Nobody here gives financial advice. We all just share our own experiences or what we have learned about other people's experience. If you are going for a TA and market sentiment based "Buy low, Sell High", then bitcoin is popular for that. Although the volatility will be less compared to some of the constantly hyped projects. There are thousands of traders and bots out there on every market. Personally, I just hold bitcoin as I have seen it go from 4000 to 20K (without buying or selling), so my expectations from the honey badger is "C'mon, do it again"

Some other ways people potentially increase their holding is by buying hyped coins on binance etc and then sell them off for BTC at listing. You need to buy their Binance coin and stake it to get tokens from these new projects. With Binance launchpad, its quite a circular economy going on there with not much being built (except websites and telegram communities).

There are no certainties in crypto. The best bet is to generally keep an ear to the ground and recover your principal as soon as possible. People here have much more capacity to risk because most of them have had their gainz from small investments only. For someone entering recently, the first step would be to recover your principal. Just my 2 sats and experience but not investment advice.

Oh Ripple, the original abomination. When Bitcoin started becoming the first decentralized currencies that did not need banks to back it, Brad figured that he could be the one to tell banks to use their own form of cryptocurrency.

He did convince a few banks to become part of the "Ripple Network" in the early heady days of blockchain integration. Yet, most banks now have some sort of enterprise DLT based system of their own. Why would all of those just decide to use XRP instead for their settlements is difficult to understand. Does it even matter if he stays in the US or the UK?

The scary part about not just DeFi but Decentralization in general is that there is no guarantee that public "governance" can indeed be better. In fact, if you look closely at most of these projects, they are essentially turning out to be "Vote by wallet" systems. All of these need voluntary contributions or "investors". Some people have way more money to fund than others. In case contribution cap is introduces, people just use multiple wallets. The last way to do it then remains KYC, which then breaks the whole point of being DeFi.

There definitely are ways in which this can be solved but it needs a much better form of centralized launch from the devs and initial investors than most are willing to do. Its becoming more and more like capitalism vs socialism. Capitalism fares much better in creating value.

Reading this article makes me think that this is clearly a new form of Bitcoin advocacy. Now that institutions want to get into bitcoin, the whole narrative of "criminals use bitcoin" is being converted to "LOL, Look at those criminals using bitcoin thinking they can't be traced". The article is also littered with other nuggets like "Bitcoin is solid", "Criminals don't want to stay in volatile cryptos", "Bitcoin can buy Tesla that the other obscure currencies cannot".

Whether criminals use it or not should not even be an issue anymore. Criminal groups that need to pay their lowest level operators will not transfer "Bitcoin" to the wallets of their poor little foot soldier. Ultimately, they all do it in cash. Its just a convenient excuse to talk about bitcoin. The "law enforcement" and the "government" needs to get its own corruption in control. Its this their corruption that enables criminal enterprises, not bitcoin.

Good to see some discussion on concepts in the Altcoin section. Keep it up OP and you may have merit coming your way sooner than later. You have already defined Open Banking as a system to provide interactions between different bank accounts. That is little more than combining the databases of all existing banks.

DeFi was supposed to be about Decentralized Finance. When people say Finance, as opposed to banking, what they refer to are these complex, risk-weighted investment strategies that can get confusing for a normal person. This is the reason that "normal" people traditionally don't go into these "investments" or don't care about it. This is the financial illiteracy part of it.

DeFi in its present form is only the platform. The platform needs liquidity, exchanges, Market making, lending, borrowing and leverage such that you can enable trading in derivatives. Even though you may have the 'platform', what you need for these to work is real investors and real products. That is where this DeFi hype fizzles out because of the rampant scamming and people's tendency to fall for them. Still, information travels fast these days and with the bullrun of BTC, these anon devs, unheard of APYs and rug-pulls will all vanish. The serious set of builders will only survive but the people putting money in are now just your traditional financial moguls who are way smarter than your average bounty hunter or a forum follower like myself. That does not mean that your average guy cannot take part in it. Its just that you need a lot of personal effort to manage that money.

The best way to describe Defi is from some VP I read on the internet, "Traditional investment managers wouldn't even talk to you until you have 10,000$. With DeFi, some guy with 50$ can play the same game".

