[The internet does not forgive, nor does it forget.]

Know-Your-Customer is now known by many of us as one very dangerous process we have to go through in order to be granted rights on a not-insignificant amount of cryptocurrency-related platforms. Although it has been proven over and over that its initial intention to fight illicit financial activity has smoothly turned for the most part into a much more malicious intent, a large part of cryptocurrency users seem to either ignore this fact or simply not care that, by completing KYC forms, their identity is now situated under a continuous threat of theft, black market sales and database hacks.

The internet does not forgive, nor does it forget. And if this does not sound scary enough, Bitcoin and about any other cryptocurrency with an immutable ledger that is historically preserved as long as the coin exists is more unforgivable and unforgettable than anything else we ever had since technology.

However, people still tend to use centralized platforms that require KYC completion due to a variety of reasons. Fees and rates are better on centralized exchanges than ATMs provide. The purchasing process is way simpler and more user friendly. The feeling of safety since for any click going wrong there is a Customer Service to call. Today we are going to analyze how Monero's private blockchain partially eliminates the dangers and risks posed by the Know-Your-Customer process.


BTC's privacy-enhancing tools are prone to user mistakes and, if ever broken/exploited, every single previous user will be affected. If there is a particular reason I am afraid to spend part of my money on services such as mixers and CoinJoins, it's the fact that I can either commit a mistake that eliminates the actual effect of those kind of services or, someday in the future, authorities or someone with enough IQ or luck could find a way to link CoinJoin inputs to outputs or mixed coins to your identity.

Even with CoinJoin's existence, very sophisticated algorithms could still analyze coins and make links a strong human brain can not. Once you mix or join coins, you will have to take care not to use non-privacy-enhanced coins together with privacy-enhanced ones. One very simple but costly mistake you can make is creating this link using change. Coin Control could solve that. But how many people know how to properly use Coin Control?

If Bitcoin still has some ways to enhance your privacy, all other coins pretty much don't. While you can mix your Bitcoins, you cannot mix your Ethereum, DOGE or Litecoin. Bitcoin is situated in between what pretty much any other coin and Monero offers from a privacy point of view.

With that being said, some Bitcoin services or software do still offer a potentially exploitable privacy alternative while the rest of cryptocurrencies are  prone to heuristical analysis that link coins to identities. Meanwhile, Monero comes with privacy as a default and main focus.

By using Monero, platforms you have verified your account on will now not know anything about your financial past besides how much you have deposited and how much you have withdrawn. This is something that has particularly frightened me before: through heuristical analysis, blockchain-analyzing tools could find out where your money came from and where it's going without even asking for your permission or statement. Since most cryptocurrencies are fully public and pseudonymous, it's almost like your banknotes leave a glittery trail behind whenever you go to a store, bank or anywhere else.

Banks know how much you deposit and withdraw. However, if you withdraw cash to your physical wallet, the chain of surveillance breaks down and whatever you do with your banknotes is none of their business anymore. Since Monero's ledger is private, it solves this issue by becoming the digital version of withdrawing cash: withdraw XMR to your private wallet and nobody knows what happens to it anymore.

Surveillance States are here - and Monero can fight that. In the past few years, cryptocurrency regulations brought upon a numerous amount of maliciously-intended laws. From Know-Your-Customer 'till this day, how did things change?

If anything, authorities are still supposedly strongly fighting an invisible, overly-exaggerated enemy: illicit financial activity. Under these three words, a large number of laws have been passed through which privacy becomes less and less meaningful. If before we had them regulate exchanges, today they are trying to regulate decentralization. By trying to limit unhosted wallets, FINCEN has proven my previous thoughts right: according to their mindset, privacy should be a crime.

However, Monero comes as a solution to this as well. Its wallet cannot truly be regulated since there is no public evidence for authorities to verify whether your declared addresses and values fit what the public ledger has stored or not.


Therefore, with Monero, KYC and other similar (and even worse) laws now pose a much smaller threat than they pose with public ledgers. Having said that, as time goes on and our governments plan how to better turn our countries into Surveillance States while still camouflaging it better than ever before in an only apparent freedom and democracy, we can fight this all and try gathering our privacy back.

Disclaimer: this is not supposed to be an argument against @1miau's thread but rather a solution to some of the risks and long-term effects of KYC and similar laws.

As far as I know, when you're using Electrum in SPV move you're asking some servers to retrieve your addresses' balance.

I was wondering whether there was an option for Electrum to send false requests to those servers so that you confuse it about the addresses you truly own.. is there any way to enhance your privacy through it?

I'm looking for either this or using a new Tor route/identity for each balance request so that address balances never get requested from the same IP. The main principle is the same: I'm looking for a way I could use Electrum with Tor without telling a certain server which addresses I truly own..

We are living in an era of technology. Our entire present is digitalised day by day as we move on to a new normal where online is more prominent and important than the offline world.

Education has moved to the Internet, something that would've been considered a negative influence over children only one year ago. Things have changed quite drastically, although it happened so smooth we already got used to our new way of living.

As we move on with the digitalization, Bitcoin becomes more and more used. However, a considerable amount of people choose Bitcoin to enhance their financial privacy. Considering Bitcoin is not a private blockchain, tools like Chainalysis owns are a threat against a significant part of Bitcoin's users since the largest part of them do not use coin control and consolidate outputs and dust the wrong way, revealing their historical traces.

