Bitcoin is P2P and doesn't need government approval. These people are already considered outlaws just for protesting. Bitcoin is proving to be an alternative to the banking system in Nigeria and Bitcoin's popularity is growing in this region. Maybe they will not need to use the government printed fiat anymore and Bitcoin can be a parallel system of payments, although similar to a black market in case it is declared illegal.

Major crypto media and financial news are reproducing today a Coindesk report on Square's investment on Bitcoin.

It describes a recent analysis by JPMorgan that reports Square Inc. Bitcoin investment as "a strong vote of confidence for the future of Bitcoin". I tried to find this JPMorgan report but I couldn't find it. I looked at JPMorgan's website and other sources, perhaps it wasn't published on the internet, or I missed something. If someone has a link to this JPMorgan report or has a copy of it, this would be great to read it whole.


JPMorgan Chase Bank has been surprisingly favorable to Bitcoin lately and from one of the biggest enemies, with CEO Jamie Dimon waging a war of words in previous years, now appears to have softened its stance.

Square also released what they call a "Bitcoin Investment Whitepaper", link to the pdf is here.

It is a common tactic by scammers. I observed that they think they can scam the same victims again under the assumption that they are easy targets.
I'm reporting this post as it is an advertisement for scammers to promote their scam services. I'm sorry if it gets deleted but this is a scam post and also posted in the wrong section.

In this link from CME, you can take a course on futures and understand how it works. Now, if you only want to trade futures on Binance then the friend above has given you a link with what you need.
When you decide to trade you have to be sure that you have read and understood the rules of the exchange you have chosen because mistakes can cost you a lot.

If you want to see how trading futures in Binance is, as an example, there are many videos in youtube. There are some full tutorials available with real trades too.

Bitcoin can't be faked but you have to understand one thing. The word "crypto" includes Bitcoin because it is a cryptocurrency but it is something very different and very similar too. In a way, you put bitcoin in the same category with every other cryptocurrency with your above sentence. This is a common mistake many people do.

First of all, Bitcoin can't be faked. I don't know if other cryptocurrencies can. Bitcoin is supported by a community that is at least ten times better from the rest cryptocurrencies. When you say the word "crypto" most people that have some experience don't like that for many reasons. This word was created to reduce Bitcoin and to expose it to the many weaknesses of the altcoin industry, weaknesses that Bitcoin doesn't have on its own. The code is there it is open source and Bitcoin doesn't have anyone to steer the wheel left or right, but it is the decision of all that paves the way.

"Crypto" is a marketing term and not welcome to use next to Bitcoin because of the many fallacies in the approach of altcoins. At least you separated BTC and crypto in your post so you are on the right path.

To understand how Bitcoin works read the whitepaper , written by Satoshi Nakamoto and released in 2008. This is where you must start. The next step is the bitcointalk forum and you are already here but you skipped the step of researching how Bitcoin works. Don't worry most of us have done the same mistake but after some time comes the realization that we have to start again from the beginning.

Perhaps you can also watch a few very educational videos created by some very brilliant people of Bitcoin as Andreas Antonopoulos to get educated further. The bitcointalk forum is excellent for your education on Bitcoin and it has helped me and keeps helping people with expanding their knowledge.

I don't see how someone can mistake inflation with Ponzi schemes. Perhaps if someone has never heard both terms and have them confused in his mind.
Maybe you meant inflation of the price of Bitcoin compared to the USD. This would be correct because I thought you were talking about inflation in the economy.


If you are a trader, be my guest and do that. Maybe you can day trade too and make millions as some traders suggest they always find the top and the bottom.

Obviously, he is someone that doesn't know what a pre-mine is and if he did he wouldn't speak.
Satoshi mined to sustain the network and if I remember reading correctly he was mining with multiple CPUs to prevent possible attacks.

The problem is that some DeFi shill thinks that the Bitcoin maxis are harming Ethereum by talking about premining and remembered to talk about it two months later from this discussion in August and now that everyone is noticing the Ethereum DeFi only has pump and dumps and exit-scams to offer.

