"What if .." questions.. well, only if it was that easy.

We are not centralized. There's no governance with Bitcoin, hence.. there are no "partnerships". If a company wants to support Bitcoin, they will adopt it.. but it's new technology, and it's less used as a currency than some companies would expect. If you spend resources to adopt a new tech, you want it to provide your business at least a slightly higher advantage. Microsoft adopted BTC as a payment method years ago, but later removed it. Same goes for Steam.

Listing BTC on forex trading platforms is a bad idea in my opinion. You're not really purchasing Bitcoin the way you purchase it on crypto exchanges where you can also withdraw. Forex trading sites, AFAIK, only provide you basically a virtual Bitcoin - as in, you cannot request a withdrawal to your personal wallet.

We should first advertise decentralization and privacy rather than providing people more options to support artificial central governance. Sometimes, slow is better. I personally think Bitcoin needs a slower growth to be healthy.

Safe from being seized and/or frozen by authorities? Yes. Safe from being controlled by anyone else besides you? Yes, as long as you have the right wallet security. Safe from volatility? No. Safe as a long term investment? No.

Depends on what "safe" means for you. If you're looking for something that is somewhat stable and has an assured long-term profit, cryptocurrencies are not it. I mean they did offer long-term profits so far for those who were strong enough to handle big price drops, but the average person usually sells under panic/fear as soon as the market starts dippin'.

Now that you do not have that much of an idea whether cryptocurrencies are safe or not, I highly recommend you to gather as much knowledge as possible about crypto and investments. Don't start off based on someone else's opinion - make your own.

Cryptocurrencies are a new kind of asset. People still do not have any idea whether it's something you should consider safe for a long term store of value or not, so volatility and uncertainty will probably last for at least a few decades.

I'd rather think that the Bitcoin market is still just way too uncertain right now due to immaturity. If you take a look at it, while it surely did follow a hard decline similar to stocks, from 00:00 to 06:00 it's almost like it didn't know what to do.

If we think about it, maybe Bitcoin isn't neither a safe haven asset or a stock-related one. Maybe it's something different and this is why it also acts differently. We still try to attach Bitcoin to different definitions, terms and categories yet we never think it might actually fit into an unique definition of its kind.

Both have their differences, yet comparing Bitcoin to something else is the easy way to make someone get at least a little idea about how BTC works.

Doesn't Bitcoin have digital gold attempts as preceded projects? It turned out to be a different creature though. Bitcoin can be anything we want, as long as the majority of votes go that way. I don't think BTC could be compared to gold as much after we'll get more privacy features. I guess the more blockchain tech advances, the less similar they become..

If they're able to "crack the code", even with a fork or a quick fix, they'd already have enough information from the past to link addresses to identities and intrude our privacy. Quite ironic how the agencies we pay intrude our own private life and come up with silly excuses for it.

The future regulations coming to Europe will probably include at least a partial crypto ban - or restrictive use - for privacy coins. I really expect them to take some kind of action against the stuff they fear.

Quantum computers currently do not pose any risk to Bitcoin because it would make no sense to use all those resources just to harm a cryptocurrency. In the end, we'd just fork off and all the resources they've spent would have been lost in vain.

Bitcoin will advance alonside technology. Once more powerful computers are released, the hashrate will increase as well. As soon as quantum computing becomes the norm, the hashrate will probably be high enough not to pose any risk anymore from the 51% attack perspective. Private keys may be at a high risk though, but that is something devs can fix.

I don't think anyone is stupid enough to purchase hardware worth so many millions of dollars to attempt a BTC attack when they know escaping the attack is as easy as creating a slightly improved fork.

Digital economy and decentralized blockchain tech are probably going to be two completely different things though. Seems like it's more of an advertisement for the digital economy - which in the largest part will be composed of CBDCs in the future - and not Bitcoin. Is this a good thing, or is it once again educating the masses about the even more centralized future camouflaged under the name of "digital currency"?

Kinda crazy how a lot of people used to think Bitcoin is unaffordable back then. A lot of them still think it is but regret purchasing at sub-$1k. If the pattern repeats, I doubt it will repeat now. I just have a feeling we have to wait one more year before the real bull run potentially begins.

If back in 2016 we had a pretty bad situation considering the Hillary vs Trump endless debates of how "elections could start WW3", today we have a real danger in front of us and that should boost people's trust in decentralized stuff - only if they knew BTC can't be a ponzi, isn't controlled by billionaires, does not hand the authorities your keys and does not betray you.

Well, the day stocks fell very hard was the same period of time when Bitcoin got dumped heavily so I wouldn't call it "standing strong". Stocks and crypto sometimes go in parallel, while other times move completely different. In time, crypto markets will likely choose something to follow between commodities and stocks.

For passive income.. well, it's a very big hit-or-miss situation unlike other ways of earning a passive income. Crypto volatility could turn your 3-months-straight profit into a 6-months overall loss, pushing you even farther than when you started. Those who've bought Bitcoin between $10k and $20k few years ago are still on a loss today, unless they've until now lowered the average price they paid for BTC.

Unfortunately though, this is only one of the pretty short list of successful stories of daily trading and making sacrifices for a potentially successful future. Most stories end quite bad as not all of us take the best decisions..