In consequence, the existence of privacy-focused coins might come in handy in the era where surveillance and control are on an All-Time High. On the other hand though, that is not the case for everyone - especially since investors are being pushed away as cryptocurrencies like Monero are slowly being delisted from exchanges while privacy slowly becomes a crime.

So I wanted to gather a general opinion on the subject. What do you think? In the current times we're living, are Monero and privacy-focused coins a necessity?

I've been watching Dogecoin in the past 24h continuously, but made no move on the market for many hours straight. But then, I decided to finally make a move and sell the remaining coins I had in my Ledger Nano S.

Binance suspended DOGE deposits. RobinHood went crazy as well, but believe it or not.. they both go crazy whenever DOGE goes wild as well. Binance finally unsuspends the deposits and I decide to make my move. I go over Ledger Live and try to send my DOGE, but I meet the Service Error 503 message every single time I try to spend my coins.

Cryptocurrencies are supposed to be decentralized. But the fact that multiple platforms suspended their service with DOGE specifically or turned into sudden errors makes me believe it's a plan between them all to manipulate markets.

Been around 9 hours and I still cannot spend my DOGE through Live. This is what Ledger has turned into: weak database security, adding centralized exchanges to the user-friendly Ledger Live and now suddenly DOGE goes into "Service Error" once prices go wild.

Fuck Ledger. I'm moving out all my coins ASAP and might start supporting an actually decentralized hardware wallet, not something that centralizes what's supposed to be free.

EDIT:
2 API rate errors, 15 DOGE downtimes in under 24h and still counting. See the errors and downtimes here: https://status.ledger.com/

Looking to purchase up to 11 XMR.
The minimum trade amount I accept is 0.01 BTC (or 2.5 XMR).
BTC/XMR rate will be taken from CoinMarketCap at the time of trading.

Will go first if I trust the person I'm trading with.
If you aren't trusted, you will have to either go first or use escrow. For the latter, you will be covering the fees.

BTC transactional fees will be covered by me if you agree with 5sat/byte or less. Otherwise, they will be deducted from the BTC sum you receive.

So Ledger gives us the ability to use a single 24-word seed for all cryptocurrencies you'd like to hold, which is quite convenient. However, I've been having some trust issues with Ledger lately and the Secure Element (and having to plug an USB device every time I want to make a new tx) makes me feel even more insecure.

I currently have all my crypto holdings anonymized through mixers, Tor, coinjoins, Whonix etc so that all links to my identity are broken; my computers are all running fully free operating systems.. so plugging in a device with a non-open-source component, especially since the device is specifically created for crypto transactions, might be a mistake privacy-wise.

Now I have a few other cryptocurrencies I'm holding besides BTC but I was wondering if there was a way to have only a single seed for all those coins besides Ian Coleman's tool. I have so many papers with a different seed on each for every coin, which becomes quite annoying at one point.. so I thought if there was a way to replicate what Ledger's done with the 24-word seed, it'd be so much easier to use the same one for all my coins.

Any ideas?

I've been using JoinMarket on a full node for a while but I'm planning to switch to a smaller, less power-consuming device which doesn't have enough storage space to hold a full Bitcoin node on it. It's synced right now, but it's pruned. How can I set up JM to work with an already-existing ".dat" file rather than creating its own so that I don't have to resync the blockchain from zero?

So right now if you wanted to run a full node, you'd have to sync the entire blockchain from its inception, back when addresses were all empty. This uses a lot of storage and makes syncing take way too long for an average PC.

But I was just wondering: as long as the blocks are accepted by the majority of nodes/miners, what is the need of having so many hundreds of thousands of blocks stored? If nodes accept and successfully verify the last.. say 100 blocks, then why is it necessary to also store the other n-100 (where n = number of mined blocks since Bitcoin's inception)?

I understand that syncing from zero and preserving the entire blockchain makes it pretty impossible for history to be manipulated. But wouldn't it make more sense to basically snapshot all the current balances of addresses and start over from there, storing only the last 100 blocks and, every time the 101st block is mined, to store the 1st mined block as a now-permanent, verified change of the addresses' balance and then the wallet would remove it from the device, now basically considering the newly mined block (the 101st) as being the 100th and so on?

Looking to purchase up to 1,500 BEAM.
The minimum trade amount I accept is 0.002 BTC (or 150 BEAM).
BTC/BEAM rate will be taken from CoinMarketCap at the time of trading.

Will go first if I trust the person I'm trading with.
If you aren't trusted, you will have to either go first or use escrow. For the latter, you will be covering the fees.

I have lots of residue paper from old wallets of mine. Seeds, printed wallets and QR codes, privkeys etc. I want to get rid of those in the safest way possible, without having to fear the possibility of some bad actor finding those papers and linking them somehow to my identity/location.

I've looked into different ways of destroying docs but unfortunately I cannot really find something viable for a large number of papers. I'd rather destroy any paper I don't need than have all of my banking statements, old wallets etc stay intact in plastic bags ready for anyone to check them out. The paper shredding machines I found that offer an at least decent protection are too expensive to consider them an option.

So far, the best/easiest one I found is placing the papers in a bucket of water and letting it sit there for as long as possible, and messing up the papers using my hands every now and then. Fire isn't an option right now - and I found burnt papers before that gave me absolutely no difficulty to read.. Is there a better way to get rid of those that I may have missed?

