The SEC isn't protecting anyone. It's extremely hard to build up a case against certain entities that are said to manipulate the market. It's a false sense of security people think the SEC provides. If you lose money, you still have lost money even if the SEC manages to build up a case against the manipulators. They're not an insurance company.

Another thing is that we have plenty enough evidence where the SEC hands out fines but doesn't take any further action. The fines paid are an absolute joke compared to the profits that have been generated, so what incentive is there for people or companies to follow the rules? It's far more profitable to break the rules with how the fines are just a few % of the actual profits generated. 

It does not change the basic principles of its decentralization, but it will make new people a bit too confident in what legacy financial institutions offer as service. They will buy their coins through their bank, store their coins there, borrow, etc. It's very convenient, but also very sad to see happen because that goes against what Bitcoin stands for.

A lot of the people entering crypto do not even have their own wallet. All they know is buy/sell and send coins from one exchange to another and that's it. What has this to do with Bitcoin's decentralization? It will get much worse when actual banks are entering the space and outcompete the current crypto exchanges. It's done quite easily, especially if the bank closes the bank accounts of exchanges. Without bank accounts you can't onboard users.

Looking back, it's actually a good thing that they exist. We now have actual evidence that big blocks don't yield more demand because payments were said to be super duper important. It's somewhat of an experiment, and one that doesn't involve exposing Bitcoin to huge risks by increasing its block size to some crazy mb size.

There is so little demand for payments and cheap transactions that the BSV network is being spammed by a few weather and price fetching apps. +75% of the transactions are coming from those apps. +50% of BCash's transaction volume comes from spam addresses, lol. Just goes to show how desperate they are. So much block space yet no idea what to do with it.

I do thank Roger Ver as CEO of BCash for the free money. It was a nice pay day.

I'm not contradicting myself. PoS was never on Bitcoin's roadmap and will not be forked in ever (the far majority is actually against it to make it even more clear that it's not going to happen). PoS has been on Ethereum's roadmap for years now, and they might actually get it to work out. Different roadmaps, different niches, different ecosystems. It's just how things are.

PoW is quite powerful as long as the incentives align and the miners are following the rules just the way they are. In Bitcoin it's more profitable to be a brave miner than to be a rogue one. There is always theoretical risk, but that's with anything in life. Nothing is bullet proof. Bitcoin throughout the years has proven to be on the right track with PoW while PoS networks haven't shown much of what they claimed to be or wanted to achieve.

Can be? They have been for years. I can use my debit card almost anywhere and I don't have to keep an eye on the price constantly to see how much purchasing power I have left for the day. It also doesn't cost me anything per transaction.

Crypto just sucks as payment method in most areas, and the few areas crypto is actually better than conventional payment methods, are not significant enough to make the price of Bitcoin do anything. In order for crypto to challenge convenional payment methods, crypto needs to be exponentially better to make people finally switch. Crypto right now is exponentially worse.

Crypto however is great for peer to peer value movements over the internet, there is a lot of room for growth because the PayPal's of this world suck balls in that area.

I'm not too keen on Liquid myself. It's not Bitcoin and doesn't do anything to improve Bitcoin's transaction throughput. Less centralization should be the aim, not more.

From the Liquid site. 

It is a broad term, but that's something no regulator wants to explain in-depth. It's much easier to prosecute people like this because they do not know what they are being accused of exactly, but they do know that they are in deep troubles. I think that most people will not dig deeper themselves but just accept whatever they are subjected to. 

It shouldn't come as a surprise anymore that whenever there is something shady going on, Huobi's name always pops up very high on the list. Huobi and OKEx were also the exchanges where BSV pumped hard on most likely fake volume, all to create liquidity to sell into. No shortage of shady activity.

Such proposals are kinda pointless to discuss because they will never be forked in. Neither would I want them to be forked in.

People keep complaining about low transaction throughput, high fees, but we have years worth of evidence that people just want Bitcoin to work as it does. We don't see major transaction volume increases in the altcoin side of the industry despite their fast and cheap transactions. If people really cared about that, the transaction volumes of altcoins would grow exponentially, but they don't.

Be happy with what you have. We have one shot with Bitcoin so let's not turn Bitcoin into a gimmick coin. Altcoins are those gimmick coins.

I'm pretty certain that even the most hardcore OG's are trading Bitcoin back and forth in order to accumulate more Bitcoin in the long run. How can they not? Bitcoin's market is so repetitive that it is a wasted opportunity to not do something with the boom and bust cycles. You know it does those crazy bull runs, and you know it does those crazy bear markets.

1BTC=1BTC is kinda irrelevant at this point. Every asset in the world falls under the umbrella of the US Dollar, so people will use that currency to benchmark Bitcoin against.

It gets the job done in scenarios where regular internet isn't readily available, but it's definitely not safer than transacting regularly.

In the end, it all comes down to security tradeoffs when you want to get something done alternatively. Lightning Network is the same. You don't enjoy the top notch security of the main network, but you get the convenience of being able to send Bitcoin instantly and near free. As long as the amounts concerned are low, the security tradeoffs don't come even close to the convenience Lightning provides you.

Nowadays it's impossible to randomly connect to a smartphone without having to manually approve the incoming connection request. I remember back when I had a Samsung D500 I randomly connected to people's phones just for fun.  I'm glad things are different on that front now.

