Not really. Let's go in order:

In May, China began restricting crypto in bancoing and payment services. And on September 24, China's central bank declared all crypto activity illegal, from mining to buying, to selling.

That is, a complete ban on crypto was introduced. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58678907.

Next, China blocked all cryptocurrency tracking sites, as well as Alibaba stopped selling any mining equipment and the final touch was China's announcement that any investments in crypto are now illegal.

These are the measures they took to completely kick cryptocurrency out of the country and give complete freedom from competitors to their digital yuan.

I read the news today that Tornado Cash will be blocking sanctioned addresses. It was posted on their Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/TornadoCash/status/1514904975037669386


Although the blocking is only provided at the frontend level of the application, the smart contract itself remains the same as before. So this blocking can be bypassed by simply using the smart contract directly.

So far, Tornado Cash has received about 27,000 ETH of the stolen 173,600 ETH

If we are talking about centralized steblecoins backed by dollars, I am not sure that all the power belongs to the companies. All the collateral is on a bank deposit, and if the bank decides to freeze these assets, there is nothing the company can do. Another thing is if we are talking about decentralized stablcoins like DAI and also algorithmic stablcoins which are pegged to dollar but have bitcoin or altcoin reserve, like UST from Terra.

I'm not sure that CBDCs will completely replace stabelcoins. Maybe the binding will change, which used to be fiat based and now will be CBDC based. Although many stablcoins are tied to the dollar and we won't see a digital dollar anytime soon.

All this would be fine if governments did not go the way of China, after launching their own CBDCs to monopolize the digital payments market. There is no telling how the digital yuan would have evolved or what popularity it would have had if China had not chased all miners out of the country and banned all cryptocurrency activities. The Chinese were taken away from their right to choose whether to use bitcoin or to use centralized CBDC. I really hope that there will not be such cases in the world practice anymore and CBDC will complement the crypto industry, not eradicate it.

It would be nice if the wallet, when bitcoin support will be integrated, could immediately convert BTC to WBTC, to interact bitcoin with Ethereum blockchain, or at least change immediately in the wallet. Such an action would greatly simplify interaction with DeFi, farming, lending, borrowing, and other crypto activities. It would be a universal wallet, especially when paired with a hardware wallet.

Actually the bounties died a long time ago. All those who are now trying to make money on bounties and airdrops by spamming the forum with these countless tweets, Facebook reports, you are wasting your time. The market has long been transformed. If you want to earn tokens, which will have some value, then participate in testnet, in Ambassador programs, etc. The times of bounties are over, and they all bring almost nothing to their participants, with rare exceptions. The time that bounty hunters spend on this could be spent in far more profitable pursuits.

As if the whole market hadn't turned into a big dump. Micro altcoin season ended quickly, lasting a month or so. Bitcoin falls below 40,000, and will pull the entire altcoin market with it. If someone decided to hold on to Shiba just because of the news of a listing on Robinhood, by the time this altcoin is added (if added at all anytime soon) it will be worth less than it is worth now.

Shiba has been in sideways movement for a long time after a strong dump, there was an attempt to grow in February, but it ended quickly.

I share your opinion. How long has the launch of PoS been delayed? It will be postponed again. Actually, I saw a PoS Ethereum review somewhere and there it was said that considering all Buterin's previous statements, as well as already published developments, PoS transition should be expected not earlier than the middle of 2023. Unfortunately, I can't find the source of this research.

The speculative part of the statement that it is not worth investing in mining equipment is also alarming. If they don't launch PoS this year, it will be extremely unprofitable to follow such advice.

It's not about predictions. Any crypto asset is very hard to predict because the crypto market is unpredictable and very shaky. Everything can be going well, but then one piece of news ruins everything. A prime example is May 2021, when China announced a ban on cryptocurrencies.

But that's not the point of my previous post. The point is that most altcoins are created simply to make a quick buck from the crowd, the hype, and the trends. All these altcoins have no other idea than to get rich quick and they don't solve any problems. Something similar is now happening in NFT. Most of these tokens are worth absolutely nothing (except for their minting value), but for some reason the owners of these NFTs value their tokens so highly.

