Project fun aside, why would it be a better idea to do this rather than mining using your home's electricity?

The only thing that could help is that a sudden large increase in your home energy consumption is obvious compared to the consumption of an electric car. But still, I find it just as a potentially fun project... until your car's power is suddenly overpowered and leads to other malfunctions you'd have to spend a lot of money on.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Not anonymous.

Monero is fully private and very exchange-friendly. Exchanges are the actual ones not being privacy-friendly, so it should be the authorities and exchanges you should be hating on, not the coin itself. They're too thirsty for control to let a private blockchain run properly.

I'd place my bets on Monero as the best thing after BTC. Privacy is still strongly undervalued.

Privacy on Bitcoin fully depends on how precautious you are. If you really want and need to go anonymous, I honestly recommend considering Monero as well.

The thing about Bitcoin and privacy is, the blockchain is public. That means that if someone ever gets to crack or exploit CoinJoins or Mixers, all your past history will be revealed. If you are using one of them, be careful about mixing non-anonymized coins with anonymized ones. If you need privacy on BTC, you have to be extra paranoid since everything is recorded on a transparent ledger..

Before KYC, we just need common sense. Newbies fall to these projects no matter how stupid they look, so that's the main issue. I would personally not invest in something that I'm being promised. I mean, people fall into "pay me money and I will give you 2x" scams.. why would we have any kind of expectations?

Guess you're talking to yourself... yeah, newbies need correct info and you're misleading them on your own. We have no damn idea who created Bitcoin so unless you have evidence, do not present that as an undeniable information.

Could be Japan. Could be a single genius guy. Nobody knows and it's all speculation, just get it already..

Honestly, I think it'd be just the current price divided by 47.619.. So around $700 today. I don't think the supply matters as much as the tech does, especially since Bitcoin would've then had 1B max supply since inception. It's like we'd think what 1 BTC would be worth if there were only 441k BTC max. The effect is imo the same.

If that is possible, then it might as well already exist in the network. Find an exploit yourself, as they are well incentivized. If you get to find a well-hidden exploit, expect good donations coming from many sources.

If we are talking about how paranoid we are about tech, then why don't you start from point zero? Hardware and OS. Do you trust that your hardware components do not have backdoors that could put your funds or personal information under risk? Do you really trust the entire OS you're using? Do you trust hardware wallets, especially since Ledger's have a closed source component?

The fact that you have written what you have written here is based on "blind trust" of your keyboard and operating system. When you open up Bitcoin Core, you blindly trust the OS that it doesn't take your .dat file and broadcast it to a number of 3-letter agencies.

But Bitcoin is different. You can read every single line of its code. If you cannot trust even that, then I guess tech isn't for you!

The fact that Bitcoin is dependent on an internet connection is for sure a "weak point" of it, but I really think the shutdown of the internet would pull us back hundreds of years, and by that I'm talking about barter too. Fiat would likely have no more value since people would care way more about physical, real stuff rather than paper money!

The first probable thing that'd happen in this case is civil war, since internet today is considered a large % of our freedom. We come here to do and say about anything we want.. and most people (especially kids born from 2005 on) depend on the internet every day. Remember that this would cause a HUGE fuss in the most important sectors such as the food industry! Remember that the banks would probably not work anymore since they also depend on the Internet infrastructure themselves.

After all, Bitcoin is part of the technology advancement and most risks that tech has affects Bitcoin as well.

Not really. 2FA protects your account, but if you hold your BTC in a custodial wallet such as Binance's, their cold wallet could get hacked and you then would lose your money as well, even with 2FA enabled. To avoid getting hacked, you just need a clean PC with a verified non-custodial wallet on it.

If you've cloned the GitHub repo, audited the code and verified the signature for all dependencies and programs needed to compile Bitcoin Core, how would it be possible to have an exploit coming out of nowhere after compiling it using audited and verified codes/depends/software? It's not like chemistry. If you audit everything and it's all open source, the only thing that I could see happening is being attacked directly by 3-letter agencies or having installed non-free software or packages that do malicious stuff.

51% attacks have solutions, and if that ever happens, whatever the attack has been caused by will be patched ASAP by the devs. This is the beauty of open-source stuff - if something malicious happens to the entire network (like what CZ from Binance wanted to do, which was rolling back blocks), we either fork off or patch it through coding.

If you don't know coding, you can use a version that has been audited and tested already before by multiple other devs/users... for example, you could use the version previous to the latest one.

