It doesn't seem very smart to me, and not just because of the timing to sell them, but maybe being a member of this forum I am biased. For me in the near future having Bitcoins in reserve is going to be as common for states as gold reserves, which USA keeps mostly in Fort Knox.

It would be a bit pathetic for them to sell Bitcoins now only to have to buy or mine them in the future. Although I suppose they could seize them from criminals in the future as well.

I see this as relative, because there comes a time when you can't hide it and it doesn't make sense. Think of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, for example. But without going to those extremes, it is not logical to have a net worth of $10M and live in a slum, hiding your net worth because it would be very dangerous if people in your neighborhood knew that you are rich. You can live in a neighborhood according to your economic level and drive a car according to your economic level, without hiding it.

The OP's case isn't that of someone who does not hide his wealth, it is that of someone who engages in stupid behavior. Letting on that you have a lot of money in a vacation spot, where you have traveled alone and are drunk most of the time is putting a bullseye on yourself saying "mug me" or "kidnap me", which is what has happened.

My experience is the opposite. People who are content with what they have do better financially, because they don't try to get into risky investments, they don't buy stupid stuff to impress the neighbor and things like that.

Not everyone would like to become a billionaire and buy an island, especially when it requires effort. Normally if you are doing well financially, you will do even better if you are satisfied with your life and your wealth is a complement than if you take wealth as an end in itself, always aspiring to be richer and richer no matter what you have to give up to get there.

My take is that the idea of destiny is outdated. It made more sense in a Newtonian conception of the world where a Creator made the rules of the world and when he set it to work, he did it precisely like a Newtonian clock without leaving degrees of freedom in the system. Whoever knew the causes could calculate the effects.

Well, fiat money is a poor store of value because it keeps losing purchasing power. There are some better than others, however, as the Euro is much better than the Bolivar, for example.


Of course, inflation is much more noticeable now than in 2015 for example, so it is better to look for better stores of value than fiat, such as Bitcoin, but if we buy Bitcoin with that idea we must do it for the long term and be aware of the volatility.


We may be a bit biased on this forum regarding Bitcoin, but I agree with the general analysis you make. I believe that little by little the trend is already reversing.

Leaving aside what has happened recently, trying to pay for low-value goods or services is going to be like trying to pay for low-value goods or services with gold: you won't be able to. Even if there are a few places that accept bitcoin as currency, with the commissions you have to pay, proportionally higher the lower the amount, it is not going to be worth it. The same thing happens with gold today.

Well, that's what I thought. For me the bear market, or the worst of it, is over, but maybe it's a matter of semantics. Calling bear market now is not entirely incorrect.


Correct. The current prices represent a 70% return. There is no major asset that has such a great return this year, as is often the case with Bitcoin.


The good news is that it seems that the attack is fading, and the fees are reasonable again. Let's hope that this will help the price to grow steadily.

Nothing because the scenario you paint is simply false. No one guarantees you anything when investing in the stock market, today with the information that is available you are responsible for your decision making.

If someone has lost all his money in the stock market is that he is quite stupid to be honest, because it means that he has not followed the basic principles of investment, such as diversifying, and has bet everything on a fancy low cap company like the one who bets everything on a fancy shitcoin.

On the other hand, many people who complain about how much the stock market has gone down are not complaining about how much it has gone up. I have been investing in the S&P 500 for 10 to 15 years. Last year my investment went down, but the total return since I started investing is clearly positive, and that the doomsayers and whiners don't usually tell.

So whoever loses money in the stock market, well, tough shit.

Well, I just think that red tagging Maddof when he's already dead of old age in jail doesn't do much good.


That is wrong in one case. That of Plaguedeath, who put this link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5438452.msg61721790#msg61721790
Although I think it would have been better to have posted a link to the OP of that thread using loyce.club.

And on the other hand, I recently left a red tag to someone who was connected with a ban evader, who had bought the account, etc. And when I saw a reasonable explanation I changed the tag to neutral. In total the negative tag lasted less than 12 hours on his profile. Nowadays that doesn't hurt anyone.

