Plenty. When i first heard about bitcoin, I also heard about this guy Amit Bhardwaj peddling a sort of token on his website. A lot of people i know were investing in it. Turned out that he just scooped up all that BTC and fled. He was pretty much a serial scammer and you can see the excellent posts by user tmfp that he posted on the Indian sub.

Then there were those who threw money into cloud mining scams. The perpetrators had Youtube channels in Hindi which took you to their purported mining facilities in China (which was actually just some data center).

The moderator of Indian sub Benson Samuel started a company called, Coinsecure, I believe. Seems like he wasn't secure from his own partners. One of his partners ran away with keys to their cold wallet and disappeared. People haven't heard from Benson on the forum since then. I wish he is well and somehow over that act of deceit.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies give an option to those people whenever they wake up to its need. Those of us waking up to it realize the importance of browsing privately, transacting privately and it is great that cryptography gives you that option. Its a gradual change and the original adopters don't have to burn themselves out for it to feel like a revolution. The more this becomes mainstream, the more people realize that they have a choice and a method to maintain privacy.

If the government and financial institutions stop seeing the in-flow of taxes and fees that centralized exchanges bring, they would have an excuse to declare things subversive. Its a very fundamental question though. Whether everyone should have the freedom to behave in whatever way they want irrespective of norms? Norms translate into rules and regulations over time. "True freedom" while being part of a working society is a mirage. You'd have to be an ascetic looking for "liberation" if you want "true freedom".

Thank you Mr. H for the head-up on my re-eligibility. I will take 0.

Address: bc1qtmu332awmf85uy8sjsjdd65lgpsnw0ta99mzw5

Its amazing how historical events become mainstream. The Guy Fawkes image really became mainstream in India after the movie "V for Vendetta" i guess. So much so that while Holi shopping 2 years back, I found the mask in one of those basic provision shops. This is a very mofussil place in Bundelkhand region I am talking about. That mask is still has a place in the back of my car..

Hello Garvit. Thanks for reaching out to bitcointalk. IMO, This is a great idea. From what i understand, the credit card will be like a normal fiat card but the cashback will be in bitcoin. It can be a great way for increasing the familiarity with bitcoin as well as gaining a customer base for bitcoin-centric projects. The possibilities ae huge. Would be glad to discuss over PM.

If it launches, I for one will be buying one and will be ready to be a loyal customer. You will need a lot of promotion to get people onboard. I would also say that rather than starting huge and aiming the plebs, you should keep this as a niche product in the beginning aimed at people adept at using bitcoin and crypto in general. If you just ask a normal Indian fellow Pajeet to take bitcoin, he will either runaway citing fear of illegality or he will start asking you for freebies and to 10X his money..LOL..So i think its better to be a bit geek-elite in your approach. You could use referrals from people like us to onboard more users. Once you have a dedicated community, expansion would be a matter of marketing and promotion to the general public.

The idea of a debit card that you load with BTC and can then spend fiat with is good too. I just feel that none of these products will have the scale of usage necessary for the involved partners including banks, legal teams etc etc. Do you think there are enough people who can use such a product?? Would the turnover and fees justify the product??

Bitcoin already is the best example of Decentralized Finance. Lending and borrowing bitcoin with better returns than banks is already possible, though not so widespread or automated. There have been attempts to make lending/ borrowing tools for bitcoin but I haven't checked how these work (custodial or non-custodial) so cannot comment.

The current wave of DeFi is mostly stablecoins and the ability to earn interest on it. A lot of centralized players have established themselves and they are almost like banks themselves. The "governance token" mechanism is little more than "vote by wallet". The hype about DeFi is due to the insane gains being made by anonymous twitter shillers and anonymous developers (with anonymous airdrops). Its the small retail buyers who FOMO into these and lose. There are some good attempts but decentralized, they are not.

You should join the discussion here and answer those questions. IMO, PoS will ultimately lead to centralization.

