 BTC today with my trading profits during these first nine days of the year.
Hoping to add well more than 0.5 BTC to my long term stash by the end of the year. My goal is to add 1 BTC total between 2023 and 2024 before the bull market really starts cooking again.

For those of you still trying to build out a Bitcoin stash you can be happy with, including those of you trying to get up to being a whole-coiner, this will likely be the last year you can make significant progress on that as it'll start getting real hard to accumulate tenths of a bitcoin when the price is mid five figures, high five figures, and in the six figures.

Who is accumulating and how much are you hoping to add to your stash this year?

Anyone else love how cheap Bitcoin tx fees get during bear markets?

I just sent my first transaction in a while and it cost all of 38 cents (1921 sats).

Critics complain Bitcoin is all expensive to use, except when a bull market isn't actively going on fees are cheap. I remember last bear market fees got down to the 5-10 cent range. Not too far from there at this point.

I paid a 0.0063% fee on my transaction! Last time I sent a transaction when fees were higher about a year ago I paid a 0.001% fee (but that was me moving most of my bitcoin). Meanwhile whenever I go fill up on gas I'm getting charged about 2.9% extra for using a credit card....ahhh legacy systems!

With the rise of tracking of Bitcoin transactions by Coinalysis and stuff, keeping your Bitcoin pseudonymous seems harder these days. I normally buy through Coinbase Pro, but I was wondering if there is an easy way to buy Bitcoin privately, and without getting charged a premium? Only things I know of are Bitcoin ATMs and localbitcoins but pretty sure ATMs have a high fee and I don't want to have to go find an ATM everytime I want to buy anyway, and localbitcoins tend to sell at a large premium as well.

So is there anything like a decentralized exchange for Bitcoin where you can get current market price and exchange stablecoins with Bitcoin with other people? Or any other good buying option that preserves privacy?

Anyone else see this about the proposed ECASH Act in Congress to make offline digital cash:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/28/22999894/ecash-act-digital-currency-us-congress-bill

Yesterday I saw a more in-depth article about it but I can't remember where I saw it. But basically seems like some people in congress want the equivalent of a hardware wallet for digital cash but instead of being crypto it would be more similar to cash - you store it locally on your device (a card, specific device, or phone) and you can transact in-person offline with it using I guess NFC communication.

Seems like they want a competitor to Bitcoin that isn't a CBDC, but from what I can tell the whole idea is a massive fail.

It seems to ignore the whole double spend problem lol, or I guess in this case the create free money problem. As soon as people became able to hack these devices they could presumably load them up with as much money as they want, since the whole idea is to transact privately offline as though it were paper money, and therefore there is no verification on the money. Makes you realize that Congress (and whatever companies are working on this tech) still don't get the genius of Bitcoin and blockchain.

On the News skit on SNL this weekend they had 'the Devil' on as he was taking credit for many things he said he invented Bitcoin, alongside a bunch of bad stuff.


Amazing in 2021 a joke like that can be made. Shows you just how early we still are when SNL thinks saying Bitcoin is evil will ring true with people.

Not ranting, just like how at a trillion dollars we still get common reminders that we're still in the early days of Bitcoin's growth and acceptance.

I get what normal ETFs are. But what the heck is a futures ETF? Cuz futures are just bets on where the price of something is going to be in a certain amount of time. So they are usually short term price bets, rather than actually investing in something. In futures you specify a price for the end of your bet right? So how does a futures ETF work? How does an ETF take into account the short term nature of futures and the bets on different prices?

And why would anyone want to buy a futures ETF? I get owning bitcoin, I get having a bitcoin etf for people who want to invest but don't understand the real point of bitcoin so don't want to deal with actually owning their bitcoin but just using it as an investment, and I get futures where you can make short term bets on your price prediction as an alternative to just trading it, but whats the point of a futures ETF?

I don't mean to like advertise my own article here, so apologies in advance. But I wrote this article a couple weeks ago to define Bitcoin, hitting all the key points, by going through all the strengths and buzz words and whatnot. Gotten a handful of comments on it saying it's a great way to define Bitcoin so thought I'd share it on here.

It occurred to me to write it because like a month ago I was on a first date and the girl asked me how I retired in my 30s and I said I'm retired thanks to Bitcoin. She was like oh I've been thinking about getting into crypto so she started asking me about it and on the spot I was fumbling around with trying to describe all the benefits and concepts of Bitcoin. Check it out if you want. I think it's a pretty comprehensive and easy to understand run through Bitcoin.


Link to my Medium article

I've remember hearing about Schnorr and Mast and Taproot years ago. Now that Taproot is confirmed and coming in November, what are the major improvements to Bitcoin that are being researching/worked on now that we could see within a few years?

Simple question. Between BTC and ETH what would you want to load up on right now if you could only choose one?

Personally I'd go with ETH, but that's because I already have a lot more Bitcoin than ETH.