Decentralization of the data and hardware requirements of a Facebook scale social media network is just not possible. Blockchains already get chock-full with transaction data. If they had to store everything else, i don't think that you'd want to wait for 20 seconds everytime you "Like" a comment. Maybe if someone made it compulsory to have social media only on blockchain, it'd help wean off people from the addiction due to the bad user experience.

The kind of decentralization that Social media can have is in terms of the governance mechanisms like what DAOs are attempting. A platform where moderation rules or decisions like tracking user-data isn't made by centralized entities or even single founders, but by a widespread group of people with stake in the organization.

True. Maybe he did consider the true hodler when he says "Most BTC (not all) is locked in multisig".

This may well be the future because people are willing to use Wrapped BTC to access DeFi and other kind of interest-yielding products on smart-contract enables blockchains.

There are two scenarios when this cannot happen:
1. If smart-contracts become native to BTC making all of this "token-bridging" a redundant service.
2. If people continue to hold majority of their BTC with their own keys in their personal wallets. (the way its meant to be).

Gavin's hypothesis is more a reflection of his bitterness about losing the blocksize debate than anything else. The biggest organizations running miner can be a scenario but that doesn't mean that that they'll send everything to 0x000...(which is just an asinine jump of imagination, btw); the rest of the ACTUAL users can always fork away their own blockchain separate from the so-called corporate blockchain which doesn't even have any bitcoins now.

As soon as miners go offline, the bitcoin network can run with even just 2 computers running the chain which users (Full nodes) agree is the Bitcoin chain. All they'll need is a coordinated update to their full nodes. Now in Gavin's dystopian future, if the corporations even end up owning Open Source Software to the extent that only THEIR chain can run, then well, there is no point arguing this extreme case.

TLDR; This is a pretty amateur argument and I would seriously expect better from an OG. He never really fails to show his lack of conviction and understanding when it comes to Bitcoin.

To enable this, won't coinbase need its own check-collection and clearing system? Is it allowed to do this in the USA as a non-banking corporation? Also, What does "paycheck" mean here? Who gets salaries as checks in 21st century?

I think one of the important use-cases that Coinbase is trying to capture is people trying to invest in Alt-coins listed on Coinbase. A lot of people don't want to go through converting USD from banks to BTC and then pay the fee for further bridging to Alts or other chains. Once the funds are directly on coinbase, they can easily change to Alts or Bitcoin as they desire. IMO, This is just a smart additional step to make it easier to onboard customers.   

Mining is competitive business but old miners that cannot compete with the BTC network do inevitably shift to mining the lower rung coins. Litecoin is on a different algorithm so BTC miners wouldn't be used. BCH can be mined with them but that network has only been decreasing in price as its intentions to attack BTC were not appreciated by the crypto community.

I think if anybody is looking for older miners, they'll be better off with something that supports Scrypt as LTC and DOGE can be merge-mined with them. Unfortunately, most mining is now a matter of scale. If you cannot scale then it is impossible to see this as more than anything but a hobby. If you can wait for the next bullrun, that is when you end up making a solid amount.

This also has nothing to do with Miners having to shift to other coins because of BTC hashrate. Hashrate only affect profitability of older miners and that too, if your electricity is too costly. Everything depends on profitability and long term reliability. For example, Right now Digibyte is fractionally more profitable to mine than BTC but miners won't shift to DGB en masse because it doesn't have the same network effect.

This is an important question. Like @pakhitheboss said, most bounties are saturated by users from the Indo-china countries who are deeply engaged with all kind of bounties using multiple accounts but that should not take away what you can earn from them. I haven't seen the Alt-coin bounties section for a long time but i think it is a journey and my guess is as good as yours as to what it can earn for you.

