The article itself highlighted towards the end that the gas fees have fallen from a high of ~11$ TO ~3$ within a span of 2 weeks. Those two weeks actually were quite profitable for the miners. This of course was not sustainable. As the hype dies down, people stop putting in exorbitant fees. Another thing to note is that this does not speak anything of Ethereum's own growth or potential. Its just that due to the creation of easily accessible "vaults", YFI made the whole DeFi ecosystem surge. As these are still ERC-20 tokens, ETH miners saw fees skyrocket.
This has also exposed Ethereum to competition from alternate blockchains and a lot of projects are already building on these chains. Overall, i think competition is good for any space. Ethereum has failed to find any way to save investors from being continuously scammed. That combined with the high gas fees may well challenge Ethereum.
Nothing to be said vis-a-vis bitcoin because is doesn't matter to bitcoin.

So many people talking about Tron. I read about Justin Sun in this article from the Verge  a few days ago. Former employees attest to the horrible ethical standards of their founder. While the website of Tron shows Justin as your average starry-eyed, well mannered geek receiving felicitations from Jack Ma and bidding millions for a dinner with Warren, the article in The Verge has terrifying details about the actual incidents. The huge community network effect though plays in favor of TRX. Justin Sun surely is a marketing genius.

Stop scamming man. The trend of ICOs is long gone. Your CEO picture seems to be copied from a youtube stream of someone named Adam Torres who apparently interviewed the CEO of RDE group.
People are talking about DeFi here. Something that has huge potential similar to the ICOs but same pitfalls of scam and over optimistic projections and promises. Who names their coin with a suffix "ICO".

All of that demonstration of reverence towards Satoshi et al does not change the fact that you do not need a "bitcoin core developer" to deploy a contract and put up a token on Uniswap with the name of bitcoin. Anyone can deploy a contract, mint some "scarce" tokens and put it for swap trading on uniswap.
What exactly are you offering?? As far as your claim to letting people experience bitcoin is concerned, please note that an ERC-20 token is nothing like bitcoin. You will not be using any bitcoin wallet. What is needed is a metamask wallet connected to a browser. Anybody interacting with your token will have no interaction with bitcoin.

Also, a cursory look at your "token holders" shows that they most of them are new addresses of almost the same age as your project. So stop fooling people. You have distributed it all to your own address and are just hoping that people will try to identify the contract pool on uniswap and swap these useless tokens with their ETH or any of the other ERC-20 tokens. This is a scam clear as the day and i am tagging you as such.

Also, remove this post from Bitcoin developemnt. Go scam in the Altcoin section if you must.

Purely from the perspective of the pandemic, bitcoin may not be the most suitable investment for a person depending on which part of the world he lives in. The pandemic made it all the more important for people to have access to liquid cash in case things go south. (To be honest though, when things are going really bad with hospitals overflowing and no ICU beds, money isn't going to be much help).

As a source of income though, not just bitcoin but all the latest hype cycles can actually be a source of income. Even the development and bounty jobs offered by various projects can be good source of income. All of this has been enabled by bitcoin due to the solid support it gives to the whole ecosystem. So, if you are only looking for an investment considering the pandemic, a person would be much better off earning bitcoin than simply buying into it. Buying is a long term thing and should be done with excess investments funds.

In these times of low economic activity, i think governments and countries prefer that people put money into some investments and move the money around. The De-Fi craze is doing exactly that. Earlier, you had to go through investment banks to move sums of money between corporations. Today, its happening on a massive scale with several small retail investors putting in money that leads to a much greater amount.
Uniswap had a volume greater than coinbase a few days ago. Think about it, Would the governments want to shut down such a movement of money or actually encourage it. The only thing going against DeFi is the propensity for scams. The only thing that can defeat it is itself. Otherwise, i feel the stage is set forthe established players to continue growing.

This has been a recent trend in the bitcoin community to position its pseudo-anonymity. As regulations and governments clawed their way into the anonymity and non-KYC features, Monero crowd has been eager to position itself as the truly anonymous coin. Sophisticated techniques to trace blockchain transactions have also rendered bitcoin "not so anonymous" anymore.

Bitcoin has a development roadmap that will also allow transactions to be anonymized. This is MimbleWimble which has actually been implemented into Grin. Bitcoin has a fork in the road where anonymous transactions can be a feature available to the user. Monero has privacy by default which has made it an easier target in these times of regulation. BTC on the other hand has a tightrope to walk on. This also gives it an option into the future. Monero is a dead end and any speculative increase can only come from greater Darknet activity in the coin, which, we hope so, has a natural upper ceiling.

