For those who had a balance in Btc do you know if they also received their balance via PayPal as btc or was it converted to fiat? Also really surprised that they paid out 100% value!

When the same soundbyte hits multiple outlets it always feels like a warning larger hands are doing the opposite in the background. Originally the narrative was that bitcoin was environmentally unfriendly. Once Blackrock settled in to setting up their ETF it suddenly became environmentally friendly. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a last ditch effort to catalyze that prehalving correction people are expecting to scoop up cheaper coin.

You're playing with fire once you start touching leverage, loans, or emergency funds. If you can make the payments or think you're in a good enough position to avoid an emergency over the next year and a half then yeah probability is on your side to ride the bull. But a lot of people have done what you're thinking and have been burned before. Think out the risk/reward of your personal situation before proceeding. God speed lol

Ok ty. This makes sense. Someone was telling me otherwise which made me second guess.

Thanks for the response. I understand that. My question is in regards to how consensus is made on a program change. Is it by nodes or people?

Using your example, Larry wants to change the 21M cap with a hard fork. If he has 51% of nodes and upgrades the program on these nodes, what's to prevent it from happening? I heard that forks were resistant to centralization because this is not how it works and wanted clarity on what unit is being counted in the 51%.

Curious because the conversation on dual pricing has usually been around non-KYC and KYC which I've never subscribed to. Institution (frozen) vs public (liquid) pricing divide is something I can absolutely see and actually does make me wonder if in this scenario KYC/nonKYC origins would have as much weight in this world.

Sort of jarring to see a real world 5 dollar wrench attack but should be a good wake up call on what to expect with the rise in price.

Border wallet is made for this. It's a pattern to a key that will indicate your seed words. Humans remember images way better. Worth looking into.

This. For most people the first thing that excites people for bitcoin is seeing the "gainz" which increases their interest. From there you can foster their curiosity to have them ask you questions to get them deeper down the rabbit hole. Without the initial intrinsic motivation people usually feel lectured to. Seeing is believing.

I honestly think it's a smart stepping stone. Getting to the center of an adoption curve takes time. Offering an existing financial model the mainstream are comfortable with and having these banks onboard newbies to familiarize them with digital currency is good. It's then MUCH easier to have that population converted to self custody. Onboarding a new concept from scratch is really difficult and expensive en masse. I remember when people were freaking out about getting into a stranger's car for Uber and they were in billion in debt for years waiting for the culture conversion to click.

I agree Hal might have been too old school, but I wouldn't put it past Michael to use this as the trojan horse for market conditioning.

I don't mind the extra steps and using that as a way to gain user diversity is actually quite nice thinking! But the main hurdle is the arbitrary limits placed by the payment methods on category type spending (crypto) so getting BTC or CBDC is still considered the same.

I feel like meetups are brought up a lot as a solution which I'd love to do, but I've never had any success with finding anything. I feel like it used to be a thing before but now everyone is looking to buy (especially as we approach the halving). It may also just be my country is not great for meetups.

Thank you for the links Darth. I'll certainly be deep diving into your other guides later as well and following your CACHE protocol for existing KYC coin. I think that settles my concerns for method 1.

I don't plan on selling back to fiat, but regarding the post I am having difficulty dealing with the bank-imposed bottlenecks to convert to bitcoin for what you call my HODL stash regarding method 2. Do you have any suggestions on how to convert more quickly without having accounts frozen?