Umm. Whales make a living off of noobs everywhere. In traditional stocks, DeFi and of course, bitcoin. But then if you don't have a truly decentralized PoW ledger like bitcoin, this whole other "platform" shit will mean nothing. The future though is not perfectly secured like maximalists believe. Bitcoin needs to be more agile in terms of development as it cannot be denied that Ethereum has a lot of money backing it alongwith an army of developers. (including everyone's favorite scam devs which, like, 90% of those who know solidity are..LOL)

Just because some people make profit by flipping their ICOs, IEOs or now DeFi tokens doesn't mean that they aren't scams. In the simplest terms "Scam" is defined as "A dishonest scheme".

Right now what is happening in DeFi has a very simple template just like ICOs and IEOs had their own templates:

1.) Hype about staking and farming

2.) Hype about the project's "governance" token.

Everyone is rushing to sell their own governance token hyping people to provide liquidity. There is nothing underlying to justify the APYs, except the prices set by initial pairing ratio on Uniswap like DEX. The devs are thus enticing people (or rather people are getting enticed) to invest more by showing APYs. The small holders get burned buying into their governance tokens or providing liquidity for them.
Every DeFi project will work well for those who get in early and of course for the whales. There simply is no underlying value. There are few projects that are actually working on financial products with Decentralized access. Yet, those either don't get the attention or only get VCs and whales, which ultimately makes it just like traditional finance.

So Yeah, Scams..

This "conspiracy theory" has nothing new to it. Every conspiracy theory has a few things in common:

1.) World Government

2.) A belief that Wars are "arranged" by both sides

In reality, with Biden coming to power, i hope that this whole gloom-doom scenario of Us vs Them which plays to the machismo of men wanting to pick up a fight will stop. A lot of energy has been wasted in letting the sadists live out their fantasies over live television speaking about deep state conspiracies and what not. We may be seeing the return of positive interactions between people and return to science and arts rather than religion and arms.

The US media will stop being the circus around Donald and Donald will be happy mulching his burger and attempt to golf. Now that he won't be president, Donald would be just another hate spewing, indecent man. The world can go back trying to build and retain the environment for future generations.

This is called wash trading. The exchange or those with incentive to fool people into thinking that some Uniswap Token is "valuable" will trade with themselves. Or have bots do multiple trades between different addresses owned by one person or the exchange themselves. The anonymous nature of crypto transactions ensures this.

"Volume" is just a measure of total trades happening so it gives an impression of "interest" about the project. This makes people FOMO into thinking that the "token" must be good if so much trade volume is going on. Uniswap is heaven for scammers and anonymous twitter shills with lot of money to dump upon unsuspecting small retailers. You can read this link for more info.

It is never easy to separate scam from the good ones. If they are not scams then they are non-starter and non-monetizable like Ark, Lisk, Bitshares or the plenty of others that have a history on this forum but never really made it big. The fundamental question always remains that what exactly do alts have to offer when there is BTC and ETH for every possible blockchain use-case there can be.

LOL. Tell us which one of YOUR alts died. I mean we all should be a bit candid sometimes and talk about our own shitty or crazy experiences with Alts. Nobody ever talks about them. I ask this because this particular post of yours seem to come from a place of having been through the roller-coaster of hoping that maybe ONE of your alts will moon like you thought..

For you to know that how people are raising millions, you must understand how uniswap liquidity works:

1.) A developer announces a project, an airdrop to get supporters and makes a website to say great things about their project.

2.) The airdrop takes place to just a few people but who shill it to a lot of others.

3.) At the time of listing, anybody can set any price by setting the ratio of liquidity pairs.

4.) As more people join in, the network effect kicks in and the initial holders can easily dump their tokens.

5.) Hype is created through anonymous twitter accounts about "Projects" that are doing little else than copying code to show "pools" on their website. (Show me ONE example of a DeFi project doing anything other than staking and pooling)

6.) The anonymous twitter people are the ones wanting to dump.

7.) The price inevitably goes down as newbies buy due to FOMO and the shillers dump.

