First it was DeFi on Ethereum, then came DeFi on the other chains like Polygon, Solana (which has been stuck for a while), AVAX, BSC (Private chain akin to Binance exchange) and FTM.

Then it was NFTs on Ethereum and then on all the others.

It is hard to choose which one is supposed to be the best amongst these. I'd say that most legitimate projects still build on Ethereum first and then move for implementing on other chains. The high gas fees and the ridiculous NFT drops price out most people who cannot afford to pay upwards of 30-40 USD per transaction. This is where chains like BSC come in.

If you simply want to gamble your money on farms which are mostly only meant for pump and dumps but you feel you can take it out in time, then BSC and Pancakeswap have the easiest interfaces and ease of transferring assets due to the Binance bridge.

If you are completely new, i'd strongly recommend taking your business to FTM though. There are enough bridges for you to easily transfer amongst different chains and they provide staking rewards with the Spookyswap platform. One advantage of FTM is that Andre is also building on it. So, it could easily be the next big thing.

This is also linked to the real estate market. Somehow, i keep hearing about this overheated real estate market in China akin to the Housing bubble which led to the 2008 crisis in USA. I have no love lost for China but at a time when the whole world is struggling, any sort of upheaval in the second largest economy of the world won't do any good to anyone. Especially in the backdrop of the pandemic and all the money printing that went on to support people and businesses out of job.

As far as a bailout is concerned, if the CCP judges that it is important enough to protect investor confidence, they'll do it without doubt. CCP has always supported businesses in one way or other. Most businesses in China are linked to the highest echelons of CCP so it is possible that they will bail it out before the shock can spread.

NFTs are a promising innovation that is being exploited to the hilt now. It has become a closed club with this system of "drops" that are communicated to your closest friends and then you all together shill it to the plebs. The result is that you sell a lot of copied 3D "Art" hyped on twitter at over-blown prices.

The opensea guy seems to have taken this a step further. He is not even taking the pain of generating the art. He selectively pumps these NFTs and the "floor price" is artificially raised. They then shill it through the group of people who are all collaborating with each other to hype it up. This is all just pretty demotivating to see because something that starts with such idealistic promises and then gets exploited so easily by bad actors. This happens all the time in crypto and the time of reckoning (atleast for those companies that are based out of the US) is pretty nigh.

It is just sad that none of the people who can actually explain about these Alt-coins no longer visit the forum. For example, Solana is basically a blockchain on a novel consensus mechanism that its developers were confident can actually prove itself out in the wild. It works on what they call "Proof of History". Any consensus mechanism has to work on scale and that is demonstrated only in real world conditions like this.

The block generation has stopped because the consensus mechanism broke down at scale and multiple forks are happening. This clearly shows that the consensus mechanism is nowhere near mature enough to work at scale. This is why if you are betting on Solana then you will be caught dead in the water when the sentiment cools off.

This is already happening and now Ethereum supporters are calling all of these other PoS coins as "centralized" and pointing out the team allocations etc while comparing the same with Ethereum (Not that it was itself democratized in any way since beginning). All of this is happening while Ethereum itself is planning to move to L2.

I agree that it is better to have more options in the L1 space. All of these will anyways never be PoW. So, in away, they'll always be centralized. If there is a market for trading of stablecoins and all sorts of new projects which give back insane returns, then there is no reason that smaller players should be priced out by Ethereum fees while those sitting on thousands of Eth from the early days buy up all the liquidity, all the IEOs and make the smaller players pay for their rent.

With platforms like Solana and Avax, people just have option to use cheaper fees to try and trade shitcoin against each other. Whoever gets out first before the inevitable dump cycle begins for those platform on the platform projects, wins. When you've won enough of these farming pump and dumps, you can go back to getting some stability in the form of BTC.

Anybody who stays invested only in these PoS coins with all of their portfolio will eventually be left behind by one of the coordinated dumps that they can never be part of. So, Always trade some of your PoS coins for WBTC. The fee maybe high to come back to the on-chain network but having WBTC on some of these alternate chains can keep your portfolio risk-free and balanced in the long term.

Stupid Scam Coin. Wouldn't recommend anyone to buy anything from that non-https, insecure, Piece of Shit website.

Right. But from a purely experience perspective, setting up LN payments will surely give these MNCs a taste and they may find it a good thing to make part of their offerings elsewhere. This also helps them to go through the cycle of learning a new system and implementing it. Imagine if this had been implemented 5 years ago, a lot of managers would either be ruing about having lost on gains or would be sitting on Bitcoin stashes.

Related to this, people, were busy trolling these centralized exchanges about how McD and Starbucks have implemented LN before the exchanges. Though it is understandable that the exchanges wouldn't like to lose on the fee they charge for transfers to your accounts. Let us hope that one of the big exchanges implements LN and starts offering cheaper options for trading and transferring. Just one is enough as the rest will follow to keep up.

