There's way too many reasons why this dream will remain a dream. Governments and banks will simply not allow it to happen and they have a lot of tools at their disposal to stop widespread adoption. But they don't even do that right now because of another biggest obstacle in Bitcoin adoption - people themselves don't want it. Bitcoin is too complex and too risky for them and offers no big advantages from the point of view of average citizen. They are fine with their bank handling their funds, and they are fine with inflation because either they don't have a lot of money in savings or because they invest their money.

The most realistic adoption that can happen is that there will be simply more places that accept Bitcoin and you would be able to make a large share of your typical spendings with Bitcoin if you choose so.

It would have the same effect as doubling the block size in terms of blockchain capacity and storage requirement for full nodes. And that would be pretty bad because the blockchain is already large enough that people who don't have a lot of storage space on their computers don't run a full node anymore.

Also, Bitcoin confirmations at 10 minute block times are considered to be quit secure, some businesses accept 1 confirmation transactions, typically it's 3 at most. With faster block times the demand for confirmations will rise, and it would take the same time to actually have your transactions finalized, despite them technically being confirmed faster. Ethereum or Litecoin have much faster block times, yet when you send them to exchange the exchange asks for more than 10 confirmations, so it often times take as much time as depositing Bitcoin.

I'm disappointed that almost every other post suggests to just move coins to a new wallet. That's not the solution to what I asked. I specifically asked about a steel plate seed backup, because there could be lots of different situations where you might want to only destroy this specific backup and not moving the coins to a new one.

Imagine that you are traveling abroad and took your steel plate backup with you, and suddenly the situation in the country you are visiting started deteriorating due to war, or coup attempt, or terrorist attack, etc. And there's a lot of security checks all of a sudden and you no longer feel safe carrying your steel plate. But you have another plate in your home country and other backups. So destroying the one you have won't lock you out of your coins. And you can't even securely create a new wallet because you don't have access to an air-gapped PC, only your always-online phone. This is a situation where you'd want to destroy your steel plate.

But even just destroying your physical record of your empty wallet could still be a strong enough reason to want to destroy the seed, so it shouldn't be brushed off by these "just move the coins to a new wallet" replies.

It's not totally useless because it contains your transaction history and you might want it not fall into other's hands. Also there could be situations where it's not an option - you want to destroy just a backup, not the wallet. Imagine you have two backups, one at your current location and another at a remote and safe location. Let's say you are moving from your current location to some new one where you wouldn't keep your steel backup with you because the new place is not safe enough. So you'd want to destroy the backup at your current location, while still relying on the backup at your other safe location.

SegWit and Taproot didn't change much for an average user, and LN is still so far from being "officially" launched that it might as well be ignored. Bitcoin's scalability hasn't changed much from its release, and features for an average person too.


Facebook and Instagram weren't possible in 1996, because Internet speeds couldn't handle even a few pictures, needless to say things like video streaming. And forums back then were rather small things with thousands of users while Facebook has billions. And developing such platforms wasn't possible 30 years ago because web browsers couldn't do a lot of things they do today. So in my view the progress of web technologies is far bigger than the progress of Bitcoin.

This thread sparked a question in my head. Imagine that you are in a situation where you need to dispose of you wallet seed backup, but it is etched on a steel plate - how would you do it? The easiest answer is likely acid, but not everyone has access to it, and depending on the steel plate, it might be even highly resistant to corrosion. Another option is to damage it mechanically - in many of these steel plate products you are supposed to etch the words, so it should be possible to erase them or render unrecognizable. But it's likely hard to do thoroughly and traces of the words could remain.

Any more ideas?

That's waaaaaay too high, I'd be surprised if it even touches $200k. $150k would be a good result for an ATH peak, but it might even be lower at $125k, because there's a pattern that each ATH gets relatively closer to the previous one. There was a $1,300 peak, then $20,000 and then only $69,000  - and here people hoped that Bitcoin would go above $100,000 because going from $20k to $69k is not as big increase as going from $1.3k to $20k.

This has been my fear for a long time - if most of Bitcoin's value come from "buying it to sell later", then sooner or later it will crash very hard until its value mostly will reflect its utility.


Ethereum is far worse than BTC due to its high centralization, and its utility is actually fake, because it just provides crowdfunding and marketplace for more useless tokens.


The difference between crypto and dotcom is that the Internet technology was making constant and fast progress every year, while crypto has been stagnant for a long time. Bitcoin is not too different from Bitcoin of 10 years ago, and altcoins just invent new ways to sell premined tokens with no real use - DeFi, NFT, ICO and so on is essentially the same.

TBH if someone wants to promote something to you, and you know that the only just started, then it's your own responsibility to take everything they tell you with a grain of salt, since it should be obvious that someone who just started is not a good teacher themselves.

