Timothy, I too agree that for the average investor, 99%, we are better off simply holding BTC and ETH for the long haul and let everything develop around it. Having said that, I also believe that an expansion of ideas in the crypto space will do more long term good than bad. Certainly a lot of people will lose money along the way and many systems will go bust, but out of all that a few gems will be discovered and form the foundation for a better and sounder crypto space.

I think that most people putting money into DeFi understand that they're participating in an experiment. This is the way the technology will be developed and refined, in a massive open experiment.

Held ETH once for 24 hours, couldn't sleep. Its not money, it's not a world computer. It totally fell over in the recent DeFi craze. I really don't know what it is. Every time I see the world CRYPTO I cringe tbh. I think there are many whose minds were made up a long time ago about pretenders to bitcoin's throne and and then multitude of 'interesting projects' that seem to arrive by the minute. This whole space is polarised. Hate to say it but RV should really split the channel into Bitcoin & then Crypto. It would save me time wading through s***coin shillers and half-baked blockchain theories. Sorry but maybe I'm just intolerant. BTW I suppose I am a bitcoin maxi but if a better SoV came along I would jump to it in a heartbeat - so far nothing seen and there have been 8000 'interesting projects'

No thumbs down - must be a strange feeling :) I agree - yet conceptually DeFi or the space has potential. The idea that someone mentioned of being able to pay for a coffee using your Google shares to me is a clever way of considering the potential. Same with ETH - I agree, in its present form seems unsafe but to be able to encode money could be interesting - well if I was a government or CB I would be doing everything to get that - you could tax everything and create money with inbuilt inflation. Anyway, I don't want to give them idea. There are pitfalls as well - people will sell their freedom or life for money. I wonder what the value of BTC will be when it is not dollar backed? I am assuming that it will become more and more in demand once the fiat goes to an extreme meaning by then it will be a different context to now. Like how much BTC will someone give for a weeks worth of food? Will it have already established some form of value - otherwise it is a bit arbitrary or will be market driven.

No it's free market capitalism at its finest ;)

it will still exist!

What makes you think there is something every government around the world could agree upon? ;)

For merchant accepting bitcoin as payment look into BTCPay Server or Strike app. Both are using lighting as the underlying tech for it. But bare in mind bitcoin merchant adoption won't happen for years yet, not because of the tech, but because people don't want to spend their bitcoin, even if every merchant accepted it, it won't be used. This is Gresham's Law in full effect.

But Yunier R, there may still be utility in using BTC as an intermediary. For example someone might have a digital wallet full of various tokens, stablecoins, forex or whatever. If the merchant just accepts bitcoin the customer's wallet can do a conversion or swap from any of those to BTC to make payment.