[not]

I've installed the Tor bundle before setting up a Bitcoin Core full node on a fresh Linux install and today, upon checking out the Network settings in the wallet, I noticed that it has not automatically checked the SOCKS5 option which, as far as I read, should be automatically done if it detects Tor on my PC.

Hence, I have manually done this (set up the 127.0.0.1:9050 proxy) and restarted the Core. Upon restart, I notice it does sync but it also gets around 10 peers connected. AFAIK, the Core connection through Tor only allows up to 7 (or 8?) peers at a time.

Therefore, I have closed the Core QT and launched bitcoind with the "-proxy=127.0.0.1:9050" option through terminal, and then closed it and re-launched Core QT with the same option. In the end, I get no different results. I created a bitcoin.conf file to force this proxy and no difference.

I tried purging all Tor-related packages and done a clean reinstall. Tried both from the package offered through the Tor official website and building from source - makes no difference. Hence, I'm afraid my Bitcoin Core is actually not running through Tor and I'd like to make sure it actually is. How can I verify?

I have a few hundreds of small inputs that I'm looking to join together. By "small", I'm talking about $10 and under. Most of them are older change addresses.

My question is.. how can I join all those small inputs together without sacrificing my privacy? I've used Coin Control on all of those specifically not to link them together, so linking them now means linking all my entire BTC history together.


Now about Wasabi and CoinJoins.. I was wondering something: doesn't the server I connect to see all the UTXOs I own? As in, say I have 5 different addresses in my offline Electrum I have never linked together before. Now I want to move these coins to 5 different addresses I generated on the same Wasabi seed.. doesn't the server see that my Tor IP owns all those 5 addresses basically, or is there 1 separate IP generated for each address balance request?

I was thinking about creating my own server with its own blockchain explorer so that I don't need to connect to external servers anymore for balance retrieval, but I can't seem to find a good tutorial for that to also work with Wasabi while still maintaining the same level of security.

[If our systems are unable to establish that a viewer is above the age of 18, we will request that they provide a valid ID or credit card to verify their age.]

On the 22nd of September, YouTube has announced new plans for Europe: identity verification for videos that are age-restricted.

If until not too long ago the verification was a Google account which already required mobile number verification, the corporation will soon implement a KYC-like procedure in order to be allowed to watch age-restricted videos.

It seems like the new procedure has to do with Revision of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), which has been adopted on the 6th of November 2018.

According to YouTube's recent blog post,

As part of this process some European users may be asked to provide additional proof of age when attempting to watch mature content. If our systems are unable to establish that a viewer is above the age of 18, we will request that they provide a valid ID or credit card to verify their age. We’ve built our age-verification process in keeping with Google’s Privacy and Security Principles.

This is very alarming imo. If we rewind the time back to 2013 and slowly remember all the new "regulations" and "guidelines" that have been implemented among most of the online platforms, we would find out that these things are so smoothly implemented it's just scary. I keep repeating on a daily basis this same idea that only seems to become more real every day: privacy is soon going to be a definition of the past!

So I just got a RYF-certified device on my hands and I'm now thinking about what I should be doing with it.

I love my Ledger. I've been using it for a long time now, but I am constantly thinking about the fact that I sometimes have to access Live to remove/add apps on it, and that is something I definitely don't like from a privacy perspective. I have no programming knowledge to review source codes, and I am highly paranoid that Ledger Live may be collecting information from my HW (I know it does not have an identifiable serial number, but it does have apps and the addresses and these could be linked to my IP) and either store it or even sell it to other interested parties. PC components have backdoors and creepy closed-source stuff in them, so I am constantly wondering why Ledger wouldn't.

In consequence, I'm contemplating about moving my mixed/CoinJoined coins to an airgapped PC that will never go online. I would have used my Ledger in conjunction with an airgapped PC (I'm somehow pretty scared about my private keys and seed living on a hard drive and Ledger makes me feel safer about it), but I know it sounds like a useless idea.

Sometimes I'm wondering if airgapped PCs pose a risk when it comes to outdated wallets. If I airgap a device, I want to keep it forever offline. Will my funds be under risk if I never update my wallet again, as long as the device is never going to connect to the outside world?

The doubts I'm facing are about the way I should store my long-term coins now that I have three different devices: a RYF-certified one, a laptop with all wireless and bluetooth modules removed and HWs. I have been thinking about using my Ledger as a "hot wallet" for non-mixed coins and storing the mixed ones on an airgapped device, but I am not sure whether I should use my RYF-certified device or the kind of device doesn't matter as long as it has no wireless modules to communicate. I want my airgapped PC to be as authority-proof as it can be. Could my non-RYF-certified pose a higher risk of being unlocked by someone who has access to the backdoors installed in it?

In fact, I am not even sure if there is any better alternative, so I thought some members out here could give me a helping hand. I am basically looking for the safest (from a privacy POV) way to sore and use my coins as privately and open-source as possible, or at least for someone who knows what they're talking about to tell me whether my idea is a good one or needs improvement.

[Cum am aflat despre Bitcoin?]

Recent, am reușit să trec de pragul de 1.000 de Merite. Consider acest lucru drept un țel la care înainte mi se părea imposibil să ajung, însă pe cât de imposibil părea pe atunci, pe atât de ușor mi se pare acum că am reușit să îl ating.