Just remember that you are essentially playing the "game". Its a game in the gamble sense as well as in the "game theoretical" sense of knowing how other people holding same investment will react and finding ways to benefit from it. Ultimately, all markets are a game of sentiment and information. The traders and investors invest millions and make millions. You can now invest "hundreds" and hope to make back "hundreds". The problem is too many people hoping to invest hundreds in the hope of making thousands. Those people are just giving away free money to the real market makers.

Any signature campaign that pays in the form of its own stakes or tokens is hardly going to be worth your time these days because of the sheer amount of scams that have taken place with this model.
Though if a Sig Campaign is serious enough to pay its participants in BTC and ETH, they can then actually attract attention in the form of better participants from the main section of BCT forums. The people who take BTC seriously and will doubt ICOs to be scams are also the best people to judge and demonstrate your campaigns legitimacy if it is legit in the first place. This is because these people will not take fake promises as a given without analyzing your project. When they do, they will actually be able to contribute to your community as a developer.

BCT forum is filled with people interested in finding something worth their time. Hence a decent BTC paying campaign is your best bet, both as someone wanting to market their project or as someone looking to join a bounty that isn't just a waste of your precious time (If you feel your time has value, that is).

There are quite a few people in these comments who are coming around to the point that DeFi is here to stay. Atleast for as long as the regulators allow DEXes like UNISWAP to operate. Bitcoin is a completely different proposition compared to DeFi. Any serious person who is putting money into such projects is also keeping his bitcoin. Because bitcoin is the foundation that actually gives legitimacy to the whole idea of cryptocurrency.
Without Bitcoin, all of these other projects would simply be private servers run by a bunch of people giving away useless tokens and essentially engaging in unregulated, financial fraud. It is their liquidity with respect to BITCOIN (through USDT, ETH etc) that these projects are surviving. You remove bitcoin from the equation and i guarantee that all the REAL investors putting thousands of dollars into these alternate blockchains will just withdraw.

Also, for all the talk about PolkaDot, Synthesis etc, there is still nothing novel or revolutionary about any of them. The only real success in this whole space till now has been UNISWAP which has been able to garner a huge market share and attention with its Pooling and LP model. The rest are all just people with deep pockets throwing money at these devs hoping that they would eventually come up with the next biggest network effect.

The BTC price crossed 12000 USD and still rising. We are just in the middle of the week so this isn't the weekend spike. Lot of bullish news had poured in for quite sometime and the way BTC price just shrugged the Bitmex incident seems to have finally given succour to the bulls. Get ready for the usual pangs of the price difference between USD and INR that almost all the Indian exchanges pile up.

Anybody knows how do they justify them? Is that an India tax?

The hype about jumping onto the highest APY and farming the shit out of it is definitely over. As with every hype cycle, there aren't enough new people to fool i guess. Information travels fast these days. So everyone knows now not to lock funds in anon accounts and if they give you free money to build trust then you take that money and then scoot. Not take it as a signal to invest more.

So now that the dynamic has changed, the hype generated due to scammers is low. Those people who still believe that there are rich mofos out there who want to put money in novel areas are continuing to come up with more financial jugglery into DeFi space. I keep saying this but DeFi is just crypto-devs wanting to replicate big finance. The good/ bad thing (depending on how you see it) about it is that you don't need a sophisticated degree or anyone's permission to gamble money into it.

Lack of entrepreneurial mindset
"Entrepreneurship" was a subject in one of the compulsory humanities courses they make you take during Engineering. The basic idea was that an entrepreneur has risk taking capacity. As Indians, we are inherently risk averse. This is because of the unstable society and shitty law & order. Musclemen, fourth grade policemen and illiterate politicians are our masters. In such a situation, every 90s kid knows that if you have a stable Govt job, you will have some kind of an identity that will help you or your family. So everyone just toils over books to get out of the shithole and reach a position of authority, power and wealth.

Entrepreneurial mindset akin to that found in West cannot grow without a stable society and law and order. Everyone loves American businesses but most were started by Americans who lived the best peace years through history and coming from well-read, prosperous families themselves. Its ironic that while this Govt preaches Indians about "startup India", they have created the worse societal conditions ever where people are just not feeling secure enough. In the name of anti-corruption and digitalization, we are slowly going back to the days of license-raj and tax terrorism.

