It wouldn't be a cult without proselytizing, would it? 
god the spectacular thing about bitcoin is that if it weren't a wildly unstable speculative asset, it would be literally nothing. the speed of the network just isn't sufficient to support its use as actual currency. this guy is calling transaction times of up to 15 minutes "instant transfer."
lol 15 minutes is a fast transaction time on the bitcoin network, you have to pay a fairly hefty fee to get it to clear that fast (last time I had to deal with the network it was like over 20 dollars I think, and that was over a year ago).
(This is for a single-block confirmation; many places require 3 to 6 confirmations, which adds another 20 to 50 minutes, on average, and possibly a lot more than that if the network is unlucky.)
Making awkward chitchat with the barista for 15 mins while the transaction for your coffee completes.
15 years ago, a global banking goldrush ended. Satoshi created bitcoin so the next goldrush would benifit him.
I miss the good ol' days of bitcoin. Back when people weren't wasting gigawatts of power mining this shit inside of warehouses full of vastly overpriced GPUs. All the way back when Bitcoin was widely ridiculed and you'd be called a rube for thinking of it as a sound investment. Back when techbros were begging people to spend it on actual goods and services to legitimize it as a currency.
Most importantly, back when you could use it to buy cool, illegal shit online like LSD. As far as I'm concerned, that was the only worthwhile reason for bitcoin exist at all, and it can't even do that anymore because of how inflated the price is.
somebody once offered me 20 bitcoins in exchange for my username on irc
i turned him down because Bitcoin was worthless
The most I ever had at once was one entire bitcoin. I got it back when it was at $300 and used it to buy weed for the first few times in my life.
It must suck to think about the what-ifs in situations like these, especially yours with 20 entire bitcoins. How early on was that, btw? By worthless, do you mean all the way back when they were worth maybe a few cents to a couple dollars?
Regardless, when you really think about it, it doesn't even matter. Say you took the 20 bitcoins. They would initially just be some kind of novelty to you, and you'd store it on your PC and not think about it for a while. But one day you'd find out your Bitcoins that were worth a couple dollars before are now worth $20 each. Wow, amazing! Better cash out before this bubble bursts. Just got lucky and made a few hundred bucks!
There is just no conceivable scenario where any sane person continues to hold onto them until they're a millionaire.
yeah it's crazy to think about it.. at one point that would've been worth over 100k
at the time it was offered Bitcoin was worth around $.05
I honestly never thought it would be worth more than that
but when i think about it i don't get bothered too much because i imagine i probably would've lost them before they were worth anything substantial since i used to format my computer several times a year without ever backing anything up, and beyond that, if i had them and they were worth $100 or something I likely would've sold them all at that low price and then I'd really be kicking myself
Can't do it anymore because Bitcoin transactions are all public and police can easily trace who's buying what. Use Monero and you can still buy drugs online.
I've never been too concerned about the traceability of bitcoin because I always got it by paying in cash, they wouldn't be able to connect the wallet to my identity.
But also because the police aren't going to launch an investigation into one person buying personal consumption amount of drugs online. Well, not unless they already knew your identity and were already coming after you, but in that case you'd be fucked regardless of which cryptocurrency you used. The traceability is something only dealers and people who buy in bulk need to worry about.
Once you bust one vendor or market, it's pretty easy to take that list of customers and subpoena Coinbase/etc to get some low-hanging fruit. Buying in cash is good but increasingly rare nowadays and expensive. In the current legal climate, traceability is primarily a concern for vendors and markets. Most places will not sell via BTC, or charge you an extra fee because they have to run it through mixers. But who knows how US policy might change in the future, or if better chain analysis products might tempt law enforcement to keep putting in the same amount of effort with many more arrests to show for it. Once it's on chain it's there forever; don't make the mistakes of the early Bitcoiners.
(On a practical level XMR has much smaller transaction fees)
No one uses GPUs to mine Bitcoin specifically; GPU mining was on its last legs in 2012 when FPGA mining started up, and by 2014 it was totally dead because ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits, aka custom mining chips) came onto the scene. The GPUs are for altcoins now.
Source: Was a miner back then; got out in like 2014, after wasting most of my bitcoin buying ASICs that showed up too late to make back what they cost. (But on the bright side, I'd still be an awful smug techbro lib if I'd retired off my bitcoin gains, so in many ways this outcome is better lol)
No one uses GPUs to mine Bitcoin specifically; GPU mining was on its last legs in 2012 when FPGA mining started up, and by 2014 it was totally dead because ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits, aka custom mining chips) came onto the scene. The GPUs are for altcoins now.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Back during the early days of bitcoin, it was really the only major cryptocurrency. There didn't yet exist this kind of incentive to waste an entire small country's worth of energy and resources to mine the cryptocurrencies that exist now.
I never got into it as I was into drugs. A friend of mine did, and spent most of his Bitcoin (that he mined for free on bog standard PCs at his work, because you could do that then) on drugs. He opened an old laptop a few years back and found 2 BTC though, and spent them on a small warehouse in Athens to live in! I can’t begrudge him that in the slightest!
I thought way too long about this reply so I'll post it here too
If I point a gun to your head and tell you to send me all your bitcoin, you will probably do so, and then you will call the police to tell them that I robbed you at gunpoint. The police will then arrest me and make me return the bitcoin to you that I stole. When you call the police after I stole your Bitcoin, are you trusting a centralized authority to decide whether or not the transaction was legitimate? After all, if I check the blockchain, the transaction seems perfectly fine.
Blur and OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplaces, both have measures in place to attempt to stop the sale of stolen NFTs. Should we trust these centralized platforms to decide whether or not a token should be tradable? Should we demand they abolish these theft protections in the name of decentralization?
As long as there exists a state with an authority on violence, Bitcoin being decentralized is a mere technicality. All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. If the state wants to take your Bitcoin to pay for another war, they can do so regardless of what the code says by simply having the police knock on your door.
Do you want to abolish the state altogether? If you think all centralized authority is bad, what are your thoughts on the crypto space getting increasingly centralized? What do you think about Yuga Labs buying up other top NFT collections? Should they be allowed to do this and if no, who should stop them? How does Bitcoin solve any of the problems you outlined and do you really think that if the government hadn't been able to print money, they wouldn't have found another way to bail the banks out?
My only concerns about popular cryptos are whales conquering coins on coins. Technology itself is solid and Satoshi is a god.
Imagine still believing Bitcoin was created by one guy called Satoshi Nakamoto.
