There's no need to look deeper, because they are all lying about utility. No one in real life uses things like smart contracts or DeFi for their applications. No matter how many new features you add to crypto coins and tokens, they will not be used in real economy, the world has seen and decided that crypto/blockchain is not a way to do things, that existing solutions are better. So the only use case of crypto is pumping it and dumping to bigger fools.

If you can't memorize the 12 words, then any lifehacks like making songs aren't going to help you in the long run. The problem with memorizing is not being able to bring it up from memory in one week, but keeping something in memory for many years. It's easy to forget refreshing your memory because of some events in life, and then realize that you forgot your seed because you didn't repeat it in a while.

Human memory was not created to store data the way computers do, our memory was designed for storing concepts and associations, not raw bits of data in precise order. Anyone who decides to store their seed in their memory need to understand that it's so unreliable that they should treat this backup as if it doesn't exist and rely on other methods first.

"Cloud" is someone else's computer. Whomever owns the cloud storage can read the data that the users store, and could be forced by law enforcement to share the data, or hackers could hack the service and steal the data. You can also be denied access to your data for some reason, or the service could suddenly close or lose data as a result of some accident. You can use strong encryption to reduce some of the risks, but still the risks remain. So using cloud as your only source of back up is a very bad idea, but if it's one out of many backups and its encrypted with strong cryptography, then it's more acceptable, but still not optimal.

To me it sounds like the opposite. The exchange and its owner legally owe money to users, and there's some chance that the users will get at least some portion of their money if the government will manage to seize anything. But with self-custody if you lost your keys, it's not likely you'll see them again.

But typically in both cases the worst case is losing your coins forever, and it seems to also be the most common outcome when something go wrong.

Self-custody is better than custodians because when it's done right, the chances of losing your coins are significantly lower. And it's not rocket science, people need to just use their brains and create multiple backups, instead of writing down the seed, putting it in a cabinet, then accidentally throwing it away with garbage during cleaning.

Funny to hear that from the CEO of an exchange that allows some absolutely degenerate leverages like x100 or x150, which is one of the big reasons why it's not on good terms with the US regulators. Shady shitcoins and tokens, "high yield" investment opportunities, projects that spend 100 times more on marketing than on development are bread and butter of exchanges like Binance, because they take their cut in trading and listing fees. It's not sustainable, because you can't scam people forever, but Binance is not demonstrating with their actions that they want to be a legitimate and sustainable business.

For years people who criticized altcoins were branded as "maximalists" or "extremists". Time has proven that they were right, that the altcoin ecosystem, including exchanges, is unsustainable and does not produce anything useful. Bitcoiners should double down on drawing the line between "crypto" and Bitcoin. We need to have exchanges that are purely Bitcoin exchanges, they would only deal with Bitcoin and fiat, and not even the stablecoins will be listed. We should be criticizing "crypto" instead of saying "not all crypto is bad". Because it's only Bitcoin that is solid.

You are asking a question which can be answered with a survey or market data from exchanges. Unfortunately, there's no easily available data that links crypto investments and stock investments. But the marketcap of all crypto is less than 1 trillion, and SP500 alone is 33.5 trillion. So crypto is not any sort of competitor of big, mainstream stock markets, but it could be a competitor of penny stocks, since both them and crypto are high risk high reward "investments" that more often than not turn out to be scams.

If crypto would follow Satoshi's vision, we would just have 3,000 copies of Bitcoin. And we don't need even a single copy of Bitcoin - Litecoin has proven that. Bitcoin doesn't even need competition to keep improving, because Bitcoin devs don't care what's Bitcoin market share, they care that the code is solid, that the protocol is safe and resilient.

The age of Bitcoin copies is long gone, you can't get anyone to invest in it anymore, today any new coin must have smart contracts and DeFi and NFT and whatever other buzzwords are trending.

Wealth is not money, if you are printing money you are not creating wealth. If you are creating cryptocurrencies you are not creating wealth. Wealth is goods and services. And crypto isn't good at creating them. How many jobs did crypto create? Some thousands of exchange employees, and some developers, writers, promoters here and there. Not enough to matter on a global scale. And most of the world is not using crypto, because people don't feel the need and benefits in doing so. So in terms of global trends and economy, crypto is a very small thing, despite existing for well over a decade.

