Why on earth would anyone send you collateral if you control the BTC?

"Hey I'll let you look at the $10,000 in my account and maybe let you do a trade or two on it if you send me $4,300 first".

Reminder that the real Satoshi has known Bitcoin addresses, including some that have a huge amount of coins, so all he needs to do when he is ready to come back into the public world is to sign a message with the associated private key.

Of course there is a chance he's passed away but anyone ALIVE who is claiming to be Satoshi should be disregarded until he signs a NEW message with a private key associated with a known address.

With an ETF shareholders, admittedly only the larger ones, have a right to redemption meaning they can request delivery of the underlying asset. To simplify the Bitcoin ETF's it is a cash only redemption meaning you would get the spot market price of Bitcoin not physical Bitcoin but effectively it's the same thing. So with an ETF in a very real sense the shareholders are owners of the underlying asset and the fund manger, in this case Fidelity, is just a custodian. It's not as good as holding Bitcoin in your own wallet but has the advantage that you can get access to it through an IRA or 401k with a linked brokerage account.

Yes this is correct quite a few 401k's including mine allow you direct control of investments through a linked brokerage account. They charge an annual fee for it but it is modest particularly in my case as I have a fairly good sized balance in the account.

I have a feeling that the wide availability of Bitcoin ETFs will herald one of the longest and most stable bull markets for Bitcoin that we have seen to date. I've always invested in BTC using a private wallet but with Fidelity's offering I feel fairly safe and confident putting a portion of my 401k into it. I had to check a few boxes that I accept the risk but other than that Fidelity authorized the transaction.

Proof of payment checks out. If you didn't receive the funds chances are your wallet is misconfigured. That's not Despairo's fault.

Dogecoin has been dead for years, it is a copy paste coin with no useful purpose, but there are periods where it was price pumped by a billionaire likely for his own personal profit or that of his friends. SEC should really investigate.

Every day it seems a new story emerges about an exchange going bankrupt. Has been a recurring pattern since the Mt. Gox collapse. Why, with so many examples of failures, do people continue to keep their money on these? You don't own crypto if you have "coins" on an exchange, you have an IOU from a business that may or may not even be solvent.

Hardware wallets are typically 2FA, meaning a PIN is required, so loss of the wallet shouldn't compromise your private key. For the wallet words, you could store those in an encrypted file system on an offline device. Printing them out in a folder labeled "my private keys!" or keeping them in a safety deposit box, particularly, is not very secure. Safety deposit boxes are very common theft targets and a thief will assume anything he gets out of one must have value.

To OP - of course they exchange numbers. That's why it is a DIGITAL currency. If they exchanged something other than numbers, it would be analog.

This is solved by requiring consensus before validating transactions. A bogus node can get lucky and, at great expenses, validate a double spend but it would be caught and rejected with the next block. That is why transactions aren't generally considered durable until six confirmations. At that point, it is infinitesimally unlikely that a bad actor would have been able to validate six blocks in a row.

It has real value, but the fiat to Bitcoin conversion rate is not a very accurate assessment of it. Tends to get overbought and oversold as the mood varies from euphoria to panic.

I don't have an issue with that. The "Greater Fool" concept has driven the rare coin and art markets for centuries. My big problem is that you aren't actually buying the art when you buy an NFT but, rather, in most cases all you are getting is some metadata that describes a piece of art that is stored somewhere else. It is like buying the Mona Lisa but, instead of the painting, you get a piece of paper saying you have the rights to a bit of wall space at the Louvre. That's great until they move the painting. Then you own some drywall.

And every copy of Bitcoin, with a different starting seed, is also scarcer than gold. That doesn't mean it has value. Anyone can copy Bitcoin by just changing a few parameters in the source code. The value of something is not determined by rarity, that is irrelevant, but rather consumer demand. Technically any 256 bit random number you generate is unique in all the world. Good luck, however, selling it.

Historically it tends to fall about 80% off peak in a crypto winter. So that means the low is probably in the $14k type range. We're not far from that, so this isn't a bad time to buy. It may, of course, stabilize much higher than that and begin a new bull market.

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USDT has performed admirably so far. They've redeemed every request. USDC is solid as well. Both infinitely better than the UST/LUNA scam.

With fees, very possibly!

The aggregate market cap is for coins traded on major exchanges. Yes it can be skewed a bit by pumps on obscure alt-coins but overall it is fairly reliable. BTC and ETH combined have been the lion's share. The bottom few thousand coins really don't amount to shit.

Staggering when one considers it looked to be on a sprint to $5T just a short time ago. A rather epic collapse.

The actual content of the NFT, such as a piece of art, is rarely stored on the blockchain. The reason why the content (such as a JPG, MP3, or Gif) of the smart contract associated with the actual NFT is stored on the web and not the blockchain is because of the size and cost. So you don't really own a piece of art. You own a piece of metadata describing some art that is stored on a centralized server. Those servers will, inevitably, eventually go down, be hacked or bought out so the owners of an NFT will, in the long run, own nothing but some metadata pointing to a defunct site.

There is definitely a perception out there right now that 95% of the coins out there are just a white paper and "team", plus some bad copy and paste code, with nothing tangible or worthwhile backing them. At least Bitcoin, Ethereum and a few others are actually used in commerce. Similar to the great Altcoin collapse of 2013 when the vast majority lost 98% of their value. Some of these coins honestly have even less going for them than say a Feathercoin or Sexcoin particularly all the truly asinine attempts to use a blockchain where decentralization is not needed and there are vastly better solution to the same problem; i.e. all the "web 3.0" garbage.