What i can tell is that people are indeed earning from bounties and also from being part of multiple new projects on discord, telegram etc. This generally takes a long time and you have to be part of the ecosystem for sometime and understand legit projects from scams. I would recommend that you should just visit the websites of the growing Alt-chains namely AVAX, DOT, FTM, SOLANA. Follow their twitter and read on the websites about what they are doing. Try to be part of some of the giveaways and airdrops or by investing small amounts.

These things tend to give returns whenever a bull run happens. Just don't invest your own money and try to earn by working from them. Lot of people did the same thing with Ethereum. And the same people are hopping onto these alternate chains but in lesser numbers so there is still opportunity there. Just don't try to substitute a real job with this. If you have free time then do your research as i suggested above and the opportunities will come to you gradually. Be safe and do not put money in hopes of money. Just build a portfolio from earned crypto. That way it won't hurt you as much when a scam hits or a anonymous developer rugs your investment.

There is nothing "unfortunate" about it. The separate user bases do not mean that people can simply bet so much money on centralized PoS chains whose only products till date have been clones of each other.

People and more importantly, institutions get the confidence to invest in Alts because of the easy convertibility to Bitcoin, which is the real innovation underlying everything. Take Bitcoin away and these just become Smart-contract platforms which are looking for a problem to solve where there is none. Most use-cases like DeFi and NFTs that have found buyers also derive their legitimacy from the fact that they are ultimately on-chain money.

Take Bitcoin away and I bet none of the million dollar NFTs will have anymore value. Infact, most of those OGs who have enough to invest 1000s of ETH on these NFTs and DeFi farms, have that kind of money because they have been Bitcoin bulls who diversified. Its only the newbies who are bedazzled by Alt-chains claiming TPS and what not. So, for anyone in this space, never ever keep all your portfolio in Alts. If you are not stacking Sats while being a part of this journey, you are missing the point and will regret later. Smart investors always do that and this is why you see this correlation with Bitcoin price.

The electronic versions of Fiat money are useful to banking providers as they can afford to reduce their service costs for ATM transfers etc. Digital money also makes it simpler to track transactions by the middle class. Its a non-brainer that the entry barrier to anything digital is quite high as it needs a certain degree of comfort with technology, which everybody may not have. This is why it always surprises me when countries actively try to push CBDCs.

They are utterly useless for a developing country with huge population like Nigeria. A lot of times these are pet projects of politicians/ officials who want to appear as tech-savvy and doing something "digital". One thing that may happen is that exchanges like Binance can start supporting this electronic version. It'd be straight forward for the governments to then keep a tab on the people trading through these exchanges. Every government has a structure similar to IRS which wants to maximize tax returns. These officials can use the information to actually pin-point users who are into cryptocurrencies.

I think the biggest impact is that it is going to pave the path for Twitter's gradual diversification into all things that money-transfers enable.

Facebook enabled payments on Whatsapp. Facebook has a market feature where you can set up shop and sell items.

What stops Twitter from replicating that with Bitcoin. That is infact the low hanging fruit. I believe that if Twitter users actually get the hang of LN transactions and this NFT User ID thing becomes a reality, we may well be looking at the biggest network and community for crypto products and tools yet. Sky is the limit when people's twitter accounts also become their financial identities.

A verified Twitter account could easily be an escrow or provide other "trusted" services necessary for finance. Like i said, Sky is the limit here.

To be honest, I am kindda surprised that it all went downhill so quickly for BCash. If nothing else, it did have Gavin's support. Yet, this is where the amazing thing about crypto comes to the fore. The success actually depends on how sincere the people using it are in terms of their conviction in the usage of crypto as well as in terms of seeing crypto as different from the usual deceit of the business world.

Compare how Gavin has behaved with his screwup about Faketoshi. The guy has literally humiliated himself in front of the whole world but Gavin never really called him out. He never had the conviction to commit to the Bitcoin ideals of transparency and decentralization. He was clearly the kind of guy who loved making "deals". Ditto for Roger Ver. These people were never in it for the ideals but were in pursuit of fame and glory and money for themselves. This is why these communities eventually scatter. Because there really isn't the conviction of ideals. Crypto is a completely new concept and it is changing the way we communicate and do business by changing the definition of money. It needs a certain conviction of ideals.

