It won't be one or the other. China will likely continue to be a powerhouse for the manufacture of mining hardware, for the same reasons they are significant in the semiconductor/computer chip industry. I think US companies will be significant in the finance, brokerage and exchange space. And I think miners will continue to be significant in both countries.

What makes Bitcoin better is that it's actual money. It has a complete economic design that incentivizes strong security and therefore encourages transaction/network liquidity without trusted intermediaries. It's probably a better place to store your money -- Bitcoin isn't subject to bail-ins or bailouts. In fact, that's why it makes sense to use fiat payment options sometimes so you can save your bitcoins.

For any given transaction, Bitcoin isn't necessarily a better "payment option." For merchants, irreversibility is great! For consumers, less so.

This "stablecoin" hype is getting a little out of hand!

I wouldn't put much stock into the current lack of volatility. It's just a temporary pause in market activity. I don't think Bitcoin could find real "stability" until after mass adoption has already occurred. Until then, the market will continue to speculate about future adoption (causing major volatility) and will probably keep going through these bubble periods like 2011, 2013 and 2017.

When did you experience those problems, though? It's not 2017 anymore. The market's been pretty dead, as evidenced by trading volumes. I'm guessing there are less new customers signing up these days and less work volume across the board.

Still, I'm getting conflicted messages here. As of a month ago, they had reportedly doubled their staff over the course of seven months. Apparently these firings were of remote workers. They're probably just reorganizing internal structure and not actually downsizing.

Since Bakkt needs CFTC approval and hasn't received it, maybe the rumor isn't substantive to the market yet. Maybe the "rumor" is regulator approval and the "news" event will be the actual launch. I think that's what it was like with the CME futures last year. The actual launch of the market coincided with a selloff.


Nope, nothing new here. Bakkt has been saying for a while that they're waiting for CFTC approval.

They're definitely capable of applying current securities laws to the low-hanging fruit. Most ICO tokens are obviously unregistered securities, particularly with how they were marketed with an emphasis on investor returns and without proper avoidance of US investors. A lot of those cases are open and shut. For what it's worth, I think their enforcement actions and general presence over the past year has deterred some of the more egregious ICO scamming from continuing.

I think it's more about resources than anything else. They're stretched far too thin to keep a handle on anything but the lowest hanging fruit. The space proliferated so fast, and they're a legacy institution that usually spends many months or even years pursuing any given case.


I don't think they can change much without new legislation. They're just enforcing old laws that have been on the books for decades. If Congress redefines cryptocurrency with regard to current securities law, the SEC will have to change their rules.

Robinhood says they keep all coins in their custody, yes. See here:



Unfortunately, you can't actually withdraw coins from Robinhood, even though the coins are supposedly held in their custody (not derivatives). It's strictly an investment platform where they hold all assets. Supposedly, cryptocurrency deposits and withdrawals are coming in the future.

The IRS has made clear that digital currency like Bitcoin already falls under current tax regulations. They released a memo in 2013 defining it as property. Income from transactions involving property is taxable in the US.

They also published a reminder earlier this year:

In a secluded area -- and the OP is right. You should always conduct in-person transactions in public places like coffee shops. There have been some pretty brutal robbery cases where people were trying to exchange bitcoins for cash in uncrowded settings like a parking lot at night.


Unless you want cold hard cash and want to maintain your privacy. In-person transactions are really the only way to get cash outside of the banking system.

The reason electricity is so cheap in WA is because of all the hydroelectric (clean energy) capacity there, so the clean energy angle is probably moot.

When miners push the grid beyond capacity, they increase the electricity price for everyone else. It makes no sense to only view things as if the miners are helpless victims being punished by utilities. Businesses (including mining businesses) actually pay less than residents. On average, Washington businesses pay 7.68¢/kWh while residents pay 8.53¢/kWh. Businesses are already receiving significantly subsidized electricity costs vs. residents. Why should that be?

What do these localities gain by having miners set up operations? It only makes sense to incentivize businesses if they actually help local economic growth and prosperity. If they are increasing costs of living for everyone else -- and this is the primary concern in all of these cases -- it makes sense to stop subsidizing them and to disincentivize them from operating in the first place.

Does Ephrata receive tax revenues, and how significant are they? Are miners contributing to the local economy, or do they simply drive up everyone else's electricity costs and give back nothing? If I lived there, I would only take a pro-mining stance if there were benefits for me and my community. It's irrational to take a blindly pro-miner stance because it would only mean higher electricity costs for me, and possibly an unreliable electrical grid.

For larger coins, yes. I've had some success buying lesser known coins on exchanges like Cryptopia, Kucoin and Mercatox and flipping them after they got listed on major exchanges like Binance.

I like Gemini for long term swing trading and holding/withdrawing USD. It feels a lot safer than most alternatives.

I wouldn't say China is irrelevant. Chinese mining hardware producers, mining farms and mining pools are a very big part of the ecosystem. There's really no hardware producers that begin to compare to Bitmain's scale. China is also a huge market for cryptocurrency investment with its 1.4 billion strong population.

The old "China bans Bitcoin" tricks might not have the same effect as they did in 2013, but they're still a big part of the market. The rest of the world is just catching up.