Bitcoin trading isn't mainstream in China. The CCP has pretty much banned bitcoin mining and isn't very thrilled about their people having anything to do with BTC. They want them to use their centrally issued CBDC so that they can keep track of every single payment and embark on to a perfect, utopian society where everyone only takes and spends what they need. For the benefit of the society, you know.

Apparently, a lot of BTC trading happens in China but I have no idea what is the basis of this perception. I don't know where do people get that data from considering the restrictions. And now that BTC miners have been unwelcome, whatever volume resulted from the miners trading their BTC would also be gone now.

Compared to that, Nigeria is still struggling with defining Bitcoin while their central bank parrots whatever the "international managers" say. This is the same case as with India. Its unfortunate that intellectuals and economists in countries like Nigeria and India continue to remain beholden to the views of IMF and other western nations. This slave mentality ingrained due to centuries of imperialism just doesn't seem to go away. I wish all of these people actually sat down and did an unbiased assessment of actual impact of cryptocurrencies in their countries. They'd be pleasantly surprised to find that it has been mostly positive.

Pretty cool article. Mostly skimmed through but the definitions in bolded are simple and easy to understand for a beginner. "Non-government money" is a good way to start. Just that some people immediately associate "non-government" with nefarious. So, i'll probably start with "Programmable money".

The way you moved up to defining "BYOB" was also seamless. And congratulations if you are the writer and actually retired at 30. That is very cool. Though as part of your OpSec, you shouldn't be telling people that crypto allowed you to retire. Better take up an alternate story like you are a developers with loads of freelancing income. Something like that would be better to keep unwanted attention away.

The government's stand is typical of politicians. They are reading the mood and don't want to dampen the idea that cryptocurrency startups have the potential to provide a lot of jobs as well as international funding for the young developers.

The RBI on the other hand is just another one of those "borrowed institutions" of India which have traditionally relied on tried and tested international formulae. This is the misfortune of India as a country. When it comes to any sort of innovation, standards and basic research, Indians always shy from breaking new grounds. Be it technology, social science or economics; the much heralded indian intellectuals prefer to follow the lead of the "Gora Saab". The Gora Sabb of RBI, the IMF, has clearly taken the stand that "Cryptocurrencies can cause instability", notably in case of El Salvador. Shantikanta is just doing what we Indians are ingrained for, follow the lead and parrot the same thing as expert advice, without even considering the positive effects for a moment. Doing that would require courage and original thinking, stuff that is hard to find amongst Indian intellectuals.

I don't think this would make much of a difference to the final bill. The government will not want to appear as digitally uneducated and cowardly. The bill will most probably follow the commodity classification and then leave it upto the SEBI and other Industrial bodies to play with it. The Govt hasn't been a big fan of RBI and i hope that there copy-pasted opinion is set aside.

Last I checked on Bitmain's website, they put it on the consignee to manage custom clearance for their Mining equipment. This was not the case before the RBI ban. The Indian government has not made any definite rules and back in 2017, there was a ban on import of mining equipment too.

So the customs will treat anything related to Bitcoin mining with extreme prejudice. This is why none of the suppliers will take the responsibility upon themselves for "delivery". They'll happily take the payment for the machine though. Those you will find providing offers will most probably be scammers. For the time being, this is pretty much a lost cause and I'd suggest you not to waste too much time on this. The obvious other option is to go for GPU mining and convert the returns to Bitcoin but this is nowhere near as profitable as the ASICs.

Congratulations on getting your customers to use Bitcoin. People love to merit such posts but pictures of the said LN PoS would be great. Because God, that is pretty damn fast. Where is your store located exactly? If you've already found people who are doing LN payments, this means they already have funds on L2 chain. You must be in either a great location or in El Salvador.

Upon reading such posts, I seriously wish that there was a bit less uncertainty in society and from banks when it comes to Bitcoin. As an individual, it is often hard to share Bitcoin information or evangelize about the payment methods because people often don't take it seriously. Most people I've tried talking to IRL, are mostly dismissive of the long term stability. This also shows to me that most people in real life are wary of experimenting or learning something new. They are mostly only comfortable with what they know for certain. This is one of the main reasons that legislative clarity regarding Bitcoin usage is essential.

Censorship by private corporations, in general, is definitely an issue that needs to be dealt with. This is the new reality that FB, Twitter and most of all, youtube, have come to wield a lot of influence in the past decade. Nobody was ready for this reality. No doubt the governments and those on top want more power and that needs sufficient checks and balances, yet society can no longer ignore the fact that moderation is the need of the hour. Without moderation, anybody can say anything. It has also been made into a political issue now and a resolution will need a paradigm shift and emergence of some kind of new socially/ politically acceptable philosophy like how things like equality, fraternity came into being.

Till then, Individual nuance is the only answer. Like in this case, if anybody wants to share Hitler's videos with the context of an admiration for his oratory skills, this maybe an acceptable thing to do in a purely academic setting, but it is not suitable for public consumption. Opinion may vary on this but as a society, we HAVE to agree on certain norms. Otherwise everything is fair game and its no better than being animals.