I don't think it's comparable to the situation Bitcoin is currently facing. The BTC situation is a new for me: an oppression covered in false support. It's like saying you support drug use while heavily restricting its trading, markets and usage. I see what you did here, but I think the gov hates barter way more than they hate BTC due to the fact that BTC is fully public. No matter how much I want to support BTC, the fact that we do not have even optional privacy makes it an amazing control tool for authorities.

When Bitcoin gets opt-in privacy is the same moment when you'll start seeing the same oppression you have witnessed back in the '80s. For now, they are in fact actually happy about BTC's existence since probanly >90% of the users don't care about privacy or make little mistakes that uncovers their entire history.

It is indeed quite creepy that governments indirectly coordinate exchanges. KYC goes both ways usually though at ATMs, and the worst part is, they most likely will snap a pic of your face whenever you're using it. That's why (or at least one of the main reasons) the camera is placed at eye-level.

Electrum on an airgapped LUKS-encrypted PC or hardware wallets. I prefer the former as it's fully customizable (hardware components, operating system, storage space etc). There are DIYs for Trezor if you're interested in creating a coin storage device by yourself.

No matter what you do, be extra paranoid especially when you're planning something for the long term. Is that password good enough? Does that airgapped PC really not have any wireless modules in it such as WiFi or Bluetooth? Is the Electrum version audited and verified? and so on. Little mistakes make for big losses here, so a few more minutes spent per each step will maybe end up as a waste of time but better safe than sorry.

If you had a decentralized and private way of earning money and you had to choose between that and  someone guiding you all the way from beginning to end, providing you full support for any kind of issues you encounter and so on... Would you choose the hard or the easy way? My gut feeling says the larger percentage would take the easy way because you feel "safer" being guided.

You get the same feeling of safety when you come here as a newbie and are guided around. But how many people who are into crypto get the support they need? We don't have customer service and forking Bitcoin Core off GitHub to read the docs isn't the same as entering a bank and being met by someone who wants to help you.

Therefore, a lot of people really are in the game for the money. Where large sums are being made, there will always be an increase in the percentage of people who don't care about anything but profit.

Lots of people are selling Bitcoin through banks, but it's not a requirement. Peer-to-peer remains an option you can still pick as a Bitcoin holder.. so adoption is in my opinion not slowed down or anything, it's just that it takes a long while before people start realizing "hey, we are finally getting it and we certainly are needing it!". That's when BTC clicks as a need for the average human, because privacy and freedom are two of our basic rights. We need it and it's evolving faster and better than ever before.

Bad idea. Any YouTube/Twitter... or even TradingAdvice personality that I have followed gone badly wrong after a while. Don't follow their words, they aren't crystal balls. If you care about price predictions, better study the markets yourself or simply follow news constantly so that you're up to date at all times with what's going on with the coin you're studying. Other people could wrongfully influence and attract you into a pitfall since they're most of the times paid for saying what they're saying.

I don't think it ever was about purchasing a significant amount of equipment that is specifically created to mine cryptocurrencies. It was all about "1 CPU = 1 vote", which in theory sounds quite fair. The mining part of the network will probably "centralize" upon a few mining pools soon, I can agree with that, but there will likely be a solution coming soon for that too. But speaking about technology early investment and advantages, early birds will obviously always be ahead of the game no matter how much you change the system..

Would Gold still be mined during a zombie apocalypse? Besides rich men sending their little "slaves" to mine for them so that after the zombie apocalypse they are still the richest, I don't think gold, cash, Bitcoin or so on would be worth anything for the average person. As I've sometimes heard, you cannot eat gold, can you?

Barter is the way to go in that case. I give you food, you give me weapons or your little safehouse. But Bitcoin will probably not cease to exist even in that situation - you find a PC with a full Bitcoin Core node on it and there you have it.

If by cashless society you mean Bitcoin and other decentralized solutions, then it's for the better. This is the time where we either all start noticing all the Orwellian mindsets and actions and start attacking them by moving on to uncensored and decentralized solutions or we just lose our privacy probably for a timeframe long enough for even the next generation to notice it.

I doubt Trump would move to cryptos though, at least not publicly. The next thing mainstream media needs to know is exactly this, so they could simply correlate it with the "incitement to rioting" and properly call him a terrorist. He's a billionaire, he turned rich with the help of corps.

There's likely no government in the world that is privacy-friendly at this point. With the tech developing and advancing at such a creepily-fast pace, privacy is gonna be a thing of the past sooner than we think. Biden and his team will not be privacy-friendly either. What they might do is just abolish their plans only to introduce even more surveillance & control, but camouflaged in a better way. That's it.