There is a thing called as "sunk cost bias". Its understandable that people who have bet money on XRP will continue to keep hope. This hope serves the purpose that you can get out of XRP while there is still time. Once the exchanges start pulling the plug or start getting summoned to explain, the downfall would be quick.

For those saying that XRP should get to defend itself, give one argument as to how a 100 billion premine of a centralized coin, sold to gullible retail buyers by onboarding exchanges and false marketing is defensible?? Not even the shittiest of coins do that. Even they have these rules about only a percentage share going to founders (at least, on paper).

Any surprise that most of the shills and defenders of XRP are shitposters with zero merits?? Compare them with those who have been saying for a long time that XRP is basically the traitor of cryptocurrency and the big daddy founder of all that went wrong with crypto ecosystem. Those slick and devious salesmen on the helm have been selling XRP to the general public by paying exchanges to list them. Next they benefited by having retailers be conned by the "low price" bias.

Newbies jump into XRP thinking "ohh, so low". There are idiots who think that it will someday go to 100 or even 1000 dollars. All while never doing the research to realize that these people actively dissociate themselves from XRP by calling themselves as promoters of "Ripple platform". I am sure that as the lawsuit keeps rolling in, Garlinghouse and co. will simply say that XRP is not their main concern but their business is only about promoting the "platform".

This is because they have been selling XRP to partners for a long time making a killing (600 Million dollars). All while the idiotic shills buy into their scam.

You cannot compare Ripple to neither BTC or not even ETH.

As of today, BTC is still being mined by people willing to put their own time and investment into maintaining a mining setup. There is no centralized party that asks you to buy bitcoin or invest in mining it.

Even ethereum has a mining system but they are now dreading dangerous waters with the PoS model. Otherwise, the emissions are fair enough, although unlimited, which can again be a point of contention.

Ripple on the other hand is a classic premine. What else do you need as proof except the fact that the founders have made over 600 Million dollars by selling billions of the tokens that they simply gave to themselves? Ripple is basically the biggest fish. The next target i believe are going to be the stablecoins, exchange coins like BNB and any of the other tokens issued by major, well-known entities in the space.

The people of USA demonstrated the whole world that how crazy and idiotic they can be. It has been shocking to see the cycle of fake news, divisiveness, conspiracy theories that have led to a condition that there are more deaths in US than any other developed country.

COVID is a bitch but wearing a mask and taking care of basic hand hygiene plus keeping distance has helped a lot of other countries. Even the huge population of India has been able to keep their numbers lower than the US because people are not behaving childishly. Businesses have slowly been able to stay open with people wearing masks and keeping distance.

If good sense were to prevail, full scale lockdowns wouldn't really be needed. But then there are these people who think that wearing a mask or taking a vaccine is going to result in them becoming slaves.

How do you plan to connect the price of bitcoin with the energy consumption or sustainability?

Price is determined by the supply and demand for bitcoin. The supply is pinched due to people valuing their stashes as an appreciating asset which also pays off bills. Whether energy consumption makes a difference to that? Guess, no.

The hash rate will always find equilibrium due to older hardware going offline and newer, more energy efficient hardware coming online. Till such time that the coinbase reward is too small to justify mining. In an ideal world, the fees on-chain would be sufficient for mining to stay profitable. But the world isn't ideal and we are already seeing that custodial bitcoin solutions are coming up with corporations increasing the number of bitcoin they can safely claim to hold. When enough wall-street type institutions have them, they can easily give people "representative tokens" against the bitcoin in their custody.

Banks and financial institutions are already engulfing bitcoin as another of their "product offerings".

Liquid is a very enterprise kind of solution. Its between exchanges and the only thing you can trade L-BTC with is stablecoins and assets on their chain. For most people, other bitcoin pegs are becoming more of a norm. Like tBTC, renBTC etc.

Liquid is just something that Blockstream did because they can. If anybody else did that, they would have been denounced (and were so) by almost the whole bitcoin community as a centralized solution.

