The death of bitcoin would decouple all the other projects from it but it would leave most of them dead.

When bitcoin goes up, the other projects go up because their rate is "fixed" to bitcoins, but then the people holding altcoins might decide to exchange some of the alt for the higher security of bitcoin.

Once bitcoin is finally decoupled from fiat and more tied to everyday items (like a gallon of milk, or the price of a house). The other cryptocurrencies may follow. Such a decoupling would break the strong connection bitcoin exchange rates on exchanges and the value of different currencies.

I think it's primarily a commodity, but unlike most commodities it's actually much purer because we can know exactly how much of it there is.

While being a commodity it's also a currency, because it has the properties of one.

I don't think it's a security.

My mental health is independent of my portfolio's value.

Money isn't everything, you can't let it ruin your life like that. I think you need to gain some perspective.


Mental health is more related to health. If I gain 20 pounds and also lose muscle that will cause me a lot more stress than losing 50% on my crypto portfolio. If my best friend dies in a crash that's going to cause me a lot more stress.

What Ivan's argument from the episode linked above it was that if Malta wasn't going to do it, someone else would.

I don't fully agree with that, I think it's important to turn as many countries bitcoin friendly as possible. It's interesting to remember how much money bitcoin and crypto in general draw when it comes to investment. I think this decision was all about drawing money to malta. They used blockchain the way bankers and investment people use it.

It might be a nitpick but it shows that they are not interested in the ethos of bitcoin, they are more interested in making money.

The price quoted in the article is all wrong. 0.01 BTC is about 65 dollars.

0.1 BTC would be 650 dollars.

I'd be willing to be 0.01 btc for a yearlong subscription of a decent magazine.

The first of all dates, August 18 2018 is the registration of bitcoin.org

The second date is the publication of the whitepaper

The third date is the launch of the protocol with this embedded in the coinbase of the first block which converted from hex to text reads as follows : "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."


I'd argue for October 31, 2008 and then January 3, 2009.

I mean we can party on both dates.

There is an episode of Good Morning Crypto about that.

I'm going to link it here Malta PM: Crypto is the Future of Money, Huobi EOS Manipulation
 by Ivan on Tech on YouTube

I think we should celebrate bitcoin's birthday on the date of the publication of the whitepaper.
Since it's a protocol and not an implementation of said protocol we're celebrating.
So the date, I believe is October 31, 2008 so bitcoin's birthday is about 1 month away!


I expect the lightning network to get closer to being implemented.

2020 is going to be more significant due to the block-halving.

What I want is a big fat party on the anniversary date.

Syscoin has one of the most active development teams.

It's trading really low right now and yet the team is going as strong as ever. They've been at it longer than nearly every other small cap coin. They've weathered a lot of storms.

If you want to get into something that could potentially go up 10x in the next few years. Syscoin would be a good bet.

http://www.syscoin.org/

If you want his reasons, start with the Whitepaper. It's a really good read.

Bitcoin Whitepaper (Bitcoin.org)

here's the abstract


1. His political ideology. He was probably libertarian leading and definitely didn't like the bank bailouts.
2. Electronic cash would be awesome for the Internet credit/debit cards with their model are really bad for the Internet. You are forced to share your credentials with everyone you transact, so if anyone wanted to steal your funds, they can and they also know your name and all your history is linked to your true identity and shared with the bank at the very least.



I think he disappeared because he realized that he would be targeted by the CIA. He was more paranoid than Gavin and when Gavin decided to talk the the CIA Satoshi vanished completely.

Like OMG, bitcoin is so slutty I heard she went to the mall and gave Josh a handjob in the movie theater, in front of everyone.
and then she got drunk, and she made out with Jimmy.


But seriously, I've heard everything so far. I discount bullshit simple arguments right away, especially when the thoughts expressed are just parroted points pushed by the typical naysayers.

The Internet got the exact same scrutiny. People were saying things like "What if the criminals use it to blahblahblah" and they were also saying that it's just a fad.

 

If Bitcoin is a bubble, then what is the dollar?

If Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, so is every commodity and stock on the market.

If the world's governments try to ban bitcoin, they will only succeed in driving it underground and implementing more anonymization features.

If bitcoin was vulnerable to hackers, nobody would use it. As long as you're reasonable in safeguarding your keys, you're probably safe.

Even if Satoshi has 1 million coins and even if he wanted to sell all of them, the market would only move in the short term (if he sold all at once).

Also I don't think Satoshi still has access to those bitcoins. They were worth nothing back then so it's completely possible he just changed wallets or lost the keys as so many after him have.



For a small blip of time, bitcoin would plummet down near zero as people lucky enough to have liquidity would buy everything up. Then things would probably bounce up in the thousands again before you'd even know it.


People think whales make the markets but they really don't. It's buyers and sellers. I'm not afraid of how much Bitcoin Satoshi potentially has.

I've done that here in there. I wish more stores accepted bitcoin.

Even though I didn't get anyone to accept bitcoin outright, the mere exposure effect works. The more they hear about bitcoin the more likely it will be they will accept it in the future. So it takes more than one of us. It takes multiple of us per store, perhaps multiple times for each of us.

I don't see my bank accepting bitcoin any time soon. But more importantly I don't see me giving them my private keys or sending them my bitcoin over any time soon either.

I'd prefer using a company in the crypto space like coinbase and the SHIFT card then trusting a bank.

I agree with nearly all of your headings, and this is a big part of why I hodl. People think bitcoin is a scam and that bitcoin is dead and that's why the price is where it's at now.

With all the positive developments going on, It was difficult for me to understand why the price is not moving up. Then I realized that this is not a rational market. The price may not go up until it's too late for most people to jump in. Although that may just happen by definition.


