There's nothing that limits you to holding your Bitcoin wallet password or recovery seed only in one place. You can create as many backups as you want and in different formats - on paper, on CD, on USB, on metal sheets and so on. The problem is that some people treated it as just another password and made only one backup copy and then misplaced it, when in reality they should have treated it as nuclear launch codes.

If you take Elon's words at face value, it seems like he sees himself as a messiah who will save America from some political catastrophe like a civil war, and he wants to do that with free speach, so that all political sides had access to it and no single side dominated the info space.

Now he seems to be on track to suffer a huge loss, as advertisers don't like the idea of Twitter to become a place of uncheked free speech, because they don't want to be advertised on a platform with a big presense of extremist content like racism or homophobia.

If by "digital currencies" they mean altcoins, that's the absolutely right stance, they are dangerous investment scams. You need to tell people that Bitcoin and altcoins are fundamentally different - altcoins are poor copies of Bitcoin that exist only to enrich the developers, while Bitcoin is a legitimate open-source project.

And people should be aware of dangers of using Bitcoin to avoid doing expensive mistakes and getting negative experience that would turn them away from Bitcoin. So you shouldn't out right dismiss concerns but explain how Bitcoin has both positive and negative sides.

How can we know? We can't read others people mind or interrogate them. And I don't think the motivation matters that much.

I also don't like these sorts of unrealistic predictions, if you set your expectations too high, you will sooner or later get severely disappointed. People need to be grateful for what they already have, Bitcoin has demonstrated fantastic performance before, even if it stops growing, the people who invested in it before the 2021 bull run have gotten themselves a very sweet deal.

You guess wrong, it's not as simple as taking LN code, switching a few lines and having a functioning LN on an altcoin. Coins that are closer to Bitcoin in their architecture will have an easier time of pulling that off (but still not easy), but most of the coins that that were released in the last 6 years have very different codebase and architecture, so it would take a ton of effort to implement LN for them.


The answer is that they both have high fees when they hit the limits of their on-chain capacity. So the answer depends on the current state of their mempools.  In recent times Ethereum tends to be more expensive.

I think the US might still defend Taiwan even if they will succeed in creating their own semiconductor industry - after all, US is a superpower and it's not  going to cede this status without a fight, especially since US military is clearly more capable than any military in the world by far.

And TSMC sounds like they are not happy about the prospects of losing their monopoly rather than being worried about getting invaded by China because the US will lose a reason to get involved.

Where did you get this idea? Do you have data to support it?


Do you believe there's a significant correlation between those activities? Do you have data to support it?


Steam, the largest online store of PC games used to accept Bitcoin, and Bitcoin was such a small fraction of their revenue, that they stopped accepting it when fees became high for the first time, and they didn't lose anything. Even when people have an option to pay with Bitcoin, in many cases they chose not to.

Problem is, you can't spend a large portion of those coins legally, or it will attract attention and you will get busted. So actually the best bribe is the one that can be reliably laundered, because then you can spend it on a new car or a house or a yacht.

Short term investment makes sense when the market is bullish - it's likely to crash, possibly below your entry price, so it's better to take a profit while you can, instead of having an unrealized loss. But when the market is bearish, like it is right now, it's better to plan for a long term investment, you should buy and wait, without worrying about the price, for the next bull market. Short term trading in bear market is more risky, because the market often goes sideways, there's a lot of bull and bear traps.

Debunking CWS is like debunking flat-earthers. Anyone can do it with little effort, but there will always be people who will not be convinced, just because they like having "alternative opinion" and go against the grain. Note how CWS tweets have only a few likes - he's just a cult leader with a small cult. It's better not to pay too much attention to him.

Bitcoin Core is written in C++, and it would take many years between writing your "Hello World" and making your first pull request to Bitcoin Core.  But if you want to get involved with the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, you can learn Javascript and fullstack web development and make some useful sites for Bitcoin users. Maybe a portfolio tracker, or a mempool monitoring, or something LN-based. This is a much lower barrier for entry and it can take you less then a year between starting learning Javascript and making full websites alone.

Bitcoin protocol doesn't know anything about any "wallets". From the point of view of the network, only addresses exist, and what we call "wallets" are just tools for managing addresses. There's no premium addresses on the network, so there's no premium wallets. Maybe your friend meant a vanity address? A vanity address is an address with pre-generated text in it, unlike regular addresses which are random-looking. Anyone can get a vanity address, you only need to run a software that generates one, and the longer the text part, the more computing power you need.

The pressure to get merits is caused by desire to join well-paying sig campaigns, which require high rank. And this is a problem, because this forum shouldn't be treated as a job. There's no guarantee that sig campaigns will be a thing in the next year, or that this forum won't vanish suddenly. And after that, what would people who relied on sig campaigns do? There's no other forums that pay for crypto discussions as well as this forum does.

This isn't abuse, it's just an imperfection of the merit system. High rank members get merits for shitposts because they have recognition on this forum, but since they are already high rank, merit becomes purely a vanity stat for them. And despite merit points being a limited resource, it's not like newbies lose something when high ranked members get merited. There's plenty of spare merit in this ecosystem, I personally sit on over 120 sMerit and there's not enough good posts from newbies to give it away.

If none of those coins were lost, the price right now would be lower, but we can't know by how much, because we can't know what would have happened to those coins. Maybe some of them would be sold to hodlers who wouldn't touch them, or maybe some of the owners would still hodl them.

Anyway, massive loss of coins is a thing of the past. Today's coin management solutions are far better than an early days, and people are less careless with their coins, and coins are now less concentrated - in the early days people owned thousands of coins, now people own single coins or a fraction of a coin.

The best thing about the moment when the last coin will be mined is that people would finally stop asking what will happen, when the last coin will be mined.

If you look at Bitcoin's supply chart, most coins will be mined by 2030. So it would be another 110 years for technically all coins mined, but practically the fresh coins will become a tiny part of available supply in the market. We already saw how leavenings affect the price, I expect that to be the case for the next 10-15 years, but with each halvening the effect will be smaller and smaller, so the corresponding cycles will have smaller gap between the top and the bottom. Bitcoin will become less volatile.

Blockchain is just a programming paradigm. If a 10 y.o. never wrote any code, they should learn to program first, which will take a few years, and then they could do something with blockchain, although the question is what? There's nothing cool that you can do with blockchain in real world, unlike fields like AI or game development. The most useful thing for the world a person interested in blockchain can do is contribute to Bitcoin and its ecosystem, but that requires lots and lots of experience and talent.

Past performance alone is not a good argument for anything. Shitcoins and ponzi schemes also have amazing ROI, until they collapse. A better argument is that Bitcoin's fundamentals have not changed, so this bear market is just a period of speculative cooling off. There are no good reasons to think that Bitcoin is in bear market because something is wrong with it.


Buying random "crypto" is a good way to lose money. Altcoins are losing their value in the long run. They are crated to generate hype, get money from investors and market manipulation, and then the devs move on to a new flashy project with the same formula.

You are missing one point - in most countries the Bitcoin ecosystem is such a tiny part of the national GDP, that it's many times smaller than the margin of error of measuring it. So countries that ban Bitcoin don't really feel these negative effects.

Most of the countries that banned Bitcoin are repressive regimes that don't want their people having any financial freedom, because it could potentially undermine the regime, if Bitcoin would get serious traction there.

Of course we can't stop them from engaging with Bitcoin, but we can distance ourselves from them, instead of embracing them and just turning the latest celeb who dabbled in Bitcoin into the latest "Bitcoin Jesus". Especially after the many cases of it immediately backfiring, like with Elon Musk.