8.) Rise and repeat as the developer, the twitter shiller move on to newer projects.

At the end, the steps to avoid getting rekt are the same as always. DYOR. If you think you have "missed" a project, then don't FOMO. Do not invest more than you are willing to lose.

Blessing in disguise because ISRO has a unique position in terms of being able to do space research having found both a market as well as a purpose. The purpose part is important because that is what ultimately drives the employees to be inventors. This kind of an approach is completely lacking in every other manufacturing sector. We need serious investment in product development for defence and civil purposes. This over-reliance on imports through JVs by private companies is not a solution to the fundamental problem.

By the way, Thank God for Biden looks to have won. Trump is going in with his lawsuits and all. Hopefully there are no surprises anymore.

Dude, Everyone has heard of Birsa Munda. Read Bipin Chandra. The tribal rebellions like the Santhal and Munda rebellion were amongst the first armed rebellions against the might of the British. Indian Tribal communities are amazing. And if you ever find a person who identifies himself as a "tribal" from the Chhatisgarh region, NE region etc, it won't take long for you to relalize their big hearts and cool attitude.

Comparing bitcoin with ETH is stupid. Bitcoin serves its purpose because miner's trust it and put money into establishing mining farms. This trust comes from the technology and the truly permissionless nature of changes. Bitcoin's use case has been of a solution to the double-spend problem and it has delivered that. It is the foundation on which this whole experimental spaceship is being built.

Compare that with ETH which is far from its initial promise of being a world computer that would allow anyone to host DAPPs running on a decentralized processing network. They then started talking about sharding and then completely pivoted to PoS, which i fail to understand why everyone is so excited about.

There is lot of such noise everywhere. People in the Alt space say and believe crap like this and then expect people to believe them. You say "Great technologies like EOS". How is EOS great? Block.one raise 4 fucking Billion dollars without delivering a single line of code. They put forth a ridiculous constitution and completely let cartels take over the whole DPoS thing. How did they arrive at 21 nodes? Nobody knows. Technology wise, when they finally released the whole jamboree voted to increase the total supply.

The outlook is bad for every single crypto that has no use case. ETH has found a use case in making ERC-20 tokens which in turn have not found a use case themselves. The importance of ETH will diminish with more of these newer projects vying for the market share. The whole Alt-space is currently just disorganized, scammy and unaccountable. Till these things change, the newcomers can continue to risk and make money.

Rightly said. There is not a single blockchain in existence that cannot be compromised by someone with enough funds to influence the outcome. While I would bet my satoshis on bitcoin if such a time was to come, even then, when the thing at stake is "democracy", you can never fully rely on technology. CZ'z comment is just another one typical of these Chinese marketers. Frankly, while the Chinese have been contributing a lot, they are shit at marketing. Take for example the antics of the TRON guy.

The day when people start relying on things like blockchain voting is the day when you can actually bid goodbye to democracy. Even today, the best method to vote is the good'ol method of manual ballots and the weeks and months of kickass work done by a plethora of people ranging from minor Govt officials, booth workers to bipartisan observers ready to come to blows in case any hint of fraud becomes visible. This is the only way that real people get to participate in the democracy. People think that "voting" is just the power that democracy gives you. In reality, becoming part of the whole voting process from electioneering to booth level jobs distributed to community members, is the real proof of democracy. If there is anything worth fighting for, its your individual, sovereign right to a fair election.

Its a crazy and Shit idea to have elections on blockchain. Someone tell CZ to shut the fuck up and keep selling hype.

I too wish there was more discussion on this. It would atleast be possible for people to have more information about the consensus process rather than just assuming that 32-ETH validators will automatically lead to a working chain. Moving from PoW to PoS has long been considered the alternative for scaling the blockchains after Vitalik's failed attempts at sharding. The whole ETH 2.0 narrative gained ground very quickly after Vitalik posted that characteristically complicated roadmap of ETH 2.0

For one, I wonder how exactly blocks are going to be formed in a blockchain where people can be "validators" by just staking or locking ETH. Where is the actual "node" that orders the transactions and propagates them. Sure its Proof of "Stake". Does that mean there is no "Work" at all? I would love to have explanations from some of the people here who understand this.