Ethereum was premined by 72 million tokens from the Genesis Block. 60m went for the ICO and two rounds of sales and 12 more million for the devs (more info here).
This is the Ethereum devs premined tokens transaction:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x9c81f44c29ff0226f835cd0a8a2f2a7eca6db52a711f8211b566fd15d3e0e8d4

This is what a premine is, and it has nothing to do with Satoshi mining to stabilize and secure the Bitcoin network in its infancy. Instead, it was Ethereum that was created with a carefully designed plan to make devs rich and premined at a 70% rate.

This was one tweet among others that probably triggered many altcoin fans that haven't even done the slightest research on the coins they bought.

He probably assumes that 7 million Bitcoins will be lost after a hundred years. This is reasonable considering that many will lose access to their Bitcoins, some will die and take them with them leaving nothing to relatives, and anyway, many more millions of Bitcoins may be lost under different circumstances. Perhaps he is wrong but what can happen in 100 years, or in 200 years.

Mt.Gox was hacked multiple times from 2011 and they only went public about it in 2014 when the exchange collapsed being unable to handle withdrawals. These bitcoins were not lost but stolen, this is different as they can be accessed as long as someone holds the private keys and many were laundered until 2017.

This number, 1.5 million, does not contain the 1.1 million Bitcoins mined by Satoshi. Chainalysis also reports that close to 4 million Bitcoin have been probably lost forever (read here)

Core Scientific address and contact information is here along with all their repair centers worldwide from the Bitmain website.

I read the link you shared for the first time and did not remember seeing it before. There is no contact information just an address in california. Perhaps this is only for California miners only. It says USA-CA repair so it might be a local technician.

Core Scientific, a large crypto mining operator and AI software development company, becomes the first repair center for Bitmain's Antminers in the North America.

The company will perform repairs with expert engineers for Bitmain's hardware and will also service Antminers out of warranty.


Probably this will end some of the pain for NA miners as from what I've been reading most have many problems with time delays while sending machines for repairs in China . This will reduce the return time of the devices and increase profit for miners located in North America.

More info:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/core-scientific-named-bitmains-cooperative-repair-center-in-north-america-301133395.html
https://cointelegraph.com/news/this-crypto-mining-operator-was-named-bitmains-sole-north-american-cooperative-repair-center

Covid caused the crash in March and the cure for covid will cause Bitcoin to crash too? So by this analysis, anything that happens will only cause Bitcoin to crash.

Ok I don't buy Bitcoin then because I know it's going to crash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

I think that the US economy is currently in a recession as the term recession suggests that two consecutive quarters of negative growth are needed to be in one. Q1 of 2020 was down by 5% and Q2 by 32.9%.

But all data are very bad and perhaps it will take at least two years of fixing problems to recover (meaning to reach the same GDP level before recession).

I'm not exactly sure but I think that the CBDC is a replacement of the fiat currency in a form of digital currency and as they are doing in Bahamas they remove fiat when they mint the digital coins. In Venezuela the Petro was purposedly backed by oil reserves and other assets as the Bolivar is completely useless, but they didn't use in a way to replace the fiat but as a way to bypass the sanctions and embargo imposed.


The value of dollar is raplidly reaching the price of one grain of sand!

We have seen many central banks in a rush to create a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) and the Bahamas have now successfully tested one and getting ready to launch it across all islands by next month.

The name of the first-ever CBDC to be officially launched is "Sand Dollar" and it will be pegged 1:1 to the national fiat currency (BSD - Bahamian Dollar) which is also pegged 1:1 to the USD. The Bahamas Central bank explained that the digital currency will not be a cryptocurrency or share similarities of stable coins but will be a digital representation of the fiat currency.

The CBDC was created by NZIA Ltd that is a joint venture between IBM and Zynesis (a Singapore based blockchain software company. NZIA is creating CBDC digital currency payment solutions with the use of blockchain nodes and their technology as back-end dubbed "NZIA Cortex DLT" (I did not find more info about this).

Initially, there will be 48,000 sand dollars available through a mobile wallet service and the Bahamas central bank will be able to mint more by removing BSD from circulation to avoid inflation. The central bank of The Bahamas is considering the Sand Dollar as a digital currency and stated that:

Some of the key features of the Sand Dollar are :

• Offline functionality
• Near-instant validation of transactions
• Monitored transactions, Non-anonymous
• Interoperability with all payment services
• Domestic use only
• Mobile wallets - QR code scanning - 2FA
• Mandatory KYC procedure

The Bahamas is the first country to launch a CBDC and the results may set a precedent on the future launch of CBDCs in more countries that are in a testing phase of their digital fiat as China (DCEP) and Sweden (e-krona). In January the finance ministry of Bahamas released a Q&A on the new Bahamian Sand Dollar on facebook, you can read it here.

