This makes me think of this kind of thing - countries that don't seem to trust their citizens and have rulers who want to control, not let people be free, even more so with the incoming US administration.  Talk about bad company for the USA!

Censorship is bad for everyone, including their business.

https://help.sideshift.ai/en/articles/2874595-why-am-i-blocked-from-using-sideshift-ai

"had most everything in the old AOL email"

What do you mean by this?  Do you mean that you had opened bitcoin and copied the private keys and then placed them into your aol email?  What OS were you running in 2009 and 2010 while mining?  Linux, windows, Mac?

Just trying to figure out the best way to help, but the emphasis on looking at old email instead of the wallet.dat files is confusing.

Taproot and other privacy enhancements can't come soon enough to avoid this concept of tainted bitcoins. By their "logic" banks should have detectors to check cash for coke in order to not accept it for deposit. (They should sanitize it too.)


* see e.g. 
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-exactly-how-often-cocaine-and-feces-show-up-on-your-dollar-bills-2017-07-11

Pretty much anyone who bought or mined through January 1, 2021 (and hopefully this continues) got the benefit of it.  Assuming they didn't sell.  In short, anyone who didn't try and time the market has done well.

As far as institutions, most are buying for the long haul - years - not days, weeks, or months.

And who says this is a "pump".  Was it a pump from and of these points to the next: 0.10 to 1 to 10 to 100 to 1000 to 2000 to 10000 to 30000?  Or was it just natural increase in demand?

It just means that your bitcoins are worth more than they otherwise would've been since fewer are in circulation.  This isn't a problem that needs a solution.  There is plenty of room to the right of the decimal to handle it and that can be increased if ever needed.  Just because coins haven't moved doesn't mean that someone doesn't have the key.  

Just remember that in a free world what someone else does with his bitcoins (money, life etc) really isn't your business and vice versa.

See, e.g.

I wonder how AstroHacker is...check out the comments on this one, pretty similar to the ones today:
https://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2011/06/bitcoin-is-economic-singularity.html
(Or the original
https://web.archive.org/web/20120118204206/http://astrohacker.com/ahc/bitcoin-is-the-economic-singularity/
)

Or

https://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adoption-and-price-appreciation-of-bitcoin-in-the-long-run/

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12156.0

I think you’re right.  The funny thing is, I bought a Trezor back when they came out. I haven’t used it yet. I’m just more confident in cold storage on a computer. I’ve looked at the code etc and don’t NOT trust it, but  just prefer to have the screen and keyboard on a non network connected computer.

I'm not sure if you do.

Be your own bank doesn't imply that you have to spend anything.  It implies much more than that.  Take a look at some of the things Satoshi said.  (As an aside, I will say that Satoshi's vision would be irrelevant in a p2p system anyway since people are free to use it as they wish, but his vision was not limited to merely commerce, but to the impact bitcoin had everywhere and to say otherwise is a mistake.)

"Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" is a comment on the anti-bank, anti-Chancellor, anti-bailout events.  It takes power from the corrupt governments and other entities and gives it back to you.   That power is your freedom to use bitcoin however you want. Bitcoin takes over a function that has been for centuries a function of government - creating and controlling money.  When money was backed by something, government power was constrained.  With fiat, there is little.

Think about these tidbits we have:
- decentralization.  That applies to everything, including governments.  
- Privacy - "As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner."  With taproot and other improvements helping more.
- The paper stresses Bitcoin’s advantages to commerce and people as a free-enterprise payment system. Peer-to-peer transfer is pure free market, with no intervention from governments or anyone else.
- Anti-inflation - see above.
- "Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own."
- "[Bitcoin is] very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly."

- "I’m really excited about the thought of something practical that could truly bring us closer to freedom in our lifetime. :-)”  Satoshi: “Your understanding of Bitcoin is spot on.”

- Satoshi was a fan of b-money which the proposal opens with "I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word ‘anarchy’, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations."


So don't try and pigeon hole bitcoin.

At that point it will be even more useful as a currency.  People will start to spend it, use it, and transact in it, not having to trade out to fiat.  Whether that point will be $500,000 or $5,000,000 is an open question, but it will probably be in that range. (Excluding of course the effects of inflation which will make it higher). The sooner it gets there, the better for everyone who owns it, and most importantly, better for the world.  Bitcoin takes power from those who have used government to seize it and gives it back to the smallest minority in the world, the individual.  