Cu pași mărunți, mă apropii de al șaptelea an de când m-am înhămat la o aventură ce pe atunci era nouă, părea nesigură și totuși, în același timp, reușea să mă fascineze: Bitcoin.

Cum am aflat despre Bitcoin?

Interesul meu în domeniul crypto nu a început altfel decât auzind la știri despre o monedă ce părea să fi depășit pragul de $1.000. De la mici căutări, am ajuns să vreau să cuprind tot mai multă informație, să cunosc cât mai mult despre ceva ce părea a fi imposibil: o economie complet decentralizată, corectă, transparentă, publică, în care fiecare dintre noi își atribuie un rol și ajută prin propriile acțiuni la dezvoltarea acesteia.


Care este cel mai important lucru învățat în ultimii 7 ani de zile din experiența crypto?

Consider că una dintre cele mai mari și cele mai grave greșeli pe care lumea le comite este faptul că se orientează după ceea ce spun emoțiile, și nu instinctul. Întorcându-mă înapoi la 2015, îmi aduc perfect aminte faptul că emoțiile îmi spuneau ”Bitcoin se prăbușește”, în timp ce instinctul îmi spunea că este doar începutul a ceva uriaș ce se va dezvolta continuu. Urmărind emoțiile, am prăduit pe atunci sume mici pe lucruri inutile. Însă echivalentul de pe atunci al unei sume de $60 în BTC, la cursul de astăzi, ar fi aproximativ $4.800.

Același lucru s-a repetat în anul 2017, când prețul monedei Bitcoin a început ușor-ușor să urce. Emoțiile îmi spuneau că se va prăbuși din nou, instinctul că urmează ceva similar anului 2013. Din păcate, am repetat aceeași greșeală: am urmărit emoțiile. În consecință, la un scurt calcul pe hârtie, astăzi am de 25-30x mai putin BTC decât aș fi avut dacă mi-aș fi urmărit instinctul.


Cum vedeam atunci viitorul monedei Bitcoin? Ce s-a schimbat azi?

Ca orice alt începător, primele mele gânduri au fost mai mult visătoare decât realiste: părea că urmează ca Bitcoin să revoluționeze totul într-un timp foarte scurt, să devină ceva ce va face parte din viața tututor. Aș fi putut să pariez pe ideea că este vorba de răsturnarea sistemului de sclavie în care astăzi ne aflăm prinși cu toții.

Acest lucru s-a schimbat pe măsură ce am realizat faptul că, deși se poate o astfel de schimbare radicală, nu doar că ar fi ceva ce Bitcoin nu ar putea susține, ci cei din rangurile cele mai înalte nu vor lăsa o economie necontrolată să funcționeze. Avuția oamenilor va exista în orice condiții, fapt pentru care aducerea monedei Bitcoin în prim plan este doar un ”vis umed” al celor visători.

În ultimii ani de zile, ni s-a demonstrat tuturor cu mici pași (dar repezi) faptul că intimitatea noastră în mediul digital este ceva ce se vrea a fi atins și controlat. Din păcate, părerea mea este că numărul de persoane care să înțeleagă acest lucru este prea mic să se mai poată da înapoi.

Așadar, felul în care astăzi văd Bitcoin-ul în viitor este precum o sabie cu două tăișuri: probabil că va fi o monedă ce va crește din punct de vedere al prețului de aproximativ 8-12x cu fiecare ciclu de 4 ani, însă viziunea pe care Satoshi o prezenta în Whitepaper va mai rămâne valabilă doar pentru un procentaj complet nesemnificativ de utilizatori ai monedei. Deja putem observa faptul că instituțiile publice și corporațiile încep să își înfigă ghearele de câteva luni de zile în monedă, acumulând cât mai multe unități și încercând să dizolve ceea ce Satoshi intenționa să creeze.

Din păcate, singura mea temere care a apărut în urmă cu aproximativ un an de zile și a continuat să se dezvolte tot mai puternic este cea că persoanele care vor vrea să urmeze viziunea lui Satoshi vor fi luate în vizor drept posibili criminali.


Dacă aș lua-o din nou de la capăt, însă cu cunoștințele actuale.. ce aș face diferit?

În primul rând, aș acționa, după cum spuneam și mai sus, după instinct - nu după emoții. În al doilea rând, aș fi mult mai răbdător decât eram pe atunci să îmi înmulțesc banii. Consider că graba pe care o aveam la momentul respectiv a dus la multe pierderi pe care altfel nu le-aș fi avut.

De multe ori, când observăm că am ratat o șansă, tindem să ne aruncăm cu capul înainte în speranța că există și o a doua. Multe persoane au făcut același lucru în multe alte situații similare cum ar fi bula dot com de acum câteva decenii sau acțiunile Tesla de azi. Cu o minte neclară, ajungi să iei decizii pripite pe care mai târziu le regreți. Așa cum spune o vorbă din popor, cu răbdarea treci și marea.

Una dintre marile mele greșeli a fost faptul că, la un moment dat, am renunțat la Bitcoin în favoarea unor monede alternative. În final, am câștigat din punct de vedere al soldului în USD, însă dacă de la bun început aș fi mentinut toată suma doar in BTC, aș fi avut mult mai mult de atât.