But of course, props to the family for having the guts to sell everything and get into BTC. I would personally not be able to do this, as it could've gone wrong very easily. Wouldn't want to turn a hope for millions into an unfortunate situation of homelessness and poverty - especially when my family is at stake.

Had people cared about the objectives of projects, DeFi, ICO, IEO and all other kind of hypes wouldn't have ended up as large pools of scamcoins. Just look how many coins there currently exist with the term "Finance" in their name. These did not exist 2 months ago.

The crypto space has been so filled up with shitcoins that "researching projects to know what to invest in" truly became a big waste of time in >90% of the cases. This is unfortunate, but it's the reality we're looking at. We aren't governed by any authority, so you're free to create whatever you like, be it a scam, a pure experiment or a legit project.

Bitcoin is much more convenient to be used as a safe haven asset than a currency for daily usage. Decentralization comes with a cost, but remember that centralization does as well. We pay monthly fees for having bank accounts and commissions for most txs we make through banks, right?

But Bitcoin fees are changeable, unlike bank account fees which are fixed through the signed contract. You can download Electrum and choose the fees you want to pay - which could be as low as 1 vsat/byte. The time you choose to pay those fees matters a lot tho as well, but if the mempool is empty enough, you can spend BTC with very low fees and have it confirmed in time.

In the meantime, make sure you use a SegWit address specifically to support lower fees and faster confirmations for them. AFAIK, the percentage of SW users is way too low and this is one of the reasons fees don't decrease very often.

Some people are sometimes caught in the middle of worst situations possible. You could deposit a large number of BTC on an exchange willing to do a very quick trade and withdraw everything, but have the hack happening exactly while you were doing the trade/depositing. It does not necessarily mean that the guy was holding his $401k on the exchange as a safe storage.

While Bithumb may have been to blame for having security breaches, this is centralization and what trusting a third party means. All platforms have doors open for security breaches, you just have to find them.

Most of these happen because the projects are rushed - and they're rushed for a reason: for the coin creators to make money.

If a project wants to be successful, it does not need shit exchanges and hype. All it needs is to be a legit project with a legit vision people enjoy and want to support. But nowadays, unfortunately, most coins get a pump even from the crappiest exchange listing they get. Even Binance listing your coin does not make it better in any way. It should be the coin's tech that is unique and progressing - not all about listings and how much bonus you give to your supporters.

Bounty hunters? They are to be blamed as well, because they are the ones supporting these scams. If all bounty hunters would've properly researched a project before joining instead of rushing in and desperately trying to get rich out of nothing by joining literally every single bounty out there, they would've not only been much better off but the image alts have gotten would've been much better right now.

I wouldn't take it that way. A bank robber successfully escaping does not necessarily encourage more people to rob a bank as well.

Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing to happen. Freezing funds is exactly why a lot of us avoid centralized exchanges.

If the hacker is smart enough, he/they will successfully cash out without leaving much of a trace behind. Stealing that much moeny is a very, very stupid move unless you already know how to leave close to no trace behind you when cashing out. As for the tracing part, is it really that cool that you can have your own funds tracked this easily? I mean, Bitcoin is awesome but I'm kinda skeptical about the tracing part.

Rather than focusing on fiat instead of crypto crimes as some users above my reply say, I think it'd be even better to do a comparison between the amount of crimes there are in fiat vs crypto for all these four categories. It shows even better how uncomparable these two economies are when it comes to illegalities.

As I said before, if we wanted to fix crimes, we should first of all fix the most pronounced ones which are, in the largest part, committed by corrupt politics and wealthy men. We can't point fingers towards something that has only appeared one decade ago when we have crimes that have been going on and repeating for centuries yet nobody ever took care of them properly.

Only because we let them do so.

Wrong education and advertisement about privacy and security speaks words here with the VPN situation. VPNs are sometimes worse than not using anything at all. A lot of them actually keep logs of everything you do.

VPNs are the same way we've been wrongfully taught about internet privacy and anonymity as we'll be taught about CBDCs being better than BTC and privacy coins. The vast majority will fall for it.

Do people typically write about BTC randomly? Altcoins are usually heavily mentioned only during hypes and pumps, as everyone literally spams "moon!" everywhere. Bitcoin has been quite stable around the 10-11k area for a long time now, so a lot of people probably lost their interest compared to months ago.

I think you could call it "the calm before the storm". I've noticed it's usually the calmest times that come right before heavy bull seasons.

I'm kinda sad to see some people bragging ERC20 token creators for freezing funds. You don't get that yours could be frozen as well, do you? Seems nice when it's a hacker that is being stopped, but when you're affected yourself it doesn't look that well anymore. We're supposed to be decentralized.

They probably do not feel like being in a rush - holding your BTC in the wallet you've initially transferred hacked coins to or moving the coins to another wallet is about the same thing unless they want to cash out, right? Like Mt Gox, there's plenty of time during which they have to take care of probably almost all aspects of their lives from a security perspective, lol.

Edit: Maybe they're looking to exchange their BTC through Bisq? In that case, I guess it doesn't even matter whether you've mixed your coins anymore.

Hi o_e_l_e_o,

I am interested in doing the trade; I can do up to 10 XMR. If the offer is still up and you're interested as well, shoot me a PM (or reply here). I should be available on the 28th of September from 17:00 UTC for at least a few hours.