Announcements of "breakthrough" in nuclear fusion happen all the time, and generally nothing comes out of it. This one seems to be more concrete, but I doubt that we'll start building fusion reactors tomorrow, it might still be decades until the first profitable reactor will be launched.

To me the most remarkable thing about nuclear fusion is not how clean it is (I believe fission is also sufficiently clean), but how cheap and abundant can it be. Perhaps if this technology can be mass scaled, we will enter a new technological era.

It's not just finance, a lot of commercial software has a tendency to become open source for the reasons you mentioned - it's better, more secure, more reviewed. But proprietary closed source software is not going away, in certain cases you don't want your competition to have access to the thing you are developing. Plus it's not like a lot of companies have all their codebase open source - only some parts of it are, so we can't really talk about "open source finance" if it's not 100% open source, like crypto.

There's basically three major obstacles that stop Bitcoin from being a widely used currency.

1. Scaling/fees/tx times - Lightning Network mostly solves it, but LN itself is still not widely adopted or polished

2. Legal concerns - fiat payment networks are regulated, there's financial monitoring, AML and so on, so merchants don't have to worry about it. But using Bitcoin would create a lot of problems for them in this field. Most countries prohibit large cash transactions, and it's likely that Bitcoin is prohibited too, if the law says that only bank transfer is acceptable.

3. Volatility. People don't want to hold a currency that always changes its value. Plus the whole deflation thing makes people who do own Bitcoin not want to spend it, because it will be worth more in the future.

The problem isn't that a bank or a government could take control over an address, but they could deny access to it. Imagine if Hal got arrested, the government could seize the contents of his safety box, and he would lose one of his backups. It's not the end of the world if you have other backups, that have different treat model and can't be seized by government easily. So there's no contradiction here with "Satoshi's vision", because unlike with fiat, you are not storing bitcoins themselves, but information for accessing them, which can be copied.

Volatility or price stability, even centralization are not the main problems with them. The main problem is that they are scams, they are created only to be dumped to "investors" and then the devs abandon the so-called project. And the second problem is even deeper - blockchain and cryptocurrency technology is not fundamentally very useful, it doesn't solve some big problems, it doesn't solve many problems, and it's full of drawbacks. So even the few projects that are honest and have devs who really try to create something are doomed to fail.

People think that AI is very powerful because it's artificial intelligence, and we know from movies like Terminator that computers can be smarter than us, but if AI was known under some less hyped name, like "neural network", people would be less inclined to immediately believe in everything that comes out of it.

So called "artificial intelligence" can't perform any sort of complex analysis of difficult subjects and do things like writing original essays, it can merely mimic existing human works.

The share of digital payments varies heavily from country to country. There are countries where over 70-80% of payments are cashless, there are also countries where only 20-30% are. I don't see any country officially adopting a policy of getting rid of cash entirely. That would create more problems than it solves, cash is a plan B for emergencies that render digital payments unavailable, it also works in places with poor or no connectivity, and so on.

If everything was great, people wouldn't be creating these alternative narratives so often. I never saw anyone saying that Visa or Mastercard is a work of art, or that it's the most important thing in human history. Yet billions of people use it every day. Without singing praises to it, without even thinking about it, because it just works.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic currency, just like Satoshi said. When people start calling it something else, like "a swarm of digital hornets", "digital gold", "art", "revolution" and so on, it suggests that it isn't doing well as currency, because otherwise people wouldn't need to create new narratives of what Bitcoin is.

As for art, wikipedia defines it as:


And Bitcoin is neither of those things, it's simply a tool for storing and transferring value online.

The problem was that when fees got high, customers were bombarding Steam support about their stuck transactions. Sure, BitPay's shitty service only worsened this problem, but even if Steam was receiving Bitcoin directly, the problem would still be present.


Who in the world cares about El Salvador?


I'm not saying that Bitcoin is totally useless. But on a global scale it's insignificant. It has less than 300k transactions per day - that's nine million transactions per month, So a population of one small country would be able to do one transaction per month if they adopted Bitcoin. So what's the benefit of accepting Bitcoin for a large company? It's going to be a tiny share of their payments and not increase their revenue in any significant ways. But it will introduce development costs, maintenance, maybe even legal risks.