Pe urmă, deși fiind al treilea lucru pe listă nu înseamnă și că ar fi cel mai puțin important, aș studia în profunzime cum poți să îți menții intimitatea și anonimitatea online în tranzacțiile cu Bitcoin. Din fericire, nu am făcut până acum ceva de care să mă tem. Cu toate acestea, consider că îndreptarea noastră înspre o lume tot mai digitalizată în care viața personală devine treptat ceva din domeniul trecutului este ceva ce trebuie să mă preocupe.


Care consider că ar fi cele mai bune thread-uri pe care le-am scris vreodată?

Thread-ul care m-a ambiționat foarte mult să continui să încerc să fiu un membru mai bun al acestui forum este următorul: 36 spammers, one person. Is this kind of affiliate spam allowed on the forum?. Astfel, îl consider unul dintre cele mai memorabile din experiența mea de aici.

În afară de acesta, consider că următoarele thread-uri ar fi cele mai bune pe care le-am scris până acum:
  - Entering the Privacy & Anonymity Atmosphere. What are the costs?
  - Why we should never trust anyone for being the real Satoshi.
  - O perspectiva a viitorului monedei Bitcoin ..
  - Personal Opinion: Only a matter of time until Bitcoin will surprise us again


Ce cred despre BitcoinTalk?

Consider că BitcoinTalk este unul dintre cele mai interesante locuri în care mi-am exprimat vreoată opiniile și, totodată, locul din care am aflat mai bine de 50% din toate informațiile pe care le știu în momentul de față despre Bitcoin și criptomonede.

Primii mei ani de pe forum nu au fost cei mai roz, având în vedere că astăzi mă aflu pe lista SMAS și mult timp am fost considerat o ”căpușă” a forumului. Însă așa cum menționam și la începutul acestei postări, lumea crypto este una cu foarte multe oportunități în care înveți cel mai mult din propriile tale greșeli. Astăzi, consider că am reușit să mă ridic înapoi pe propriile picioare și să repar problemele pe care acum nu mult timp le aveam.

Am avut la un moment dat șansa să o iau din nou de la capăt. Aș fi putut să creez un alt cont și să încerc să mă ridic din nou, fără să trebuiască să car în urma mea trecutul pe care l-am avut aici. Cu toate acestea, am preferat să încerc să fac o schimbare - pe care, aparent, am reușit-o. Pentru mine, acest forum a fost un fel de platformă de inițiere în lumea criptomonedelor.

De câteva luni de zile, am un puternic sentiment că Bitcoin iși va alege în cursul următorului an calea. Astăzi se împlinesc 12 ani de când Satoshi Nakamoto a publicat Whitepaper-ul monedei Bitcoin. O cifră importantă, o cifră ce reprezintă un ciclu. Din câte bine știm, Bitcoin a reprezentat și încă reprezintă o mare durere de cap pentru marii bogătani ai lumii. Brusc și într-un mod surprinzător de viclean, acestea și-au schimbat macazul recent și au început să susțină moneda creată de Satoshi.

Să fie acesta un rezultat al imposibilității mai ”marilor lumii” de a câștiga în fața monedei? Să fie un plan de atac gândit în profunzime în ultimii ani de zile? Rămâne de văzut. Pentru mine, un singur lucru este cert: fie că vor vrea să îl doboare sau nu, Bitcoin este pregătit să lupte.

So many altcoins exist, out of which some are more known and used than others. Many of these coins claim to have an utility - for example, Siacoin exists, praising themselves as a Storage Platform.

But what truly bothers me is that, if I think about all those alts I have ever purchased and held, I have never used them for what they are supposedly created for. Besides Monero, where privacy is basically the default, most coins I have ever held have only been used for exchange deposits and withdrawals.

Hence, I thought it'd be a quite interesting idea to create a poll and find an answer to the following question: Do you really use the altcoins you own for the purpose they're supposedly created for?

[1. Bitcoin isn't really scarce]

Only a few hours ago, The Motley Fool has posted an article in an attempt to gather as many arguments against Bitcoin as possible - without even realizing how pathetic most of them really sound. This further proves that, besides the "money laundering" already tiring and annoying attack against BTC, there isn't really much negative stuff one could say about the King of crypto.

As TMF has partnerships with some of the top financial news outlets, their article has already appeared not only on their website but also on MSN, Nasdaq and so on.

I thought this is such a stinky and disgusting attempt to stain our cryptocurrency's reputation, so.. as a result, I strongly wanted to argue against the author's points. Let's begin.

But as good as bitcoin has been for investors in 2020, my blunt opinion is that it's a terrible investment. Here are 10 reasons you should avoid bitcoin like the plague.

Well, here's the fun part: it's not been a great investment just in 2020. besides a short timespan during which Bitcoin has standed above $11k, we have more than an entire decade of profitable investment. Whoever bought at literally any given time between 2009 and 2020, with the exception of a few months (the crazy 2017 bull run and this year's top levels) and still hodls today is on profit. Let's see if the next 10 arguments stand strong.

1. Bitcoin isn't really scarce
First of all, bitcoin is only as scarce as its programming dictates. Whereas physical metals, such as gold, are limited to what can be mined from the earth, bitcoin's token count is limited by computer programming. It's not out of the question that programmers, with overwhelming community support, could choose to increase bitcoin's token limit at some point in the future. Thus, bitcoin offers the perception of scarcity without actually being scarce.

