It's the same nonsense that we see with all the 24 hour news networks. Maybe they are justified during an election or some huge natural disaster, but most of the time there simply isn't enough interesting news to fill 24 hours. So what do they do? Spin any old trash in to headline news with false details and fake outrage. Anyone else remember the amount of coverage Obama got when he wore a tan colored suit (gasp!).

Most crypto "news" sites are the same. There simply isn't enough news or new happenings with bitcoin to justify multiple articles a day. But they need their clicks and they need their ad revenue. So they churn out complete trash like this article, and don't even bother to do the bare minimum amont of fact checking. Gotta keep expenses low regardless if it means posting trash.

Just another poor quality article from cointelegraph. I suppose that's one way to do your journalism - post any old nonsense and wait for people to correct you with the actual facts. Cunningham's Law in action.

Burger King are not accepting bitcoin.

Takeaway.com is a fast food delivery company, similar to Uber Eats. They accept bitcoin via Bitpay, and have done for years. They also happen to do home deliveries for Burger King in Germany. Therefore, if you order Burger King for home delivery online in Germany, you can pay with bitcoin via takeaway.com via Bitpay. Bitcoin won't be accepted in Burger King restaurants because obviously you do not place orders in physical restaurants via takeaway.com

Leverage and arbitrage are two very different things.

Arbitrage trading can certainly be profitable, but doing it manually is next to impossible. You are more likely to lose money than make any profit. There are whole networks of bots with various fiat and cryptocurrencies already loaded on to various exchanges, primed to take advantage of any arbitrage opportunities within seconds of them appearing. You can see this whenever there is a sudden large buy or sell order on a single exchange which creates a price difference between it and other exchanges. Immediately the bots kick in and the gap in price is closed within a minute or two. By the time you have even noticed the gap, it's probably too late.

To effectively arbitrage, not only do you need to have a bot doing it for you, you need to have significant starting capital. It isn't sufficient to make a trade on one exchange, withdraw your funds to another exchange, and make a second trade. The price differential will have disappeared by the time your withdrawal confirms. You need to have both bitcoin and another fiat or cryptocurrency (or preferably 3 or 4 different currencies) already loaded on to a number of exchanges. Storing so much money on exchanges obviously exposes you to a large risk in and of itself.

So sure, you can make gains with arbitrage, but it isn't risk free and you'll need bots to do it for you. If you set up the bot wrong, one wrong trade could wipe out not only your profits, but also your capital.

If anyone offers to use arbitrage to make money for you if you send them an initial "investment", be aware it is almost certainly a scam.

They are risking the money they have left if they do nothing. Their currency is devaluing constantly. It is currently around 60 pesos to the dollar. A month ago it was 45 pesos to the dollar. A couple of years ago it was 10 pesos to the dollar. If I were Argentinian, I'd be holding as little of my net worth in pesos as possible.

Two problems with this. How many average Argentinians do you think have an easy on-ramp in to the stock market, and how many people have enough money to buy on the stock market? These are people living in poverty. They are looking to stop their money devaluing so they can use it to buy food, water, pay bills, etc. The government have just made it harder for people to trade pesos for dollars, which is historically what they did to protect themselves against rampant inflation.. The stock market isn't a viable alternative and can't be spent on day to day needs. Bitcoin can.

There are an awful lot of newbies who plagiarize, and there are very few of them who then go on to become an asset to the forum. It is very much the exception, not the rule. Not banning someone for breaking the rules in case they then go on to do something beneficial in the future would mean that no one gets punished for anything ever. If you have become an asset to the forum, and a minor infraction from years ago is found, then some leniency seems fair, but if we offer that leniency to every brand new account then the forum would rapidly deteriorate in to an unusable spamfest.

In terms of the OP, I tend to agree. Reporting spam from over a week old is usually a waste of time since the spammers will already have been paid for it and no one is reading it anyway. It's reasonable to report more major things like linking to malware or plagiarism though. I think the place we seem to be at regarding temporary bans and signature bans if an established and beneficial user is found to have made some historical plagiarism is probably the right balance.

Coinbase Pro ranks high on my list of "services I wouldn't trust with a single Satoshi", alongside Bitfinex.

They are kind of like Facebook - they put on a good front, don't get me wrong, and they have plenty of users, but scratch the surface and it's clear they care only about profits, and will abuse their customers to no end to achieve that. They launched support for a bunch of altcoins that their shareholders were bag holding and dumped said trash on their userbase. They sold customers' data to third parties without their knowledge or consent, and offered no compensation when customers complained. They paired up with a company which manufacturers and sells surveillance software and equipment, including the ability to hack in to victims' microphones and cameras without their knowledge. Your coins may be slightly safer in Coinbase than they would be in Bitfinex, but that's hardly saying much. Your data, on the other hand, is likely in the hands of 20 different people before your account even gets verified on Coinbase.

I wouldn't touch Coinbase with seven proxies a 10 foot pole.

Because to lose my funds via Electrum I would need to download a fake wallet, forget to verify it, install and use it without doing any due diligence. I'm not that stupid. To lose my funds via a hardware wallet I would need to stop using a passphrase, again use some fake software or maybe let someone else gain physical access to my device, give away my PIN or seed, or something similar. I'm not that stupid.

To lose my funds via a biometric wallet, an attacker only needs a photo of my face or anything I've touched, from a hand rail to a door handle to a bottle of juice. Unless you plan on wearing gloves and a full face covering 24/7, biometrics are far more easily hackable.

So while Firefox are blocking tracking cookies and cryptominers, Google are blocking ad blockers and anti-tracking add ons from Chrome.

It absolutely boggles my mind that Chrome has something like 70% of market share. Every new development makes it worse for users and more of a money maker for Google, yet people still keep using it. It tracks everything you do and reports back to Google constantly to build a complete profile of you. Your data is sold to any number of unknown third parties. They are literally blocking ad blockers. Being fast was its only real selling point, except it now eats RAM like there's no tomorrow and isn't any faster than Firefox. Chrome is pretty much spyware at this point. Firefox is superior by pretty much every metric.

Most clued up users already have add ons installed to block both cryptominers and tracking cookies, but good on Firefox to make these changes default.

A solid review of the shadiness, borderline scaminess, that is iFinex and Bitfinex. I think your final score of 3.3 is way too high, though.

I would have expanded the section about Tether a little. Not only did they loan themselves Tether to bail themselves out, but around the same time they also quietly changed the Tether Terms and Conditions from "Backed up 1-to-1 with USD" to "Backed up 1-to-1 with USD and other assets" to "Some of it is backed up by anything we want, including other cryptocurrencies and the interest on the loan we paid to ourselves". Essentially, they printed Tether out of thin air, loaned it to themselves, sold it for bitcoin to bail themselves out, then claimed the Tether is backed up by their future loan repayments to themselves. What a joke.

This behavior, followed by their IEO, leads to only one conclusion: They are insolvent and have been for some time. I would have given them a lower score, plus added the advice to withdraw any funds stored on their platforms and sell your Tether holdings as soon as possible.

This is next to pointless.

There are a lot of faucets which are just scams - they earn money from you completing captchas, but when you try to withdraw they don't let you. Furthermore, to be earning 2000 sats a day from faucets I'm guessing you must be using 10 or more different faucets? When you do withdraw, you are going to get hit with 10x withdrawal fees, and then you are going to have to pay 10 transaction fees to consolidate in to one UTXO. You will lose the majority of your earnings to fees. Not to mention you are wasting hours of your life and paying more in electricity fees for earning a handful of cents.

If you already have a job, can you do overtime? A single hour of overtime, even in a minimum wage job, will earn you more than a month of collecting faucets. If not, then you should offer a service. Check out sites like https://www.reddit.com/r/Jobs4Bitcoins/ or https://earn.com/.

They spring unannounced KYC on you for no reason other than you deposited your own money to their wallet (note wallet, not even an exchange).

They ask for more KYC than is necessary for literally any reason, and far more than exchanges ask for to buy tens of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin.

They appoint themselves judge, jury and executioner by having Terms of Service which let them shutdown your account and keep all your coins for any reason they decide is "misconduct", but give no definition as to what that is.

They do all this in the hope that some users will just give up and surrender their funds.

And yet you say your faith has been restored?

No one is worried about customers committing fraud via FreeWallet. The concern is that FreeWallet will commit fraud by refusing to let you withdraw your own coins.

As I said before, I would quickly learn how to store your own coins, before FreeWallet decide once again that for some unknown reason you aren't allowed access to your own money.

I would expect a dip, and maybe even a big one, but not a full on ~90% crash.

If Satoshi's coins reactivated, then I think a lot of newbies would start panicking about an upcoming dump and sell their coins. It would become a self fulfilling prophecy. I think quite a lot of smart players might sell up too, but only because they could then buy back in cheaper. I think there would be too many people waiting to buy the dip or buy back in after selling to see a full on crash.

At the end of the day, it's not like a million new bitcoins suddenly materialized out of nothing and raised the circulating max to 22 million (assuming Satoshi has a million coins, he may have far less). These bitcoins were always included in the 21 million limit. There would be no inflation. The protocol and technology hasn't changed, the fundamentals remain the same. I for one would be buying the dip.

There's another interesting factor to consider - assuming Satoshi's coins were moved by Satoshi himself and not hacked, would the return of Satoshi cause a price rally?

They weren't printing USD. What they were printing were what they called bond coins and bond notes, which were officially pegged 1-to-1 with USD, but in reality traded for far less than this. These bond notes later went on to become part of their new currency which was launched earlier this year when the government declared all foreign currencies are no longer legal tender.

These bond notes were initially pegged at 1-to-1, but actually traded around 3 or 4-to-1. Since becoming part of Zimbabwe's new official currency, they are supposed to trade at 2.5-to-1 with USD, but currently go for around 11-to-1, and continue to rapidly devalue.

