Stock market is not zero sum. Youi need to understand the relationship between a stock and the company's earnings.

The price of a stock is generally thought of as the price investors are willing to pay for per unit earning of a company. A companies earnings depend on several parameters like performance, market conditions and resources available with it. Investors in the market use the available information about these parameters and an expectation on future earnings is created.

Based on the expectations of future earnings and confidence, the market collectively decides a fair price for the stock. The money bought in from investors in such a way helps the company to expand, setup newer facilities, grow and increase its profitability as well as revenue. This increased economic activity essentially "create" money. So, the initial action of buying/ selling of the stock is not a zero sum game.

The above is a theoretical, ideal condition. Yet, that is the basic outline of how stock markets work to create value.

This pump on DOGE may feel insane but there is no reason it cannot go up in value as a cheap coin which several of the newbies will buy as their first crypto. I like the reasoning that Elon's tweet have a lot more method to the madness than we like to believe.

This pattern of behavior is not new for Musk. He has a tendency to side with the underdog. He had pro-GME tweets when wallstreetbets was coordinating the Gamestop squeeze by asking people to buy small amounts. The DOGE reddit is going through something similar. At the end of the day, it is your money to bet. If you end up winning, you can thank yourself. If you end up losing then too you gotta just blame yourself.

Just remember that there is no way to predict this market. Nobody knows when BTC will go down due to a flash dump by whales who will get a whiff of some negative legislation by SEC or someone else. We, the retail investors are the last to know. So put only what you can afford to lose. Targets, targets.

There was a need to counter-balance not just central banks but the trio of Banks, Corporates and Politicians. They raised walled gardens of access where a person could rise into wealth simply by being in the right circles and having the right connections.

While there is no secret society per se like @Stompix said, there definitely are these circles of influence. How far you go in life depends a lot on who you know, where you schooled and who your daddy knows. The information asymmetry has slowly been broken by Internet and Social media for some time now. This has enabled more and more people to have the opportunity of becoming financially self-dependent.

The last of the barriers were access to capital. This has been, and is still being, challenged by crypto. In my mind, this is the picture of the coming world. Easier access to information as well as capital for everyone. Monetization of skills irrespective of where you live or what you do. This is the empowerment that Bitcoin has enabled.

The banks, politicians and corporates would do well to align themselves with this new reality. And they surely will, like they always do. As people, it is on each one of us to be vigilant enough not to be co-opted.

This is a pretty meaningless comparison. Google is a technology company. Bitcoin is not a "company" and its "marketcap" defines little about it.

Even if it surpasses Google, there are no guarantees that it will continue to be above it. Nor that it has generated any sort of revenue or products comparable to a company like Google or Amazon. Bitcoin is a separate market in itself so comparing it with other corporate giants will not tell us anything meaningful about it.

The meaningful criteria in terms of Bitcoin are, How many transactions are happening with it? How much of it has been acquired by individuals or corporations to utilize its SoV feature? What is it contributing towards financial inclusion for people around the world?

Comparisons like these are well-intentioned but misguided. Bitcoin doesn't really need that kind of shilling, does it?

Ethereum is decentralized and all, but only for the time being. With ETH2.0, It'll be a PoS coin, which BSC already is. There goes the decentralization benefit that ETH has over BSC.

The one major advantage that ETH has is the ecosystem of developers around Ethereum. Yet, it is not alone in that race anymore. There are several projects which are willing to incentivize developers to work with them. This is a typical free market now. Over the years, anybody who has used Eth can check and find how much they paid for gas fees on etherscan. You'd be surprised to know that it may well be more than you ever earned back from all those trades and staking etc.

Those crazy fees really don't mean a thing, being as they are higher than even BTC transactions for the last several months. There are too many people who have suffered due to this. BSC is backed by Binance and CZ knows that there are enough disgruntled users/ developers who only need little nudges to come over to their own compatible chain. I would say that if Binance doesn't go up in flames with this overheated market and ensuing regulatory oversight, we will see incentivization for developers and users on BSC. Ethereum will pretty much be a relic by then.

For all the analysis the OGs and us Seventeeners gave to OP, he should have just listened to Elon and bought DOGE.

