One of these days when the dust has settled, we'll maybe know the story behind these people and what the forum and the fights on it meant to them each personally.

OG and Vod have this legendary rivalry that keeps popping up in the forum. Lauda has now long gone. New players keep dropping in and leaving. How can one forget QS? I wish someone someday will make a documentary about it all. Hope the narrative will be how things happened and not a biased viewpoint.

Often through these debates, it has always seemed like one man's truth was another man's lie.

Yeah sure. You make a newbie account and only care to write in this thread for 11 straight days. Just be honest and let us know how does this work for you. An honest story about how you came to this forum. On an anonymous forum nobody would be able to see if you are an Alt or not, anyways. So you have nothing to fear.

An honest story would instead bring you merits. How do you guys learn to guilt trip people this way "your intention was good, hope i can also benefit".

To use bitcoin on another chain, it has to be guaranteed that it can be redeemed back on the main chain anytime with same value. To maintain this value, or peg, a trusted party will always be needed because the private blockchain cannot be trusted to be secure enough. Bitcoin isn't trusted because of just the code review but also because of the hashing power. This new blockchain should have an equal hashing power for users to trust it in the same way that they trust Bitcoin chain. At least that is the logic of the most stark opponents of wrapped tokens.

An equal hashpower chain not being possible, all the wrapped tokens rely on some sort of delegated decentralization. Even the federated peg from Liquid is an example of that.

TLDR, the issue would be that the smart contract holding my bitcoin isn't itself on a secure enough platform/ blockchain.

I think this misses out on most valuable tokens. LINK is targeting its own chain in the future so they may not remain an ERC-20 for too long. USDT is basically Tether in ERC-20 form. Earlier it was only on the OMNI chain. WBTC is basically gateway to yield farming for BTC holders who want to milk the high but risky APY's that DeFi projects tend to offer initially.

I think the most valuable ERC-20 token currently is YFI from yield headed by Andrje. Not because of the price but simply due to the amount of work and code this team is pumping out. I think this made a fortune for quite a lot of people. It remains to be seen how it handles regulations which are sure to kick in anytime.

If that is what you want then you are doing a very bad job at it. It doesn't sound surprising or mysterious but just another clone of the other clones. Everyday there are hundred such projects that come up and then vanish.

If getting people excited about Elrond is your motive, then you should just list out some projects, use cases that you think are built on it and are doing well in terms of user base. Otherwise, multiple chains like Tron, EOS etc have existed for years now which have gambling Dapps and all kind of other things built on them. Yet, these just don't have the usage or volume to demonstrate any superiority over Ethereum as such.

I doubt that when banks and governments start issuing their own cryptos, they would be open to any form of competition.

Ideally though, IF the politicians or economists were to suddenly agree that even the lazy central banks should have some "competition", then maybe they would say that stability and innovation are desirable. Yet, the way things work, financial institutions have zero accountability. Things seem to be working fine for the politicians as well as banks currently. People are least concerned about what irresponsible banks does to them in the long term. It is hard to see a future where politicians would be compelled to compete for votes on the basis of a vision of best banking/ currency practices. We have bitcoin but it is also getting subject to government interference and regulation with every passing day.

What makes anyone think that if all countries were to start issuing cryptocurrencies, it'll be any different than their already existing currencies??

Its not like they will peg it against other cryptocurrencies or against bitcoin. (which they ideally should btw)

It'll just be a sort of digital representation of your current bank balance. There won't be an airdrop and there won't be any speculative market to take your countries currency to a 10X. Even now, in most economies, your bank balance is generally just digital. It is not backed by anything other than your governments promise. The same will be the case with these central bank currencies. A centralized currency is little more than banks printing money.

