I think the main difference is, you cannot lose anything when you use a Ponzi, apart from the time wasted to use it. You invest none of your own time into the faucet, and they do not promise you huge returns. You invest some electricity for the time you spend to solve the Capthas, but that is about it. These faucet owners use Ad income and some of their own money to fund these faucets.

There are no money coming in from any user, apart from the faucets who implemented some sort of gambling multiplier or a lottery system, where you have to buy something to participate. ^hmmmmm^

Brother, you will have to sell some of your dope and then take that money and buy some bitcoins. You wait until the price then increase with $50 and viola, FREE MONEY. I have been in this world for a long time, and I have never found any free rides. You have to give a little to receive a little. ^smile^

I do not trust any of these f#$% exchanges at the moment. You go there and dump a lot of coins to trade and then you trust them to keep it safe. Most of them are not even audited and the people working there have no background security checks been done to see if they had a criminal record.

We are no talking about banks and high security financial institutions here, in many cases these are just young startups with 10 or 20 people working in a few small offices. ^hmmmm^

I think I will also opt for a deceased Satoshi, but this has to be confirmed. If we know that he or she is dead, we will at least know that nobody would have access to millions of coins and we will also know that they will not lay claim to the ownership of the technology.

A living Satoshi would be a risk to Bitcoin and also be under threat as a central figure head. ^hmmmm^

My observation about this is that the strong liberal and anarchist users have declined over the years and the new generation of Bitcoiners are more speculative in nature and out for some profit on the technology. We have moved from a community with idealistic views on changing the world to a better place for all, to a world where everyone just takes as much as they can from the technology to profit the most.

This is just a natural change during a phase where mainstream adoption are becoming a reality and a more diverse group of people are getting involved with the technology. ^sad^

It's not just the Chinese, is all over the world. The whole Brexit thing is also placing some tension on the Europe banking system and the US banks are dishing out money like no tomorrow to stimulate artificial growth. The whole fiat system is under pressure at the moment, which might be good for Bitcoin. ^smile^ 

This crash were perfectly timed for all the wrong reasons, and I am not saying it was planned, but that it happened at the worst time possible. Would you shut down your service if you reach full capacity? Could it be that their network could not handle the load, and it crashed because of that? I just know a lot of people are going to switch exchanges after this embarrassment. ^hmmmm^

Even if you have the total number of users registered on the exchanges, you would still not know how many of them are active traders, or simply people who signed on to do single trades or just to sell bitcoins acquired from somewhere else. These exchanges have to give us a general idea on how many active users they have on their system, to get a clearer picture. ^smile^

You know what they say, everything that goes up, must go down again. We have seen loads of fiat being pushed into speculation and also some gambling being done from the Chinese to push up the price. At one stage, everything has to go back to normal again, and I think this is what we are seeing now. They have speculated and now they are selling or more people are selling, because the price was high enough to dump a bit. ^sob^

This guy can open a Pandora's box, if he succeeds in patenting this technology. I know the banks will fight him tooth n nails on this, because they already invested millions into Blockchain based technologies or they will have to pay him royalties to use it. This is going to get very dirty in the future. ^smile^

Your last argument about the old timers makes complete sense to me, but hopefully these changes would not be done in a way to compromise the safety of coins stored years ago. < Software should always be backward compatible > I am also of the opinion that block sizes or any other parameter within the protocol should only be changed, if it is very detrimental to it's survival, not just to add small cosmetic changes. ^smile^

Well, if a lot of people are doing loads of small transactions, they might be halted temporarily to proceed, if the blocks are full, but this will have to be a well timed event from a lot of people. The dumping of coins can happen with one single transaction, so block sizes will have no influence on that. ^hmmm^

He will have a tough time in court trying to go up against the other people, who already started patent applications on the technology. They will have to go back and see what part was patented and who was first. The evil side in me wants someone like him to succeed, but I always root for the bad guys in movies. ^smile^ It is either him or the banks. 

Localbitcoin should be anonymous, compared to the other methods to exchange fiat to bitcoin and back. Some of these
users are just paranoid and over protective. You can even have some government agent on the other side of the trade, you will never know. ^hmmmm^

This is something else, you might find interresting http://www.bitbiz.io/threads/newbie-guide-to-trading-on-1broker.810/ - Most trades are done on https://1broker.com/ and it's mostly CFD's on global markets. Hope you find this helpful, I surely did. ^smile^

The world's richest person, Bill Gates is supposed to be a geek, and if that label are being applied to people with knowledge, I would gladly wear that label and earn that kind of money, if that is what a geek is supposed to look like. We throw labels around without even thinking and we hurt other people's feelings. ^hmmmm^

Why would you want to endanger people's lives with this endevour? These people are under constant threat from their own government and they will die, if they go against their dictator's rule. Let's leave them alone to build their nukes in peace. Bitcoin is for the land of the free. ^hmmmm^

Just to make sure, what do you want to mine? Solo mining for Bitcoin are not going to be profitable, if you are going to consider that route. It might be better to mine some other Alt coin, and for that you do not need these over priced Asic's. Can you give us some more detailed information on what you are planning to mine?

It depends on who will be getting the winning bid, if it is another hoarder, it will not influence anything. If these coins goes into the exchanges, we might see a dip in the price. The announcement might even push the price down a little, but it will not have a huge impact. The supply & demand forces are still at work here, and currently supply is still on par with the current demand to keep the price stable. ^smile^

Let's hope a Bitcoin hoarder pick up these coins... Clearly E&Y wants to capitalize on the higher price.

Those days are loooong gone now, because the difficulty is just too high. I doubt if any solo miner will ever again be able to mine a Bitcoin block on his/her own. The mining pools are simply too big and too strong for that to happen. I doubt if anyone is even attempting that, but who knows. Some people might still think they might get lucky enough and the equipment might just be laying around and they not paying the electricity bill.

I have given up on solo mining Bitcoin, years ago. ^smile^