Its pretty clear that most of these people with ideals (Maxwell, Jack Mallers, even Jack Dorsey) are with Bitcoin and don't care about "versions of Bitcoin" that false prophets and businessman like to pursue in hope of capturing "market share"

Toughest Blow my foot.

China throwing out miners is the best thing that can happen for decentralization of mining. The rest of the world is anyways tired of the Chinese copying everything and then claiming technological superiority over the world. The earlier the crypto world is rid of the deceitful and opportunistic Chinese community and government, the better it'd be for the free people of the world who see crypto as an innovation, an opportunity and a revolution in how we transact and manage finances.

Most Chinese community I am aware of are anyways just meme-scammers pumping their bags with bots and shilling. Even if they try to build something, it always has some sort of underlying deceit that is controlled by the Chinese. The upbringing and conditioning within a regime that you cannot question and where you cannot follow the natural human urge of freedom has ensured that most Chinese products are a result of the sole pursuit of money. Lets be done with their hypocrisy, atleast in the crypto world.

All of Bitcoin bulls think that China banning Bitcoin must be about it being scared of the financial freedom or just trying to FUD to buy low (which is really just a meme imo, a nation state wouldn't consciously behave this way).

There is one more aspect to this. China seems to have lost it with Bitcoin because the utility it provides as censorship-resistant money is something they see as enemy action. They tried controlling it but there is too much support from rest of the world. Their interest in Blockchain per se extend a lot to shitcoins like EOS, NEO etc. At one point, I believe they had a technology ranking for cryptocurrencies on which EOS was at the top. (Natuarlly because its a centralized shitcoin with 21 delegators, half of which are from China. Infact the machinations of the Chinese cartels to maximize their control over EOS is one of the reasons that it turned into such a burning wreck).

Most Chinese communites are neck deep in shitcoinery. Every memecoin and centralized scam coin generally has a huge chinese community. There people are probably just turning all of those earning straight to Bitcoin. Its not that China doesn't want their people to continue to dabble into shitcoins. They infact made the first official one with their CBDC Yuan. They love the fact that on a centralized blockchain, they can finally monitor everything.

The average Chinese though, are smart enough to continue to hold BTC. This is what annoys the CCP and is behind their persistent Bitcoin FUD. They just want them to become blockchain zombies but not have access to the only truly decentralized crypto. Good Luck CCP..lol..

Mining is still as wonderful as it used to be but of ETH moving to PoS is threatening to end the party, atleast till the market decides that it wants a place for PoW Smart-contracts. At present, developers and users are equally willing to put money into PoS chains too. There may be a condition that one of these unknown PoW coins will start finding backers because of decentralization purists looking to have smart-contracts on PoW chains.

The GPUs would continue to be worth it then. The two cards you mentioned are nearly 900 USD per card on the local websites. At USD 4 dollar per day for the two cards, it'd be >400 days for breakeven. So you will have to do it for the love of it and if ETH continues to go up, it maybe worth it. Tough choices all along man, as usual..!

If you have the passphrase, the simplest way would be to recover it using Metamask. Metamask is now supported on mobile too so if you have a clean smartphone, that too could be an option. Metamask mobile also supports NFTs which desktop doesn't.

ETH is also moving to PoS in the coming future so not much use thinking about restarting to mine, IMO. Though you can dust up the rigs and get them ready to go if some other PoW coin increases in value. You never know what will be next with crypto.

I hope you can safely recover everything and find a happy stash somewhere.

So I guess this is Jack's answer to Elon's question on the "B WORD" night. Elon asked "Would you accept bitcoin for ads on Twitter?".

