I don't disagree with anything you said. Yes, it's confusing and there's no shortage of scammers trying to make it more confusing in order to bamboozle people.

My humble advice is to ignore "crypto". Adopt, at least for now, the philosophy that, "it's either Bitcoin, or shit coin." That'll simplify things immensely for those just getting started, and is true for at least 99.9% of other coins out there (100% if you want my honest opinion).

Maybe, in the distant future, when/if you decide to dive down the rabbit hole and really get comfortable how Bitcoin functions and what gives it value, then you'll be in a better position to judge other coins. More likely, you won't bother because you won't need to.

But, mark my words, nothing is going to replace Bitcoin. Some other coins might manage to fulfill some esoteric fringe use cases that Bitcoin doesn't, and maybe one those use cases will be beneficial to you. If so, awesome. But they're not going to be able to replace Bitcoin.

Layer 2 protocols are tools that operate on top of the (admittedly slow and variable) Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning Network (LN) is currently the most prominent and allows secure transactions that complete in a few seconds with extremely small fees. LN addresses the "it's too slow/unpredictable" argument against Bitcoin.

There are many other Layer 2 protocols running on top of Bitcoin in various stages of development and production addressing different issues and use cases. But, you don't need to know about any of them, honestly. You don't need to pick the winner (there will be many winners doing different things). When any of them catch on and go mainstream, then that will drive more demand for Bitcoin to help power that protocol.

That's layer 1. Read up on layer 2 options. Lightning Network is the best current example, but there are others and will be more. That's where most of the innovation is happening now. The media never talks about it because it's necessarily more technical and they think their readers/viewers are all idiots, so why bother.

No, no, no! Ted Stephens got them all up to speed with his famous "Dump Trucks and Tubes" educational lecture. Now they're all experts.

But these people are not obese. They're already starving to death.

Nutrition screenings conducted at shelters and health centres in the north found that 15.6 per cent – or 1 in 6 children under 2 years of age – are acutely malnourished. Of these, almost 3 per cent suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment.

https://www.who.int/news/item/19-02-2024-children-s-lives-threatened-by-rising-malnutrition-in-the-gaza-strip

And that's from nearly three weeks ago.

trickle down authoritarianism

Probably not a great band name, but certainly a good album name.

Now I understand where ChatGPT hallucinations come from.

🤷‍♂️ I'm sure they have their reasons. Who am I to judge? As I said, confidence is 0.003% 😁