Note: Seventeeners or 17ers are people who got into crypto in 2017 with the Bitcoin ATH. They are the ones who bought at the highest and then lived through the last 3-4 years to watch their dumbest friends make hundreds of thousands while they made the "sensible" trades..

To paraphrase the great axe-wielding swarf Gimli..

Satoshi Alive! Coins dumped! Great Chance of buying Low...

What are we waiting for??

On a serious note, if Satoshi were to ever come back and take a look at the communities, riches and industries that his contribution spawned; he'd probably be quite interested in having a more than significant role in the future. He wouldn't be selling any of those coins than necessary. He'd probably enjoy being a benevolent dictator. I would even like to fancy that he'd "airdrop" some to all the forum contributors.

He was a thoughtful, smart, idealistic person. He'd probably have the "With great power comes great responsibility" epiphany and the world will change for the better, One Sat at a time.

Interesting academic exercise but I disagree with the premise of the Reddit post which tells people to:
Happy thoughts about having a significant percentage of the network time does not equate to having the wealth that early adopters have made and continue to make. In my mind, this pushes the same narrative that the wealthy elite have pushed upon the middle classes throughout the last century of wage-slavery. "If you work hard enough, you will have a good job, a suburban home and can retire decently".

What people should know is that wealth making opportunities will continue to present themselves. Bitcoin is not the Alpha and Omega of the human struggle for generational wealth. If you were not early into Bitcoin, you did miss a shot of a lifetime. The technology and information has enabled its believers to mint fortunes. Tech and Information will continue to do that. The question is whether you can be there. Putting ones time, money and effort in that is better than trying to cope with BTC ownership. Make BTC a compulsory part of your regular investment and stop fretting over "targets".

This is very similar to the move by the Reserve Bank of India back in 2018 when it prohibited all banks within India to stop giving service to any crypto based business. This meant that every exchange got shuttered and a lot of people sold off their holdings as they had no way to liquidate their crypto.

I don't know about Turkey but in India, that prohibition only meant that the fiat on-off ramps stopped existing. You could still hold crypto and do what you want with it. A lot of people who were only interested in day-trading sold off but some people kept their crypto. In 2020, a petition filed by those exchanges won in the Supreme court and this prohibition from RBI was termed illegal. Lately, there have been wide speculation about a parliamentary legislation though.

Turkey seems to be going through the same paces. People won't be able to buy and sell directly but you can still keep Bitcoin. Good time to reorganize all the P2P stuff. There are a lot of people from the Turkish community and i suppose we will start seeing an uptick in the marketplace involving Turkish businesses.

Personally I feel too exhausted to play this game anymore. The novelty has worn off now and the latest trends are too demanding in terms of time and understanding. LO. I sound like those middle-aged professionals wondering about career prospects against the latest batch of new employees.

Of all these coins, DASH and XMR will have to be singled out because the anonymizing is not helping the marketing. EOS has more or less failed with its PoS model. Plenty of other PoS coins have better communities. With ETH 2.0, it'll become completely redundant. ETC is the Ethereum chain that forked after the DAO bug. The only use case of ETC I can think of is being the minable chain after ETH turns PoS. It can become the currency of choice for those on ETH who want to stick to the original vision of DAPPs on a PoW world computer. I don't suppose there are too may of those people. So there goes ETC.

From the above elimination, you have XEM, NEO, IOTA and LTC. I propose that you add something to the discussion now and let us decide what to buy.

On another note, I think these 2017 coins had their time. They did not really come up with anything new. More excited about what things like LINK, AAVE, COMP, ENJ would do.

You said it yourself. Coinbase is a company that holds, sells and markets cryptocurrencies. There whole success is built on top of Bitcoin's success and marketing efforts towards convincing people to invest in cryptocurrencies. They, in turn, derive fees from the users actions. The correct classification for coinbase would probably be that they are a service provider and not really a crypto company themselves. When companies giving crypto services become valuable, then that value is accrued from the value of cryptocurrencies themselves.

A lot of people said above, and i agree, that Bitcoiners shouldn't be concerned what Buffett thinks about it. That was a rhetoric statement as to what stance would nocoiners take in the face of this valuation, if it sustains and grows in the long term. The traditional nocoiners always give the argument of "no intrinsic value". What i meant with WB's example was, would they be willing to put more of an effort and try to "understand" the value rather than try to brush it aside? That was the point and it doesn't really needs pontifications about how Warren Buffet matters or doesn't matter to Bitcoin..