The post doesn't show the full context of your post. Nobody knows if you acknowledged the fact that Hitler was a sociopath, extremely evil man. Even if you did, sharing a video from Hitler praising his oratory skills is like putting on a picture of a psychopathic serial killer and how he was so good at convincing young women.

He perpetrated one of the greatest evils of the modern history and the instances are well documented. Facebook is supposed to be a safe place for everyone. Who knows if there are people there seeing your posts who lost their ancestors, young children, mothers and fathers in those days. I don't think they'd exactly be convinced by your appreciation of Hitler's oratory skills. Don't be dumb about this. Its not about your freedom of speech but what is appropriate to be endorsed.

There are enough good orators to make an example of. Obama, JFK, Churchill and a lot of bold, courageous, decent men.

PS: Move this to the "Politics & Society" board as it sure has nothing to do with Economics.

The whole thing depends on how they end up defining "private" crypto. The recent increase in funding and advertisement by exchanges like CoinDCX has indeed led to a general awareness and adoption amongst people. So the government may want to take a politically correct stance by not nipping in the bud something that is earning money and jobs for a lot of people. Polygon co-founder Sandip became the first crypto billionaire in India. That kind of story gets the masses going and ready to support a project.

In the best scenario, the govt will refrain from any bans but come up with regulations as to where you can trade and where you cannot. That will save a lot of pain coming from the MLM seminar scams. At a time when jobs and employment is turning into an important issue, the government will have probably read the mood of the youngsters. So, I am positive. My actual comment was on this third class media failing to do its duty in helping protect the people through correct, researched information. Sadly, expectations can't be any higher when a publication like "The Hindu" allowed full page advertisements from the scammer Pankaj Bhardwaj during the 2017 run.

The NFT game is now mostly about the set of early influencers and their friends launching new projects. The more of the old boys' club that you have, higher is the possibility that it'll receive insane bids.

So I haven't tried this and like everything else in crypto this is probably a lot of hard work. What you have to do is follow most of the big people who have made it. The ones from BAYC and Punks. Punk 6129 and 4156 are good. Join their discords and look for the conversations where lot of budding artists share their works. If you find some promising (you need an eye for the right mix of art and code), go for it. As the community builds around these, the floor rises.

A discord group I'd personally recommend is of the folks from universe.xyz

They were behind the lobby lobster NFTs that raised 1000 ETH for donating towards lobbying efforts of the organization coincenter. A lot of their NFTs are available below the minting price. The proceeds go towards lobbying efforts. They have a few rare ones that have BTC eyes too. Overall, a good project to get behind. Its all about the community in NFTs and DeFi. These people have a good community with a low enough entry barrier right now.

This isn't financial advice. Its just a project team that I find non-scammy and sincere in their approach towards most thing about blockchain finance as well as artist support. They are the kind of team you get behind while they are still in the works. I'd go as far as suggesting that don't buy anything. Just join the community and be a part of the process. I am sure you will enjoy it if you have an artistic bent.

So the El Salvador announcement was public. People were going to get 30$ each. Crypto Twitter was starting to get awash with pictures of people paying for their burgers and coffees using LN (Which did happen, btw). All of this was supposed to be great for pumpamentals which meant a lot of traders, probably new ones, were sitting on leveraged long positions waiting for the pump.

The central exchanges and their old friends knew this beforehand. Weren't there allegations against a major centralized exchanges about doing this exact kind of thing? Who benefits when all those long positions get liquidated? That flash crash really was sudden and unexpected amidst the news. It'll be interesting to see what happens when other countries start taking President Nayib's lead.

A lot of blockchains have been promising cheap transactions. There is nothing new in what Solana claims. It is mostly a marketing game where the first player to latch onto the latest buzzword tends to go up. Solana did it with NFTs and timing the hackathon. ETH is breaking down with congestion and any alternative, whether Solana or something else, that is seen as a cheaper alternative will pump.

A lot of others have seen upward trends like Terra, FTM etc etc. Solana has the marketing buzz behind it but as soon as the ETH fees normalize, there is little they can offer. I don't see anything fundamentally different. Its the same buzz about projects, PoS, validators, a discord and false claims about "Developers love Solana". In the medium term the price may have some upside but it has nothing special to guarantee long term survival.

Dogecoin had its pump due to Elon. While it is hard to predict what bullrun can do, one thing is clear that betting on memecoins to have profits in this space is the easiest way to lose money. The coin has unlimited supply and the LTC miners will always keep dumping it to take in profits as it has no fundamentals.

There are far better things to do in the crypto space as a whole than waste your money in buying a joke coin and then wasting your time in making stupid, spammy posts about these memecoins, hoping you can sell them at ATH. Instead of wasting both time and money in such a stupid and worthless job, you should look to work with open source teams in crypto which are actually building software applications. Even if you don't know software, you'd be much better off shilling for them than scammy memecoin developers.

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