The top comments on those twitter posts are already people whining about "Ohh but you let us buy it for years without saying". Well, the saner voices had always been telling you that its a scam. There was zero distribution of this copycat coin. They simply gave all of the pre-mine to themselves and let the price be piggybacked by retail investors.

Also, note that the SEC is calling it an "ongoing digital assets securities offering". Ongoing because all that Garlinghouse and his buddies do is sell those XRP slowly into the market (55 billion of which they still have). They use these funds to attract banks as partners showcasing their "technology". Their "technology" is essentially just a few servers running a private blockchain.

XRP is just the biggest of these pre-mined abominations that have flooded the space post ICO boom-bust. XRP is particularly irresponsible because they have carried the facade of doing important work for so many years while doing little else than going to party dinners and playing with the money they gave themselves.

The concept of fake rich or more correctly the "nuoveau riche" isn't really new.

Yet, extending that to Bitcoin is false. The premise you build upon is also not correct IMO. Tesla cars of the beginning introduced some very advanced concepts. Some of the technology that went into optimizing the battery management, materials for batteries and stacking were patented ideas put into an actual product for the first time. Tesla's induction motor and its cooling concepts still baffle the enthusiasts who work on this sort of thing. It was priced that way to ensure funding for future projects and reducing the cost gradually was the plan all along.

Calling those who support bitcoin "fake rich" maybe true for those who are only in it for massive gains. There is nothing wrong if they get them. Yet, people who truly understand bitcoin know that all the new use-cases for blockchain are still being discovered and this space has massive opportunity. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a finished product which actually has many imitators but nothing like it.

Appreciate your engagement and POV but this is just false.

An introduction to blockchain type of post is mandatory reading these days for any website or product using these technologies. As someone pointed out, there is no dearth of articles, infographics, videos on these topics. It does seem redundant in the present scenario.

It is much better to write product based articles which give the reader a sense of the widespread usage and utility of blockchain. This starts with sharing of your own experiences and experimentation with blockchain. The space has enough generalized content producer. The need of the hour is more product based content.

For me, the special thing about bitcoin's blockchain is the security model of bitcoin despite being decentralized. This is something that is simply not offered by any of the other thousands of chains out there. We should be stressing on this difference as much as we can. Alternate arguments on this are also quite productive.

Jeff Bezos will eat the world.

Even making an account on there to see what they are offering needs a credit card. Of course it is professionally managed and in-line with the growing demand of distributed ledger infrastructure that any actual corporation, however small or large, will need.

If one is looking to build a business based on blockchain, this would be the best bet. The experiment of making people run nodes and keep things decentralized seems to have failed for actual business applications. For business, this will most likely be the go-to solution.

WBTC is essentially the laziest solution to the problem of bringing more liquidity to the yield generating platforms of DeFi. It essentially targets BTC holders who are not happy with the value of their coins but want to put them to use. We are often told that wealth creates wealth. I guess a lot of Bitcoiners with significant amounts fall prey to this although its not applicable to bitcoin.

What WBTC did was to bring together a group of existing exchanges with skin in the game and everyone just "agreed" that if you send BTC in our custody, we will give you back an ERC-20 token. People on Ethereum chain will accept it for the same value as BTC. Basically an agreement with trusted parties. It solved the liquidity problem with yield platforms.

I dread the day when a much more significant amount crosses over to smaller players in the WBTC DAO. It includes a lot of players i haven't even heard about. So they could easily play the long con or the classic QuadrigaFX  thing.

I think it is safe to assume that you are some kid who has just come across a bunch of spoofy bullshit on youtube and has also found interest in crypto. Internet can be crazy that way now that you don't have to go to a library or a laboratory to test what people are telling you. All you need is a video, some more videos about Tesla and other geniuses. Bet you love the Ted Talks, right?

First things first, Welcome to the forum.

