The time to be a noob in Bitcoin isn't the tail-end of a bull market. Right now, everyone and their Grandma thinks they know blockchain and pre-mined corporate/foundation-coins will make them rich. Yet, it is clear that this will bring a lot of newbies into Bitcoin.
 
A lot of them will remain limited to the cesspool of Telegram groups, referral spam, doubling scams. Some of them will graduate to dev channels in Discords. Lower still will have the ability to recognize the history and importance of this forum. (BTW, congratulations on passing the steps yourself, IF you are a new account and someone old/ a concern-troll masquerading as a newbie).

The last level is of the very minuscule percentage that can actually think for themselves. They will go on a path of self-discovery starting from the Bitcoin whitepaper, initial communication on the forum, Hal Finney's posts about Bitcoin, the countless experiments of governance (Bitcoin Foundation), smart-contracts (colored coins), Blocksize debate and will come to the realization that the first priority for "sound money" is decentralization. The rest of the ecosystem simply flows from this one fountainhead.

If you are serious about it, you can read the excellent articles on this website. It has lot of good resources for those who actually seek an alternative to the world financial order and not just a "get rich quick" scheme.

Why do you think there can be a "Perfect Bitcoin". And that would come from alterations by Satoshi. Bitcoin has gone hundreds of alterations since beginning and continues to do so.

As Bitcoiners, we are accustomed to this sort of concern-trolling. People who aren't actually interested in learning about Bitcoin but just want to ask rhetorical questions. You guys fail to take into account the countless examples of centralized shitcoins that are nowhere near being trustless and censorship resistance.
Tell me what "whitepaper" you've read that makes you confident to post these presumptuous questions? (I can see you made multiple posts with one about blocktime and difficulty adjustment). We can take it from there, if you want to.

One thing I am certain of, is that the man who invented Bitcoin as a reaction to the monetary collapse of 2008 and shameless bailouts, would instantly recognize the bag-holders of "corporation" and "foundation" coins that are so eager to masquerade as supporters of financial sovereignty.

They have based their argument of the social adoption, "name brand" of Bitcoin which gives it value. Not surprisingly though, they did not go into the technical details except saying that scarcity is ensured through cryptography.

What they should probably realize is that the ratio of people who tend to understand and appreciate the technical under-pinnings have been increasing and will continue to increase with technology, especially web technologies becoming more and more inter-twined with our jobs, lives and so on. That is why a peer-to-peer network which enables anyone, literally anyone to verify the whole history and be part of transaction verifications ( by running a Full node), will continue to have allure for this and the coming generations.

Bitcoin is. 

I wonder how easy is it to write such articles and get paid by a website like Bloomberg. Still, the author did a service by recognizing some of the big names in DeFi right now like Compound, AAVE, MKR.

He mentioned Uniswap and even slipped in a bit of information that the user has to use a wallet "away" from the regulated exchanges. It is a nice contrast to have against the GME short-squeeze event when there was so much interference and the market showed its reality as everyone rushed to save the biggest participants. Nothing of that happened on the AMMs and the Lending protocols.

I do wonder though what are the implications for Bitcoin. Bitcoin as an asset class is the basis of the infallibility of crypto and subsequent trust on it. Whether the mainstream media can recognize that or not, is the million dollar question.

Umm..but isn't is true that "shares", "stock" "equity", whatever we call them do not need to be backed by dollars. It is not like Tether's claims on USDT being backed.

The price of a stock is actually considered to be based on its growth potential. Expectations of high future earnings can push the stock to be over-valued. Yet, this doesn't really justify a P/E ration of >500 for TSLA. But they are not alone to have such high valuations. A look a this link will show that so many corporations have these right now.

To a value investor, all of those would be an eye-sore. There are a lot of Pharma companies in there. It seems like everyone is banking on a Post-pandemic boom similar to what happened in the so-called roaring twenties.

I have made this topic to discuss viewpoints from those of you who are interested in Alt-coins or are exclusively here for Alts.