As a person that believes that decentralization is the vehicle for financial freedom I am not supportive of CBDCs but I report this news because of the importance of the first official launch of a CBDC anywhere in the world.

This is the link of the Sand Dollar white-paper : https://cdn.centralbankbahamas.com/download/022598600.pdf

Satoshi managed to create the blockchain that gives to Bitcoin decentralization. Bitcoin is not administered by an entity or a government. It is managed by consensus. How powerful or rich a participant in the community is, it does not matter when making a decision. So the power of a single government in unimportant and no one can kill Bitcoin.


On the contrary, governments have so far shown their distaste for Bitcoin and try to stop it, regulate against Bitcoin, and campaign against it using their favorable mainstream media.


Are they protecting Bitcoin or trying to ban it? You can't have both arguments one after another. It is either one or another.

This post belongs in the altcoin section.

I understand that bounties are important for some forum members but you are taking part in many that have very shady rules and if you had logic you would never accept to work for months without any guarantee. It is your fault for allowing these managers to have a job and get paid while you don't. If you take part in the promotion of a project through a bounty campaign in social media and more important as a content creator you should demand better options of payment instead of a promise that you might get paid after many months in the form of tokens of this project.

If the project is not a scam, values their coin, and want it to succeed after getting listed in an exchange they should have a marketing plan that includes funds for payments of bounty hunters in Bitcoin or another already tradeable cryptocurrency, and the payments should be weekly.

Instead, bounty hunters accept bounty rules like these:

• Bounty is expected to last x weeks, but team reserves the right to prolong or shorten if they see fit
• Total of x project tokens is allocated to the bounty, conversion to the equivalent value will be done when bounty ends
• The bounty manager and the project team reserve the right to make changes to the conditions at any time
• Payments will be made after x months
• No tokens will be distributed if the project fails

All these along with some more ridiculous rules that I read make me believe that these projects are all scams and just pay the minimum they can only to hire the bounty manager. Why you even accept these rules? The payment should be in real money and not after x months that may be never. The working conditions imposed by ICOs and bounty managers are worse than slavery and you are willingly accepting them. Also I have many doubts about any research made by managers on the validity of a project.

About that, it is these people that are already being targetted by the regime, lost their jobs in the private/corporate sector because of their political views and actively participate in the demonstrations. It seems to be the only way to transfer funds to Belarus from a foreign country as the government has also stopped all foreign fiat entering.

Source: forklog

The translator I used gave the word citizenship. I looked at their website again and it seems they changed to filling a google form and they say they will contact the person in need and discuss the situation. They seem to also offer relocation to another city if needed and job opportunities.


I found many sources one was claiming it is 90 euro and one that it is $117 so I've written ~100. It may has to do with the exchange rates changing and reports coming from different time.
I looked the exchange rate today 1BYN=0,38USD and multiplying with 375 Belarus Ruble (which is the minimum wage) it give us $142.5 as a result. Thanks for pointing this.(I corrected the post).

Sometimes it is easy other times not. It is best to avoid sending money to anyone without understanding what is happening and how scammers may trick you. Generally if you want to invest you will have to trust an exchange and pass KYC in some of them. Bitcoin is P2P though, meaning you can buy from someone directly. You may try this forum too as there are some trusted members that can be an escrow for the deal and make it without any problem.

To detect scams in general first of all you need evidence. For example in the case of new projects a plagiarized whitepaper, fake team members, etc. There are other red flags but you will need concrete evidence that they are scam. Sometimes these are hard to find but they are always there the entire time.