Of course, coinbase isn't the first crypto company on NASDAQ. Still, its the first one with a huge user base and a large presence within the US mainland. This quote from an NYT article sums up what coinbase listing implies for nocoiners and normies out there:

Maybe we need to temper our expectations from Bitcoin. A company like Coinbase brings users onboard through marketing and hand-holding. It gives a lot of people the assurance they need before jumping into the unknown. A percentage of those users will surely slowly gain access to the understanding of private keys. With the incessant media attention, this point was always going to come for Bitcoin.

Maybe what you want is for the Binance plan to come to fruition like you highlighted in one of your own posts i replied to here.

This is what the article says about the Tai Chi strategy:

While I do not believe that US customers need to be "taught" technological turnarounds, yet this plan to find a footing and a legal face for its products within US mainland is not beyond Binance or CZ. For example, while Binance asks for KYC, The funds on BSC do not. A verified user can easily and very cheaply shift their funds to BSC. (Which is basically a centralized network using Binance owned nodes, hence the low fees). On BSC, the whole ETH based DeFi is being recreated and people are jumping on to the bandwagon due to the low fees.

Binance isn't the most legal of entities and a binance IPO is not something that can happen anytime soon. That will not stop CZ from doing his own thing. Binance is going to list the Coinbase stock in its own version..LOL..

Now that Coinbase has been valued at double digit billions, we have to wait and see what investors like Warren Buffett have to say about it.

They have always shied away from accepting Bitcoin's value due question the underlying fundamentals. Coinbase with its 56 Million customers should give them some reason to derive a valuation. If the stories of the Dot com unicorns and their stock appreciations are anything to go by, Coinbase can be one of the best long term investments.

The report pointed out repeatedly that Blockchain is the best forensic tool available for tracing transactions. It states multiple times that authorities can trace coins that have gone through mixers, when they go for it. Does that render anonymizing platforms useless in the long run? In a probable future where Bitcoin is going to be used for all sorts of financial transactions, would it be a good thing that the governments will have all the control over how normal, middle-class people manage their money?

I don't know about the developed world but a lot of people in developing countries often pin their hopes for a comfortable retirement on pieces of obscure lands bought in the hope of appreciation. When such assets appreciate, the transactions happen in cash while the transaction amount that appears on paper trail is lesser. In a world with cryptocurrencies, it'll be impossible to do anything like this. Ditto for small businesses, self-employed blue-collar workers using cash to earn a little extra. Some call it tax evasion but does it bode well for the common people?

The real money launderers don't have to worry as they have plenty of options like HSBC, Citibank to do it for them in far more sophisticated ways. The report raises more questions than answers. Though as a purely lobbying and PR exercise, there is nothing better than an ex-CIA director endorsing the use of Bitcoin.

You are talking about an exchange with all the features of Binance except that it shouldn't have a CZ on top of it.

Cross chain transfers are something that are seen as a holy grail. Cosmos and several other claim to have been built from the bottoms-up with an approach to have the ability to "talk" to any blockchain. This means that the protocol is there but specific applications needs to be built which need developers' time and funding for them. This has led to a scenario in alt-coins where funding is made available through sponsors and hackathons to open source developers around the world. They hope to achieve a network effect of enough chains and enough projects.

IMO, they all suffer from the same basic flaw. In the name of transaction speed and inter-operability, they compromise with the basic value proposition of blockchain to act as money. They use various forms of PoS instead of PoW. Expecting Bitcoin millionaires to trust their money freely to a set of "validators" is a little too much to ask. This doesn't mean that people aren't doing it. Lot of Bitcoin moves cross chain through wrapping services. People already use these partly decentralized services for wrapping tokens for use on other chains.

If you are going to compromise with PoW at some level, then why not do it at product level rather than protocol itself? This is why such a proposed DEX can only be an academic curiosity and not really something that traders need or will risk their money with.

