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> I'm thinking something like draw regularly, in order to build a war chest to "defend" the cryptocurrency against too violent crashes

Or just print fake money and call it "USD" on your exchange.

Judging by various crypto forums, the method is typically to build an echo chamber and keep telling each other they're all going to be billionaires, while burying the opinions of anyone who dares to disagree.

Another method is to get lucky in a bull market and pat themselves on the back for being so talented.

> They are not building tools for the government to round up "undesirables"

The tools they're building and the data they're collecting could certainly be used for that purpose.

> Storing your coins on coinbase (or any other exchange) is pretty much always a bad idea. If you don't own the private keys, you don't own the coins.

The problem here for most of the people currently FOMOing in, is that there are no "good ideas" as far as coin storage goes. Storing on shady exchanges is risky, but due to lack of knowledge / technical skill, many/most would also be at risk of losing their coins one way or another if they held the keys themselves.

What this tells us, is that this technology isn't ready for mainstream use.

> there's a lot of people putting their faith in opaque corporations

Bitfinex and Coinbase, for example.

I almost expected to see a "Buy my book / attend my seminar to learn more!" link at the bottom of this post.

I can't imagine very many of the people FOMOing in in recent months could understand the whitepaper even if they tried to read it.

The extent of their knowledge is usually something along the lines of "my friend/grandson/etc who fixed my computer once told me it would make me rich".

I sure hope you're right. It's far beyond time for the "changing the world!" and "Don't be evil" style feel-good propaganda of Silicon Valley to be pulled back to reveal the reality of what it has been used as cover for.

What could be more powerful than a US president who also happens to have direct control of a large portion of the world's communications and information consumption?

> Exactly, an elected position would come with even more publicity, actual responsibilities and the possibility of being held accountable for his actions.

Having full control of the platform a large portion of the population depends on for news and communication could help him evade much of that.

I wasn't really aiming that at you so much as at the constantly changing story about Bitcoin's purpose coming from the Bitcoin community as a whole.

It's hard to argue that something that could be worth +/- 10%+ in the time it takes a transaction to process is a good "store of value", too.

> 2) The people spamming the network stop

That sounds kind of like hoping that people sending spam via e-mail just stop one day.

> What? That doesn't even make any sense. You can sell the bitcoin for USD then pay your taxes.

If that's the logic we're going with, I can pay my taxes with baseball cards and beanie babies too.

After going out to see a movie for the first time in a few years this past weekend, I can't really picture many of the overweight families I saw fully reclined shoveling hamburgers into their faces wanting to get up and "interact" with a movie.

> It allows me to save my money outside of the global financial system, a system I believe is corrupt and manipulated.

You'd have to be incredibly naive or willfully ignorant not to see the same corruption and manipulation happening right before your eyes in cryptocurrency markets.

This same pattern seems to repeat immediately preceding any "big announcement" for pretty much every single coin/token out there. It's obvious that insider trading is rampant across the entire cryptocurrency market.

I hope Coinbase and their employees' activities are properly investigated at some point. I think they'll find a lot of "interesting" activity going back very far, assuming Coinbase hasn't "lost" or modified records to hide those activities by now.

Yes, there's an option to enable blocking. I think it should be the other way around, which was kind of my whole point. That's the only way to encourage site owners to stop designing sites that break when they can't spy on users.

Tracking scripts should be blocked by default, not just delayed. If a user has some strange desire to be watched, give them the option to opt-in to their browser unblocking tracking scripts/domains.

So do many of the Silicon Valley executives who are pushing their privacy invading products on schools. That's why they send their own children to private "tech-free" schools to prevent them from being exposed to the same products that pay their parents' bills.

> They were successful in the EU (the shopping and Android cases are slam dunks in my opinion) but were stymied in the US under the Obama administration (despite FTC staff recommending a case be made) [2].

I wonder why that was.

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

It would be kind of hard to prevent people from posting something about my death on Facebook, unless I figured out a some way to temporarily re-animate myself.

I know a lot of people. Many of those people unfortunately use Facebook. There's a good chance that at least one of them will be posting something about it, regardless of my wishes.

I sometimes worry that, after doing everything I can while living to avoid using Facebook and/or supporting their business model in any way, someone might throw that all away on my behalf if something were to happen to me.

I'd see an announcement of my death on Facebook as an insult, as my death would essentially be creating engagement/ad impressions/clicks for Facebook.

I'm not suggesting Bloomberg is accepting money, but individual writers would be a much softer target.

It's also possible that the writers are invested in Bitcoin themselves.

This seems to be the case with most of the articles about Bitcoin. I suspect there are a number of large holders and exchanges paying PR firms to get stories like this published/upvoted/etc and keep the train going.

Many of the people we're talking about were dumb enough to buy $500k+ homes on "stated income loans", when they had little or no actual income to speak of. While I do think the people who were offering those loans should have been punished both financially and criminally, I don't think the people who were foolish enough to use them to buy homes they couldn't afford should have been rewarded.

People discussing Bitcoin's cons are typically downvoted away by the same people yelling "HODL" and spewing various unhinged, delusional predictions about how a single Bitcoin will eventually be worth more than the US GDP. Because there are so many greater fools buying at ATH then trying to create more of themselves to avoid being the last one off the bus, it's pretty difficult to find an internet forum where it's possible to have an honest discussion of Bitcoin's pros/cons.

I assume you're forgetting the incident where Uber started following users around even when they weren't on a trip?

Also, take note of the fact that I said "outside of the Silicon Valley bubble". Believe it or not, there are other places on earth with companies that employ tech workers.

By pay off mortgages, do you mean essentially giving free houses to people (e.g. rewarding them for making incredibly poor choices and financing homes they can't afford)? Or do you mean pay them off temporarily and have those people pay the government back?

If it's the former, what kind of message would that send to those of us who were responsible enough to avoid getting in over our heads?

Hearing it on a forum mainly full of people who sit behind a desk all day writing advertising and tracking code is particularly amusing.