The point of this story is to not sacrifice your cash flow for short-term profit. But Bitcoin doesn't have any cash flow. The only way to profit from Bitcoin is to sell it. Selling Bitcoin is not an equivalent of killing a goose that lays golden eggs. You can use the profits to buy Bitcoin later at a lower price.


Greed is what also makes people miss out on selling at a profit when the price is high, and then regret it when the price crashes.

What would fundamentally change if Bitcoin reaches 500B marketcap? It's only 100B higher than where it is now.

The problem with Bitcoin's price is that it's hard to make an educated guess about how much it should be, because it's not based on anything. It's not a stock or a bond, it's not a national currency, it's not a commodity (it's not being consumed). It's most similar to gold, because gold's value is way higher than the value of gold's use in industry and jewelry, and yet gold is far less volatile and actually exhibits anti-inflation and safe haven properties, unlike Bitcoin.

If Bitcoin's price is so easily influenced by events around a single company, it means it's very far from being mature. Imagine if the price of gold changed by 20% because some gold exchange pulled a scam. And yet people say that Bitcoin is gold's rival, that it is a better store of value.

If you can ignore volatility, it doesn't mean that other investors can do the same.

Why should Bitcoin devs waste their time on a threat that is powerless today, will be powerless in the near future and unclear when or even if it will ever be serious enough to put private keys at risk. And this threat is not unique to Bitcoin, your credit card and Internet connection also could be hacked by a quantum computer, yet cryptography researches are not rushing to shift towards quantum-resistant cryptography, because they know there's still a lot of time left.

Unlike with oil, precious metal and other commodities, it's unlikely that we'll ever see a shortage of Bitcoin, because bitcoins are not consumed, it's a currency, so it just changes hands. Sometimes it gets lost permanently, but it's not big enough to matter.

Why would the holders refuse to sell their coins when they are offered a good price?

I don't really care how stellar someone's reputation is, if they have seen the keys, they could have copied them. My point is that users need to understand this risk, and if they are willing to take it because they like the product, that's okay, it's their right. But there needs to be full disclosure about the risk when such product is advertised/recommended. Because it's very different from Bitcoin's security model where your security depends 100% on your own actions.

It's a good reminder to everyone that the manufacturer of Casascius and all similar products could potentially have kept the keys, and there's absolutely no way to know that they did not.


What we can learn is that if you are using a system that is theoretically unsafe, you need to be ready to lose your money.


How do you verify Trezor's hardware? How can you know that it generates random seeds and not pulls them from a hard-coded list that would allow the manufacturer to eventually pull a similar scam?

We already have mBTC as a convenient unit for fractions of Bitcoin that are much larger than satoshi. It's convenient because most of the world (sorry, Americans) are familiar with SI, so people don't have to learn how much 1 mBTC is, everyone knows that "milli" stands for 1/1000. I don't see how any other unit in this category could become more popular than mBTC.

Twitter is still free to use, the $8 subscription is for the blue checkmark. And this blue checkmark gives privileges like higher priority for replies, so it's actually very attractive for someone who runs bots. Countries that casually dump millions of dollars for social media manipulation can easily afford thousands of "verified" bots.


Freelance writers get hired to write texts, from a few hundred words to many thousands. Twitter is not hiring any writers, any sort of content monetization is based on the auditory that a creator can attract. It's a completely different thing from freelance writing, and a freelance writer can't just suddenly switch to being a "Twitter writer", because they lack brand.

Historically, between bear market and a bull market there has been long periods of stagnation and sideways trading, that are generally still viewed as a part of a bear market. This is likely a part of this pattern. Price going up and down, again and again over certain range - this time it's around 16k to 22k. A sign that the real bull market has started would be a rapid breakthrough above 30k or even higher. Right now nothing truly interesting is happening.

They hire companies that have developed specialized software to analyze blockchain tranasctions and trace the funds. Governments don't track every single users, generally they do it for high-profile criminals.


If you want to be 100% anonymous, you have to trade Bitcoin for cash. Using any sort of payment methods that are tied to your real world identity makes it possible and often easy for your government to find out about your trades.