Enabling content creators to tip each other with Bitcoin isn't really as huge but a major corporation spending time and effort to deploy bitcoin and Lightning-compatible product is a great approval for the future of bitcoin as well as Lightning. Becoming a Bitcoin/ LN expert would be a great way to get hired by Twitter.

Once LN and payment bots are integrated, there is nothing stopping Twitter from becoming something more than pure tweeting. If facebook could have markets, so can twitter. Only they'd be Bitcoin powered and so much cooler.
 

I don't know about loving encryption but once can definitely fall in love with Bitcoin. Yet, like OP has shared, it is always heart rending to get scammed and have your hard earned money end up with an anonymous, faceless, conscience-less scum of a human being who do all of this as an excuse to "earn my wage".

Like there are hundreds of other ways to make money but these people choose to take the path of harming others. Crypto provides a very easy way and fertile ground to scam because of the anonymity, the high skill barrier, greed and the stories about people getting rich from unknown projects. My sympathies for you OP if you have lost big. Still, comparing USD and EUR with BTC just because you got scammed is not the right thing to do. I'd suggest that learn from the mistakes and don't let this ruin your mood about a technology that still has a lot of potential.

Get involved with projects and teams that are still building sincerely. I have a topic about one such project called BarnBridge. They are hard working and have  a lot of people who are trying to build all sort of fun things. Checkout that topic and write a message there if you need introductions. I'll be happy to help. You too @tuertezii.

What he probably means is that El Salvador accepted several others apart from Bitcoin as legal tender too. I am not sure if they have done so with Any Alt-coins. Its only Bitcoin.

OP, I am not sure how you have made the connection between Nominal Rigidity mentioned in your post and Bitcoin adoption. All these existing theories are applicable for traditional markets and traditional money. Bitcoin is nothing of that sort. It is evolving its own use-cases and its own economy with time. So it cannot be judged on the basis of traditional economics except for the rule of Demand and Supply.

Merchant adoption is a personal choice for people and businesses wanting to support a decentralized economy which is not limited by borders. This is a new social value that many people have begun to subscribe to and is the biggest reason behind adoption and growth of bitcoin. Whether that leads to volatility decline is hard to predict. Volatility will continue to depend on overall sentiment of the people who are involved with Bitcoin, not on adoption.

Apart from censorship resistance, it is also the privacy, if done correctly. All other kind of online money transactions are generally a way to predict your spending habits and turn people into more of consumers. All of this recording and Big data prediction about people is pretty bad for humanity in the long run. In a way, these things are destroying the heterogeneity and the natural evolution of habits and values that human undergo.

With everything tracked and the next advertisement you see being based on what sells the most, its a bleak future to contemplate on. This is one of the main reasons that we need a transaction system where you are just an address and the next instant, you can be another address. There should be no way to club everything that you do in your life to predict the next choice for you. That takes away the power of "Free will" leaving only an illusion of it.

From what I have read, Kusama is the testnet for Polkadot and the mainnet is yet to be launched. Then why is it that both the tokens are already being traded. DOT is supposed to be the governance token but who is holding all of this DOT and where do the votes happen?

I also tried to check the validator stats but the telemetry link on the official website gave an error. There are plenty of projects but the research behind the founders and teams is way more sketchier than it used to be for ICOs. In case of Ethereum, there was atleast this forum where a lot of people used to hunt for scam teams and tried some level of dissuasion. How is that being done on something like Polkadot?

Seeing that you have a lot of posts related to Polkadot, you'd be the ideal person to answer some of these.. @Zasad@

The original ANN post is too old to do something meaningful with this but with the planned shift to PoS, Ethereum miners will eventually be forced onto other GPU chains.

I haven't heard of Quarkchains before but would be open to getting introduced if they have a working chain and a roadmap. Can you guys share something about the current state of affairs and what is Quarkchain about. There are already a lot of alternate chains that have launched and gained popularity during this bullrun. Where was quarkchain in between all this?