The Fed cutting interest rates by 0.5%, the largest cut since the financial crisis, before the looming recession has even begun, is not a good start. With rates already this low, there is little scope to cut them further. The deficit is at $1.1 trillion and ever growing, and the Fed is already printing money to prop things up with their "definitely-not-QE" overnight repos. Even without coronavirus a recession was probably on the cards. The economy is definitely going to get worse, and there is going to be very little slack like there was 12 years ago to stimulate it once the infection has played out.

I'm also not sure what this is supposed to achieve. Cutting interest rates makes money cheaper to borrow, so stimulates borrowing and investment. But the issue here isn't a lack of investment, though. The issue is a lack of production. Mass quarantines are resulting in supply chains collapsing. They are shutting down production. There are workers who either can't get to work, or have nothing to work on. There is money to be spent, but nothing to spend it on. You are now throwing more money at an already saturated market. All this results in is more inflation.

It's at times like this I am really happy we have bitcoin as a hedge against this mess.

So the insurance will cover you if the exchange's security is sub-par and they end up being hacked.

Since they are insuring the exchange's hot wallets, and not a wallet the customer control, it will offer no cover whatsoever if the exchange chooses to restrict your access to your coins. So if they lock or freeze your account, place any restrictions on it, spring unannounced KYC requirements on you, decide they no longer want to serve your country, decide your activity is "shady", decide they don't like where you deposit your bitcoin from or where you withdraw your bitcoin to, etc., etc., then this insurance provides absolutely no cover whatsoever.

Why place your coins in a wallet of unknown security which is prone to being targeted by attackers, rogue employees, or exit scammed, even if it is covered by insurance, when you can just cut out the middle man altogether and store your coins yourself?

Every development like this moves exchanges and web wallets one step closer to being fiat banks. We shouldn't be encouraging this, we should encouraging users to withdraw their coins from these third party platforms.

It's definitely a scam.

The site has online been online for 26 days, yet they already claim to have over 18 thousands customers. Despite having 18 thousands customers, there is not a single review or even a single mention of them anywhere online, Reddit, Twitter, Medium, etc.

The majority of their site is plagiarized from here: https://cryptopay.me/bitcoin-debit-card/

I created two orders from different browsers on different IP addresses with different details, and they both gave me the same bitcoin address to send coins to.

To other people in your the local community. You obviously aren't having any goods shipped in from elsewhere, but there will still be buyers and sellers locally trading the essentials. There will still be a need to buy food, water, batteries, tools, and so on. If the internet is inaccessible then so is the fiat banking system, and you can't just use a goTenna network to withdraw some cash. Some people might have some cash in hand they can spend, some people might want to barter with other goods and services rather than use money at all, but some people might want to use bitcoin.

Ahh, I misunderstood you then. Your mention of a global pandemic made me think you were referring to a global telecommunications failure. In that case, you are absolutely right. If there is some widespread but local issue affecting your internet access, then technologies such as these are potential solutions to continue using bitcoin.

Obviously the draw back of these systems is that you still need somebody to connect to. goTenna devices have a max range of about 3 to 4 miles over open terrain, and much shorter than that in built up areas. You can see a map of goTenna nodes here: https://imeshyou.gotennamesh.com/. If you live anywhere other than a major city, chances are you are not in range of a node.

Slight correction here. Bitcoin still needs the internet to function. You can use a system like goTenna when you personally don't have internet access, to send your transaction to someone or some device which does have internet access, to broadcast on your behalf. If a global event knocks out the internet, then local networks like this will not be of much use. You could theoretically set up a local network with its own nodes and miners to continue using bitcoin locally, but the difficulty would be so high that you would probably be unable to mine any blocks. Even if you did mine some blocks, when internet access was re-established and your nodes connected back to the main bitcoin blockchain, all your blocks would probably be invalidated by a longer chain from another source.

That's not an accurate comparison. The YoBit campaigns (YoBit and Cryptotalk) were co-ordinated from a centralized platform, upon which users had to create an account. Any payments that were made could be made instantly to their "account balance", without ever having to perform an on-chain or a Lightning Network transaction. It's the exact same underlying idea as trading on a centralized exchange - your trade confirms instantly because nothing ever has to touch the blockchain. All that is updated is the centralized service's internal database. It's fast for your account to be credited, sure, but you still have to perform a normal bitcoin transaction to withdraw the coins, and until you do withdraw them then they aren't yours.

A Lightning network transaction on the other hand can be just as fast with the added bonus of not being reliant on a centralized third party to keep control of your coins.

OP is creating an offline, air-gapped, cold wallet. He will presumably have a watch only wallet on an internet connected device, and use this air-gapped wallet to sign transactions. Although OP should absolutely keep his seed phrase backed up on paper as well, he can't sign transactions from a seed phrase.

OP to answer your question: If you are using a laptop for cold storage, then I would recommend only using it for cold storage. I would never connect it to the internet, and I would even go as far as removing the WiFi card from it so you can't accidentally connect. I would ignore any driver updates - they are irrelevant since you won't be using the laptop for anything other than your cold wallet.

As you say, if you encrypt your Electrum wallet with a strong encryption key, then even if someone steals the laptop they can't access your coins (unless they can guess or brute force your key).

Being a newbie on the forum simply means you are new to the forum. It makes no statement as to your previous experience or how much knowledge you do or not possess about various bitcoin related topics. There are plenty of other resources online you can use to learn about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It is entirely possible to spend months reading the forum and learning without ever posting or without even having an account. I would go so far as to suggest that this is a good thing - if more users did this and spent time reading and learning before posting, the amount of spam would reduce and the quality of discussion would improve.

