Just pick up a dictionary, choose out a couple (>4) random words, and you're good to go. Easy to remember and quite secure. Secure passwords don't have to be hard 
Once you have that, get a password manager, don't reuse passwords and use 2FA where possible.

Not hard and you've just increased your security by a massive amount. 

Protonmail is great, I've been using it for a while now and can not say anything bad about it. Can't wait for them to finally release their calendar service soon!

It is interesting that they aren't selling their BTC. They must have enough income from other payments to pay their expenses. Maybe they just don't get that much BTC payments? It is a rather risky business move though. Oh well, it seems to have paid off 

I'm curious if they are planning on accepting other cryptos in the future..

Scarcity in itself doesn't create value though. You can have as little supply as you want, but if there is no demand, there won't be any value.

I'd argue that the thing that gives Bitcoin value is its brand name, its first mover advantage. Everyone has heard of Bitcoin, but almost no one has heard of, say, Ethereum or any other altcoin.

Compare Bitcoin to the thousands of shitcoins that are also scarce and have limited supply, but are worth (almost) nothing because they have no brand name. It's not that they are technically worse than Bitcoin, some may even be better than Bitcoin with some cool features. Yet they aren't more valuable than it. Simply because Bitcoin was the first.

If you want to protect your coins, just use a hardware wallet. Way easier and waaay more secure than an antivirus :p An antivirus isn't going to protect you from proper malware anyway.
Yes, they aren't that cheap (not expensive either nowadays) but they are absolutely worth it considering you could lose your whole stack otherwise.

You're giving the impression here that people will be safe after installing some software, you'll have to do more than that if you want to be safe unfortunately  
As you mentioned, common sense is probably the most important. A hardware wallet won't help you either if you just send coins to a scammer.

There is no way.

If there was, everyone would be doing it.

The easiest and probably best way is to do what everybody does. Get a job, learn a skill, and work hard every day.

Don't invest in a risky asset like crypto looking for profit, you won't find it easily. Only invest in crypto with money you don't care about and can afford to lose.
Don't try to trade, if you have no experience you will only lose your hard earned money.

Anyone/anything that promises you big profits, should be a red flag in your head. There is no such thing as easy profits.

Edward Snowden doesn't have anything to do with the CIA/NSA anymore. If anything they are enemies now, and they have been for years.
 
I personally don't see any reason for these agencies to have created Bitcoin, there's no motivation for them, they don't benefit of it in any way.
*puts on tinfoil hat* Or that's what we normies think anyway...

I'll do the napkin math for you.

Every day 144 blocks are mined, every block rewards the miner 12.5 + 0.1555 BTC. So every day 1822,392 BTC (= $16,4 million) is given to miners (on average). If you assume for every BTC a miner mines he pays 0.5 BTC in electricity (not sure how accurate this is, just estimating) than that would mean $8,2 million spent on electricity daily. If we assume an electricity cost of $0.06/kWh that comes down to 273.3 136.6 million kWh daily. If we consider 300,000 txs per day we get roughly 910 455 kWh per tx. Which is what the average US household consumes per month 15 days . So that's even worse than what the original post said.


Again this is really rough napkin math, if you want more accurate estimations, go to the link I put in the OP, it is way more accurate :p

EDIT: Thanks Mike Mayor for correcting my math  

It is 2019, there are climate protests nearly every day all around the world. Meanwhile bitcoin is consuming more energy than a small country

In my opinion the bitcoin network needs to take responsibility and change so that it has a smaller footprint, it just isn't responsible to burn such a large amount of energy for such little utility. I honestly felt a little ashamed when I read that for a single transaction Bitcoin uses the amount of energy that could power an US home for 22 days! ^[1] This number will only be going up as the price rises.

Yes, I know this energy is securing the network, which is of course very important.
But shouldn't we try to find a way to minimize this energy consumption. Shouldn't we be looking for alternative methods? Maybe even something like Proof of Stake? There has to be a better way.

Or do you think that electricity consumption is not bad in itself, just the way it is made. eg. If all of bitcoin was powered by solar, it would be fine.


[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

It's not because Bitcoin has always lead altcoins in the past that it can not be overtaken in the future. There is always a possibility that an altcoin with a unique feature (eg. smart contract, or anonymous txs) gains more adoption because of it's real life use than Bitcoin and overtakes it. Or this may even happen when a state-backed crypto is released and receives forced adoption because of the government.

Same goes for security, there is a (probably very small) chance that a bug is discovered in the bitcoin client which causes the whole network to fail. Or maybe the chinese government decides to buy tons of ASICs and 51% attack the network. These situations are not probable but they definitely are possible.
Nothing is invincible, not even Bitcoin

Exactly. Rule #1 of crypto has always been: "don't invest more than you can afford to lose". Crypto is a massively risky investment, profit is just as guaranteed as losses are. Don't think that crypto will give you free profits, because you WILL be dissapointed.

