You assume that all mistakes come from the lack of knowledge or experience. But there's a wide variety of other reasons that can force someone to make a mistake, like being tired, sleep-deprived, distracted, etc. I don't see anything strange about a supposedly experienced a wealthy user making such mistake.

If anything, it shows how dangerous Bitcoin can be, because it allows such things to happen. So this should be a reminder that with Bitcoin you are your own bank, meaning you are responsible for checking your transactions and no one else.

This is just survivorship bias. People who encounter problem write a negative review or share their story on social media, while those who don't have any problems have no reason to voice their opinion. I've been using online banking and credit cards for years and haven't encountered any restrictions not even once. All the people that I know in real life also never encountered anything like that. If bank account freezes were a major problem, I would have likely encountered it by now.

If most people don't run into problems with banks, they have no reasons to look at Bitcoin, especially if you consider just how many trade-offs Bitcoin has.

Can you blame the outsiders for mixing Bitcoin and altcoins and thinking that they are only for speculative trading when this speculative trading is the largest use case for both Bitcoin and altcoins and even inside this community most of the discussions are about the price.


Scams and failures are normal when it comes to new inventions, what is not normal is complete lack of actual use cases years after the tech got introduced. There are not web3 apps that are used because they are good, it's always just a new iteration of crypto tulip bulbs, like Cryptokitties and NFTs.

ETH was introduced 7 years ago, at this point there should have been hundreds of millions of people buying goods and services through smart contracts, putting legal contracts on blockchain, doing decentralized computing and so on - instead it's just a platform for investment scams.

Web3: World-changing tech or just a scam?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist who runs a popular science channel where she not only talks about her field of physics, but also about science and technology in general. She tries to make unbiased summaries with opinions from different sources. I think this video is a good look at crypto from the point of view of an intelligent outsider.

Her own personal opinion is that web3 is "a case of a software enthusiast who lost perspective. An average user wants an app just to work...". But my personal opinion is that crypto devs didn't lose perspective, it's just their users are not he people who will actually use the token, but the investors. Everything is done to just lure investors and dump the premine, that how the devs make profit, they don't need any users at all.

I doubt that government tries to intentionally avoid everything connected to Bitcoin, a much likelier explanation is that they don't know about it and don't care about accidental association. That's even more depressing than the government trying to fight Bitcoin, because it shows how insignificant it is in the grand scheme of things.

I bought an apartment with my profits from the last bull run. But I have been holding for a long time, I don't think such returns are feasible anymore for investors that start with small capital and don't use huge leverage (and remember leverage = gambling).

I don't think that there should be some goals tied to Bitcoin investment, this can be really counterproductive if it makes you miss out on profits to wait for this "goal". Better just make as much money as you can with Bitcoin and then see how you can spend it.

El Salvador is not going to benefit from their Bitcoin holding until they sell their coins. So if during the next bull run they will at some point have two times higher value but fail to take the profit, it will all mean nothing. But if Bukele will do it, it will be a very bad look for him - it would look like he doesn't believe in Bitcoin.

Also, a far more interesting statistic is the number of Bitcoin payments per day in El Salvador, or amount held by individuals. Because that's what adoption is about.

People always find ways to screw up a good idea. With DCA some people advocate to buy during the bull market, like Microstrategy and Bukele did, and now they sit on an investment that still didn't break even. But if they bought earlier, dumped at the top, rebought at the bottom and got ready to dump during next bull run - they would make serious profits. Of course they can't do that publicly, because they need to maintain a reputation of true Bitcoin believers, but you don't have to do that. Your goal should be profit first of all. And buying during bear market and then selling during bull market is a better strategy than the version of DCA that tells to always buy no matter the price.

Bear markets happen when supply expands (holders put their coins for sale) or demand collapses (people with $$ don't put buy orders). It is actually a combination of both factors in different proportions.

Holders moving coins to cold wallets is not changing the supply, because they can send the coins back to an exchange quickly. Even if they will vow to only use DEX, it's still a connected global market and price will change quickly.

Pitchforks are only for those who demand blocksize increase today, especially an unrealistically huge increase.  I think it's pretty much a conensus among everyone that there will be an increase at some point, when storage will be much more affordable. It could be in 10 years or 20 years or even more, but technology will surely progress. But this doesn't cancel the fact that on-chain capacity will always be small, compared to transaction volumes of even a small country.

Looking at the past halvenings, there's no immediate hashrate drop due to miners switching off after becoming unprofitable because of the halvening. This is probably because a lot of miners have high enough profit margins that even after halvening they are making profits. Plus the price growth will help to compensate for halvening.

The problems might start arise when the price will become more stable and there will be no more post-halvening bull runs. If mining will become more saturated and profit margins will become lower, then halvenings could have big effects, although at that point transaction fees might start playing bigger role.