Try Grin instead. More room to grow i suppose. It also had support from the Bitcoin community but has been awfully quiet for sometime.

You will not find a UPI payment option for transferring bitcoin. Some exchanges will now allow you to buy BTC using INR and pay through UPI. Yet, when you want to make a pure BTC transaction out of these centralized wallets like Zebpay, WazirX etc, the fees will depend on their own whims. If you store crypto on your own desktop wallet like Electrum then you can choose to go as low as you want depending on how quickly you want the transaction confirmation. I suggest paying a one time fees to transfer from these wallets to your own desktop wallet. If you use the exchange wallet for every transaction (for IEOs, staking, changelly, purse.io, forum transfers etc), the fees will be exorbitant.

Jermoe Tash also highlighted a great example as to where the BTC transactions really shine. If you use centralized wallets and exchanges, they will of course charge the standard fees for even smaller amounts.

I have a small 4-GPU rig using RX580s. During the recent ETH gas explosion, my prospective profit was hovering around 6 USD per day. Its another story that my rig was lying unused and i was someplace else so i couldn't put it back online to earn those profits.

On normal days, those 4 GPUs have a daily profit of around 2.5 to 3.00 USD. It has taken almost 2 years to ROI. I think if you can get hands on older GPUs available for a pittance on ebay etc. and have an electricity cost of around < 0.06 USD per kWH, GPU mining can still be profitable and a fun way to earn some crypto, albeit with an initial investment of ~1200 USD.

When they give you an airdrop, most of the time its just an email-ID and an ethereum address. There is no harm in filling those stupid forms as  long as they don't ask you to KYC. Always beware if they come up with any sort of "Buy 2 and get your 1 airdrop token" schemes.

Treat your time as valuable and don't be afraid to ask the hard questions. Ask yourself, what value they really are adding and if they have any talk with clients about their real product. Most airdrops want to confuse newbies by positing a authentic looking website and having an anonymous, strict admin on telegram who will keep saying, "No FUD please" when you ask questions. Stay clear from those. Any serious team will always have thoughtful, intelligent admins willing to answer questions rather than deflecting.

Lastly, most of these are useless projects even if the devs are well-meaning. So anytime you can, just convert part of those tokens and keep stacking your Sats. That way you will hedge the potential profit and loss. DO NOT hold onto these coins in the hope that they will grow incredibly. This almost never happens in reality.

Money laundering seems an obvious issue when you look at it superficially. Yet, anyone who uses cryptocurrencies for actually hiding gains will need to convert fiat and vice-versa at some point of time. Every single fiat on-boarding method, is traceable today. Until someone is willing to deal in cash in such a way that they have a whole setup of street level P2P bitcoiners exchanging millions everyday, transferring the billions of INR that are supposed to be "black money" using bitcoin would be no easy task.
If you do it through established centralized exchanges, it'll be easy to trace them. Infact, once a single connection is established between fiat and your BTC, the steps to trace back will never be that difficult in case of a criminal activity. I think its just typical laziness on part of the Indian babudom. While the whole world is busy in evolving regulations in such a way that the innovation potential is realized, these illiterate fuckers would prefer to throw the baby out with the bath water. It makes me feel so frustrated as an Indian.

As said above, this is most suitable for the Altcoin section. There maybe lot of people like you who would want to safeguard some significant amount into things like USDT. If you want stable value then i guess stablecoins is the way to go. They are the only product whose purpose itself is to maintain the peg against dollar. There is DAI from MakerDAO and plenty of other stablecoins like BUSD, SUSD, USDC etc.

If conversion is not an issue and you really just want to hedge your risk then you may go into simple fiat as well. Though, if you have significant BTC, then liquidating all into stablecoins will be bad.

That man isn't really old. He is just your typical balding, small business owner. The people he is giving advise to seem like middle aged couple so there isn't the age difference. Instead, the dressing sense is showing the difference between a self-employed Indian businessman and the ironed-shirt wearing, salaried Indian employee.

That is why its Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, i guess. A lot of Indians lost money by buying random crypto-offerings. This time around there people are better aware and are mostly going through established exchanges. These exchanges list cryptos that have been out there in the international market for a while. During 2017, a lot of people got fooled by advertisements and local marketing. People aren't so naive anymore though.

Watch the giant take a knee in this 4x speed video.. Utility-wise, it is just an attraction for the millions of franchise fans and will surely bring them a lot of cheer. Technology wise, i suppose this is little more than a giant non-standard crane like structure. It must have a lot of high pressure hydraulics for those moving parts. Keeping it stable within its movement envelope would have been the basic design criteria.