Don't overinvest otherwise you will lose sleep, you will be looking at the charts every day, you will be stressed, and most importantly you will make bad decisions based on emotions/stress and lose money because of it.

Price manipulation happens in both directions, bitcoin has been manipulated to pump many times in history too.
It's rather naive to think of manipulation as the bad guy that is the only reason crypto isn't mooning 24/7. Manipulation is both pumps and dumps that will cause other traders to have to take losses due to unnatural price movement.

That it is not true, almost all exchanges that do fiat <-> BTC also allow fiat <-> other crypto, without having to first exchange to BTC. Same argument holds for ICOs, many ICOs used Ethereum as a platform and currency, so you don't have to exchange to BTC at all. And also for gambling there are platforms that allow you to gamble with other coins than BTC (eg: Etheroll).
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency but that does not make it 'the one'. Nobody knows which cryptocurrency will be succesfull, if any.. If somebody did know, he'd be quite a rich man 

That's not how it works though. You can not predict the future based on passed data. Inductive reasoning doesn't always work. Technologies have inherent limitations, saying crypto will overcome challenges because it was able to do so in the past is simply false. That's like saying the sun will keep burning forever because it has always done so in the past, but that is not true, one day the sun will stop burning.

There's a good chance that crypto will overcome its problems and I believe that it will, but there is no way to know that and anyone claiming otherwise without showing proof is lying.

Thats the thing about trading though, you can't really learn it from reading books (except for some TA basics), you have to learn from experience. One way to get experience without suffering losses is just trading without any money, write down every trade you would make but don't actually do them, then after a while you can see and evaluate what your result would have been. Or you can also just start with a small amount, that'll feel more realistic and you won't have to worry about losses.

And then when you feel you're experienced enough you can start trading real money 

Almost all exchange tokens are just a way for exchanges to make more profit. They try to promote a token by giving it's users discounts for holding it while they actually hold the majority of tokens in their own wallets. After the token has gotten some traction they can start pumping it more and slowly selling their own bags while the users are buying them all because they get a small discount on fees. Inherently the tokens have no use so IMO there is no reason for them to exist except to make money for the exchange owners.

I think if you really want to make money trading crypto you have to always keep on eye on the charts. Simple because these are such volatile (and often manipulated) markets. There can be 2 days of low volume trading with barely any price movement. And then all of a sudden some big player comes in and makes the whole market pump or dump 10% within 5 minutes. If you were not looking at the charts (or even asleep) during such a moment the losses could be catastrophic. This is also why stop-losses are so important in crypto.

This is absolutely not a given. Crypto currencies still have many many challenges to overcome before they can challenge fiat currencies. Crypto is still in its infancy and is still very much an experiment.

The biggest problem that has yet to be solved IMO is scaling. At this moment there is no blockchain that can handle even 1/10th the transactions that VISA is doing. The technology just isn't there yet. And there is no certainty that it will ever get there. Maybe cryptocurrencies are at its core just flawed and outright can not be scaled up due to some limitation. If that is the case than it will never replace fiat currencies.

Then there is also the government. Governments will do everything in their power to stop their own currency from losing dominance, if they lose their money they lose their power, which is the last thing they want.

I guess this is the result of the current bear market we are in. People that are only interested in BTC for the profit are losing interest because we haven't 10Xed in the past month, they came here for profit, lost their patience and are now leaving. In the background however things have never been more positive, there is great news coming from every place in cryptocurrency and adoption is increasing, but that isn't something people notice, which is why they lose interest. If/when we return to a bullish market it will look like people are interested again and the space is alive again, but in reality it has never been dead.

This itself probably won't have a big impact as others have said. I definitely won't waste my BTC on coffee  

However it is a very important signal that Bitcoin and crypto are being legitimised and accepted in the real world. A couple years ago, Bitcoin was a small corner of the internet that no government wanted to talk about and that they didn't want to acknowledge. This news is part of the bigger picture that crypto as actually being accepted and acknowledged as a real thing, which is very exciting IMO. Bitcoin's future is getting brighter with every piece of news

At least Bitcoin is volatile in 2 ways, up and down  Most of these countries have a very high inflation national currency so holding that doesn't make any sense. They flee to bitcoin because it is easy to buy, transact and use even though it is still volatile. A currency that can go up or down is more preferable than a currency that can only go down, so it makes sense that people are buying bitcoin there. I'm glad cryptocurrency can finally be used for some real life purpose and can actually help people be safe from their governments.