It's just polls, personal opinions, and predictions. There's no hard real world data of blockchain use today in actual economy. It's always just empty talks about the bright future, and this has been going on for years, starting from 2016. 7 years of hype, no results, and billions of dollars lost to scams.

If blockchain was such a great thing, it would have been used already. But it's not.

This problem will start arising in our lifetime, especially if after a few halvening cycles the price growth will start failing to compensate for them.


Blocksize increase will definitely happen sometime in the future, and it might result in higher block rewards because more tx per block = more fees. But would it alone make mining more sustainable? Probably not.


LN is still in beta so people are reluctant to adopt it. And the fees are not painful enough to force people to start looking at LN. 10-15 sat/vB is not that much right now. If the minimum fee will consistently be $5 or more, than LN will start looking more attractive.

LN can justify $50 on chain fees, because they will be like a fee for opening and maintaining a payment card with instant zero fee transactions. If the channel will last for a year or two, that's not a bad deal.

But the worst possible scenario is low Bitcoin adoption with low on-chain activity and as the result low fee rewards in blocks - together with halvenings it would indeed knock a lot of miners out of the game and make the network less protected. Our last line of defense will be treating low confirmation counts as unreliable. If right now 1-3 confs is enough, 10-20 might become the new default requirement.

People have different priorities. Some value money above personal achievements, others have the opposite views. A person can be happier as a teacher with low income, instead of being a programmer, because they are doing what they love.

And even if trying to answer your question from a purely economic point of view, it will still vary from person to person. Sure, it can be highly efficient to invest the money while self-studying to become an IT specialist and earning more than people with a Ph. D., but think about long-term sustainability. IT work is not for everyone, many people burn out after a few years and don't want to work in that field anymore.

Analogiies with tumble dryers, Christmas lights, banking industry and all the other uses are bad, because you can't imagine modern society without them, but you can easily imagine it without Bitcoin, since most people are not using it anyway.


The estimation only changed by 10%, hardly a groundbreaking reevaluation. What has always been the case though is the fact that Bitcoin consumed a small part of global electricity, and electricity is a small part of emissions. A small part of a small part is a tiny part. Putting all mining to a halt would have such a small positive impact on environment that it could not be even measured.

My transactions typically have 1 input 2 outputs so 10-20 sat/byte is not a problem for me. However, I have a growing backlog for some consolidation, and with over hundred inputs every sat/vB matters. I really-really want to see 1-2 sat/vB fees at some point in the future, I hope that ship hasn't sailed.

But this ordinals nonsense can go on for years, and then some other nonsense will be invented to keep misusing the block space. We're in a spot when this problem is not big enough to warrant a hard fork, but annoying enough for users to notice.

Spamming transactions can only work if blocks are not full. In that case miners can mine their own useless transactions, because it would not have a missed opportunity cost. Otherwise they would lose some money by not mining the real transactions and hoping that it would drive the fees up and make up for the not mined transactions.

If there's 7000 transactions in a block, and the miner chooses to not mine 6,000 low fee transactions, let's say at 2sat/byte, then the remaining 1000 transactions must increase by 6 times the value of not mined transactions to break even - so every transaction should add 12 sat/byte to their fee. And this will probably not be the case, because rational users will increase their fee only by a few sat/byte above the minimum. Also there's always users who for some reasons overpay on transactions, and they would probably not react to manipulation anyway.

I think miners could try to manioulate the fees by finding weaknesses in fee estimation algorithms in popular wallets and then mining just a few "fake" transactions with very high fee to make the algorithm recommend higher fee to all users.

The closer we are getting to halvening, the higher the chance to see some early bullish movements. And the chance of bearish movements should reduce too, it would be quite strange to see Bitcoin moving to its 16K support when the halvening is half year away. I voted for sideways and think there still many months of sideways ahead, and eventually a bullish breakthrough like in the previous markets. There can also be smaller breakthroughs followed by pullbacks - $32K then $40K after some time and so on.

Asking about your type of all time high is the same as asking for all Bitcoin future and no one has any idea about that. There can be anything between Bitcoin crashing to zero tomorrow and Bitcoin enduring for millions of years. Bitcoin might even outlive the US dollar, which would make this question hard to answer, because currently the USD is the main benchmark for BTC. Or if you want to be pessimistic, consider that every bull market peak can be the ATH, because after that Bitcoin can crash and never fully recover.

Well, scammers in general try to target the most vulnerable people who can't think clearly and recognize a scam. Elderly people, people in dire financial situation, victims of some disaster and so on. Shouldn't really be that surprising that they target the FTX victims.

This is why it's important to report scammers to authorities and demand from politicians and law enforcement stricter crack down on online scams.