A good way to understand scams and how people detect them is looking at this thread: Scam Accusations

Elections in Belarus, protests and economic hurdles

Belarus is considered as the last dictatorship active in Europe. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has been accused of electoral fraud for decades and is in office since 1994 and the collapse of the former Soviet Union. This is 26 years currently. The latest Belarusian elections are disputed and a series of massive protests against Lukashenko and his government are taking place in most Belarusian cities for more than three months.(Source: Wikipedia)

It is important to add that Belarus is one of the poorest countries in Europe, minimum wage is around $140, and the rest official data is manipulated by the government to a point that it is hard to make a valid analysis. The Belarusian government is accused of rigging the elections and the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya claims victory with at least 60% of the votes. The authoritarian government is trying to crack down the peaceful protests of Belarusian citizens from more than three months and there have been reported many cases of torture of detainees and human rights violations by UN experts, as well as cases of enforced disappearances of vital members of the opposition. (Source: United Nations)

The situation is far worse and I only gave a brief description without moving into more of the reports coming from Belarus and the UN. The Belarus elections took place between 4-8 August and it was announced that Lukashenko won with 80,1% of the voters. Belarus also cut off the internet from their citizens during the heat of the protests on August 10th blaming outside forces and large scale DDoS attacks. Although it seems that VPNs weren't affected but internet speeds were slower than usual. (Source: Vice)
A major cryptocurrency exchange in Belarus Currency.com announced they were dealing successfully with all the internet shortage problems. (Source: forklog the link also contains information on how to bypass internet blocking)

Also important about the Belarus Economy is the depreciation of the national currency. The government has limited liquidity and issuance of loans for the retail and corporate sector in a bit to strengthen the ruble but these restrictions may lead to a shadow currency market.
The Lithuanian Foreign Minister stated that "the Belarusian economy is on the verge of collapse". (Source: Interfax)


Bitcoin is already helping

The good news comes with the use of Bitcoin as a way to fund the opposition in a country where all funding options have been cut-off by the government. A Dutch NGO (non-profit/government organization) "Bysol" - Belarusian Solidarity Fund" (link: http://belaruswith.me/) has started funding Belarusian dissidents using Bitcoin as means of payments.

Belarusian protestors that were fired from their job for political reasons can apply for aid and a one-time payment of 1500 euro that will be deposited in their Bitcoin account. The move is seen as a system of parallel currency and a free economy movement for Belarus, with the help of Bitcoin.

Three categories can apply for payments:

• employees of state enterprises dismissed for active civic stance;
• civil servants and security officials who left office due to disagreement with the actions of the current government;
  
• employees of state enterprises who are on strike, but not dismissed, who have no one to replace (for example, miners).
  

The requirements for the Bitcoin payments are:

• The one-time payment is € 1,500

• Applicants must prove the fact of dismissal or participation in protests at enterprises

• Publicly declare their citizenship in a video message

(Source: forklog)


Tech sector asks for radical changes

Meanwhile, a Trustee wallet representative in Belarus and CEO of Crypto Emcee Eugene Romanenko, who is also hosting cryptocurrency conferences in the country, was arrested on August 9 (Source) but he was released a few days later. He spoke out of the role of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies:
"Decentralization is the main sign of the Belarusian protest in 2020. Don't forget that Belarus is a world-famous IT country. Belarusians have learned how to communicate effectively using Telegram and Viber. What prevents them from transferring money to each other 24/7/365 in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? Nothing. Turn off the Internet - Web 3.0 will help out"
"The laid-off workers are already receiving support in Bitcoins. The next step is to sell goods/services for cryptocurrency, bypassing fiat money. The next step is to sell goods/services for cryptocurrency, bypassing fiat money. There are already dozens of stores ready to put up price tags in cryptocurrencies. Before our eyes, the birth of the Belarusian crypto-economy is taking place, in which millions of Belarusians will be involved within a year or two."

This event in my opinion is huge and perhaps similar in effect to the Cyprus banking crisis of 2013, although different in circumstances. Bitcoin besides other features has a use case that is to bypass central governments and authoritarian regimes and help fund dissidents in their fight against corrupt and oppressive governments.


Other sources and more information:
Coindesk: Belarus Nonprofit Helps Protestors With Bitcoin Grants
Beincrypto: Dutch NGO is Sending Bitcoin Aid to Protestors in Belarus
Sifted: Belarus Tech Protests

I will edit post asap, thanks for pointing this. Not a small mistake, that's 200 million people less..


Thanks for this information. I haven't looked in Huobi much besides some reports I've read. Certainly, there is interest from China and a government can't stop Bitcoin but only make it difficult for its citizens to trade or own. Thank you for the constructive comment.