This is something that isn't sufficiently discussed anywhere. Well, Tether and the exchange BitFinex have the same parent company. Most of the trades in bitcoin happen through tether (after customers turn their fiat into that). Yet, that time has gone when Tether or Bitfinex was a matter of concern for just bitcoin. Bitcoin has a diversified set of trading participants which include OTC trading desks and traditional banks getting in to offer BTC to customers. Then there are companies like Paypal. You can safely assume that even if Tether were to face some kind of regulation/ bans; bitcoin would survive as demand will quickly eclipse the supply (after maybe a dump).

What is more at risk are the plethora of ERC-20 tokens and their trading which has been linked to USDT since it moved to cross platform support. If that happens, these Alt-coins and the DeFi platform will quickly become unviable.

Pretty much this. There is no problem if someone is doing bounties as long as you don't spam the forum or just engage in zero-effort, manual work. People who get engaged with projects and actually try to figure out things for themselves, deserve the money they can make from selling off once these projects get listed. It is a net positive for the individual. How that affects the whole ecosystem is a different question and the answer to that is not positive.

Not just Elrond, there are plenty of other projects that have established PoS based platforms. Yet, it is difficult to take away or replicate the network effect that Ethereum has. For all its delays and false promises, Ethereum continues to work and had a robust support from its PoW miners who continued to invest in GPUs and energy to mine it. That itself leads to a big group of people who are technically invested in it.

When it comes to PoS currencies, the first step that you need is to put in upwards of a thousand bucks to actually become part of the system. That way it becomes more important to take profit than to be part of the development ecosystem.

Despite this, i do hope that we will see an increased share of developer interest in some of these new projects. Increased competition is always better for the end product and thus for crypto adoption.

These Scandinavian countries with their public amenities and the target of low corruption always sound like the best places to live in. Considering the relatively benevolent nature of the governments there, the main reason for them to move to a blockchain based currency may be the transparency and ease of movement/ usage.
Countries like Sweden spend a lot in public amenities and if those expenses are on a blockchain, the possibility of inefficiency and corruption will become lower still. I wish more governments around the world could take care of people the same way.

Printing money and calling it "Stimulus" has somehow taken the centerstage in the name of financial stability. Basically it is the governments way to ensure that people keep working for paychecks and remain blissful in order to keep consuming. There has to be a balance between this expansionist spree of developed economies and the requirements for a viable, happy lifestyle. When there is no balance, the whole circus comes under threat with any upheaval, like COVID-19.

How does Bitcoin help that? I think the answer is pretty much that it doesn't. It just gives the people like  us a choice to have our own economies sans borders and regulations meant to keep you restricted and the wealthy protected. Whether the people that are actually running our societies and economies are themselves going to change is an entirely different question. Too much investment has gone into the current setup of capitalist, profit-seeking, constant growth markets. This is unlikely to change due to bitcoin.

Whoever is asking this question, Ask him what is "World government". The governments around the world cannot come to the same page on existential issues like Climate change. Yet, do you think they will come to same page on who gets to determine the future of money and control over it.

When it comes to bitcoin, nobody wants to lose the initiative that Bitcoin has sparked. Not the EU, nor USA, nor China or Russia. And those are the big ones. Then you have all those smaller developing countries who don't really hate the little sparks of innovation and revenue stream. On the far end are countries that downright hate the current world order and will do anything to circumvent it. If use of bitcoin allows them this, they WILL do it.

So its pretty difficult that everyone in the world will come to an agreement to dissolve their bitcoin wealth and sources of revenue/ innovation. Even if they somehow come to an agreement, its technically not feasible to simply "outlaw" software. When that happens, you can officially assume that the world has given up on democratic thought.

I don't touch my bitcoin. If i find a way to spend them and buy something i need, I buy an equivalent amount in fiat. Other than that, I buy small amounts I am comfortable with.
Around 30% of that amount, i keep reserved in the hope of finding some projects that actually look like they have devs behind them who want to do something awesome. These hopes generally turned out to be unfounded (atleast they have in the last few years). So now I just put a target price with respect to bitcoin and sell the alts when that hits. Slow accumulation.