Even if an exchange doesn't ask you ID, your bank already has it. Your bank will always provide information at the request of your government.

What does this have to do with freelance writing? Freelance writers get hired to write texts for someone. Twitter is just a microblogging platform. It's a completely different field.

Twitter wasn't a profitable company before Musk, and now it's losing its main source of revenue, which is advertising, as the result of Musk's decisions. And introducing some tokens or subscription is not going to even undo the damage. There's a high chance Twitter will go bankrupt in the next 2-3 years.

The very definition of middle class is someone who doesn't live from paycheck to paycheck and earns enough money to able to make purchases at a whim, save money to retire early, etc.

And the problem with investing what you can't afford to lose is that not only there's a risk of Bitcoin crashing and never recovering, which is relatively small, but you also need to be able to withstand bear markets. From time to time people have to tap into their savings, because they have some unpredictable emergencies and needs. If this happens during a bear market while your position is in red, you have to take a loss. Managing money is more than just having "strong hands". It's about avoiding risks that are too dangerous.

Revolution is


If a tiny percentage of the population uses Bitcoin, and not as a replacement for fiat, but as a tool to get rich quick, that's not a change of political power. If Bitcoin was adopted by at least some 20-30% of people, and those people used only Bitcoin and never fiat, you could talk about a revolution. Until that happens, Bitcoin is just a rarely used alternative.

But Bitcoin is not a stock, it's a currency, and being volatile is a very bad thing for a currency, it makes it unattractive for users. Imagine if US dollar showed the same volatility - prices in stores would change every day, and planning something even 2-3 weeks ahead would be hard, because the price could change by 5-10% unpredictably.

And as for investing, stocks can be analyzed. Lots of people predicted that Tesla is overpriced. But with Bitcoin no one can ever make an accurate prediction where it will go next.

Regardless if it's the bottom or not, now is a good price to buy. Those who try to find the absolute bottom or top are often missing even good opportunities and end up with lower profits (if any) then if they tried to simply make a good trade.

We can assume with a great confidence that if the market cycle pattern holds, the price will be much higher than it is now somewhere in 2024 or early 2025. This should be a reason enough to accumulate today.

It depends on how much money have you earned. Is it enough to change your life? To generate passive income that can sustain you? Or is it an equivalent of a few salaries?

If you earned truly a lot of money, it's better to put aside a large share of it, like 70-80% and invest it into a diversified portfolio of low risk, stable yield assets like stocks, bonds, bank deposits, real estate, etc. The rest can be split between cash and Bitcoin.

If you haven't earned enough to create a decent passive income, then you should put most of your money into Bitcoin, hodl it and wait for a peak of a bull market to sell it.

Compared to the rest of the Internet, it's a quite polite forum. People generally won't call you names here, unless you have an established negative reputation (I'm talking not about the reputation score here, but the actual reputation).

If someone doesn't agree with your point, it doesn't mean they are "criticizing you harshly". Countering someone's arguments and defending your arguments is the whole point of a forum, if everyone just agreed with each other, there would be no need to talk about anything.

Or maybe chainanalysis is so strong that it can unmix the mixed coins, so even if the thief did everything correctly, the funds will be tracked.

As I understand, mixing is not formally proven to break the connection between coins, it's just that no one has managed to demonstrate the opposite so far. But chainanalysis companies have been working on it all these years, so there's a possibility that they will come up with a solution or maybe already have. It could be probabilistic - it may not work for every output, and sometimes provides false results.

Bitcoin allows tracking of funds, and by tracking funds you can find those who interacted with the owner, which could lead to finding the owners identity. KYC is not the only way it can happen, just the most common and easy one.

Imagine a thief selling coins for cash during in-person meeting, and the chainanalysis tracks down the buyer of the coins, since they do a lot of transactions and leave a large footprint. So the law enforcement questions this buyer and looks at the camera records near the place where the trade happened and get a pretty good profile of the criminal.

If Bitcoin protocol or Bitcoin ecosystem could guarantee that a previous transaction can not be linked with the next transactions, identifying users would become less likely.