When you throw away all the context - PPP, median wages, costs of living, rent prices, transportation and so on, your list just reflects the nominal GDP of countries. It doesn't even answer the question of "which country is the best to immigrate to as an unskilled worker to earn 1 BTC". The best way to get 1 BTC is to get a lot of fiat first, and how to do that is something that everyone has to figure out themselves, because everyone is in a different country and has different starting conditions.

I seriously doubt that altcoins steal potential investors from Bitcoin. Altcoins are ultra-high risk investments that promise very fast returns. Bitcoin promises nothing, it has no marketing teams, no official promises at all, it's just an open source project focused on improving what it already does. Altcoins and Bitcoin are like penny stocks and S&P500. They attract different types of investors.

If someone sells a lot of BTC by filling the current buy orders, this can crash the price if there's not a lot of depth. For example, if there's only a few buy orders for buying 1 BTC at $30k, a few for 1 BTC at $29k, and so on, then fulfilling those orders by selling thousands of coins would bring the price to very low levels instantly. But if the market has enough depth - if there are orders for buying thousands of coins at the price slightly below the market, then dumping a lot of coins will only drop the price by fractions of percent.

But another thing to consider is that some orders might be fake and they will get removed when the price will start moving (spoofing). And price changes trigger placement of new orders, became traders and their bots react very quickly. Even a small sell could turn into a panic and big crash.

Also, large transactions often happen outside of public markets, aka OTC trading, so they might not influence the market at all.

And lastly, even the news or blockchain activity can influence the price sometimes.

Crypto isn't really an asset, its value doesn't come from some uses, it only comes from speculative trading. So it's better described as an investment game, similar to HYIPs, which are generally viewed as scams.

The rule of thumb should be that if a coin has no real users and only investors, then it's not an asset, only a speculative vehicle.

By cybersecurity people generally mean security for application developers. Things like avoiding SQL injection and other common attacks. As a user, you don't need to know that. You only need to know how to keep yourself safe from malware and phishing/social engineering/scams, how to avoid unsafe Bitcoin wallet setups, like brainwallets.

Jameson Lopp's articles cover almost everything that a beginner needs to know

IMO for people who use a correct cold storage setup or hardware wallet, the accidental loss of seeds/passwords/extension words is a bigger risk than someone carrying out a sophisticated multi-stage attack against them. Do we even have any documented cases of airgap-jumping malware that targets Bitcoin wallets? Yet the stories of people losing their seed words that were written on a piece of paper are quite common.

Is it surprising? A lot of stuff is more popular than crypto. Crypto is an unorthodox investment for a good reason - it doesn't yield any results. You only profit from crypto because its price experiences a market bubble, not because it attracts so many users that the value grows organically. That's why cryptos crash, while successful tech companies don't - the tech companies actually have value.

I don't agree that they invade people's privacy. People agree with the terms and conditions, which include monitoring their accounts and reporting to authorities if needed. If they object to that, they can just not use that service and use paper money instead. CBDC will come with a contract agreement when someone creates an account, just like with banks.

Invasion of privacy is when someone is forcefully spying on you against your will.

The energy required to generate a vanity address is in the same order of magnitude as using air conditioner or electric heater for a few hours.

No crypto activity, not even Bitcoin mining, is a significant contributor to global warming. Bitcoin network might consume a lot of electricity, but it's still a small fraction of global electricity, and electricity itself is a small fraction of global greenhouse emissions.

I don't like this pattern, my pessimism tells me that it's another one of those "Bart Simpson" patterns when the price instantly crashes after a long period of failing to break the same level of resistance. And there would be nothing strange in falling to $26k and trading sideways for weeks or months again, because there's still a lot of time before the halvening, and even after the halvening the bull run kicks in after some time.

XRP is a shitcoin, just like all other altcoins. They are developed by a small team of people who only care about profit, and there's no incentive for them to actually create anything, because stupid people invest in their scam anyway. It doesn't matter what metric an altcoin can show today, be it trading volume or market share - in 10-15 years that coin will be dead and forgotten, and its developers will enjoy retirement in their multi-million mansions.