Who are these "investors" that drive the price up??

Do we ever get to know the names, faces or institutions behind these price rises. I am not saying that "Polkadot" is your typical run-of-the-mill project. It has a lot going for it with big names backing it (including, apparently, the cofounder of Solidity). It also has a lot of community led initiatives. Yet, the price rise is only because of the exchanges and the day traders exploiting those interested in it. Like every other project out there, these have a founders or initial team with a major share of the tokens already. To participate in the so-called governance in any significant way, you already need to be one of the big holders which means you need to be someone who either bought cheap at entry (with the sole purpose of selling at a target price). Thus, this is pretty far from a fair launch.

What they have going for them is their grants program to support developers on their chain. Yet, without sufficient interest and large enough community, they are also being run by a small group of interested individuals. Such a situation will always be the one where the interest of few will be above the general interest.

So even though they are trying well, I don't think Polkadot poses any threat to Ethereum.

Stablecoins from trusted third parties like Tether etc. have been great for bitcoin and crypto in general because of the easy ramp-on and ramp-off from fiat. Yet, there workings aren't really transparent and there is as much "proof" and "backing" to these stablecoins as any other fiat currency can have in the time of central banks and fractional reserve. So Governments leaving their own systems and using any of these existing stablecoins is out of the question.

If you or someone else actually wants to be a "lender", you can do it way more easily with BTC. BTC is tradeable to every imaginable alt-coin. There are multiple Alt-coins that allow you to earn from lending or providing liquidity. Using Stablecoins for that same purpose is just lazy.

In terms of the ERC-20 hegemony which has made Ethereum the prime choice of developers for Alt projects, there are plenty of alternatives but not many will find it easy to succeed. There is no dearth of developers and investors willing to put money and time into creating startups whose products are based on Ethereum. That community is its strength.

There are alternatives of all shades like Polkadot, Cosomos, Lamden and a lot else. Yet Ethereum had the benefit of being PoW and with it the confidence of being decentralized. When it turns to PoS or some other form of it, i doubt that people would like to trust it with the same kind of monetary confidence that they currently do. That is the chance for the next PoW based, smart-contract platform.

Ummm.. I haven't watched the video yet but I don't think that this refers to an actual "school" or "university" located in Austria. What they are talking about is The Austrian School of thought the way it contrasts to Keynesian economics.
The way our world runs depends on what schools of thoughts gains dominance in our Economic and Political life. Most of the modern centuries have been about Democracy in Political thought and Keynesian economic theory when it comes to economics. Austrian economics is generally opposed to federal reserves with unlimited power and fractional banking. This is why they find resonance with Bitcoin.

Everyone equates DeFi with the concept of "Farming" and "Yield". This has been popularized this way because of the poster boy of DeFi and his token. Andrje and YFI with his website yield.finance.
What Andre did was provide an easy way to move your tokens to the various lending and borrowing platforms and earn from the fees. Uniswap took this one step ahead. As usual, scammer got wind of the fact that people will throw money onto anything that promises returns. This is why DeFi has been taken over by HYIP schemes that come up with a medium post, discord, twitter shills and then disappear overnight after selling you their tokens on Uniswap.

This has overshadowed a lot of otherwise decent work being put in by developers and students/ practitioners of modern finance. The work is related to importing the products and investment opportunities available in traditional finance onto the blockchain and by utilizing the capital base of crypto enthusiasts.

In an ideal world, DeFi and the various "startups" would be semi-respected entities trying to make things work differently. Its kindda unfortunate that everything gets spoiled when it gets too democratized and easily available to everyone. ICOs and DeFi are prime examples.

That is one long ass article Stan. I am only halfway through yet and finding it quite informative and the views expressed seem solid. Thanks for sharing. Would you care expanding on this quote from the article. This is something retail investors should be educated about. Just a bit of explanations in this quote would suffice: