this is a decentralized world and we are in a semi decentralized forum. nobody wants KYC whether they are developers or they are regular users. and it will never happen either because this forum is not supposed to act as the authority who decides what project is allowed and what isn't.

then KYC is not the solution. educating investors is the solution.
besides being a "scam" project is not just about running away, it is mostly about being a shitcoin in my books. 100% of the ICO fundraising tokens are scam without an exception but unfortunately people only see those that pulled an obvious scam and ran away! otherwise none of them did anything apart from creating the token and taking the money.

whenever there is a very high risk of getting scammed or buying something that was acquired illegally, such as it is in this case with your "gift cards" that might have been bought with stolen money or be stolen themselves, people are not so willing to do any trades so you will always be limited to certain options with bad rates and that's only if you are lucky.

somebody has a man crush

this is kind of an obvious statement though!
all this drama is for short term and any rise or fall that Libra may or may not cause is not going to last that long. in my view saying Libra has any effects on bitcoin is like saying PayPal has effects on bitcoin! they are both centralized company created digital money and these things are the main reason why [decentralized] bitcoin was created in first place!

i am torn between your title that is inviting people to make random guesses in any time frame they want, and your own vague but obvious statement about price being higher and your signature that is contradicting all that
now i'm not sure if you are trolling...

i believe you can although i have never tried it.
the obvious way is to just check and trust the version message they send you to decide based on their service flags as it was mentioned above. but another way would be to simply send a header request to try and get a certain old block at a low height. if they can't give it to you then they don't have it and that means you are connected to a pruned node.

people who are in bitcoin are two categories, those who are in it for the profit, those who are in it for the freedom. (you can be in both groups too). but those who are in it for the freedom don't give a shit about bans and altcopycatcoins that are being created out of bitcoin no matter if it is the government who does it, a newbie who creates a shitcoin or big names who create a shitcoin. you can look at the history of bitcoin with all the forkcoins that mutated out of it and all failed to get anybody interested in them.

there is a big ass Marketplace subsection dedicated to exactly what you are asking here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=5.0
users selling anything for bitcoin there. from digital goods to physical goods that need shipping and this is a global forum so you can find people from nearly all around the world here. and as others mentioned be careful and use escrow. it is also a good idea to read the sticky topics in each board, they always contain useful information.

no bitcoin is valuable because it is useful. the utilities it is providing and the way it is providing them (decentralized and secure) is giving it the high value and is the reason why it keeps on growing.

it is so much more valuable than others because others are pretty terrible projects. there has been not that many decent projects and unfortunately the top altcoins are all crappy coins that are either heavily centralized and get pumped and dumped or are manipulated bubbles that are about to burst. in such a diseased altcoin market no good coin can thrive which is why they are going to be far behind.

these service flags don't necessarily mean different nodes. they can be the same node that offer different services. for example a NodeBloom is the same full node that accepts bloom filters. technically you can disable it and reject bloom filters and still be the same full node.

as for SPV clients, there is no way to distinguish them to be able to count them and then say what percentage of the users are running SPV clients. that would require all nodes to cooperatively build a database of addresses they check with them and then count them which is obviously impossible not to mention the privacy issues.

you gotta read between the lines. the lines are saying "bitcoin, thin air, libra,..." but between the lines is saying "we are afraid if every company started printing their own money instead of using the money we print then soon enough US dollar is going to start becoming weaker and weaker and even cause the collapse of it".

otherwise every one knows that bitcoin is not out of thin air. every kid knows that the drug trades and all the illegal activities are done using the good old US dollar.

this is best if you turn it into your cold storage otherwise just encrypting the USB is not really giving you much of a security in my opinion. and to do that you need to disconnect your network inside the installed OS so that it can never connect to the internet.
you might also want to disable some extra stuff including guest login,...