Seems like micro-currencies are created to make the local economy more resilient and to reinforce the regional identity. Bitcoin, being a volatile and global currency uncontrolled by anyone, wouldn't suit these needs. A small local community would be at the mercy of global speculators who often decide to dump Bitcoin when they feel like it can't grow fast at the moment, and they would be powerless to stop it. But in case of their local currency, they can control it and maintain its value.

The whole point of joint investments is to surpass an entry barrier that no single partner can surpass alone. One person is not rich enough to start a business or buy a property, but 4 partners together have enough funds to do so.

But it makes no sense to pool Bitcoin investments. You can buy any amount of BTC you want, even $1. There's no upsides and only downsides to this.

Hypothetically speaking, you can monetize almost anything. So it's possible to make your passion work for you, but how hard or easy it is to achieve this depends on what your passion is. If your passion is programming, you won't have a problem finding a high-paying job. But if you passion is playing video games, you'll have less options - becoming a videogame streamer, bloggger, journalist, pro gamer, etc. The demand for those experts is far lower than the number of gamers.

Is there anything fundamentally important about going below 50, as opposed to slightly above 50 values? Because on this chart there's a lot of times when the index was close to 50, and it didn't result in bull markets.

Volatility is periodic, but just like with the price, there's no clear patterns that could allow predicting the next movements with high confidence.

Also, this chart clearly shows the effects of halvening and its bull market. The whole period of 2020-2021 - the time of bull market, had high volatility, because there was a lot of price movements, both upwards and downwards. And the bear market had periods of stagnation, just like the previous bear markets.

So if the price and volatility will increase in the near future, it wouldn't be because the value dropped below 50, but because the halvening is coming soon.

The upside is that is that if others invest in what you already own, your investment goes up and you have an unrealized gain. But of course convincing your own grandma to buy BTC won't make you richer, but convincing tens or hundreds of thousands of rich investors will do the trick. That's why we from time to time see CEOs, billionaires, big investors and other wealthy individuals promote Bitcoin - they already bought it and want others to pump their investment.

If an ETF will get approved sometime close to the halvening, it might become a source of media hype that will help to fuel the bull run (that would happen with or without it). In the previous cycle we had "institutional adoption hype", with Microstrategy leading the way, Tesla following and later a few other companies making statements about adopting Bitcoin, that seem to never materialize.

But I think the relationship between the media hype and bull run is not clear. Is the hype causing the bull run or the bull run creates a need to explain it, so positive news get amplified?

I don't see were this conclusion comes from. The price is formed by supply and demand. If the demand will become extremely low, Bitcoin could be dumped by selling even a million BTC or less. And those long term holders will be holding empty bags. This is of course an extreme scenario that I brought up only for illustrative purposes.

But you should always remember about the demand, instead of looking only at supply. Supply is not known perfectly, because we don't know what Bitcoin holders plan to do, but at least we can get some info from on-chain activity. But demand is completely unknown to us.

First of all, the QR code itself can be replaced without hacking. For example, if it's a sticker, someone can put their own sticker on top of the original one. If it's a photo posted on social media, someone can edit it in Photoshop to put their address. You get the idea.

But on software level, this task is not as trivial as replacing a clipboard, but still could be achieved, at least theoretically. The QR-code scanner app could be exploited to replace Bitcoin adresses with hacker's address, if it has such a sophisticated vulnerability.

Those people don't fall for ponzi schemes. It's very easy to spot a ponzi scheme if you have basic financial education. You see a promise of unrealistically high returns with regular payouts, you see that a company doesn't have a solid business model - the only conclusion is that they are paying out from the funds of new investors.

Experienced investors might fall for startup scams, when they get promised a groundbreaking new invention that will take some time to show even the first results, but that's very different from scams like bitconnect.