There are a lot of networks vying for attention at the same time. While things like Cosmos, Polkadot, even MATIC are desperately trying to gain a portion of the pie, ETH itself is moving to Proof of Stake. I think all of these various versions of PoS and non-PoW chains essentially miss the real characteristics of blockchain. DPoS or PoS can never be decentralized and there will always be the chance for some centralized party to arise and then disputes leading to overall breakdown. Just see what happened to EOS.

Also, now that we are discussing Alts, why do you think MATIC is any better than the dozen others out in the market?

The western industrial powers first burned all the wood that they could find and then go and tell the Amazonians to "preserve" their jungles. They killed off wild bisons and all other sort of animals and then tell the Tanzanians to save the Serengeti.

They burned all the coal and petroleum that they could on the road to industrialization and then tell the rest of the world to go to renewables.

They conducted every form of possible nuclear testing and then told the rest of the world that its dangerous so they shouldn't try.

Now Elon Musk launches hundreds of satellites after they have littered space and then tell the world , "Oh, space debris".

The more you hear these sanctimonious calls about saving the planet, its often discouraging to think that who in the end are these seemingly concerned rich people are actually trying to save.

If major countries implement cryptocurrencies, it means little else than a shuffle to the banking system. In country's like China and India, you can already store your bank balance on mobile wallets and make payments akin to using a cryptocurrency wallet. If the countries decide to use blockchain based currencies, the only reason to do that would be to have an impeccable and easily auditable record of every single transaction within their jurisdictions, which means a.) More Taxes and b.) No currency printing charges. Whether this will have any effect on bitcoin or not depends on whether people would accept these in place of bitcoin.

If the govt wants to put its money on blockchain, its welcome to do so. That doesn't mean that i will stop using bitcoin or striving to stack satoshis. Given a chance, I would rather be part of this community of open sourced value, open source technology and open source governance. There will never be anything like bitcoin, ever again. Why would anyone want to let that go?

It seems that the US isn't just in step with technology but with enough of a trail, they were able to gain access to the so-called "Individual X" and somehow had enough leverage on him to pry those bitcoin out of him. That is pretty scary. It also doesn't feel like that "Individual X" was much of a hacker. If he had been, this condition would not have arrived that the authorities traced the wallet's owner and then forced the keys out of him. He was probably someone who just happened to be in possession of the wallet but found himself in the clutches of authorities, either recently, or maybe from the beginning.

With the ~144,000 BTC initially siezed from Ross/ Silk route, the total stands at over 210,000 BTC that the US authorities had access to due to the Silk Route investigation. The mystery now is the capitulation and fate of "Individual X".

I have nearly zero direct stake in the US elections but anybody can see that the orange man single-handedly brought the level of debate and discourse to historic lows in America. This has had a ripple effect throughout the world strengthening the hand of right-wingers everywhere. This whole thing started as a pushback from the working classes worldwide against the elites who keep getting richer. Unfortunately, extremists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and all form of cuckoo people came crawling out of their basements to declare themselves to the world. My hope is that with Biden winning, this lunacy will come to a balance. Just like the left-wing lunatics needed balance, this right-wing rhetoric has gotten out of hand.

Its the lack of foresight and competence of Indian leadership that they can't see this game plan of keeping India limited to being a middle-class market and a middle-class service providers. Western corp. learnt their lessons after China made rapid advances through reverse-engineering, copying, iterating and at times IP espionage. Indians waited for the tech masters to share but as was seen in case of Russia (cryo engine), France (Rafale Know-how Jaguar upgrades), USA (GE Reactors) etc, no major corporation is going to provide you any assistance.

Indian companies are on their own and they still refuse to spend on R&D. There is still an abysmal gap between Industry and academics. And to drown all these real issues, we talk about Digital India.