From a newbies perspective 8% per year or even 20% per year sounds even conservative when compared to shitcoin projects that promise those returns per month or even per week. These exchanges are preying on retail investors who can't tell a reasonable investment opportunity from a "too good to be true" offer. No matter how many times you tell people to do their own research, there will be millions who will still become victims of these scams, even despite being aware that such scams exist.

There is no can be no official Bitcoin account. Bitcoin is not a company or a centralized project with one owners. Bitcoin developers do not own Bitcoin and can't speak on its behalf.

We do not know who owns that account. And it doesn't matter, because their opinion is as valid and influential as an opinion of some random commenter on the Internet.

If you are borrowing Bitcoin against your shitcoin, you are essentially shorting your shitcoin, which is often a good idea. If you're doing the opposite - borrowing an altcoin against Bitcoin, you're going to become bankrupt, because all altcoins are destined to go to zero, and once your altcoin turns red, it won't turn green ever again.

I recommend everyone, especially beginners, to not look for shortcuts and trying become rich quick, and simply accumulate Bitcoin for long term. Those who try to become rich quick usually end up becoming poor even quicker.

How does Bitcoin solve the problem of scammy exchanges? The original exchange exit scam happened with Mt. Gox - a Bitcoin-only exchange. Bitcoin protocol doesn't have in-built fiat trading capability, so there must be exchanges in the ecosystem, and p2p exchanges like real life meetings, direct bank transfers and DEXs can't fill the full demand for exchanging BTC and fiat, because not all people want to trade in such risky way. That's where centralized exchanges come in, but because they are not properly regulated, there's a high chance of them doing shady things that eventually make them collapse.

How many years has it been since crypto scams have been a thing? 8? 9? And there's no sign of it all coming to an end anytime soon, because people actually enjoy this one big gambling device - there's a lot of time for high risk high reward gambling, and then there are some periods of cooling off when the market implodes, but eventually it all starts over again, as people like to believe that the next bull run will be big and bring the promised revolution.

Things like hiyps and ponzi schemes exist to this day, and there are fools who engage with them despite the warnings of the professionals, so altcoins and scammy exchanges can be a thing for a long time too.

Unfortunately, that's not the conclusion that people outside of crypto make. They see fiasco after fiasco and decide that all of crypto is a scam, including Bitcoin. How can you convince them that Bitcoin is different? They didn't study the crypto protocols to understand the fundamental difference between centralized and decentralized crypto coin. And they don't see that Bitcoin is being massively used in real world. That's why shitcoins and shitcoin exchange crashes drag Bitcoin with them.

Fiat currencies also crash, but they crash when something fundamentally bad happens with their country's economy, and not when one exchange shits its pants. For Bitcoin to have a shot at becoming "the future of money", it must demonstrate resilience, it should be withstanding the FUD and not crashing by 20% over something that has no influence on the network and the protocol.

People say that Bitcoin will become less volatile when it will be more adopted, but how can it get adopted when its so volatile?

The conclusion is actually more complex than that. Each payment method has its pros and cons, and different users have different requirements. For some privacy is critical, for others its not a concern. A drug dealer has different concerns than someone who buys groceries in the nearest supermarket. Or things like being able to make transactions across borders are only a benefit if you plan to make such transactions.

Payment cards and cash still represent nearly all financial transactions because they suit the needs of people.

I don't see how crypto or tokens can do anything here. They only have value if someone is willing to buy them. What value would a token have if it was printed out of thin air and airdropped to the masses who will dump it to pay their bills and buy food. Printing fiat works because it already exists so adding more only dilutes the current value. And alternatively you can tax the ultra-rich to redistribtue the wealth to the poor.

Bitcoin cycles are tied to halvenings. Each halvenings are less and less influential than the previous ones. Going from 50 BTC to 25 BTC per block is huge. Going from 0.39 to 0.195 is way less noitceable in terms of emission. This ATH showed less relative growth compared to the previous cycles, and I would expect the next ATH to be even closer to the current ATH. But this doesn't mean that the cycles are over, they just evolved.

Nothing is free, sites like faucets advertise themselves as "free Bitcoin", but it's actually a grueling and low-paying job. Sites that offer you Bitcoin or other crypto to watch ads or videos are not worth your time. If you are lazy but want to make money, the thing to do is to stop being lazy, work hard and smart to build wealth, and then enjoy being lazy again once you can retire.