Pawan's remarks here on that other side-topic we started on your raffle thread have the same answer:
Most of these "Indian devs" are IT guys in their first jobs trying to do a side project or a hustle. They may not be contributing to open source but in striving to bring some apps and products onto these alternate blockchains, they are only trying to establish some sort of income stream. While there is little chance that they will come up with something groundbreaking, you cannot simply write them off. There are a lot of passionate people out there too. They just don't have enough money to let their passion take precedence over everything else.

"In the same way as satoshi"

Now thats a befitting sendoff. They had already withdrawn from the forum a lot. It was a great inning marked by dedication and a lot of work. The post count, merit, numerous threads, troll wars, impeccable comebacks, acid humor, campaign management, escrows and fighting for the forum that they did speaks of the effort that was put in. Hope you are moving on to greener pastures to dedicate more time to other real-life ventures. The forum now has a life of its own and it will outlive us all. Best wishes for your endeavors.

PS: The sheer engagement from Lauda account confirms that it wasn't just a "Him" or "Her". "They" were a bunch of intelligent felines..

If you have a stable job, you will be entitled to that loan on normal interest rates. If you take it against property it'll be lower still. Small businessmen often take loans at exorbitant rates from informal lenders. The rates can be as high as 2-4% per month. In comparison to those people, you are at a good position to risk this. Just one thing differs which is that you intend to just hodl in the hope that it'll double in price. These businessmen put it into ventures that they are sure will give them returns.

If you have a plan and risk-capacity to put that BTC to work and bring you profits, then you can take the loan. If you are only counting on the price increasing then, imo, its not a good idea. While we all want bitcoin to reach new ATHs, that 50K figure you cited is not going to be such a cakewalk.

Paying 18% in taxes can seem unfair to many Indians who have apparently slogged it out in the gulf countries to save enough and return to their home states. The cases generally involve expats returning from gulf after working in menial jobs there.

Unfortunately, things are not as simple as that. With all the scanning and imagery available at airports these days, it is surprising that these people still dare to risk losing all of their money (against paying 18% tax) as well as risking their bodies to such extents.  For those who know Indian society, Kerala is the state which had its name maligned after several Muslim youths joined ISIS. There is a dominant Muslim population with links in the Gulf. The Gulf states have sponsored covert actions in India because of its history with Pakistan. So the investigation agencies are fully involved in several such cases as this is suspected to be terror financing.

This is the kind of stuff that also makes it difficult for the general public to accept bitcoin because it can be quickly linked to terror financing.

@Polo7. Up your meme game and join 4chan. The good people there will be able to explain to you what others here are too gentlemanly to state properly. Times like these, I miss @TMAN.

Seriously though, Where is TMAN??!! He hasn't been on since March..

There isn't an Indian Politics and Society board.

We all shy away from politics here. I spend quite a lot of time on the forum and most things i read are people's opinions here. Just wanted to share a few thoughts about the state of our economy and politics. You are welcome to rant yourself if you want.

The way things have slid down for us economically in the years of this fucking stupid government, the uncertainty of COVID, the overall sentiment of hopelessness, i feel like we are back to the 90s time of "dog eats dog" world where you save every penny so that you have something to fall back on. I had hoped that the downturn over the last 4 years would have been a time of Indian companies building, acquiring technologies and young Indians establishing real-world startups. These hopes have been dashed by this over-promising government which just doesn't have the competence or the ideology to steer a 21st century economy. I don't want to fucking start wearing Khadi, make diwali pots and start watching nukkad-ramayan again. I thought we were past that but every time i open the news, watch Arnab Goswami throw tantrum like the country's bahu and see Mr. Pradha Sevak don his ever growing Osho styled beard, my heart sinks.

There, thats a weight off my heart for now. I hope things don't really go that bad as we simply cannot afford that as a society considering our demographics.

EDIT: BTW, This is what triggered me. No offense to Bangladeshi bandhus. Congratulations.