If you are a good user of the forum, it is normal that the speed at which you earn merits increases as you become more active, more knowledgeable, participate more in the forum, and people get to know you better.

At least that happened to me. For a long time I earned merits at a slower pace than my activity, and I think I remember that since LoyceV helped me to rank up to Sr Member was a kind of turning point where I started to earn more quickly until I reached almost twice as many merits as activity, but since I reached Legendary the speed has slowed down a bit.

Don't worry too much about the result, the merits, and enjoy the process more, your activity on the forum, and the merits will come on their own.

I just left him a negative feedback, which someone could understand as aggressive, but if someone shows me arguments to think that the feeback is wrong, I will not hesitate to change it. I prefer to use the feedback in prevention of a scam than to use it when the user has already been scammed.

I think I'm still in DT, although I haven't even bothered to check lately, so I guess it will show.

It is not clear to me why he was not red tagged at the time for borrowing without collateral, when it is standard practice on the lending board.

By the way, Plaguedeath, probably the fact that you don't have a custom trust list is an essential reason why you are not in DT. I've had a look at your feedbacks but I see that you don't have a trust list and that's why I don't include you. There are cases of people in DT that delete their trust list and stay in DT despite having deleted it but if you want to get in DT you need a custom trust list.

I'm not surprised that Bitcoin is still going strong despite the recent fee hike, which has only made it more expensive to pay small amounts using the main chain. The blockchain is more secure than ever and Bitcoin is the best digital currency by far. The spam attack seems to have slowed down a bit and with it the fees. Let's hope that the downward trend continues and we continue business as usual.

The problem with cars is that they have gone up more than the average inflation rate. In your case they could have looked for an interest-bearing account or something similar so that the savings would yield a little, although they will always yield less than inflation.

It is usually recommended that if you are saving for something but for 5 years or more, put the money in an investment, for example a fund indexed to the S&P 500 because in approximately 85% of 5-year periods it has been profitable. The downside is that you have about a 15% chance of losing money. If you don't want to bet with those positive probabilities, what happens to you is what has happened to you, that you face the inevitable loss of purchasing power due to inflation, which has been exacerbated precisely in this period.

Another idea would be to put your money in Bitcoin, which although it is very volatile, with a high probability of cycle to cycle you will increase your purchasing power quite a lot.

Hey, Mpamaegbu, my friend.

I just realized that sashan wrote the post minutes before the block was confirmed, so I must have seen the wrong time before. But funny your comment, eh? Between yours and mine what a mess.

Just because when you wrote that it already had lots of confirmations

I might agree with you if you were talking about kicking spam off the blockchain, but simply because prices go up in a supply and demand environment, trying to regulate them down is a mistake that has been known since Diocletian's edict, no matter how much certain politicians insist on forgetting history. So what happens when fees go up in a mass adoption environment? Or in the future when the block reward is minimal?

What's the reason for that? 

For a newbie all boards are new.

So, you think it will take more time to be confirmed a transaction that's already been confirmed? 

AFAIK there is no section like that on this forum but I know there are similar ones in other forums.

In general it is for a different reason that I know of, it is because controversial things are posted on them that you don't want to be able to find at the click of a search engine.

As there is no such section in this forum, I doubt that it will be implemented, in any case at best we will convince theymos to have the lending section restricted in a similar way to the Serious Discussion one. But that, if he decides to change it, is not going to be tomorrow. He usually takes his time to make changes to the forum.

I am editing this because I just thought of the Investigations section which is closed to the public, but I don't know if it is available to all ranks.

Newbies already have a similar limitation, they cannot post on the Serious Discussion boards. I am all for this.

Having a bunch of newbies who keep asking for a loan without collateral or anything to end up red tagged seems to me a worse effect for them than simply limiting them from posting there until they are at least a jr member.

As an intention it is not bad, but the OP is asking people to stop doing what many have already stopped doing.

The problem with mempool congestion is not people on the forum sending $20 transactions, it's people spamming images on it and paying high fees for it.

It's like setting up a volunteer campaign to get umbrellas when it rains.