I don't see demand falling but with the halvenign in less than 2 years the supply will most certainly dwindle and with LN just a few years away as well, the next bull run might be explosive.

I've read up to paragraph 50 so far, and I agree with a lot of what he/they write.

Who is the "we" that the text refers to. Did he write this himself or with other people. This is some very interesting material.

If you want to know more about this particular reaction here is a longer video that explains what happens.

Link to the Video (High speed camera reveals why sodium explodes!) This video doesn't really go into why the purple flash is there, but it's extremely interesting. I had probably watched it a bunch of times in its entirety when it came out.

I can theorize as to why there is a purple flash, but I'm not a scientist myself, I've got years of physics and chemistry I need to understand.

The amperage generated during the coulomb explosion is gigantic so it's possible that the color is due to sparking electricity.
You can look up underwater electric sparks and cycle the videos frame by frame and you'll see a similar color.

To understand this I would try and ask Thunderf00t over and over until he answers or look through his videos to see if he went into it, starting with the videos related to alkali metals and water explosions.


That one with climate change just kills me. It's interesting to note that one can very easily do the experiments on greenhouse gases with equipment you can get your hands on very cheaply.

The experiment demo from the 1850s (I think a woman named Eunice came up with it) was literally comparing a flask of Nitrogen (most like the atmosphere) to a flash of Oxygen (again big part of the atmosphere) to a flash of CO2, all left out in the sun.

The flask of CO2 got hotter because it trapped more heat.

You could literally get some big glass bottles or aquariums and then seal them shut, burn a few matches or sake up some soda or just add some co2 from a carbonation machine or from an airsoft pistol.

Then stick some thermometers in there.  And that's it.

Then again, you could just visit a park that has glaciers on it and look at them shrinking year after year. You could visit many of them and you'd find that most glaciers are retreating. You might find a couple of exceptions but if 100 are shrinking and 5 are growing you pretty much know here we are heading.


You can then measure the sea level (which is probably more challenging) and find that the sea level is increasing at a rate of 3mm per year.

I can actually notice the sea level rise where I live because I'm right on the water. The highest tides of the year reach higher places then they used to and when air blows the water in it can get extreme. The difference isn't noticeable year to year but you can almost see it if you've been here long enough.


I wonder what idiots think about that? Probably that the sea level is rising because someone left their garden hose on or something. Or maybe that god is drooling? I mean if man was created in His image than it's very likely that God's a drooler.

In the 1850s we knew that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas.

In 1896 we knew that we were warming up the planet.


in 1990 we decided globally to reduce emissions.

Emissions have been increasing all the way up to 2018, 28 years after we decided that we were going to drop emissions.

The co2 in the atmosphere is increasing by around 3ppm per year. A ridiculous rate.

Somehow I don't think our cute little climate pacts like Paris are going to slow this trend.

The burning of coal, as it causes the atmosphere to heat up also paradoxically offsets some of the heating at the same time through the emission of particulates that drop the temperature.

Those particulates drop out of the atmosphere in a few weeks, CO2 stays up there for centuries. So when you stop burning carbon (which you inevitably have to as it is a non-renewable source) the climate heats even further and much quicker.

The sixth mass extinction is underway and we're the cause of it.


It's arrogant to think that humans can survive while the ecosystem dies. We rely on the productivity of the environment as much as all the other animals (if not more).

All it takes is about 3 years of failed crops for most of us to die of starvation. Maybe some humans can survive almost like astronauts in their own planet. But that's all that might be left.

I believe we have a real shot of survival if our technology somehow transcends the planet we live off off currently.

For example, climate change is obviously real, but if a big volcano erupted we could have 3 years worth of winter and then the climate change would return (temperature goes down quickly and comes back quickly)

Also in a warming planet although the net ice is down, there's going to be a lot more snowfall in many places that receive snow due to the higher moisture content in the atmosphere.

Warmer planet = more snow in certain areas


Also c02 helps plants grow but past a certain level the gains taper off completely and then secondary effects destroy the plants or make them bad for agriculture. (A simple-minded person might think that climate change is good, because plants are going to grow like crazy, yee-haw doo-dah day.


Or the good old chemicals are bad, or GMOs are bad for your health.

Any issue that requires nuanced thinking is one that a big part of the population just doesn't truly understand. To understand the world you have to be able to think through things that seem paradoxical to your intuition and overcome them with logic.

Chemists and "smart" people with PHDs are no exception.

Most chemists still probably believe that the bigger the atom of an alkali metal, the more violent the reaction with water although the opposite is true.

To them it just makes sense that the bigger more exotic, more expensive atoms are going to blow up more explosively. But the opposite is true. The explosion is ridiculously fast, faster than hydrogen blowing up (it's a coulomb explosion, the blobs of metal unzip themselves and all come to contact with the water incredibly fast).

Philip E Mason is the guy that found this out. He's almost as incredibly smug as I seem in this post. Here's a video of the coulomb explosion filmed at 11k fps

Here is the video

It took a god-damn YouTuber (who is a fine chemist and I think a PHD also) to discover the truth about this. To dig out the nuance. While nearly the entire academic world had it wrong.


Pop science is the biggest example of that. The shit they say sometimes I can hardly believe.

Solar Roadways, Powdered Alcohol, Self-filling Water bottles, new battery type with Quantum Effects, plutonium car, human gill... all shit that falls apart within 1 minute of thought.

Most people somehow seem incapable of that. And by the way, I'm not very smart of very quick. It just seems that there's billions of idiots out there.

I'll just put this Tim Minchin Song here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXr9T5xpVFs


And no, I don't believe it's always abuse. I'm not a father or mother but I sure as hell don't expect the parents to be able to monitor their kids 24/7