The foundation for bitcoin in India had not been a technical one to begin with. It was the goto "jugaad" after demonetization and all the "talk" about black money by the new Govt. I know such people who bought tens of bitcoin back then and sold the ATH. A 'community' hasn't really developed even today because Indians are not interested in putting time and effort into something that they cannot outdo. Most Indian devs are quick to realize that the primary work on bitcoin has been done. If they want to outdo or outshine, they will have to stick to new projects. That is why you will see quite a lot of Indian developers and Indians in Alt-coins.

When it comes to bitcoin, i think stacking is the thing we can do best for now as other parts of the world have strongly taken over the bitcoin momentum. Look at the SEA communities and companies declaring bitcoin holdings.

Maybe its just semantics but "bankers" aren't the enemy. Bankers as individuals are buying up bitcoin. The investment bankers that i know, they have all individually owned bitcoin at some point and some are holding. For more examples, you know that Stone Ridge actually bought bitcoin because the employees at the asset management firm won't stop buying it. JPM had to issue an advisory warning employees not to invest in bitcoin. Bankers are the people who see most of the shit going down at these places and some of them would prefer anything that brings a bit of method to the madness.

Banks as institutions though are now trying to wrap themselves around bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the funding methods involved so that they can keep themselves relevant. They make money by siloing access to information, products and opportunities while taking the most profit out of it by funding the so called MNCs. Today as an individual, if a malaysian wants to sell something that a german will buy at a premium, they won't allow the exchange and let the poor guy gain from it. The silos are useful to them to keep a check on everything from world politics to demography. That is way too much power for someone to give away voluntarily. This is what bitcoin has challenged by enabling the common man to be part of a world economy without having to go through the hoops that they have placed for us. This is also one of the most important reasons that we must keep our privacy when it comes to all the KYC drama.

Even with that information, some people tend to think that what if this is another of those airdrops that only a closed group of people will have access to. The thumb rule is to never trust something that has the name of an already pumped idea like YFI or UNI. If it resembles the name, never click on the link sent to you in mail, chat. TG etc. Go to the original website and see if there is something about it. To be safe, just never click on e-mail links about "free money".

The only "airdrops" you should safely apply to are the ones that only ask for your ETH address and probably a retweet and a mention. Anything that asks you to put in money before they put it themselves is a scammer. There are a lot of young solidity devs out there who actually WANT to build things and are looking for exposure. Those are the kind who will never go to the trouble of collecting e-mail IDs and sending targeted messages. They simply take to twitter and try to grow organically. Its the scammers who you will keep hearing about even though there is no novel code or idea.

The primary devs have been working on this for a long time. That is what seems to be behind the market confidence to boost the price. But i don't think it is as simple as that. Binance offered a bonus to trade the coin or even just hold it. It has a huge Chinese community which had been renting storage space on the network. In an idea world, a blochchain storgae slution that is uncensorable would make a lot of sense to the "libertarians" in a country like China. What we should understand that its not an ideal world. China isn't like the west where honest citizens can quote the constitution and have lawyers against the State itself. The Chinese will shut it down whenever they want using whatever means necessary.

So the bullishness based on Chinese experiment can't be a long term thing. When it comes to people using the network by actually renting storage, the question is who are the consumers gonna be? Can the Govt hold you responsible if your fraction of storage is used to host plans of embargoed material and shit like that? As a storage provider, can you claim immunity from what your storage is used for. These are questions for the long term. Short term though, its the musical chair as usual. But 50+ Dollar..Meh!

There is people over at Golem Network who had been trying to do something similar. They are about renting computing for server jobs like raytrace rendering. Its just that they don't have the kind of network effect that Filecoin managed with its chinese community.

And that is why it is probably right to say that the atheist are not just free thinkers but also the bravest free thinkers. When worse comes to worse and you feel like things just aren't under your control, I have found myself praying to "something" that I have been told as a kid would always protect me.. Those who are courageous enough to take the stand that their well being and of those they love is completely a matter of their own making and not some unpredictable matter of chance, truly are brave.
When these people decide to do the right thing, I believe nothing will scare them. Not letting yourself have the comfort of believing that there is a God to set things right and ease the pains of your loved ones is indeed an act of free thought and lot of conviction.

"Soul is not some gassy entity"...LOL..That was funny