Second thing; when Sci-Fi talks about an unlimited source of energy to power a super advanced civilization, it only means that the civilization has found a way to harness nearly unlimited energy. Say, from cold fusion, a Dyson sphere or in your case, unlimited energy with a throughput of multiple Gigawatts derived from a stone. (I'll not go into the details of how much continuous throughput you will actually need for a power source to match Bitcoin's hashing power). The point is that even an "unlimited source" of energy is not free. So your hypothetical 51% attacker will still have to buy all those resources.

You see, no blockchain is infallible. Its only the "cost" of an attack that determines its security. Why do you think all of those 1000 chains did not see people putting in billions of dollars? Because people with wealth are not stupid. The steps to attack a PoW chain will include raising capital, buying insane amount of miners, connecting to the network without anyone noticing (a 50% surge), paying for all that energy and then finding a time to attack.

And then, Attack what?? Crack open the 1 Million Satoshi vault?? Not possible. All you can do is a re-org and a double spend. You need to find yourself a "buyer" stupid enough to buy billions of worth of BTC and not look into the state of chain at that time.

For PoS, all you need is to buy enough of the crypto so that you are the biggest staker. That is ALL you need to attack a PoS chain. Happens all the time with smaller chains.

Now stop watching silly Youtube videos or you will end up thinking that Earth is flat. We have those loonies in our forum too. Even they don't believe that PoS is better than PoW for the foundational money of crypto.

I partly agree with this but you are using the precedent of what has happened till now to speculate on the future for BTC. Cash transactions allowing you anonymity has decreased quite a bit. Its all formal corruption now. The same is not the case for real-estate transactions but just wait till this new, so-called" tech-savvy" government starts linking properties to Aadhar and then to PAN cards.

The space for anonymous transactions is being continuously strangled down. When it comes to corruption, the tax evasion issue is understandable. But the intention of this Govt is in line with those of international financial institutions to turn India into the biggest market with 130 consumers who work their asses off, buy stuff and have every bit of their transactions traced to pay the maximum amount of taxes. All of this when the citizens don't get basic amenities in return for those taxes.

The whole logic of "people should pay taxes" on BTC is kindda backwards. Retail investors like us making small amounts shouldn't have their transactions KYC'd and tracked. We are small fish. (Although, you are sort of a dolphin yourself now, LOL). The problem lies with the way public money is spent in India. That is where they need transparency. But well, nobody asks the fucking government to file a return showing how they spent all our hard earned money. Not our citizens, nor our media. Though both have enough time to pose with Mudiji and talk about what a simple life he has lived while they float on a yacht together in photo-ops.

EDIT: Thats "130 Crore consumers" not 130, LOL.

A 5X increase in dollar values doesn't give much of a picture though, or does it? The price of BTC itself has increase by 4X from the low of 4000 in that time. So this would be expected even if the BTC volume remained the same. What i mean is that these figures may not be right and the real increase maybe far more than this.

The new exchanges have been good for the market. WazirX has become a clone of Binance with the same promotional trading schemes. They should be exploring options to provide more newbie friendly and small investor friendly promotions on the paltform.

I haven't benefited from any of the ICOs or DeFi projects ever yet. Mostly I try to look for an actual product and a lot of times I put money in hoping what sounds good and sincere will turn out to be sincere. But inevitably, only pumps and dumps work in this market. I am not giving up on crypto though and i still believe there are good projects and developers out there who are drowned out by the scams and bullshit.

Before investing:

1. Make sure you get in early.

2. Learn to read the contracts and checking blockchain data to link dev accounts and their transactions to have some account of their legitimacy. Someone with zero history is generally a red flag.

3. Stay away from projects that issue multiple tokens. (Some could be good but this is pretty much a recipe for over-stretching community.)

4. Look for a balance view of community and try to ask questions in the AMA. A live answering session is the best way to gauge a team.

5. Realize that it will always be risky so always recover your principal first, no matter how great the projects looks or sounds.

This has definitely been a black swan event with its typical pain in the short term and several opportunities in the long term. It has been really hard for a lot of small businesses that rely on direct contact like Supermarkets, retail stores, restaurants and hospitality businesses in general. Opportunities for online businesses have subsequently multiplied manifold.

