Of course you can, and many people do it every day. It certainly helps if you're passionate about heating systems or vinyl flooring. If you just want to play music, man, you might well be in for a rougher ride.

We're in the middle ground now where XEM is firmly on the pumper radar but they don't know or care what it is. It needs to get beyond that and imprint some knowledge of what it truly is on more people. Then it takes off properly.

I don't think I've ever seen a cockroach. Either I live a sheltered life or they don't like the climates I hang out in. Are they friendly? The one pictured is certainly a magnificent fella.

I'm not one to tell anyone else what to do with their lives or money, but that would be a near doubling which indicates plenty of signs of life. I'd be inclined to keep a little skin in the game.

I'm sure quite a few people bought at 30 satoshis and sold at 300 or so. Look what they missed out on after that.

There was a survey of professional cyclists a while back asking them that if there was a drug that guaranteed them a win but killed them within five years, would you take it? A worryingly large amount said they would.

I guess a lot of the drug testing apparatus is an attempt to protect athletes from themselves. You don't reach world class level without losing some perspective a long way behind.

In the UK student debt is only cancelled at the age of 67 or something equally silly. They're also very tenacious. They're still chasing a friend of mine 23 years after they took the loan out.

If I hadn't earnt more than the payback threshold by the age of 67 I'd be asking for compensation for being provided with a shit education.

It may well be a genuine problem. They must be dealing with thousands of people moving coins and money all over the place every day. Something's bound to go wrong pretty regularly. It'll be addressed and all will be right with the world again.

r/bitcoin should really be renamed r/fuckcoinbase for the amount of screeching and moaning that goes on over there. GDAX does seem to be having some regular problems at the moment but it's standard gremlins.

Its life comes and goes with the tides. You can't stoke excitement if nothing's happening out there.

As for 600, I don't believe so. Since no one really seems to know what the score is with Bitfinex yet I think we'll sit in boring uncertainty for a while yet.

Mutant/Cyborg Olympics would be genuinely awesome to behold but so many people would die after mutilating themselves that it may go out of fashion.

'clean' Olympics would have to be tested so extensively the athletes would need cameras strapped to their faces 24/7 so they could prove their righteousness. My favourite example of that was the Spanish basketball team who went to the paralympics pretending to be a little Slow. They were uncovered as normaltons and scandal ensued.

Had the DAO survived there's no doubt in my mind everyone would've lost their money in godawful investments. Apart from a couple of honourable exceptions, there has never been a crypto investment that wasn't an unmitigated failure.

Even the glossiest operations like Circle and Coinbase are burning countless millions hoping for a future that may never arrive. I hate to think what the average VC burn rate, but I assume they throw away everything for years and depend on one Google or Apple to redeem everything else.

Better to make a go of your own company and not lay out too much upfront.

It's a pretty bizarre way to attempt to launder anything. Why would you announce it with great fanfare with publicly posted addresses?

I've no idea what was going on but it was a fine demonstration of the gullibility and greed that flourishes here.

Indeed. I had a virtual credit card for a while. It wasn't too far off totally useless as only a fraction of the places I tried to use accepted it, and the failed attempts kept the verification amount for a few weeks. The poor thing eventually dwindled down to nothing and I had to wait for the balance to be returned.

That's just about the lowest form of fiat imaginable making you a pariah in the eyes of many. You'd be hard pressed to get a lot of conventional shops to accept it online, let alone someone selling crypto.

The usual problem with these types of cards is that they put a charge on it to test it and for some reason that often fails. You could try Virwox but be prepared for failure. Is there an option to get cash out with it?

There hasn't been anything approaching real mania yet. 2013 probably happened off the backs of a few tens of thousands of people dotted around the globe. If it experienced dotcom levels of bubble then people would be left gasping.

As ever people are concentrating on the price of one unit and forgetting how few of them there are overall.

Overall though I'm not disagreeing with the article in the short term. They're all valid points. People won't be using it as a safe haven, apart from the foaming hard core, for many decades yet. It has a whole lot of proving to do.

If it does iron out the kinks then I can see large swathes of people taking it on. And I only know one person who owns any gold. I know an awful lot more who use the internet and internet banking.

Even if they are legit, they're on holiday for rather a long time.

Why not fake your own documents? It'll save money, be fun and you might learn something too. You can push the boat out and reward yourself with PhDs and Space Shuttle pilot licences and stuff.

Do auctions even justify a thread any more, even more so for piffling amounts like this? Nothing much happened when tens of thousands were sold. Less than nothing will happen with this.

More changes hands on the OTC markets every day and no one stays up all night screaming and clawing at their faces about that.

Dark markets aren't going away which means these auctions won't either. There'll come a time when buyers are drooling at the idea of them. In future years buying over 1000 coins from legit sources is going to be a very attractive event.

I fucking love smoking and intend to continue until the day I expire. There hasn't been one cancer case in my family since time immemorial so I'm looking forward to a nice heart attack instead.

I detest conventional cigarettes though. I find them horribly stinky and the fumes are unbearable to be around. Rolling tobacco is a lot more modest.

Truly it is a nirvana of contrariness. Our only hope is that Bitcoin infrastructure becomes more legitimate before the really skilful and nasty people descend on it. If they observed how the average Bitcoiner reacts to rape and exploitation they would cream their knickers.

If you do open your exchange then call it Free Market because that seems to be the get out clause for excusing bottomless incompetence and dishonesty.

I think that's debatable. A seasoned trader would be noodling about with countless trades. For every success they may well have a bunch of losers. They'd also be so active they may well completely miss the giant pump, most of which come from nowhere for no discernible reason.

If some donkey paid a piffling amount to get in at the very earliest stages of a promising coin and was too dim to mess around with the short term chop, the chances are they sit there until it goes to the stars with the right coin. Worked for me.