Shadfurman

Agree. To be "legal" in the U.S. they want a lot of verification. Have you tried accessing through a VPN? It might only be requiring kyc through U.S. ip addresses. A lot of exchanges won't even let you access them from a U.S. up.

In my opinion monero is the best coin for long term growth atm. It's privacy features and asic resistance give it best in class added value that will likely become a major player soon and it's still pretty cheap.

Everything has risk, a diversified portfolio is less risky. The best way to mitigate risk is education.

The safest investment us probably a stablecoin in a lending investment firm such as bitbond, blockfi, Celsius, cred, nexo, etc. I haven't used any of them yet, I'm filling other investments, but they're next. Cryptos are going to fluctuate a lot. You can HODL and hope they go up or trade the highs and lows, but both of those are risky unless you know what you're doing.

Bitcoin has strayed from Satoshis original vision Bitcoin Cash and bitcoin sv are attempts to refocus on what Satoshi intended. However, Bitcoin was barely more than a proof of concept, a prototype. Satoshi intended for it to evolve and exactly what he wrote in his whitepaper was only what he intended for it to start out as.

I usually use DAI, same concept. Haven't looked into it much, but reportedly it tracks USD with smart contracts so it's decentralized.

The control and power of modern governments comes from central banking monopolies over fiat and sap the wealth out of the economies. It's not an unreadable speculation we'd be really close to a techno-utopia absent that drain on investment. The amount of money wasted is staggering.

It depends on which time frame you're looking at. I don't see any reason to believe it will go lower than this year's previous lows. It's still consolidating from the $20k high and I don't see any reason to think that will change. It just broke out of the down trend and is moving up at a pretty quick rate. I don't think it will break out of the consolidation pattern, but I didn't think it would break $9k, and i was wrong about that.

It's not a great currency yet, it's market cap isn't big enough, and there's a lot of speculation so it's volatile. The advantage is it's an inherently limited supply, no one can inflate its value. That's what makes it different from fiat. Even the Romans inflated gold by diluting it with other metals. The other advantage is that you can have any number of cryptos, where there are only a few precious metals. This increases the amount of competing currencies and increases innovation. This technology is still in its infancy. The technology behind it, blockchain and decentralized ledgers, will become core foundations of technology as important and widespread as the transistor and the internet. We've only begun to see, and can only imagine what it's capable of.

It does take special software to access. It usually refers to websites accessed through Tor. If you search "Tor Project" it should come up. You'll have to install a special browser on your phone or computer to access it. While it makes you much more anonymous, you're never completely anonymous, so be careful. A few years ago the FBI paid some researchers millions of dollars to hack it, reportedly they had full access to all traffic for weeks before a patch was released to fix the hole. I doubt the FBI cares if you're buying small quantities of drugs, still, be careful. There is also a lot of nasty things that will haunt you every time you close your eyes for the rest of your life if you see them. You might be curious, trust me, it's not worth it. The brave browser has TOR built in. I like brave browser because you get paid in BAT tokens a decent amount for viewing ads. It also has one of the best ad and tracking blocker built in. You can get it on desktop and phone. Other darkweb networks are freenet and I2P. I've never got I2P to work, the software is still available, but I don't know if it's still active. Once you connect, they'll take you to a homepage with the popular links and services, from there it shouldn't be hard to find a market. I've never used any darkweb markets so I have no idea which ones are reliable or how to vet them. Good luck, don't do anything stupid. 👍✌

You don't have to buy a whole bitcoin, 1 satoshi is less than a penny. Any one can afford to buy bitcoin. If you want to make money and not just own bitcoin, there are plenty of opportunities to make 100% or more a day, but you have to have the knowledge and skill to catch those opportunities, and even the best traders usually don't make that much on average.

They lend out your crypto and pay you a percentage of the interest. I know about BlockFi Celsius Network CRED NEXO Bitbond These are investments, which means you have to put in money to get interest. The interest is usually around 5-10%, bitbond claims an average return of 13%. You can make more with other investments, the advantage of this is that it's low risk. You can loose money in a stock fund. These operate more like a savings account, but they have higher returns. I think these have higher returns because they don't have the overhead costs of brick and mortar buildings. That's just a guess though.

Why would the price fluctuate at all if it's just going from one wallet to another?

"Free money"? "Struggle to find free money", doesn't sound like it's free then, sounds like you worked for it. There can't be free, even if you don't pay money, you're there's some value exchange.