As this year goes by, here is hoping that most of the world will be out of the pandemic and will recover. Post vaccinations and two waves, we can hope that the coming summer would be a bright one with people fulfilling all their restrained needs for going out, vacationing and having fun. Lets pray and hope for that.

As far as a crypto breakout is concerned, to be honest, I'd like it much better if the markets let me accumulate at least a single coin worth of assets first, LOL.

Pretty straightforward analysis of whats going on with most of these projects. I still consider the Liquidity mechanism enabled by AMMs like Uniswap a novel idea. Its just that it is an open invitation to manipulation and scams.

There are some projects that are trying to establish some form of Governance mechanisms too but that too ultimately comes down to buying a token. Another issue is that now these projects are creating tokens within tokens for their own ecosystems. So there is a token for staking, you get some other token as farming, there is another token for governance and when you take part in governance, the reward is another token.

They are just creating a circular set of tokens trying to interconnect their value and get profit from trading fees, locked LP etc. We need a lot more discussion because scams will keep proliferating and when enough people start losing money, the authorities will have an excuse to shut the whole thing down.

Kudos to you for this despite being a newbie here (which you are hopefully not anymore as I am happy to be your first merit-giver). While the institutional interest being shown is a big plus, nobody should enter thinking that these predictions can be true. This ensures that people only buy what they can afford.
When such insane gains are touted, new people who hear about BTC for the first time may risk too much. This results in lot of negativity later. The best option is to get into the ecosystem and try to earn BTC, rather than risking on these bets.

What gives bitcoin value can be understood on the basis of comparison with those that try to copy it. The first thing that gives bitcoin value is its novelty. It solved a novel problem.

The second thing is a community of committed and like-minded individuals. There was and still is the core community which believes in Bitcoin not the way that shills "believe" in their respective ERC-20 token on their telegrams, just for the sake of price. They honestly believe in Bitcoin's ethos of finance without middlemen and central banks.

The third obviously is scarcity.

So, Novelty + Community > Network > Scarcity.

That old time would have been about learning and sharing because bitcoin hadn't blown up so much. People used to have their bitcoin addresses in their Sig space for tips. Now that bitcoin is money, it brings all the politics and power struggle with it. Then there is the cross-cultural aspect resulting in confusion and difference of opinions.

We all wish we were here earlier but to be honest, it isn't so bad even now.

I don't know why people blame the atmosphere here for lack of community projects. The reality is that the older bunch here just stopped giving a damn about "community" or "projects". Most "Devs" moved on to swankier things and the indie/ bootstrapped nature of the projects based on bitcoin simply died out. It was only natural for drama to fill the vacuum with projects being limited to gambling and a few mixer services.

The people who made it big here in various ways, either through escrows, collectible sales or even shilling ICOs, have eventually just vanished or stick to their own part of the jungle. Nobody really talks about actually putting effort to develop blockchain based projects or utilize the chain in some way. In fact, Vod is one of the few old members who is actually putting out things in the Project development section. It is quite false to blame the "environment" here when the reality is that the people who made it big here eventually left because of better monetary prospects outside. Mostly in employment at private companies.

There are few OGs here who can blame the "community" when its you people who stopped giving a damn about the forum. People still fighting for DT1, against spammers etc are simply doing the hard, dirty work to keep some semblance of sanity. With all due respect, save the OG nostalgia. We are not missing anything. The forum rocks and we see interesting people all the time. Ohh and yeah, the ERC-20 devs and scammers get a lot of eyeballs and traction for whatever they come up with. Its bitcoiners fault that this is not the case with bitcoin based projects.

EDIT: This response appears to be a bit retaliatory. I want to add that I don't think forum OGs owe anything to anybody or vice-versa. Just that there is no need to give up on the present condition of the forum. Exciting things still happen at the forum and they can happen towards bitcoin product development too. All we need is a bit more interest in exploring the L2 solutions.