Exchanges handle probably thousands, if not more, of transactions a day. The addresses you've been watching could be exchanges sending their customers the withdrawals they've requested. Or maybe it's a mining pool's address. A large no. of transactions does not make a certain address "dodgy".

It's as worth it as it was back when it was $0.01, $1, $10, $100, $1k or $10k. Today, it's $25k. In the future, if the same cycle is followed, it will be worth way more than it currently is.

You're following a mindset that is completely wrong. A $0.01 shitcoin or stock is NOT easier to bump up and double in price than a $25k to $50k Bitcoin is. In fact, as Bitcoin has a long history of incredible price jumps, it is more likely imo that Bitcoin will follow the previous cycles than it is for stocks to randomly double up in price. Think percentage, not USD. 100% has so far been an easy target for Bitcoin every few years.

Here's how it went for me and my friends so far: I thought Bitcoin was too expensive when it was over $1k. Then, I thought it'd crash to nothing when it fell to under $200. Then, I thought I missed out the bull ride again when it jumped back to $500. Since then, I've learned my lesson: Bitcoin is never a bad investment. No hodl has gone bad for me in 7 years so far.

I told my friends to invest back when a Bitcoin was under $1k and they thought it's too cheap. Same happened when it reached $5k and then $10k. Had they invested when I suggested them to, they would've thanked me today. But never forget there is a risk and one day the cycle might not be followed. If you strongly believe Bitcoin is a good investment and can assume the risks, then jump in our boat.

Two options: either betting on Bitcoin's price purely for profit or going after the golden saying: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em! At this point, it's almost impossible to fight back against Bitcoin's existence. Best thing bankers can do is just try to change people's direction from Bitcoin to the bankers' digital currencies so that BTC's adoption slows down before they find out a way to fight it.

Bankers love money. If they purchase Bitcoin for money, they'll have to sell at one point and that means they could empower the next Bitcoin crash with the help of all the other institutional investors as well.

Also, remember that bankers hating on Bitcoin's existence does not mean they don't want financial freedom. Most of the time, it's the politicians breaking most laws and getting away with it. Bankers want freedom, but they don't want it in the people's hands.

Well, this is quite contradictory. CBDCs will either sit on Ethereum or some other already-existing blockchain (I doubt it) or banks will just create their own blockchain from scratch (more likely). Banks probably prefer creating their own blockchain from scratch because they want full control over everything. CBDCs will be real, they aren't false prophecies. China has been testing their own digital coin for months if not years now, and Europe has surely been already working on it for a while as well.

The real future of crypto is unknown, besides the fact that BTC and some other top coins will never cease to exist. Also, from what I've seen, people choose what's easier all the time so a revolt against CBDCs or fiat is very unlikely.

What's truly coming is the State of Surveillance, and it's quite eerie to think about it and the potential Orwellian-kind of dystopian world we could be turning into.

Oh yeah, I wish my friends listened to me when I told them to invest just 5% out of their lifetime savings in BTC back when it was under $700. But "ponzi scheme" and "soon-to-be crashing" were two things that were quite trendy at the time when you told someone about investing in BTC. At this point, no hodler is on a loss ever since Bitcoin's inception. It's incredible!

While I get your point and it certainly is an interesting point of view, selling is part of the investment game as replies say above. Therefore, I personally think that when we have more and more institutional investors (and not only those but other regular investors as well) joining in, these cycles will actually become even more powerful than they used to be.

Beforehand, we've had newbies coming in and dumping 100s or thousands of bucks during crashes. Since there were lots of newbies dumping small amounts, the market turned into a big parabolic bear run. But today, with institutional investors coming in with billions of bucks, a single $10M dump would crash the markets immediately and provoke a larger fuss than small dumps would. Add the regular people panicking and dumping their money as well, other institutional investors dumping theirs in order to either cash in high or just planning to purchase lower and you'd have a big bomb overall.