As above, to the OP, bitcoin is freedom.  Every person can use it as they wish, however and for whatever they wish.  Bitcoin isn't about "control" or complaining about someone using it in a way about which you don't approve.  Don't like it?  Too bad.  

The only quibble I have is that you called them journalists.  They are not journalists, they are political hacks and operatives who want power and want to support those who would do things like regulate bitcoin instead of letting people be free to live their lives as they see fit without taking directives from Brussels or DC.  In short, they want the ant heap of totalitarianism instead of the freedom that many other people want. 

Of course a statist authoritarian like convicted felon Lagarde would want to regulate something that gives people the freedom to live their lives and allows them to protect themselves from criminals like her.

Then again, Europe continues to keep her in power, so what does that say about them.  Kind of like the US electing a corrupt individual like Biden.  The difference is that Biden has a ton of protectors, at least for now, until they are ready to get rid of him for his equally corrupt and power hungry VP.

Hong Kong, etc too. Pretty much anywhere where it could happen people should own some bitcoin.  If the President of the US who has billions can be blocked by Stripe for payments, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc, then no one is safe anywhere. The fascists are having corporations do their bidding to cancel anyone who dares object.

Digital Chinese or other state backed cryptos are worthless since they are centralize and can be frozen.

The odds are that *investors* won't be selling.  The companies you see buying it, GBTC etc are buying for the long term, not trading.  They are buying because of the long term benefits - protection against inflation, appreciation, protection against seizure, capital controls etc.

The traders on the other hand are buying and selling daily, maybe hourly, maybe quicker.  There is place for trading for sure, but there is a big difference between trading and investing.  The traders who are buying on the margin and then getting wiped out when it drops to low before rebounding are just compounding the volatility.

If you are hesitant, don't do it because you might get scared when it goes from $40k to $30k in two days and then sell at 30k, and miss the rebound to $36.2k now.

Or just buy 10% now and 10% each week.  Sure, you'll miss a run-up if it goes up, but you'll also miss the down if it goes down. 

I'm talking about pretty much all of the alt coins - they are centralized either in mining (or equivalent) or in the developers etc.  Even ethereum is highly centralized although it is one of the better alts.

I know 34k and 1 are different, but you can buy $20 worth of bitcoin as easily as $20 worth of something else.  You do not have to buy a full bitcoin.

The alt coins are almost uniformly just trash.  Little innovation, centralized or both.  At worst, 90% bitcoin, 10% alts.

As far as bitcoin being "too high" at 34k, people said the same thing at $1, $10, $30, $100, $1000, $2000, $10000, $20000.  Really, go back and read the forums.  Look at slashdot when it hit dollar parity and then gold parity and the milestones in between.  People may still be waiting for it to get "back under $1"  (or $100, or $1000).  The correct answer is that NO ONE KNOWS.  

If you believe in the use cases for bitcoin, of which there are numerous, then the price will be higher in the future.  If you don't, then you shouldn't be in any crypto at all.  At worst, dollar cost average into your position.  Of course if you started that in November or March of 2020, you'd have been better off going all in.  No one knows the future though.

Market timing is only luck.

Exactly.  Technical analysis is akin to reading tea leaves, you can find something to justify pretty much any position or goal by just tweaking the parameters.

No one knows.  Just remember that every so-called bubble in the past - $1, $10, $30, $100, $1000, $2000, $10000, $20000 - has had pullbacks.  However, everyone who bought (or mined) at any of those points has done tremendously.  Will that be the case here?  Yes, if all the uses for bitcoin continue.  However, no one knows that for sure.

I never know what to tell people except that everyone who purchased at any time except a few days ago has done well in fiat terms.  I have said the same at $10, $30, $100, $1000, $2000, $10000, $20000.  

I see no reason why big companies wouldn't continue to use bitcoin to add stability and performance. 

No one knows what will happen then, but every increase in price means higher demand which should lead to more stability.  At some point the price will likely be pretty stable, in the 500k-5 million range, since people will be using it for asset protection, transactions etc.

Either that or it will be nearly worthless.  To me, every year that bitcoin survives decreases the likelihood of the "zero" scenario.

Check out here, about 3 pages in:
https://www.oanda.com/register/docs/divisions/oc/risk_disclosure_agreement.pdf

Yeah, leverage is usually a very bad idea unless you are Warren Buffett and can withstand a huge drawdown.  You are right, the stupidity of equating it only to crypto is immense.