Funny how the negative argument about Bitcoin's idea of scarcity easily turns into a very positive side.

That's right: with overwhelming community support, we could change Bitcoin's total supply. But overwhelming community support requires a very strong, justified reason to do so. Putting it another way, we will only change the total supply if it's a mandatory, vital change for Bitcoin to continue to exist.

The "digital mining" vs "gold is limited to what can be mined from the earth" point quickly falls short when you think we aren't very far away from sending asteroid-mining robots in space. According to U.S. Money Reserve, "about 244,000 metric tons of gold has been discovered" on Earth until today. However, "There may be more gold to mine, but no one can be sure how much gold is left or how hard it will be to dig up.".

Back to the outer space, TMF may be surprised to find out that there is an asteroid containing $700,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of assets, mainly composed out of metal - "including iron, nickel, and gold" exists.

Hence, if we're talking about physical vs digital scarcity, more physical gold than ever before could be found at any given time - or scientists could even find a way to create unlimited gold as science and tech advances. Meanwhile, Bitcoin's supply remains capped at an exact amount. Thank you, math for making this possible.

2. It has a utility problem
The king of cryptocurrencies also has a utility problem. To date, only 18.51 million bitcoin tokens are in circulation, with an estimated 40% of these held by small group of investors. Even considering the fact that fractional token ownership exists, roughly 10 million to 11 million tokens in circulation aren't going to go very far. For context, global gross domestic product was $81 trillion in 2017. Meanwhile, bitcoin has approximately $114 billion to $125 billion in tokens freely circulating and not held tight by investors. There's minimal utility here.

Is it that of a big surprise if I told you wealth inequality exists and, before we take a look at Bitcoin, the top 1% of the richest owns around 50% of the global wealth (and keep in mind this was before the pandemic - now the richest are worth more than $800B more)?

Bitcoin's "small group of investors" holding a significant part of the circulating supply are actually exchanges and services. I'm not sure how utility isn't there with such a huge list of shops, Bitcoin-filled debit cards, more than 11k ATMs and 212k vendors in existence and so many other options of using or storing Bitcoin available.

The GWP was actually $80.27 trillion in 2017 - and it took 4 years to grow from 2013's level of $75.59 trillion. I.e. it took 4 years to grow by only around 8%. Let's take Bitcoin's numbers from 2013 vs 2017 now:

- 2013 Market Cap (26th of Apr): $1,488,566,972
- 2017 Market Cap (30st of Apr): $21,975,158,882
- 2020 Market Cap (26th of Apr): $140,903,867,573

Say what?

3. There's a low barrier to entry
Bitcoin may enjoy first-mover advantage at the moment, but the barrier to entry in the cryptocurrency space is especially low. All it takes is time and coding knowledge for blockchain -- the digital and decentralized ledger that records transactions -- to be developed and a digital token to be tethered to the network. There's nothing unique about bitcoin's underlying blockchain that other businesses couldn't one-up.

This argument really doesn't make sense.. Yeah, the barrier is low - it's called freedom, decentralization and open-source. A kid who has enough coding skills or the capacity of following a YouTube tutorial could create his own version of cryptocurrency. We're free to do so - what's so wrong with that?

Bitcoin is the 1st of all cryptocurrencies. It's the spark of the crypto world, and that will always keep it standing. Other projects may actually represent testing lands for Bitcoin's future updates. Once a new feature proves to be successful with other cryptocurrencies and the community expresses a strong support for it, Bitcoin will adopt it.

4. Few (if any) tangible means to value bitcoin
Another beef with bitcoin is that there's no tangible way to value it as an asset. For instance, if you want to buy shares of a publicly traded company, you can scour income statements, its balance sheet, read about industrywide catalysts, and listen to management commentary from recent conference calls and presentations. In other words, you can make an informed decision.

With bitcoin, there is no tangible data for investors to wrap their hands around. There's transaction settlement times and total circulating token supply, but neither of these figures tells us anything about the value or utility of bitcoin.

Bitcoin gives you the freedom to do your own research probably better than any other publicly traded company in the world could. As it's fully decentralized, there is data about literally everything, everywhere. You could simply use the publicly-available information stored in the blockchain at any given time and do your own analysis. It's one of Bitcoin's most beautiful aspects. There's no cheating, no fraud - all information is transparent and free.

Besides my above argument, are all stocks priced at their real value at all times? Are they really?

5. Fiat currencies may work on blockchain
I believe investors are also placing their faith in the wrong asset. Over the long term, blockchain technology is where the real value lies. Blockchain can be used to reinvent supply-chain management and expedite overseas payments. But when folks are buying into bitcoin, they're gaining ownership in digital tokens with zero ownership of the underlying blockchain.

To build on this point, companies are also testing blockchain that's tethered to fiat currencies. For example, Mastercard (NYSE:MA) was awarded a patent in July 2018 "for linkage of blockchain-based assets to fiat currency amounts." This implies there may not be any need for a made-up digital token to be used at all on blockchain networks.

So how does this make Bitcoin a "terrible investment" in any kind of way? Digital fiat currencies will only be the currently existing fiat, but extremely worse from a privacy perspective. Going to your 4th argument, this is one of the big reasons why Bitcoin will always have a value. Learn to value privacy.