The forum doesn't have an awful lot of maximalists now. In fact, if you go through the older posts on the forum, you'll see that the maximalist breed wasn't really part of the evolution. Maximalists you see on crypto-twitter are mostly reactionaries to the blocksize-wars. In certain cases, they even have outright corporate affiliations; like Samson from Blockstream. Experiments in Alt-coins have been going on for a long time and nobody in their right mind can say with 100% certainty that financial implications of crypto would be limited only to Bitcoin in the long term.

Having said that, the difference as you say is, indeed, about personalities. Bitcoin attracted the best and the brightest in its initial days. Alt-coins on the other hand gave birth to the phenomena of free-loaders and bounty-hunters. The community in Alt-coin is therefore filled to the brim with people from third world countries trying to earn money by any means possible. While it started with simple, genuine freelancers; the stories of people making 100X of their money in freely distributed Alt-coins (Ether for example was a few cents in the ICO) has led to a sort of gold rush where everyone from a shovel guy to the ones with automated bucket excavators are in a race to pump their own coin through marketing (mostly social media manipulation). This has also led to proliferation of copycat projects whose only purpose is to somehow gather seed money. Marketing is provided by the afore-mentioned bounty-hunters looking for a quick flip. The crypto influencers on Youtube and twitter (mostly from first world countries) have taken this to another level. These factors make it extremely difficult to find a genuine project in this wasteland. Its the reason that even though people in the Bitcoin section aren't all maximalist, yet they have suggested to allocate anything from 60-80% of an outright fiat investment into BTC and not Alt/Shit-coins.

Most of this explanation is obvious to the people commenting here but hope this is of some help to you.

Besides this, My personal experience with the DeFi aspect of Alt-coins tells me that they have disruptive potential, at least in the short term (2-3 years). Don't go looking at the plethora of " DeFi farms" springing up everywhere. If you have time before deciding on that investment, I invite you to read a thread that I started about one of these DeFi projects called BarnBridge. You are welcome to ask questions in the thread and join the discord from the link. Ask for me if you come over to discord. There are plenty of people there willing to show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Just make sure not to engage with people asking for money or sending you links via DM. This is a terribly scammy space for newcomers and has every imaginable psy-op designed to part you from your money. For the curious and meticulous though, it is a whole new world.

The money may not be the issue but the logistics for manufacturing an equivalent of 10 years output of all the miner manufacturers would still be significant. If a Govt body ever attempted this, it would be hard to keep it a secret. Government agencies have gotten away with a lot in the earlier era when they performed nuclear tests and diverted the attention of a naïve citizenry from the ill-effects. I don't think it can be done in today's world.

With the benefits that Bitcoin and all of its spawns have given to millions of people worldwide, such a move to cripple Bitcoin would be hugely unpopular. Any potential hash-war between people and governments is basically a matter of perception. If they convince enough people that Bitcoin power consumption is a bad thing and that their centralized coins are better, we may have a problem at hand.

So what exactly happened? Coinbase is a custodial exchange and i believe they do not give access to your private keys/ mnemonics. So did you just share your user-ID and password and 2FA with someone??

And yeah, scammers are everywhere. Lot of Indians have made it a source of income and the lax policing is never able to catch them as they obscure themselves. Sorry for your loss. It'd be great if you can share you experience on the thread for the benefit of others.

US became the largest economy on the strength of its innovation in Millitary, Space, Electronics and Software technologies. Almost all of these have now been copied over by the Chinese. They have also been able to replicate and sustain the kind of R&D infrastructure that enabled the USA in the times on cold war. With a disillusioned public that simply doesn't trust corporate American and political American anymore, the US doesn't have the gas needed to compete.

This Biden plan which aims to invest money to "repair" roads and bridges. While this will surely boost incomes and lead to increased economic activity, what America needs is healing, rejuvenation and a sense of purpose that its people were known for. Right now, they are all "hustlers" trying to somehow make something out of themselves and get ahead of the rat race.

C'mon man. I respect your opinions Kevin but taking the declaration of UN SDG's as some sinister idea for a One world government is stretching it a bit too far.

The UN has been doing this for a long time now. They support the flow of information, human expertise and capital resources to developing and under-developed countries from the developed world. Sure, they could do a much better job, but couldn't we all? The polity continues to evolve and regional unions like the EU were an evolution from Empires==>Nation states==>Democracies. The experiment failed spectacularly. With decentralization gaining prominence, we may well be moving towards a better alternative far removed from a one world govt.