Bitcoin and stablecoins are very different things. The key difference is that stablecoins are sem-centralized, their addresses and transactions can be frozen by the entity that controls the coin, just like with banks. So it's better to report their use separately.

And may I ask, what is the percentage of Bitcoin payments among all payments that your business has received in that month? Because we have no idea if 13 is a lot for your business or not.

All questions about security should start with a question "what's your security model". There's no single method for storing Bitcoin keys that suits all needs. If you store your wallet file on a USB in the same place that you store your seed, then the risk of losing coins to some natural disaster like fire or flooding remains almost the same. If you store your backups in different places, you raise your chances that they will fall in wrong hands. If you don't encrypt your backups, they can be easily stolen. If you do, you risk forgetting your password and losing your coins. You have to decide for yourself which threats are the most likely for you - theft, misplacement, natural disaster, etc.

First things first, in your title you said "crypto newbies" and in the OP you talk about Bitcoin. Crypto in general is a scam, they use Bitcoin's reputation to create worthless coins with the sole purpose of dumping them to investors.


Bitcoin is only a currency, it can't solve anything that is not related to money.


There's a good argument that Bitcoin will have some value because it has utility and adoption, but there's unfortunately no good mathematical model for estimating this value. We have no idea if todays price is objective overpriced, underpriced or just right.

How many people in this world are able to fully review an open source project the size of Bitcoin Core and be certain that there's no backdoors? A backdoor can be as small as a few characters, and it can even be hidden outside of the project itself, in some dependency of the project.

I trust Bitcoin because I trust that the community reviews the code. It's still better than trusting closed-source systems, hoping that the developers are moral people and won't do anything malicious.

If the scammer is dumb enough to not use mixing or similar tools, and then send the coins to a centralized exchange that does KYC, and this exchange would cooperate with police, the scammer could get caught. Otherwise there's very low chance of this happening. Though you should still remember that Bitcoin transaction is not the only activity - a scammer could use their name, adddress, their photo to establish trust, and this could help police catch them.

If by Hypnosis you mean mind control, then it's just a myth, it doesn't work like that. You can't be hypnotized if you don't want to be hypnotized and is not making effort for it to happen. All those stories about hypnotizers robbing people are just excuses of people who fell victims of a scam.

What you should be worried is kidnapping or torture or home invasion. So keep a low profile and have some home security, like good locks, an alarm system, a weapon, etc.

Why not? It's a correct observation that by using Bitcoin in a centralized manner, like storing it on exchange, you lose a lot of the benefits of Bitcoin and introduce the same old risks of the traditional finance systems. Just because you are free to do something, it doesn't mean that it's a good idea or others shouldn't be able to dissuade you from doing so.

yes


yes


Nothing surprising if you have spent a long time observing crypto markets



Do not equate Bitcoin with dexes. Dexes got hacked in the past. Perhaps some of the hacks were inside jobs. It's not enough to be decentralized and open source to be safe. A scam can be open source too. What makes Bitcoin different from "crypto" is that Bitcoin was reviewed by lots of professionals who didn't find anything malicious in its code. And it is being developed very carefully so most bugs get caught early. And still Bitcoin had some incidents in the past. But "crypto" is being developed very hastily, no one bothers reviewing it, so there's a big incentive for hackers to find exploits on live networks and steal millions.

I'm not following any crypto-related accounts, and yet after the FTX collapse the accounts that I follow made a lot of posts about FTX, SBF and crypto in general. And the general mood among non-crypto people seem to be that crypto was finally exposed as a scam and will be done for good.

How can Bitcoin realistically distance itself from crypto? Should Bitcoiners join those who criticize crypto or should they be saying "Bitcoin is a good crypto". Or should Bitcoiners say that Bitcoin is not crypto?

Or maybe it all means that they hype around so-called blockchain technology and decentralization just inflated Bitcoin's value, and now the bubble has popped and Bitcoin returned to a more realistic levels?