People don't want Bitcoin. Steam, the largest online shop for PC games had Bitcoin payments, barely anyone used it, and they removed this option when it started creating problems when network fees got as high as $50. For Bitcoin to have any chance to get adopted, three things must happen - the price must stabilize, the regulators must greenlight it, Lightning Network must be officially released and adopted.

Satoshi didn't describe how he sees Bitcoin future in detail. Satoshi described Bitcoin's mission as decentralized peer-to-peer currency. Bitcoin is still decentralized and peer-to-peer, free from censorship and trusted third parties. But as for currency, we indeed can see that it's not Bitcoin's main use. Maybe when Saotshi released Bitcoin, it seemed that the world is about to get rid of banks and embrace a system that can't have disasters like the 2008 economic crisis. But time has shown that people quickly forgot about their concerns and have no reasons to be worried as long as everything works here and now. Basically, people are not motivated to adopt Bitcoin as a currency, the drawbacks of Bitcoin are stronger than its benefits to most.

Hi, here's what happened. I lost the email from my Heroku account a long time ago, and recently Heroku was forcing people to change their passwords, so my Heroku account is lost forever and the app was shutdown. I thought barely anyone used my app (I didn't check the database in a long time, and it was always low), so I didn't bother solving this problem and myself switched to telegram notifications.

But if there's demand for my browser-based notifications, I could try to relaunch the app. And if someone is interested in running it instead of me, I could provide the source code.

The halvening will be in the first half of 2024, and a bull market would start close to that time, maybe before it, but more likely after it. So I wouldn't expect any particular bullishness in 2023. Maybe there will be a small recovery, but most likely it will be a very stagnating year, like 2019 and first half of 2020.

Halvening cycles is the best thing we have for predicting trends, everything else is based on unknown variables, We can't know when a positive feedback loop of hype could start, but we know when the new supply is going to cut in half.

That's why making a career in crypto is risky. We have no idea where this field will be in 5 years, maybe it will all crash down and no one will need all the blockchain developers, crypto consultants, crypto marketers and so on. There's so many things better to do, like machine learning or big data, because even if they are hyped now, they still have strong fundamentals and aren't going to go away anytime soon.

I don't see any evidence today that Bitcoin is the most important thing ever, that it is going to change the world and shape human history. What we have now is that after over 10 years Bitcoin is still almost never used for payments, its volatility makes it a risky investment rather than a store of value, it doesn't react to inflation and economic uncertainty like bitcoiners have hoped it would.

It's important to keep your head cool and analyze the facts, instead of just believing in the future.

People should have learned from the lesson of Mt Gox and newbies should start their Bitcoin journey with learning Bitcoin history. Smart people learn from mistakes of others, the rest learn from their own mistakes.


You are right that Bitcoin is not directly affected, but unfortunately it is affected indirectly. If crypto ecosystem has such a negative reputation, then Bitcoin also suffers, because to outsiders Bitcoin and crypto are the same.

Windows' own anti-virus is practically as good as any commercial one. Malware often gets into your system because you click that "allow" button while installing a pirated game or other software. Or when the malware is brand new and no antivirus can detect it yet.

So first things first you should use cold storage to reduce the chance of malware stealing your wallet to zero, if you do everything correctly. And second, always avoid any interaction that can result in infection. Don't watch pirated content from streaming, download it from torrents from trusted accounts instead. Don't pirate software, use free and open source alternatives, and always download free software from the official source with a correct digital signature of the authors.

This isn't a hard law of nature. It's just an observation that humanity makes progress. I'm sure at some point in history Bitcoin would fade away, maybe the network will even effectively stop. But it might not be described as a direct replacement. Bitcoin could be used less and multiple other things could be used more.

If we think about narrower terms, like another coin replacing Bitcoin, that's highly unlikely. Historically Bitcoin always remained number 1 because it's a project that at its core is honest and doesn't have any hidden motivations. Unlikely altcoins, which are created for profit. So, anyone who truly wants to make a decentralized currency would rather work on Bitcoin then try to invent a wheel by forking Bitcoin for no reason.

But at the same time you became dependent on cryptocurrency, which is a very volatile and speculative field with unclear fundamentals. We can't know if in 10 years crypto would still be a thing or not. Maybe traders will lose interest and move on to something new, and the opportunities will become virtually non-existent. And there are other downsides, like the fact that there's less opportunities during a bear market. This can be very bad in certain situations, when you suddenly need a lot of money, but it's a bear market, so you might have to sell at a loss.