Whether this can be a step towards actual development of giant humanoid robots is of course questionable. That kind of a thing would require a far more modular structure. For example, every individual part will have to be self-propelled and powered instead of being a connected system. Like planes flying in formation.

Talk about the whales manipulating the market in cryptocurrecnies. Such a simple strategy on top of that. Like the article quotes:


So they place buy orders to ramp up the prices causing smaller investors to FOMO. Later they cancel their own sell orders which i presume would be big enough so they cannot be fulfilled instantly. I guess the actual execution would be a lot more complicated and done in real time.

Here in India, it is a dream for a lot of talented people to join one of these elite American invetment banks. The profile of a "Trader" is generally reserved for the best and brightest of Math geeks. It is so shameful that all this talent ends up in these banks where they use questionable methods to enrich the bank and themselves by fundamentally cheating other market participants. On top of that, these are considered top-class jobs and these people are held in high regard wherever they go.

Great question. From an Indian perspective, using bitcoin for actual transactions today is of no value in terms of transaction ease and cost if you compare with the numerous UPI applications. There simply aren't enough customers and merchants to provide an experience similar to normal transactions that LN can provide. LN isn't deployed widely because of the legal uncertainty. Especially after the Unocoin founders had their ATMs in Bangalore confiscated by the Police, the enthusiasm died a quick death. Your experience is bad because of a combination of of immature technology (LN) and low penetration due to govt orthodoxy in financial matters.

What bitcoin promises is a decentralized method to invest and insulate your savings from fiat inflation. The privacy of your transactions ensures that you are not advertising your spends to Google or others. You don't have to worry about the numerous legal hurdles in exchanging value when you provide online services. Though, this can lead to tax events for which i suggest you read posts by @teosanru in the Indian Local sub.

Apart from that, Bitcoin is exciting and novel in terms of the technology and its open source ethos. It is a completely new kind of money. There is no harm in getting involved.

Is this the video about the launch of the Spot Robot from Boston Dynamics? The humanoid robots are far from gaining the kind of dexterity and maneuverability to function in a room crowded with people bumping into them. Even if some day they did, i don't think that patrons would prefer continue going to a restaurant to be served by charm-less robots.
A real waitress/ waiter has so much more to offer to the ambiance as well as the customer. Some "services" would always remain better with humans.

I am yet to watch the video but that swanky, transparent case itself is overkill when it comes to mining for a noob. If someone wants to get into mining, even if they are a noob, they need to realize that there is a DIY factor to this. The end goal of a mining rig is efficiency and simplicity. The closed case in this example will result in lot of cooling inefficiency.

That is why the classic setup with a wooden or a metallic rig is the best, imo. You can easily find examples of these on youtube or on websites like firstminingrig etc. If anyone wants to spend a 1000$ on a rig, your money will be much well spent on one of those setups.

The DeFi trend is a mockery of the tenets of trustlessness and decentralization as was propagated by bitcoin. Most of them depend on setting up a website that has an instance of a DEX running on imaginary tokens of the protocol itself. The concept of a DEX or Decentralized Exchange is nothing new. It has been there since the time that people wanted to trade BTC.
The concept of listing your own tokens/ assets had already been explored by Bitshares, Ardor etc.

The main feature is the ability to create and earn fees from a liquidity pool. It is like a public owned exchange where the liquidity providers benefit from the fees. There is value in that because it is allowing people to trade on a non-KYC basis without caring about lack of liquidity. The whales who created these Liquidity pools to benefit from the fees were not saitsfied with the return. This is when the whole hype of "Governance tokens" has started. Now everyone is out peddling their own token for governance, staking, shitting and pissing. That is the problem. Everyone wanted to be bitcoin. Now everyone wants to be Uniswap, Curve or YFI. This is when the scams start in the name of the latest buzzword. Back in 2017, "Blockchain" was the buzzword. Now it is DeFi.

In the process, they are DeFiling one of the most promising opportunities of crypto.

I was not really aware of this issue that IOTA had with their clients. I do recall they had a problem with using unproven cryptography primitives. They could never really decentralize the coordinator. This may actually be a problem with all blockchain products. Organizations want to deploy their own rather than pay the software provider for the service. The democratization of programming know-how is probably one reason that companies want to cut corners this way.

Couldn't agree more as to why these coins fail one after the other. No proven use cases and no examples of a real deployed product. Just a lot of hype about interconnectedness, decentralization, immutability etc etc.