People, governments, organizations plan things all the time, doesn't mean all of those plans will materialize. When China or anyone really would start actually building a moon base, that would be significant news. Until that happens, it's pointless to discuss the implications of moon bases, potential new space race and so on.

And I'm skeptical about any big moon bases in this decade, the cost/benefit of such endeavor seems to be rather poor. Better focus on improving the rocket technology first.

People don't realize that bear markets tend to end very abruptly, a bull run comes out of nowhere and before you blink, the price went up by 50%. Good investors don't make some 200 IQ trades with maximized profits, they simply make profitable trades consistently. And it's also important to sell in the bull market, because otherwise you will have to wait for a long time till the next cycle if you'll want a good opportunity to sell. People who wait for absolute bottom or absolute top miss a ton of opportunities for making profitable trades.

And from where do you know that in Q2 2023 there will be a boom of remote jobs for software developers? What would cause this?

And why do you conclude that they will use Bitcoin? We already have the precedent of covid-19, which forced people to work from home, and it didn't increase Bitcoin's adoption significantly. That's because there's a wide variety of fiat payment methods, and people see no reasons to use it instead of them.

This infographic feels very arbitrary, why stop at 40 years ago if the technologies that came before that are just as important? Might as well put the whole history of computing, electronic communications and cryptography on this timeline.

I think Bitcoin should be viewed in the context of decentralized digital money, rather than broader concepts like cryptography and the Internet. So it's more correct to say that the quest for decentralized digital money started in early 90s.

It's a stupid argument for a few reasons. First, Bitcoin is not just a private key, it's the whole software and the network. And a ban on Bitcoin wouldn't look like a ban on running software, no one will bother with enforcing that, instead Bitcoin-related operations will be banned - exchanging it for fiat, using it as a payment method, etc. If these bans are enforced, then Bitcoin would be nothing more than a record in a database with no utility.

And second, this is just a version of the reductive argument that information is just a number and you can't outlaw a number.

I very rarely see people calling Bitcoin a religion, most commonly its when someone calls Bitcoin a cult when they are suggesting that it has no value and the community is based on pure belief.

You could draw some parallels between Bitcoin and religion, because Bitcoin community tends to be messianic - there's a lot of people who believe that Bitcoin is here to change the world, get rid of the evil banking system and fiat money. But such comparison isn't really productive, because that's just some aspect of Bitcoin community. At its core Bitcoin has nothing to do with religion, which is belief in supernatural forces.

There is no cryptocurrency that succeeded. Going up in a price for some time is not success. It's trivial to generate hype and pump the market in short term. Some lucky people might even profit from that. And then what? Cryptocurrency has no active users that use is for useful real life applications. It's only used for speculation, which is a zero sum game. And it's no sustainable. Eventually everyone will understand that crypto is not the future, because it failed to get adopted for so many years.

That's why Bitcoin shouldn't be viewed as a part of the cryptocurrency family, because it's the only coin with adoption.

Don't confuse people here, there is no such precedent.

Bitcoin is a digital currency. It's not a weapon, it's not a free speech mechanism. There's absolutely no way that any court would deem that Bitcoin is protected within the First or the Second amendment. If the US government has a precedent of seizing gold, why would it recognize the right to own Bitcoin as a part of the Constitution?

When you try to run an .exe file on Windows that doesn't have a verified signature, the system tries to warn you that it's a bad idea. People got used to dismissing such warnings without thinking, but if they listened to their own system, they would allow like 99.9% of viruses.  Because downloading pirated software from bad sources, usually first google results, is the most common vector for spreading malware.

Well, we need somebody to store their coins on exchanges to provide liquidity for the markets. Bitcoin network has less than a million transactions per day, while a single exchange has more trades than that for BTC/USD, not even considering other pairs. If no one held their coins on exchanges, trade volumes would shrink and BTC would be more volatile in short term. And the overall price could be lower as the result.

Maybe in the future, when LN is well integrated by exchanges, traders would move BTC instantly between their wallets and exchange with negligible fee, but right now it's not happening, sadly.