6. Blockchain is years from being mainstream
A sixth issue is that blockchain is still years away from gaining real relevance. Three years ago, when blockchain companies and cryptocurrency stocks were the hottest thing since sliced bread, it was expected that blockchain technology would be quickly adopted. Little did investors foresee the Catch-22 that would arise. Specifically, no businesses are willing to make the costly and time-consuming switch to blockchain without the technology being broadly tested -- yet companies aren't willing to make this initial leap to test the technology and prove its scalability.

In short, blockchain is years away from being a mainstream technology.

It's years away from being mainstream, but OP is admitting himself that it will be mainstream soon. So, is being an early investor nowadays a "terrible" choice? I thought it was the opposite.

Jokes aside, this one doesn't even have to be explained. Expecting cryptocurrency to be "quickly adopted" is a very unrealistic thing anyway - it's a technology that is only one decade old, and only in the last few years did it start to become more heard about. Huge names are already using Bitcoin on their platforms - and guess what! U.S. Space Force is going to use blockchain tech to protect their data. It looks like it's going to be used anyway, be it tomorrow or within years. It's the future.

7. Fraud/theft is a serious issue
By no means are cryptocurrencies the only asset to be hacked by thieves, but there are serious fraud and theft concerns that accompany bitcoin. For instance, novice bitcoin investors may not understand the need to store their tokens in a digital wallet, thereby leaving them susceptible to theft by hackers.

Additionally, it's been hypothesized by numerous blogs and publications that North Korea has turned to bitcoin mining and theft to funnel money into its isolated economy. Bitcoin is commonly viewed as the "currency" of choice for criminal organizations.

So are we going to blame Bitcoin because some people store millions in their centralized exchange accounts practicing shit security when they could simply store them in decentralized wallets instead?

I am honestly sick of the "Bitcoin is the choice of criminal organizations" stupid idea. It cannot even compare to the fiat crimes and money laundering figures. Banks have moved $2,000,000,000,000 in illicit transactions, yet we're naming Bitcoin the Criminal's Choice.

Let's be 100% honest: if you were to commit a crime, would you choose cash which is not transparently recorded in a public ledger and requires no IP and extra cybersecurity or would you choose Bitcoin instead? Most criminals probably don't even know how Bitcoin really works..

8. There's no regulation
Bitcoin is also an unregulated asset. Though this lack of regulation is actually a selling point for today's crypto investors given that it provides some degree of anonymity, it's bad news if something ever goes wrong. Since the majority of cryptocurrency trading and transactions occur outside the borders of the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission is very limited in what it can do if your digital tokens are ever stolen.

To be honest, it is kinda hard to properly regulate a technology that is open-source and international. It becomes even harder when you have a government that wants surveillance and control versus the community it wants to regulate, which wants freedom and privacy.

If the majority of the community wants Bitcoin to become more privacy-oriented and the US government doesn't like it, what happens? How do you adjust regulations for a decentralized currency that could be changed and used from any corner of the world?

Regulations are slowly coming to us though, and that is bad news. It's even worse than having interpretable laws actually, because the governments will want to focus more on surveillance than on privacy. The sad thing is, I do not think there is any way they could regulate Bitcoin so that everyone is happy. It'll probably be either privacy or control.

9. The tax situation is a nightmare
If you think preparing your federal income taxes stinks now, try preparing them after investing in and/or using bitcoin in any transaction. The Internal Revenue Service expects you to report capital gains and losses tied to investment activity, as well as gains and losses associated with purchasing goods and services.

For example, if you bought a single bitcoin token at $11,000, then used a fraction of your bitcoin to buy a new smartphone for $1,000, you'd have to calculate the value of your bitcoin used at the time of the transaction and recognize capital gains or losses relative to your cost basis. It's a gigantic headache.

While this is one point I agree with, I strongly believe this has been done intentionally so that more people stay away from Bitcoin. If we had easy tax reports for cryptocurrencies, people would have been more attracted towards them. But when you know using BTC means a tax reporting nightmare, you may as well stay away from it.

Again, this is something that could change. It's not a non-changeable situation. It's just that not enough people complain.

10. All bubbles eventually burst
Last, but not least, all next-big-thing investment bubbles eventually burst. No matter how excited investors are about bitcoin and its underlying blockchain, history suggests it won't be enough to match lofty expectations.

Mind you, we've already witnessed multiple 80%-plus declines in bitcoin throughout its history. Extreme volatility is a given with digital currencies like bitcoin, and history would suggest that significant downside from its current price is a near certainty as well.

As time goes on and internet freedom decreases substantially, Bitcoin becomes more scarce (halvings + lost coins) and probably also more privacy-focused. Therefore, chances are it is not a bubble but actually a still undervalued asset.

From 2011 to 2015, silver price has had a decline of over 70%. From the lowest price in the past 5 years, today it's up around 100%. Bitcoin has managed to recover from all of its declines, except the ones I have mentioned in the beginning of my thread: "(the crazy 2017 bull run and this year's top levels)". Moreover, as mentioned in my answer to OP's second argument against Bitcoin, Bitcoin's price and market cap has increased every few years by an impressive percentage.