As market participants, those of you interested in Alt-coins should understand the long term implications for future of the crypto industry. There has been a lot of shilling with Alt-coins coming up with their versions and claims of replacing PoW. This isn't about Bitcoin versus Alt-coins. For all the toxicity of maximalists, Bitcoin is the grand daddy of crpyto space and PoW ensures that it can continue to be the benevolent overlord that is impartial to everyone. Bitcoin is as much a political and social construct, as its a technological one.
Not having a central figure (Since Satoshi went away)and being PoW gives it those features.

Bitcoin's PoW is necessary because when it comes to permissionless, sound money without any central authority, there is no alternative to Bitcoin.

PoS tokens are alright for launching a product where institutional investors are present inside the crypto market because you have something defining a crypto market. That defining feature is the money of crypto, which is Bitcoin. If we don't have Bitcoin, we won't have crypto anymore.

Imagine if PoS or any of those non-PoW chains that need a bunch of validators/ masternodes were the answer, what stops the banks just form their own consortiums, running the best nodes and controlling all the stake. Ultimately, you give away your financial sovereignty and identity to the biggest players. Bitcoin prevents that.

So, play with Alt-coins all you want but take care that in whatever communities you are, make sure to tell people that Bitcoin is the life-blood of this crypto-society we are part of. It is the reason that we are having these opportunities. If mainstream media succeeds in branding Bitcoin's PoW as anti-climate and unnecessary, the P2P people's economy will disappear as fast as it came into prominence.

He isn't trying to "rally" the market. He is just clarifying his position on the crypto vs fiat debate.

The market weakening wasn't due to anything he said about Fiat. Instead, it was the climate-evangelist inside him not realizing that why exactly PoW is needed. For someone like Elon Musk, you'd expect them to have a better understanding of why PoW is necessary. Apparently, he did not.

That is what brought on this.

Darker45 gave a great answer explaining what Bitcoin is that makes it different and have the trust of old as well as new participants in the market.

Now when you talk about Altcoins and why they can't have stable value. Here are the major differences/ weaknesses they have:

1. All of them tend to have a central promoter or a bunch of early investors who come together and call it a "foundation".

2. The use-case for these Alt-coins are not well defined. After Bitcoin and ETH, governance use-case has found traction. But there value ultimately depends on the TVL of respective platforms which itself tends to vary.

3. Alt-coins communities are not built organically but through shilling and newbies joining in to cash out or "flip" the profit.

4. Alt-coin developers follow fads and don't care about actual innovation. For example, everyone is coming up with farms and pools and NFTs on BSC now and simply copying the ETH products. Look for projects that are actually trying to accomplish something rather than benefit from the latest fad.

Most Alts that manage these issues, tend to grow and retain value longer than others.

A Pro-Bitcoin title. Just one prediction in the post. Three newbie accounts commenting to increase the count. What exactly is this about then?

If you are trying to provide some sort of service, you should go to the Services board. Better still, if you are interested in price discussion, you can find a lot of those people on this topic in speculation.

1. A businessman selling candies tells you that candy wrappers are valuable.

2. He buys up all the candy paper from the market and tells you to buy it too.

3. Candy paper goes up in value but keeps fluctuating when businessman talks.

4. He says now you can buy his candies in exchange of candy wrapper.

5. Candy wrapper pumps. His bags gain value as he has all the candy wrappers he wanted.

How isn't this openly manipulation?

He shilled an asset and then asking his followers if he should accept it for payments. Isn't this monopolistic or something?

Doesn't matter though. DOGE is a PoW currency. If Musk decides to let people buy Tesla cars with it, maybe a few bag holders will be happy spending it. Its a cryptocurrency. If he chooses DOGE, its his wish. Doesn't mean that DOGE will suddenly become better than Bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn't just for bitcoiners. It is a social phenomena enabled by technology which started against the money printing and debt waivers of corporations. That is why it is important that it remains:

1. Censorship resistant: Till the last node is online on a voluntary p2p network, it can never be censored. All it takes to censor PoS is to catch hold of the biggest nodes.
2. Decentralized: People like you love to quote miner pool centralization. You conveniently forget that decentralization implies that consensus rules cannot be changed without everyone agreeing. That is why full nodes verify and propagate.