Most crypto isn't much of an investment. There's nothing backing it. You can make money off it if you're educated and skilled at trading, but that's not an investment. If they want to learn to trade cryptos, ask them to paper trade and prove they know how to make money first. Then ask them to take small position sizes till they have a larger account. There are always new opportunities. It's easy to see in hindsight that if you bought a bunch of bitcoin when it was $3 then you'd be a millionaire. This gives many people FOMO and they feel like they've gotta go find and invest in the next big thing. It's much harder to see into the future and what will be worth more. In 10 years there will be a whole new set of missed opportunities people will be kicking themselves over missing. The only way to catch the opportunities is to know how. Acquiring that knowledge is extremely time consuming and time is (can be) money, which means they'll have to make sacrifices for profit now to benefit from more profit in the future, this is the single largest feature that distinguishes wealthy people from poor people. You can give a poor person a million dollars and they'll probably be poor again in a few years. A rich person can start with nothing and become wealthy again and again and again. It's the grit and delayed gratification, unfortunately largely immutable traits. Worse, there's probably not much you can say or do that you already haven't done. They probably want to get wealthy so they don't have to work, a wealthy person can't stop working no matter how much money they have. How you are and how you're going to be is mostly imbued into your psychology either from genetics or childhood experience. That last 10%ish is worth exercising, and can make a huge difference, but that's also hard work. Maybe show them this thread...?

The US empire is in decline IMO. I think they'll try and regulate crypto to get taxes from it, but I doubt they'll try and block it outright. If they do try and block it, it will be a covert last grasp at maintaining power.

Like any other kind of trending it takes knowledge and skill. There's no free lunch.

It won't go much higher than $9.5k, it had better hurry though or it won't make $9k. I think it's still settling from the $20k, and probably will continue for at least a few months.

The reason for Satoshi to remain anonymous is due to the threat to government power through their near world monopoly on fiat via the US/Petro dollar. It's a radically destabilizing technology. I don't think Wright is Satoshi. I think Satoshi was a small group of which Wright may have been a member, I think it's more likely Satoshi is already dead and that's why he's been so silent.

Google is a crony organization. They got a lot of their initial capital from In-Q-Tel, the investment branch of the CIA. There have been quite a few indicators of them working closely with governments around the world, against the interests of their people. I imagine the pressure to go against crypto content is coming mostly from government. They've been more on the sharing side of most of their technologies aside from the algorithms behind their search, I don't think they're blocking cryptos to give them an advantage in that space.

Trace a line from the top of the $20k peak, touching the top of the last peak, and into the future. Do the same on the bottom. When it gets near the line, convert to another currency, maybe a stablecoin. When it gets back near the lows, convert it back. If it breaks below the bottom line, get out. If it breaks above the other line, double down till it shows signs of trend reversal, then take off half. The moves will probably get smaller and smaller for the next few months, we'll probably see a breakout or break down in the next 4-6ish months. (Not looking at the chart atm, so I'm going from memory.)

I feel comparing PayPal and bitcoin is comparing Apple's and oranges. Bitcoin is a currency, PayPal is a bank. There are upsides to using traditional fintech services, cryptos a new technology and will evolve to close and exceed those gaps.

You're right, but to be fair, since they're paying for posts, it's in everyone's best interests to ask and answer the same questions over and over.

Bitcoin just broke out of a downtrend where it hit a low of $6.4kUSD a week ago. It could still continue the down trend, while its hit higher highs it hasn't confirmed a reversal with higher lows yet. However it has held the support around $8.3k, it probably won't hit $9k again for a while. If it does manage to hit $9k again, it will probably won't break much higher for some time. Where still in the long consolidation from the $20k bubble. It won't run again till it breaks the long consolidation.

Bitcoin is a blockchain on a decentralized ledger. The encryption and structure in the blockchain makes it nearly impossible, even for the wealthiest governments and the smartest people, to create new bitcoin for cheaper than the cost of mining, and even that would be incredibly unfeasible. You can't falsify the blockchain, as your false ledger wouldn't match the thousands of other ledgers and wouldn't be accepted. The only realistic way to make new real bitcoin is to mine it. You can make your own crypto exactly like bitcoin. Sometimes this is called a fork. Litecoin, dogecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc, are all bitcoin forks. If you make your own crypto like bitcoin, it's not worth anything until other people start using it. Value is set by supply and demand. The supply is set by how many are mined, the demand is set by the number of people who buy it. Getting a lot of people to buy anything is difficult and usually expensive. If you're curious about making your own bitcoin-like network, the code is open source. You can download it, compile it, and run it. I'm sure there are tutorials on how to set one up, it would be an invaluable learning experience, but you'd still be left with worthless crypto.