If the posts are insubstantial and spammy, then report the posts to the moderators to be deleted. Alternatively, you can make your threads self moderated and you can delete the posts yourself. Be aware that indiscriminately deleting any posts which disagree with you or criticize your project will make many users suspect you of trying to silence legitimate issues, which is the usual behavior of scams.

Or, grow thicker skin and ignore them.

OP is an alt of this account: CoinAltBitBitAltCoin

He started this thread complaining about his other account, KarlKanKarl, being banned. He claimed three times he didn't plagiarize, until I provided proof that he did.

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You can use it to appeal your ban, sure. Your appeal will not be successful since you are a plagiarizer. You as a person are banned from using the forum, regardless of whose account you are using. If you post anywhere other than this appeal thread, you will again be banned for ban evasion.

Sure, but it sets the precedent that this kind of behavior is both desirable to the advertiser and permitted by the forum. I suspect we might see other, larger, campaigns start to ask for similar posting requirements.

For a good poster, it might not be a problem, but we know that ~90% of bounty spammers aren't good posters. Most will open threads which have been discussed 100 times before, or are simply legalized plagiarism in the form of stolen content with a link at the bottom.

We also know that bounty spammers don't just see their posts being trashed and accept it. Any thread of theirs which is trashed will simply prompt them to create more so they can still hit their quota.

Totally, and I've actually been meaning to pick one up for a while just to play around with it. I've got no issue plugging a card reader in to my desktop at home, or even carrying one around in my laptop bag. I am not, however, going to carry one around in my pocket for transacting on the move. The whole point of a wallet shaped like a credit card, in my opinion, is that it can be carried around inside your fiat wallet like a credit card. If Satochip incorporated bluetooth, RFID, NFC, or some other secure wireless transmission capabilities, I would almost certainly use one for my day to day crypto spending rather than a mobile wallet or a different hardware wallet.

To be fair, you are both right here. Coinbase are shady as hell. They partnered with Hacking Team who help authoritarian governments and dictators spy on, monitor, and oppress their citizens. They sell customer data to third parties without knowledge or consent. They listed a bunch of trash altcoins because their owners and investors needed somewhere to dump their bags. They froze markets and insider traded during their launch of BCH support. They track where your bitcoins have come from and where they are going, and will shutdown your account if they don't like how you are spending your own money. I don't trust them whatsoever.

On the other hand, the other exchanges which have been suggested are even worse. YoBit list coins which don't even exist and advertise "InvestBox" products which are entirely designed only to steal BTC from their users. YoBit is an outright scam, and should be avoided by everyone.

That's not really a fair comparison. People majorly spend fiat for these things because every company accepts fiat. There are very few companies which will accept bitcoin for a car, a house, bills, etc. I spend bitcoin everywhere I can, and often buy gift cards with bitcoin for places I can't spend it directly.

We can't control anything. The Federal Reserve or other central bank can control it for the benefit of them and the government, not for the benefit of the average person. The only price controlling that the average person sees is the purchasing power of their fiat constantly decline over time.

Unlikely it would be a blockchain. Any government run "crypto" will be entirely centralized as you say. Little point in running a blockchain when you want to keep complete authority and control over the coin.

The Satoship isn't a direct competitor to the OpenDime as it is not designed to be physically handed from one person to another. It is more of a competitor to the "standard" hardware wallets like Ledger or Trezor devices. Although inexpensive and sleek looking, the big downside is that you have to buy and carry around a bulky card reader as well, so it doesn't exactly fit in your wallet as you would expect.

CyberGhost is one of the worst. Also, I'd be interested if you could tell me a single "unique feature" they provide which isn't found elsewhere, as I am not aware of any.

Let's take a look at their Privacy Policy:
"Our ultimate holding company and all its subsidiaries". Uh oh. Who are their ultimate holding company? They are owned by a company called Kape, who were formerly known as CrossRider. This is an advertising company who purposefully infected their own customers with malware and spyware, and hijacked their browsers for tracking and advertising purposes. Even the CEO admits they changed their name to try to hide their history of shady activities. They are the last company in the world I would trust to run a VPN.

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Orbot is good, but it isn't a VPN. It routes all your mobile traffic over the Tor network.

Don't want to take your thread too off topic here, but I agree. There are a lot of great posts regarding general online privacy and security in the Beginner's board, which isn't really the correct place for them. Some get relegated to Off Topic where they aren't seen by anyone other than spammers. Part of bitcoin's appeal is to stop third parties having control of your money. It is logical that we should also help people to stop third parties have control of their data.

I completely agree. Completing KYC on exchanges is one thing, but completing it on casinos is something more. Gambling is still viewed in many cultures as somewhat taboo, and even in cultures it is widely accepted, many people wouldn't want their gambling behaviors linked to their real name and details. KYC for gambling seems completely counter intuitive. I also don't think it would particularly solve the issues raised here, for the points I've made above.

This is a very important point. Even if you think the platform itself is reputable and trustworthy (a common argument we see regarding KYC at large exchanges such as Coinbase or Binance, even though I would argue that isn't true), how can you possibly trust every single employee of these exchanges or the third parties they outsource their KYC processes to? You have absolutely no idea who is handling your documents after you send them off

That's good that you have kept an eye on your credit report and haven't seen anything suspicious in 2 years. The police wouldn't do anything immediately, correct, but if you are later the victim of identity theft and have pre-emptively filed a police report it makes it much easier to prove that the malicious activity wasn't you.

Asks if he can do it, is universally told it is a bad idea and will only lead to spam, ignores all the advice and does it anyway.