On the other hand, this truly depends on the way institutional investors sell. I doubt it'd be a $10M order on Binance, so their moves may actually not be felt as a strong impact. But when you think about it, institutional investors publicly announcing the sale of their Bitcoin holdings could easily crash our still immature market.

Personal opinion: this is a highly speculative thing and the best thing we can do is wait for another round of 4 years (so until 2028) so that we can see whether institutional investors joining in have impacted and influenced BTC cycles differently or it's better/worse than it used to be.

It is way more complex than more convenient ways such as creating a PayPal or a bank account. When you have an easier alternative, you go for that one. It's why between purchasing a loaf of bread and baking one yourself, most people prefer the latter.

Otherwise, why are there so few people who know programming languages compared to the no. of people who are using computers? No. of Linux users vs Windows ones? People tend to go more after newbie/user-friendly stuff as a priority. Bitcoin is not an average Joe's priority because the average Joe doesn't need it yet. And when CBDCs go mainstream, it will become even harder to convince someone to get into BTC unless they truly care about freedom more than convenience.

When privacy and surveillance becomes a widespread issue and a significant number of people start acknowledging the need of a less-controlled and monitored life, Bitcoin might become a priority in their lives. But until then, unless people wake up to the reality (and I don't think they will, because the transition to a Surveillance State is so smooth you don't even notice), Bitcoin's complexity will be a blockage for mass adoption.

Comes from a legendary older post from someone on BTCTalk who was drunk and couldn't write grammatically correct.

This is mostly about luck now, honestly. You never know when the bull run ends, nor do you know whether a bear run is on the way. Most of the time, as far as I've noticed, it ends up as a crash post-NYE and then the real bull run begins months afterwards.

But once again, you could start investing a fixed amount every day/week/month so that you get a favorable DCA. Rather than purchasing $25k worth of BTC today and losing half of it if tomorrow Bitcoin falls back to $12k, you could purchase smaller amounts every X days so that the average purchase price moves accordingly. This way, it's much easier to get back to a profit when market crashes happen.

They're likely the same owner using multiple accounts. But trying to register to bounties/campaigns using different accounts while still registering under the same links is a bit of a nonsense, lol.

Not an expert, but my personal advice is that you pay back the loan and remain with half a BTC. As it is a loan, you'd basically have a free 0.5 BTC if you'd do that.

It's tempting to keep both the coin and the loan, but since you're a newbie it's easy to make big mistakes. You've joined the crypto journey in quite bullish times; bearish ones such as sudden crashes may make you take emotionally-driven decisions that are often bad ones. Hence, why not keep just half of the coin and no more loan so that you're nobody's slave instead?

Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone!

I said it months ago and will say it again: my personal prediction for 2021 is $80-120k. It's really not a big surprise anymore to see such incredible increases yet so many people miss them out thanks to FUD and FOMO.

Just invest some bucks and simply forget about their existence. If you accept the risk of a potential Bitcoin price crash, you will likely be good. A decentralized economy where people have the power rather than the governments is something the humanity will never cease to need.

And the more years go by, the easier it becomes to make an old man understand today's tech as generations also renew. But I doubt the elderly are the main issue of Bitcoin's adoption. Because again, even if everyone on this world would've known how to use a mobile phone, from phones and computers to Bitcoin it is a very big leap.

It takes years as a tech geek to learn most stuff about Bitcoin, and even then you still have lots of things to learn about. The main issue we have is the impossibility of offering a very easy, user-friendly experience. If we can ever achieve the creation of a wallet which could easily be understood by anyone without any kind of crypto knowledge, Bitcoin would be adopted way quicker.

What we see with PayPal, Revolut etc seems nice at a first glance, but if you think about it.. it's not really Bitcoin adoption because people aren't using the real thing. They're in just for the profit. Once we can get at least 1% of the world involved in Bitcoin transactions, BTC will become a very big thing.

So you're back at it with the idea that everyone should be mining the same number of coins at the same time a.k.a. having a wallet linked to the identity of each so that everyone mints "fairly". It wouldn't work. If you think it would, why don't you try building your own coin? Maybe you really have a good idea we can't yet comprehend.