Another great use case for bitcoin, but you'll pay a premium trying to buy it in Zimbabwe. Still, within a month or two you would have lost far more value from holding a rapidly devaluing fiat.

OP, if this is accurate, I would suggest you immediately withdraw everything you own from FreeWallet before they decide your KYC isn't good enough or something else you do is "suspicious" (like moving your own money - seriously, this is worse than a fiat bank).

If you have never held coins in your own wallet before, make sure you spend a little time to learn how to set it up properly, safely, and securely. 6.2 BTC is far more than I would be comfortable keeping in a software wallet - you should definitely be looking at hardware or airgapped wallets if you haven't already.

Both Ledger and Trezor have instructions to follow to verify that the device you received is completely genuine, from opening the device and inspecting the hardware, to verifying it against their servers. Also, by way of updating to the latest firmware, you would overwrite any malicious code on the device. The chance of a supply chain attack is negligible provided you follow the recommended set up steps.

In terms of a bad actor, all software you are using should be open source. Unfortunately, not all hardware wallet firmware is open source, however you can independently verify that the wallet is returning the correct responses and there is no side channel attack present.

If you still don't fancy using a hardware wallet, then I would suggest an airgapped wallet. An old laptop seems to be what most people use, but if you don't have one, you can buy something for far less than the $1,800 you are considering. You can buy a Raspberry Pi for less than 50 bucks. You could even multisig between a couple of Raspberry Pis, or between a Raspberry Pi and a Trezor.

The implication is then that as more countries devolve in to monetary chaos, bitcoin usage doesn't just become advantageous but pretty much necessary. It begins with countries like Zimbabwe and Argentina which have rapidly devaluing currencies, but all fiat currencies are, by nature, devaluing. "Strong" currencies such as USD, EUR, GBP and so forth are still facing a horrendous few years: impending recession, out of control and ever growing debts and deficits, increasing inflation, chronically low interest rates, trade wars and new tariffs, etc.

People are feeling squeezed. The same paycheck doesn't go as far anymore. Rents going up. Food prices going up. Insurance going up. Fiat value going down. Bitcoin looks ever more attractive.

/r/cryptocurrency is a confused place. Any post about bitcoin gets shit on with half truths and misunderstandings, and anyone pointing out these inaccuracies gets downvoted. But then at the same time, they are quite happy to shill and circle jerk over trash coins with no adoption and use case. They seem to be able to identify some coins are trash - any post about Tron or Verge, for example, gets rightly derided for being a scam - but then they seem to have a blind spot and will upvote other trash like Iota or ICX.

Oh god, I'd forgotten all about the flippening chat. Seems hilarious to look back on. I can't see it happening with any current altcoin unless something awful happened to BTC.

Freewallet is a scam. You can read more in this thread: Freewallet.org is a fraudster who cheated me out of 15.2BTC

You can also review their trust page here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=trust;u=1177176

If the amount locked up by them was small, I would have advised against undergoing the KYC procedures at all, which is exactly what they want you to do so they can keep your money. They arbitrarily spring unannounced KYC on anyone who makes a large deposit, forcing you to hand over either your documents or your coins to them. Their ToS even contains borderline illegal terms which say they can keep all your funds if they think you have committed any "misconduct".

Be aware that you have now handed over all the information required to steal your identity to a bunch of unethical internet strangers. I would, at a minimum, be keeping a very close eye on your credit rating from now on.

In the future, never trust someone else to hold your coins for you. Use a software wallet like Electrum or a hardware wallet and be in control of your coins.

Pretty much this.

Look at the top 10 coins. You could make an argument for Ethereum having a use case, but at the moment that use is pretty much to host scam ICOs. Monero is the only other coin on there that actually has a real world use. XRP is a centralized bankers' coin. Litecoin is pointless. Tether and EOS are literal scams. Binance coin reduces trading fees on Binance, but is pointless as a coin (Why not just charge lower trading fees? Why do they need their own coin to do so? Purely for profit.) BCH and BSV are so hilariously awful that they are barely even worth mentioning. And that's just the top 10. Quality rapidly drops off as you move down the list, and it isn't exactly high to begin with.

During the bull run at the end of 2017, it was pretty difficult not to make money in crypto. You could "invest" in literally any piece of trash, and see gains of 20% overnight. Go and have a look at some of the heavily shilled coins at the time. Here are some I can remember off the top of my head:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bounty0x/
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dragonchain/
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/poet/
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/waltonchain/
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/deepbrain-chain/

They could pretty much all have the same graph. Huge spike at the end of 2017/start of 2018, followed by a rapid fall to nothing. I have no doubt that during the next big bitcoin bullrun, there will be a bunch of newbies entering the space who will once again throw their money away on trash projects, but for the time being, the majority of people who have been involved for a while are starting to realize that altcoins are largely trash.