And I don't think many people are intentionally trying to get others into crypto as beginners. They probably talk about what they have been busy with to their friends, the friends get interested and ask more questions.

We can't know without knowing the implementation details. Are those CBDCs have architecture similar to decentralized cryptocurrencies, or are they just government-run payment systems that exist on a government-owned server architecture? And what would SWIFT offer - a system where you can make any transaction without censorship, or will SWIFT have to approve every transaction?

Can't even call it a Bitcoin alternative if it has none of the properties of Bitcoin.

If you're going to trade on another platform, you should study the rules of your platform and how they handle such situations. And not only read the official guideline, but also look for discussions of such cases on that platform that happened to other traders, because on practice things could be handle a bit differently from what is publicly stated.

No one can answer your question in general, because platforms can have different rules.

The biggest advantage of gold is that it has thousands of years of history behind it, and we know that unless its supply suddenly becomes overflooded, it won't drop in value much. But Bitcoin's value is not understood by anyone, it goes up and down, and so far the long-term trend has been positive, but it could just as easily reverse. To put it simply, Bitcoin is many times more risky than gold. That's why Bitcoin is not a reliable store of value right now, but rather a high risk investment.

I remember there was a lot of hype about the supposed supercycle in 2020-2021, and then it still player out the good old pattern of a big bull run ending with big crash. So the key word here is that a supercycle "could" become a reality, but the probability of it is unknown. Could be high, could be low.

But my worry is that there's also the probability of the opposite of the supercycle - super bear market that could happen if investors and traders get bored of Bitcoin and move on to something different, something completely unrelated to cryptocurrency. With a lot of money leaving the market and no new investments, there good be a very long depression with the price falling down by 80-90%. Essentially it would mean that majority of the Bitcoin market history was a big long bubble, and the bear markets were just corrections of this long mania phase.

The probability of this doomsday scenario is just as unknown as the probability of a supercycle.

Luck could indeed be a factor, as a person who would merit your post might just not read it or be out of merit, etc. But it affects everyone equally and you can't do anything about it, so you can just not worry about it. Length is also a part of quality. Posts that are just one short sentance rarely get merit because they are rarely qualify as "quality" - they don't provide unique or rare insight. But long posts are not automatically quality posts - there are many-many long garbage posts that are hard to read and are full of useless information.

But quality is not the only factor that determines merit gains. It's easier to get merit by posting what people would like to hear than by posting something that upsets them.

You are quite correct, although NFTs aren't even legal contracts or any contracts, they are just tokens on blockchain that have unique identifiers and that's it. The people behind them told that they give ownership, but ownership is not actually ownership without having any way to enforce it. Bitcoin is self-enforcing, the system doesn't need any outside help, but NFTs are not. You can put a link or even a file on blockchain, but it won't stop anyone from copying it, so it needs the help of actual legal courts, which is the opposite of what Bitcoin has achieved.

As you know, all transactions are public and don't contain any private data like private keys or real world identity. So just knowing about transactions will not cause big problems on its own. And also the phone is supposed to only be accessible to the owner, so if someone else has access - be it physical or through malware, they could do a lot more harm than just finding screenshots of Bitcoin transactions. Just inform you friend to not take screenshots of private keys and seed and he should be fine.

Even if ALL of Bitcoin's electricity consumption was generated by burning coal, that still would have been a tiny share of the global carbon emissions to the point where removing it wouldn't cause any observable difference as it would be within the statistical margin of error. But those who use energy as an argument against Bitcoin don't care about the numbers, they just need something for their accusations, so they say that big energy use is bad.

No it doesn't, there no such thing as scaling on blockchain. The world, or even just small country, or even just a single city with a few million people needs a capacity for many millions of transactions per day. It's impossible to effectively process and store such amounts of data on a home computer, you need a specialized server equipment for that. So any solution that tells to just increase blocksize will inevitably turn into a network of one or a few large servers controlled by an entity that could be blocked or physically raided by law enforcement.

It's extremely messed up to call the police on your own child if that child is not causing any violence and doing something truly bad. I think most parents in this world wouldn't do such thing even if they'd thought that crypto is something illegal.

But this story is another example why you shouldn't tell everyone about your crypto endeavors, even to your family, or maybe especially to your family, because there's lots of ways how it can create tensions in the future.

You can't really learn how to be a high rank forum member (and join a signature campaign, because let's be honest that's what you want). It's eaither something that comes naturally because you are enjoying it, or it does not. If you are forcing yourself to make posts, to chase "quality", then you won't ever be a good forum user. A good forum user is first of all just a Bitcoin enthusiast. If you're only interested in Bitcoin because its price is growing up - that's not enthusiasm.