This. I find it so stupid that people keep looking for a cheaper exchange and that while they aren't even high volume traders. Who cares if you pay a penny or two more in fees by using Binance? In return for the two pennies more you get to use an exchange that's reliable, has high liquidity, and won't likely perform an exit scam.

Also, people are always complaining about poor support and whatnot, well, most exchanges (which are usually crap already) with low or no fees offer horrible customer support service. I once saw someone complain on Twitter posting a screenshot where half of what the support wrote (after a month!) to the dude was in broken English.  

Pay shit get shit.

Most will, but there are always those who cry afterwards because they didn't pay attention. I remember the same happening with Bittrex and BTG. People cried that Bittrex was unclear and didn't offer enough time while they were straight forward right off the bat. I do agree that more time is always a good thing, but people should keep an eye on the exchange they store their coins on.

If you don't keep an eye on the exchange that holds your funds, you are begging for something like this to happen. I'm not going so far to say that you deserve to lose your funds, but it's close to that. When I trade on an exchange and have to keep my funds in a position, I always check their Twitter and other social media pages. Nothing will catch me by surprise.

Unfortunately, there will always be that sucker who ends up making a deposit to never get it back.

I honestly can't even refer to it as an exchange. I have seen hobbyists launch an exchange that looks much better in every possible way. OP was way better off paying people a tiny amount to just ask what their opinion is on the "exchange" before going full public with it. First impression is very important and it seems that OP made a horrible mistake here.

Another thing is that launching several platforms at the same time when you can't even get one platform to function right, isn't the right path forward.

I had the same feeling, but I have seen their adds before I got involved in Bitcoin back in early 2013. It was like; are you a pro trader? Can you beat the market? Sign up now and get x$$ bonus.

I'm all for a competitive market because it helps pushing the fees down and force improvement or otherwise risk becoming obsolete as service. I'm however more of a purist myself in the sense that if you don't actually spend Bitcoin, you aren't spending Bitcoin. With these cards the illusion is created that you are spending Bitcoin, but you are not.

Not saying there is no demand for these services (otherwise they wouldn't pop up like mushrooms after a raindy day), but I'll stick to my fiat debit card where volatility isn't going to influence purchasing decisions because you expect the price to pump or dump soon.

You are right on that one. At this point none of the reputable exchanges offers such features at all. I honestly don't even think it makes sense for them to invest time and money in adding such features, because most traders looking for automated trades with certain pre-set parameters have their own piece of software custom coded.

I'm pretty sure that you will be able to find someone to get something like that custom coded, but when you haven't got an understanding of coding, how will you know that there isn't a backdoor in the code? You have to let someone else verify the code just in case. Too many pieces of scum around on the net ready to steal money from innocent people.

The more money citizens have, the more financial freedom they have, and the more incentive they have to actually start circumventing taxation legally where possible. The rich isn't rich because they are getting their asses taxed off, but because they know how to legally game the system governments set up.

In the end, people shouldn't just blame the government for everything. If you really want something to happen, you can do it. If you by default think that you won't get anywhere because the government will make life difficulty for you, you lost right there. You can only blame yourself for thinking like that and the fact that you aren't getting anywhere.

Governments are not your friend, but they don't have to be in order to be successful. Most people however make life so difficult for themselves that they stay poor for ever.

People don't need to know everything. We need tools such as hardware wallets making it easy for people to safely transact without exposing their private key somehow.

In the end, it's impossible to not make people fall for scams as even scams become more refined and look less scammy. What helps to curb down on scams is to not chase yield left and right when you have to send someone else your money. If there isn't a viable trustless way to make money, there will be huge risk to anything you do.

From being scammed by banksters in the legacy system to being scammed by someone sitting at home waiting for you to bite. Same outcome.

It will never be over.

People in the BSV camp are so delusional that they will never accept that CSW isn't Satoshi. They will come up with a multitude of excuses/reasons why he is the real Satoshi. On top of that, even if people don't believe he is Satoshi, they have all the incentive in the world to pretend to the outside world to believe it because they are balls deep invested.

I find the BSV pump quite funny though, mainly so with how it forces BCash to pump as well due to the difference in price and hashrate shrinking further and further. Roger Ver, CEO of BCash, must have sweaty balls.

PoS is not a cure. It adds so many more problems that I don't see much viability in the concept. Another thing is that most people only care about PoS because it allows them to earn passive income. They do not care about anything else as long as they see that yield. Admittedly, I like the idea of passive income as well, but I'm glad that Bitcoin isn't following that route.

If Ether ends up transitioning to PoS and there is some decent incentive for me to stake, I might seriously look into it, but purely from a profiteering perspective. I'll explore any possible trustless way to get more satoshis in return.

I'm pretty certain that the majority of the people and businesses will abide by such rules, but as always, there is a minority that simply doesn't care. The fact that the majority follows the rules is already a major win for any country. If the non-followers of the regulations such as unregulated exchanges grow out too large, they become a target eventually. No way they can keep running for ever.

Look at what's happening with Binance. It's slowly but surely turning into a compliant exchange. I'm pretty confident that within two years they will have a huge list of countries they do not provide services to, simply because their aggressive we-are-everywhere marketing doesn't work anymore due to their size and increasing regulatory pressure.

Binance made a killing when they started, and they knew exactly that it wouldn't last for ever. People however are shocked.