Before ending this thread, I wanted to express a big "thank you" to everyone out there who is constantly fighting against malicious articles and statements, especially those that many times actually do have an influence, such as The Motley Fool's. Although I may not have as much influence as a news website has, this is an attempt to hopefully change the minds of those who took TMF's article for granted.

I have been using DuckDuckGo for a long time now in an attempt to support services that are privacy-focused. It's been going very well so far - especially that I can use it without JavaScript - but it looks like OpenStreetMap isn't an option anymore when looking locations up.

Instead, we have Apple Maps as the remaining option - and it looks like DDG's recent blog post about new map functions advertises Apple's logo and devices through the images as well.

This makes me give DDG a second thought. Is it really as reliable as it's usually advertised or are they slowly moving into the privacy-intruding corporations boat the same way Google moved on from their initial "anti-evil" slogan?

[1. Which would you prefer to have as a payment choice: Cash, digital Euro or both?]

About one day ago, ECB has published a new blog post by Fabio Panetta, entitled "We must prepare to issue a digital euro". To some, it may be surprising; to me, it isn't. The world is preparing for the replacement for cash. Although the blog post explicitly says that a "digital euro would complement cash, not replace it", I think it's just a matter of time before it does get to replace it as well.

Cashless society is starting to approach us at a quite faster pace than we might've imagined - especially with the occurring events of 2020 - and I have my own opinion about it that some users around here may already know. But rather than arguing and debating my point of view as I usually do, today I want to read sincere opinions from more users around here as I'm really interested to know what the community thinks about it.

I think it's safe to say that we have reached the moment where there's no more going back. Digitalization is the future 100%, no matter what domain we're talking about. Therefore, I personally think it's important to hear what the Bitcoin community has to say about digital finance slowly steering into our reality.

My questions for you are (feel free to answer only some of them if you wish):
1. Which would you prefer to have as a payment choice: Cash, digital Euro or both?
2. If cashless society is the future, how do you think this will affect our personal lives?
3. How could privacy still remain a right of ours if, at one point, digital Euro becomes the only option we have?
4. While digital EUR surely does allow authorities to better fight criminal activity, it does also allow them to actively monitor your financial life. As decentralized privacy-focused currencies are never going to be a bank's choice, we will likely have to sacrifice one of the two. Which would you sacrifice, if you had the choice?
5. How do you think Bitcoin will be affected? Will there be more demand for it? Will there be harsh restrictions?

Blog post: https://finanz.dk/we-must-be-prepared-to-issue-a-digital-euro/ (the original post should be found here, but I can't access the link as ECB does not like Tor).

[we]

I woke up this morning trying to think of how much complete strangers really get to know about us through technology. The devices we use on a daily basis are so convenient and technologically advanced it's almost as if we're truly willing to give up everything we know about ourselves - and even stuff we don't even know precisely.

Here's how much information we risk giving up on a daily basis:
 - Fitness bands: health rate, daily steps count and body activity, your sleep and more..
 - Robot lawn mower: your garden's size, shape, structure
 - Robot vacuum: scans your house with a camera; creates a 2D/3D model of your home floor; knows any new change in your home decoration
 - Baby monitor: audio and video data of your own baby growing up and speaking
 - Wireless surveillance cams: now that wireless, cloud-enabled cameras are more convenient, a lot of people put their own home security at risk by leaving audio and video information from your house's interior/exterior on the web
 - VR headsets: Windows Mixed Reality headsets 3D-scan your room in order to let you play without having to install external sensors for the headset/controllers
 - Alexa: she knows your To-Do list, what kind of music you like, the way you talk, listens continuously to your conversations with your family and friends.. and more
 - Zoom: your in-class behavior, way of thinking and facial expressions in different situations are recorded and exposed for potential bad actors to make use of them.

And then comes the worst one: your phone:
 - With or without SIM cards or any kind of modification, your phone can be tracked at any time. Google knows where you are constantly, probably knows where you live, where your school/work is, which houses and stores you frequently visit, the stuff you're interested in, who you've added to your contacts, which kind of videos you like and more.
 - WhatsApp knows the patterns you're using when talking, who you mostly chat with, for how long and about what. Instagram and Facebook enters your private life even further, most people filling in private details about themselves
 - Facial recognition or fingerprint unlock: your physical fingerprint copy and facial structure sits inside your phone.
 - Android Auto and CarPlay: well done! Google now knows what kind of car you own as well.


Placing all the above on a list leads to a horrible result. In the end, with the advancememt of tech, we have reached the unfortunate point where we lose privacy in favor of convenience by transferring all our personal life into the digital world.

The problem here is however not necessarily that we're advancing with the technology. Don't get me wrong - fingerprint unlocking, fitness bands and Android Auto cars are amazing. But we're not using all this technology the decentralized and private way. We are actively sharing information with all of those apps we need in order to properly use the tech we purchase ourselves. We sacrifice privacy in order to be able to use the products we pay for.

In other words, at this point, a few corporations own highly-detailed, priceless information about every single day of yours. This now becomes an issue, a big concern. It's that the more technology advances, the less privacy we have and the higher the risk is of being a victim of identity theft or unpleasant hacks.

So, as the title says, there's one question that is beginning to concern me.. when will privacy actually be something we consider important in our lives? If tech advances this fast and we continue only supporting privacy-intruding software and products, will privacy not become a thing of the past?