It is safe to say that 99% of altcoins are created for speculation and have only financial interest. A group of developers creates some project on a wave of hype, hoping to make quick money on the altcoin industry. That is why we see how altcoins rise in price very quickly (making x100-x1000) and also fall quickly. Sometimes after they fall, they don't grow anymore, as developers start to create a new project that meets new market interests. Let's say that altcoins are not good for long term investments, because they are centralized, prone to hacks, lose relevance, etc. Only a small percentage of altcoins have long-term goals.

It would be nice to add catalogs by category, such as all the projects Metaverse, Lauchpad, Defi, etc. It's quite tedious to browse these pages, where projects are placed in a common pile. If someone decides to use this crypto-basket, it will save a lot of time searching for a particular industry and related projects.

In general, you need to work on the navigation and make the hashtags you put next to the project name clickable. This will help you quickly find similar projects with similar concepts.

CBDC has never hinted at centralization, especially when we talk about central bank products. CBDCs want their niche in digital currencies and payments, but they cannot compete on an equal footing with real cryptocurrencies. Why do I need CBDC when I can pay for everything with bitcoin? The only way to get people to start using CBDC en masse is to ban bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, thereby establishing complete control and monopoly in the digital world.

Ethereum may switch to PoS as early as Q3 this year. The source of this assertion is a post by an Ethereum developer on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1514010098145759232


I wonder if this prediction will turn out to be correct or if there will be new difficulties and PoS will be postponed again. This time, though, the developers are determined, Tim Beiko even recommends not investing in new ETH mining equipment anytime soon. Will PoS be launched this year after all?

TheFuzzStone has bid farewell to the forum. He wrote about it in this thread Всем спасибо, всем пока.

"Thank you all, bye to everyone.", - he wrote.

The main wave of useless NFT pictures passes and only famous projects or NFT projects with backgrounds, like your example with dancing coffins, remain. Such NFTs will continue to appear, I do not claim that there will be no more events in the NFT field and there will not be large and expensive lots. There will be, undoubtedly. But it can hardly be called a hype. A hype is when a huge number of unique addresses rotate in the industry, when trading volumes grow, and when the minting of new tokens breaks all records. But the end of a HYIP does not mean that there should be no major releases in the market now.

You can invest in three assets as a diversification. But I would prefer to invest in cryptocurrencies. Gold has turned your $1,000 into $950 or so in 10 years. Count what bitcoin would have turned your $1,000 in the last 10 years into. You would be a millionaire. I realize this is all FOMO, but digital gold looks a lot more attractive to invest in than physical gold or silver.

I would add that most people don't even search for crypto projects. Most people, especially those who are new to crypto investing, pay attention to projects which are on the earliest pages of websites like coinmarketcap. And using such methods of project selection they want to earn big percentages, they think that these projects can bring them x100-x1000. In the first case, the projects that many people talk about, including various bloggers, will never bring the desired profit, and in the second case, the desired x100 has already happened. Projects that are on the front pages have long since made the pump and earned their investors a lot of procents.

People think that the more famous a project is and the more it is in the limelight, the better it is suitable for investment. But in fact the opposite is true.

Congratulations, you have told what has already been discussed 1,000,000 times in this forum. Well, let's discuss it 1,000,001 times. Nothing in the crypto space is permanent and everything in the crypto space comes with risks. But there are times when a project can have a constant growth, which is replaced by a correction, like bitcoin, and there are projects that grow only during a certain period and then go to eternal correction and never rise to the same heights again. For such a case, you can think of examples of 2017-2018 coins that died at the time. But people thought they couldn't go down all the time and when the rise would come, you just had to wait. But it never did. And it will never come again.

This is a project that was released raw to the industry. All of these factors indicate that the creators did not bother to test their product for readiness and performance, as well as pay attention to the originality. The rush is clearly not good for the project, which, apparently, was created for the earliest profit on a well-known name.

CBDC cannot compete equally with bitcoin because CBDC is a highly centralized currency and can be blocked at any time. To develop CBDC, governments will banish cryptocurrency from their country, as China has done.

I am inclined to believe that the implementation of CBDC will happen faster than bitcoin will become the world's reserve currency, as it may take decades for bitcoin to be recognized as the world's reserve currency.