as for the choice of OS i personally dislike anything that is not popular (i haven't heard of) and since i am barely familiar with Linux i prefer sticking to the popular ones because it is always easier to fix a problem with them since they also have the biggest communities.
in this case an alternative to AntiX could be different flavors of Ubuntu. for example the most similar one would be XUbuntu which is using the same DE called Xfce so it is similarly light and can be used on older computers while it has all the features that come with Ubuntu.

cloud services can never be an option and here is the problem, when you store your private keys on a cloud server you need to encrypt it first. and we are talking about a strong encryption which means you now have to create a backup of that strong (long and random with symbols,...) password so we are back at square one of you looking for a way to store something!
not to mention you now have to also create a backup of the login details of that cloud service somewhere. you can't just click save password in your browser or write it in a text file stored on your hard disk. and this password has to be equally strong.
and finally you should think about the risk of them closing your account for whatever reason. you will have no control over that.

that is what happens to all the centralized cryptocurrencies. that is why we always laugh at centralized altcoins. you take a technology that is designed and used properly by bitcoin in a decentralized manner and then create a centralized system on top of it, then you are bound to be laughed at.


expert thieves always hide their tracks well whether they are stealing a cryptocurrency or robbing a bank physically or electronically. about $200 billion money is stolen online every year and it has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies!

that is correct, those coins with revealed public keys are at a more immediate threat compared to anything that only has revealed a hash of the public key (never used address).

as for the time it takes, i don't think we can predict it, i was just guessing. besides these things don't happen overnight. it slowly is improved. for example first instead of taking a million years to break it, it would take hundreds of thousands of years, then it is improved more to take smaller time,... and eventually reach an efficiency that it could be broken within days. somewhere along this line we simply drop ECDSA and move to a stronger cryptography. that is how cryptography has evolved and replaced with stronger versions over 2 thousand years.

i hope you realize that using brainwallet like that is the worst thing you can do for generating a new private key because brainwallets are known to be insecure because people are rarely capable of creating a truly random "passphrase". so know that if you decided to create a paper wallet with a password there is a very good chance that someone is going to steal your funds pretty easily.

i don't see where bitcoin comes in here! and as long as it doesn't it seems to me more like a new centralized network between banks which is like SWIFT 2.0 and it has nothing exciting about it for us to care about or even mention in a bitcoin related forum.
the only case that would get me excited is if they started using bitcoin itself which won't happen any time soon since it is still pretty small for handling money transfers in the millions and not affect the market price.

some things don't have to be launched for us to know what they really are!
in this case something that has copied the technology that bitcoin introduced but implemented it in a centralized manner, also has a closed source code and on top of that a private blockchain and to top it all it is owned by a company that is known to be the enemy of its user's privacy and abuses their personal information. don't you think their coin is the exact definition of a shitcoin?

can you explain these two concerns a bit more:
- how is this "leader" elected (based on what criteria)?
- and how do you fight Sybil attacks where a malicious entity controls a large number of these identities that can be chosen as "leader" and can accept fake transactions as "confirmable"?

i think most people (who aren't in it just for the money) are weary of seeing lots of new projects all claiming they are the best with new innovations. and you know it takes a lot of time to investigate each of them to see if they are actually telling the truth or was it just an advertisement. and after a while when you checked dozens and got disappointed, you simply give up and don't take anything seriously unless there is something real good going on with that project.

@DdmrDdmr posted some interesting stats and i don't think the percentage of smerits that never get spent is that high.
you are raising a valid point here about circulation of merits in the system though, but i still believe that only caring about the posts and not the person is the approach that i am going to stick to. most of those who are good posters are already spending their merits anyways.

you can't just come up with new terms on your own and expect people to accept them and know them already! not to mention that things you are posting here already have names. for starters what you are calling "shalecoin" is called "provably burnt coins". these coins are burnt by being sent to a burn address and will never be retrieved. if someday EDCSA is broken (which probably won't be in our lifetime) bitcoin will have already been changed to disable claiming of such coins. which means they can not be sold.