Full nodes don't care about anything. They just work according to protocol. There's really no call to project that stuff on me -- I'm just explaining how it works. What you're saying doesn't even apply to me since I run a full Segwit node.

It's obvious that you don't appreciate Bitcoin's design at all. Bitcoin isn't some hierarchical organization where "voting" decides what changes are made. Changes are either compatible with the consensus, or they're not. You can update your node, or you can process transactions without understanding them, like Satoshi said. One more time:

Fungibility is always under threat when it comes to exchanges. They're trusted intermediaries; they can censor and steal your money. This is what Bitcoin taught us.

It's not like you can freely withdraw BTC from Dream Market into your Coinbase account. That's asking for trouble.

I think centralized stablecoins are just a logical extension of the already existing exchange ecosystem. When you hold USD on Coinbase, that money can easily be confiscated. Coinbase can just freeze your account and reduce your USD balance to zero -- and then maybe pass your information onto law enforcement. Why would exchange-issued stablecoins be any different -- because they're "crypto?" They're still just centralized IOUs from an exchange.

I see your strategy now. You throw out walls of text riddled with dishonest statements and inaccuracies, then you neglect to respond to any of the arguments other people make.

This is what I said:


Legacy nodes validate Segwit transactions in numerous ways. You obviously take serious issue with how Bitcoin scripts work. It upsets you that there are Bitcoin scripts that nodes validate to true without verifying a signature. That's an issue you have with the Bitcoin protocol.

This dynamic was part of Bitcoin's design since inception. Satoshi spoke about this in 2010:

In other words, if you want your node to fully understand every aspect of all transactions, then you should upgrade your node.

Refusing to upgrade to a compatible node isn't a matter of consensus. As long as all different versions remain forward and backward compatible, consensus has never been broken. That's why we're all still on the same network!


When you make a groundless statement like that, you should elaborate and explain how it works.

Then I can pick apart the inaccurate/dishonest statements.

This market -- even if it inflated to the size of Tether -- is way too small for that. Effective money laundering requires very high levels of transaction liquidity. There's not nearly enough stablecoin liquidity for significant laundering.

Sanctioned Russians are apparently moving hundreds of billions of dollars through the likes of Bank of America, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank. Why bother with stablecoins?

Even Bitcoin and Ethereum would be much more useful for laundering than USDC or anything like it.

Actually, no. This pertains to both transactions and nodes. They are inextricably linked. Segwit nodes can send Segwit outputs to legacy nodes. Legacy nodes can send legacy outputs to Segwit nodes.

This compatibility has absolutely nothing to do with network topology. You're just fundamentally confused about what "compatibility" means, or you're purposefully being dishonest.


Actually, they do accept Segwit transactions as valid. If they didn't, they would reject such blocks. You may want to review how invalidity is treated on the Bitcoin network. Blocks containing invalid transactions are simply ignored.

Legacy nodes can't validate the signature of a Segwit transaction. So what? They still validate the POW, the inputs and outputs, the scripts, etc. Everything is validated the same way as before. Legacy nodes are just 1) accepting and propagating valid transactions from/to the network or 2) receiving valid outputs that have already been accepted by the network.

Your fundamental issue here is with how the Bitcoin protocol works, not Segwit.


"Consensus" = the Bitcoin protocol's consensus rules. It's not some sort of a democratic vote or something -- that's never how Bitcoin (or any network) worked.

Segwit is 100% compatible with the consensus rules, so there is nothing for your node to "reject." There is no voting. It's either compatible or not. You don't have any say over that.

If you think node operators should be able to "vote" on everything other compatible nodes do, then you don't understand how networks operate. You don't get to decide what the rest of the network does. You can OPT-OUT if you want by shutting down your "pigeon English" node, but that's the extent of your power.

Correlation or causation? I would bet on the former. When the first US copper ETF launched in 2012, the price declined for the next 3-4 years straight.

Also, it took a 2-3 years of trying before JPMorgan got approval to launch that copper ETF. We should probably expect a Bitcoin ETF to take considerably longer than that. Bitcoin is a brand new asset class; copper is a basic metal. Yet it still took years for the SEC to approve a copper ETF.

If older nodes aren't compatible with Segwit, why can I send Segwit outputs to legacy addresses? Why can I receive payments from legacy addresses to my Segwit wallet? Why do older nodes accept Segwit transactions and blocks as valid?

You have a very strange definition of compatibility.



You're making a distinction between full vs. partial validation, not compatibility. Also, non-Segwit nodes still validate transactions and blocks against their consensus rules. They don't "blindly" do anything.

In a way, this might comfort some USDC holders because it means it's a "legit" stablecoin issued by licensed money transmitters. That's worlds apart from what Tether is. The biggest fear with Tether is their bank accounts will be seized and the value of USDT will plummet. Nobody should be surprised if/when that happens after years and years of unlicensed money transmission and banking secrecy. That's definitely way less of a concern with Circle and Coinbase.

It does put a damper on the idea of secondary markets, though. If you wanted to trade USDC P2P to hedge dollar value without KYC, you have to consider who you're trading with and where the money came from.