If you want a base cryptocurrency that has the above properties, you need PoW and Bitcoin. PoS coins have never shown that they can actually succeed in real decentralization. EOS was a 4 Billion USD failure. Coins like ADA are indeed working with decentralization as the end goal but how is that possible when exchanges run multiple nodes. The foundation runs multiple nodes.
In PoW, those securing the network are economic players only interested in the best return on their hashpower. In PoS, network is secured by those who have a direct stake in keeping things under control, i.e. the biggest hodlers.

You are right that PoW consumes energy. But that is energy well consumed towards the goal of a true, people-owned cryptocurrency.

Switching the network over to renewables as much as possible. This will eventually happen because of the pressure. And its a welcome thing.

It is NOT a problem. PoW is the best solution for a true base cryptocurrency. Without it, all of these other coins are simply corporations running their own projects.
You're the one who thinks its a problem because you refuse to think for yourselves and just want to troll Bitcoin. Maybe because you resent the old hodlers. Maybe because you resent the fact that you weren't here when Bitcoin started out. Guess what, a lot of us weren't here either. We aren't bagholders with 10, 100s or even one complete coin. Yet, we understand that this isn't just about good business and my own profit.

If Bitcoin doesn't stand through these values of true decentralization and censorship-resistant, this whole other game people love playing with their centralized pre-mines and "contributor" coins; will all come crashing down.

Through all this madness, I am trying to keep my faith that Elon, at the end of the day, is the guy who re-landed the Falcon rockets and that giant, pointy piece of Stainless steel. If he really gets down to it, he should realize why PoW is important and why scaling isn't as simple as increasing blocksize.

Till now, he isn't showing may signs of coming to an intelligent conclusion though. Just today he was arguing about how Moore's law will catch up with the requirements for an increased block-size (completing ignoring the syncing time argument). Then there is of course the BSV shills and the ADA, AVAX shills inviting him for coffee.

One silver lining though was that he said "For now, we need lightning", referring to LN of course.

I have an open mind. Lets talk about it rather than throwing un-intelligent arguments meant to prove that somehow people are not realizing the benefits of PoS while you know something that we don't.

Do you realize that 18 pools in Bitcoin's PoW are Mining pools made up of thousands of different miners. Its not like the Pool can make some sort of decision and the miners will continue to direct hashpower to it. On top of this, there are full nodes that verify blocks and transactions continuously to ensure that they matchup to the consensus rules.

Those 2500 pools in ADA are simply newbies joining in thinking that them staking 2000 coins will make any difference to the network. Add this to the fact that an increased number of staking pools are considered inefficient by the developers themselves. That is why, there is an upper bound to the optimum number of pools. What they call the 'k' factor. This is 500 at the moment.

Need I to remind you that only a few epochs back, all the nodes were being run by the foundation. This is because when you have a few central parties running the PoS nodes, it is easier to maintain the so called TPS that these networks love to flaunt. You can ensure hundred percent uptime AND avoid any propagation delays. The moment these get supposedly "decentralized", the network starts to break down. This has happened with several of these PoS coins when they tried to scale. EOS, NEO are just the two biggest examples.

PoW may not feel great in terms of throwing around TPS values, but to be sound money, and to be a reliable, truly censorship resistant network that can actually keep real value safe, there is no better choice than PoW. Quite simply, if Bitcoin's PoW is removed from the equation, all of crypto will simply be a bunch of corporations selling their products and yield farms, nothing else.

I think he failed to grasp the political and economic argument behind the soundness of Bitcoin and has only yet focussed on the technical part.

This is why he jumped on the wagon without being clear about why the community has stood behind Bitcoin for so long and why do we need PoW from a coin with no central leadership, open development and a history of securing billions in transaction. The comment about 10X blocksize and blocktime was so un-informed that I couldn't believe it was Musk. We all know he doesn't do everything by himself but he is behind a lot of design activities in SpaceX. This just confirms though that being an expert in rockets doesn't make you an expert on cryptography. A lot of newbies think so.

It was funnily evident on one noobs' reply to Adam Back on Twitter asking him, "Do you think you know more about crypto than Elon?". The community was like, "Duh, yeah he does".