But it's kinda silly to think that an off-grid economy could work solely based on its currency. Bitcoin is linked to USD value because that's the easiest way to determine its value. Back when BTC was created, USD value didn't exist for Bitcoin. It was just the coin and that's it - and the first real life transaction says a lot about that: 10,000 BTC for 1 pizza, not for the USD value of a pizza.

Say miners and electricity could be paid with BTC instead of USD. Well, could the electricity industry and mining production work without fiat? They can't, because at some point fiat is still required. What Bitcoin does is, it gives you an alternative to that. But in the end, we are still living in an enslavement thanks to our system and we still can't completely get rid of it.

To be honest, it seems easier to lose a Bitcoin than it is to lose a banknote. There are obviously pros and cons, but there is no other advantage better than the fact that Bitcoin gives you a freedom fiat doesn't provide. Also, I wouldn't say Bitcoin is the fastest mean of exchange. I mean, you could hand out a banknote in seconds and there is no "confirmation" needed other than verifying whether the banknote is legit or fake. PayPal transfers are instant. It's just that Bitcoin gives us an independency we've never had before.

It's a red flag from the start and one should be quite silly (sorry to those who fell for it) to actually believe the story. Who the hell would purchase a painting worth $1.2B through a no-name shitcoin when the tx could be simply done through BTC or other popular coins instead?

It's easier to launder cash than Bitcoin, considering the currently available blockchain analysis tools we have. Criminals will never cease to find ways to do their crimes, be it with or without fiat/crypto's existence. As you said, the addresses are still traceable. Hence, it's actually an advantage for the authorities that they can clearly see who sent coins to who (and how much).

I think it's quite easy to learn as a beginner, as long as you read the documentations carefully. I'd advise you to start off by reading the docs from Qubes, Whonix and Tor. If you're interested in BTC anonymity, read Wasabi's documentations as well. These should be more than enough to start off with the privacy & anonymity studying.

If you have hardware you can somewhat trust (RYF-certified hardware should be the best as today we do not have open-source components commercially available yet) running either a free Linux distro (see this list for fully free distros or install a clean Debian which comes without non-free repos) or Qubes, you should be more private than probably >98% of today's PC users.

I really expect that to happen, honestly. It always looks like once a crash begins, everyone jumps into the hole and starts throwing their BTC away. I take this as opportunities though, although last time this happened I did not - and I regret it.

That makes sense if we look at the numbers OP put up: $1k to $200 is 5x lower; $20k to $3k is almost 7x lower. If that's the case and next crash would be ~10x, then just imagine $50k to $5k. Would be insane.

The leak doesn't have anything to do with additional security features their products have. If you're paranoid about their temporary PINs, then there are so many other things you should worry about as well - ending up not owning any hardware at all. They might've had shitty database protection, but their products have been long tested. Still unsure what their Secure Element does though - that is a big question mark for me as well, and it makes me kinda paranoid about its existence.

Well, if that's the case then they may also not leave you alone even after giving the temporary password. Luck matters here too. If they're ready to take everything from you and leave you without life afterwards, then no matter what you do you'll still have to face death.

Quite sure negotiation isn't an option when an attacker is inside your home. You either show it or you don't, they don't have time for stories.

Then one could set up multiple temporary PINs - one for cases such as hostage and torture, one for the actual portfolio you own. If someone ever attacks you, show them the main password. If they keep insisting to give away a temporary password as well, give them the one ready specifically for this purpose.

This is where adding a temporary PIN code to your Ledger helps a lot. Transfer all your funds except $50-100 to a temporary PIN and if such an attack ever happens, you could get away with a loss of only $50-100 while the remaining majority of your funds will be safe. The thief will think you've given him everything you had, without knowing you also have a hidden account containing the actual portfolio.

To learn more about how a secondary password helps, check out the following link: https://www.ledger.com/academy/passphrase-an-advanced-security-feature