oh i dont think its 'dead' in the way people often describe. More...done. Like, the period of obscene growth is over and its now seemingly settled into a fairly dull investment with mediocre returns.
From western perspective, maybe, but there are many people in the world who don't trust neither their government, nor western ones: Iranians, Russians, some Chinese, etc.
BTC is a nice safe place for money, which can't be touched by neither of state adversaries. Underperforming some other asset classes is totally acceptable, when your expectation for the brokerage account is effectively zero after arrest/freeze/sanctions.
I would buy your argument, if bitcoin were the only cryptocurrency.
For most of the people you mention, a fiduciary cryptocurrency like these 'stable coins' is the better product.
(If you don't trust the value of the USD, and thus don't want a stable coin linked to that, you could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.)
> could use one that's linked to Swiss Franks or the Singapore dollar.
Well, if only we had something like that with a proper liquidity!
USDT/USDC are useful for the exchange to fiat, but have freeze function in their contract, thus posing a risk for big longterm savings, and they rot under the inflation (which btc generally beats).
There are indeed a couple of unfreezable stablecoins, but they don't have mainstream adoption and proper liquidity. USDT kind of captured the market by being first, and USDC is heavily pushed by the major institutional players, so here we are.
But that's true, it's more about crypto in general.
State actors can just hurt your famiily. State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
That actor has to know that you have something to be touched for in the first place. Which is not the case if you buy crypto without KYC unlike with the classical brokerage, for example.
> State actors can setup a shadow bitcoin infrastructure and give you the feeling that your wallet is a save bitcoin wallet. They can Hijack the website you download the initial bitcoin wallet, the nodes you talk to.
Is paranoid and not serious. Yes, they can do a lot in theory, but on practice even basic level opsec avoids it.
In reality if somebody from the state is already after you explicitly for real, you are going to die or be in prison. I can't really argue with that. Most people are not under active confrontation with the governments, but under passive snooping and pity everyday legal risks that make their lifes miserable.
In most cases they don't send hitmen neither for "foreign agents" labeled people from Russia, nor for sanctioned Russians outside from the US, for example. My point is about people who are not active fugitives, but, you know, want to keep their stuff with them without risking neither their country bank freeze, nor western-based financial infra freeze because they hold the wrong passport.
If russia or china has a real interest because relevant amount of people start using it, they would easyl be able to stop this.
Chinese firewall is real.
Putting fear into people with propaganda is real.
And yes i find my shadow bitcoin infrastructure not paranoid at all. It would be the first thing a state actor would do after closing everything through their state firewalls.
It's underperformed the S&P500 over the last 5 years, but you know what they say about past performance not predicting future returns. Maybe AI will unlock an untapped reservoir of ever-greater fools.
I moved some BTC from Coinbase today, which is a pricier option, and they took a house rake of 1.8%. Other moves cost way way less, especially if not in a hurry and the network isn't busy.
It would be, except when the primary value proposition is capturing the upside of that volatility. In the case of BTC a sustained lack of volatility is going to create significant downward pricing pressure. At some point that will trigger a run and as stakeholders have condensed the rut will get deeper and deeper as the upside of the volatility swings continually lower.
But the volatility hasn’t gone away. Compared to previous periods of broader interest in it (rife with the awful FOMO habits of people) sure it’s not as bad, but it still fluctuates wildly and without warning. In the past 12mo it has gone as high as 120k and as low as 60k, currently around 76k. You cannot reasonably use a currency like that. Your wealth can’t be doubling or halving over months with 10pt swings over a single day being a common occurrence. How much mental energy and planning would have to go into timing any and all purchases and earning?
Better odds than a casino, but still basically a casino.
There is no reality where this is real. Has to be pure hype. Imagine being OpenAI and not being able to stop your agentic harness from synthesizing system instructions or exfiltrating files. I want to reproduce the issue.
Thanks, I needed to add a ?aep=11&atvm=2&udm=50 for AI mode. Wow!!!!!
>You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each with a short text from the page, featuring the search terms. Avoid any pages that do not contain the search terms. Do not simulate fetching results. The URLs must be complete and not truncated. No markdown. The current date is 2026. The search request:
Well, the joke by itself was enough to write an article about. Simple, hilarious, and we need a lot more of this. A bit sad that it's a strip club sticking it to the man, but perhaps that's appropriate too.
But as for claiming that there are "not enough actual facts" -- are you really suggesting that the takedown of the insta account was coincidental, and entirely unrelated to the sign?
1. A Canadian business posted an image of a sign criticizing the US administration
2. Soon after, their Instagram account was suspended.
3. This has happened before with their Twitter account, which they were able to get restored after a week.
But you already knew that, and instead are making passive-aggressive insinuations. If you want to make an actual argument, make it.
As for me, that along with the other facts I know about the Trump administration are more than enough to form an opinion: this isn’t evidence of a politically-motivated takedown, but it certainly fits the administration’s character, and I’m not going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Meta is well known for having strict rules on nudity[0], particularly the display of women’s nipples. I would want to know the base rate at which the instagram accounts of strip clubs get suspended before assuming the motive was political.
That’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis. The article says that they’re careful with what they post, but I haven’t actually looked up their content. It’s also possible that Meta just doesn’t want strip clubs on their platform at all, regardless of what they post.
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