So this thread was about the PoW FUDders who are proposing alternatives as they find this to be the right time due to a "disturbance in the force". The topic brought us to the usual suspects.

Yes, there have been multiple instances of these masternode and PoS coins launching and disappearing. As you said, the one to watch out for is Ethereum going to PoS. I see very little about how it has planned for decentralization. Even if that works as a smart-contract platform, it'll only be because the people using it are familiar with BTC.

You've been shilling Cardano. I get it as ADA has seen a lot of interest recently with several newbies joining it to join the public stake pools. Just to remind you that all this time, the pools were being run by their foundation and two more entities. So effectively, just 3 entities controlled the whole network.

I have replied to another one of your posts here which talks about the same thing.

LOL. Space-time ninjutsu. Of course it is that. I am still reading their whitepaper to see what they are upto. What is your impression vis-a-vis PoW.

That argument says nothing. The PoS architecture itself limits the number of pool operators that can be there for optimal netowrk efficiency. Anything beyond that is just useless as those pools neither get significant reward nor ever participate as they'll never get the leader slots.

For example, you quote ADA. This currently has around 2500 pools. The optimal value as per their spec is 500. This means the system isn't really efficient already. Then there is the fact that exchanges are operating multiple nodes to increase their own stakes. Decentralization and censorship-resistance are two factors that come to mind.

When a PoS network actually becomes valuable and is at scale, the amount of manipulation that the central players can do to centralize the network and profit from the reward in those cycles is insane. EOS is a prime example.

Thus, you maybe trying to show that you have done your research, it is pretty incomplete. I frankly don't think this deserves a spot in Technical Discussion and I had started a thread for people who wanted to prove that Po(Insert your favorite word) is better alternative to PoW. Maybe you should bring the arguments.

Totally agree. At one point, Bitcoiners are like the champions of this new technology that will replace money and make people have more financial control than what the nexus of politicians, banks and corporates allow them. On the other, the moment their fiat earning are taking a dump, they are out rallying against the EV revolution that Tesla started.

None of the other automakers were interested in putting money and research into EVs till Musk came along and showed that this could be done and people will buy them. Not to forget his other long term plans plus innovations at SpaceX. The re-landings are now routine. SN15 just did the first successful re-landing. Every day the guy is pushing the envelope of whats possible for humans. Antagonizing that community doesn't really match up to the values of Bitcoin.

You cannot say that. The existing Tesla models have had several groundbreaking innovations. The Induction motor that the Tesla's use, the cooling pumps, battery management system are all systems that have not been seen before at such scale.

Couple this with the battery tech update shared by Hydrogen, it is easy to see where Tesla, the company gets its value from. Now about TSLA, the stock, that is up to the market to decide. One thing is clear that the sort of P/E ratios have never been seen before with such a huge company. Its downfall can't really be due to its fundamentals as a tech giant, but probably due to Musk's irrational behavior since he has linked, then de-linked, then again liked Tesla with Bitcoin.

He is smart of course but his behavior regarding crypto has been pretty odd. The thread by McCormack attempted to explain to him but he replied "Cringe threads like this make me wanna go all in on Doge".

Then his recent tweet on "Tesla has Diamond hands thanks to our master of coin". It is beyond pathetic that instead of simply coming out in support of Bitcoin, he is actually trying to sabotage by using the crypto-world's fun, meme-coin. He talked about scaling with blocksize and blocktime and hasn't accepted his mistake despite people explaining it to him.

I really don't think he is done yet. As a community, we should keep trying to reach out to him to explain the importance of PoW as well as the history of block-size wars.

The last time people bought at ATH of 20K, it took almost 2 years to get back to that level. In the meantime it went down to sub 4K. There were those who kept Hodling AND accumulating. They are the ones who were winning in the recent bull-run. They are still comfy with 38K BTC. The thing is that there are two types of actions in the crypto world. Price-action and Product-action.

Now that the price-action is over, this is the time when you go into the products and try to get involved with something for the long run. All of this will eventually resolve itself. You need to decide if you have it in you to go through the winter.

HODLing is good of course but you need to re-invest in yourself as well as your crypto.