The house will be a physical asset you can sell later, but it will carry expenses too, and people tend to forget about these expenses. < Municipal Rates & Taxes on the property / Maintenance of the physical structure > If you subtract that over time from the first investment and you received no rental income to cover that, you will find that the profit on that property will be much lower than what you might have had, if you just waited for the price of Bitcoin to rise even higher.

I guess a physical property feels safe for people investing in traditional commodities like gold and silver and real estate. 

Most of these winners are fake and just engineered to serve as a carrot for the donkeys. The carrot is always out of reach,

Your activity is monitored and this can be seen from the affiliate interface offered on some of these sites. They pay you a referral fee on the profit they made from the users that you referred to them. You can also see this, when you exit a specific slot game for instance. When you enter that game again, it remembers what bonuses you had and what amount of coins and how many lines you played before.

So you just continue where you left off and they just make sure that in the long run, you still see some smaller jackpots, but you lose it over time. You are like a little hamster in a wheel or a donkey chasing a carrot.

I think what the person is trying to say is the old Libertarian thoughts are that Satoshi's view on centralized services like banks were to replace them with Bitcoin. I do not necessarily agree with that train of thought, but I think it might be a better solution for many of the problems associated with these services.

Will Bitcoin replace the banks? No, I doubt it. They will just adapt to the new technology and keep doing business.^sad^

I doubt that any normal customer of a bank knows how a ATM works on the inside. They want to walk up to a ATM and just use it to deposit cash or to withdraw money. They seldom know how money is transferred between banks <Swift> and that not all money in their accounts are stored in the local vault.

This must be the same for the average Bitcoin users to make it easy for them to use the currency or the other features like Smart contracts.

I think it also has to do with the numbers, because these advertisers knows a country like the Philippines will have a much higher poverty rate than say Finland and these countries will have loads more users using these faucets for income, and that does not necessarily translate to sales.

The irony for me is, these poor countries actually need the higher payouts, seeing that faucets are there to help people to get hold of bitcoins. The world is so upside down, it's sad.

Bitcoin Heaven for me will come when people around me start to fight with me, because I did not introduce this technology to them earlier and also when I can walk into any shop and I can pay with bitcoins. That would be perfect and I will be in a position to tell them, " I told you so " 

We are still teething with scaling problems, but that will soon be resolved. Not everyone wants another PayPal.

 

Excellent first post, and I hope your travel down the rabbit hole will be just as good. I think a lot of people first have to use it, to realize how special it is. Once they break that barrier, things will be so much easier. Lots of people like you are out there, but they have not taken that first step.

Now the difficult part starts and that is to spread the word, and if I were in your shoes, I would first do some research to be in a better position to explain it.

What would be great, is if someone could create custom number plates, with the following " Sold4BTC " or " BTC RIP ? "
or some sticker in the rear window, saying " Bitcoin is Alive! " or " Bought with Bitcoin " I just want people to know that it was bought with Bitcoin.

Tesla is a great car, and I also want one. It would be great if they throw in a PowerWall too. ^smile^

I guess Barry said it best, "What does not kill you, makes you stronger" and this definitely shows in the community. A lot of dead skin has been shed, and we are looking much better than before. We now have one enemy clearly defined and we can concentrate on that for now.

Investors will soon realize the complexity of this environment and how competitive it can be and this might scare some or it might excite others. Who wants to invest in a boring commodity? Keep the adrenaline pumping, we like it rough. 

The thing that I do see here, is a lot of misinformation and a lack of communication going around. I like the fact that CIYAM can contest most of these false claims and comments. I would have wanted to see some more Chinese miners coming on here and explaining their side too.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories going around, and these things tend to cause friction and trust issues. If I was a investor from the western world and I hear that the gears of a technology are mostly operated by a traditional Eastern Communist country, I will have some concerns.

On the other hand, if I were a investor from the other side, and I see that the system development and maintenance are mostly being dominated by a group of Capitalist western countries, I would also have concerns.

Communication coming from both sides will decrease the gap between this divide and the Core group are doing just that.  

They should just continue with the investigation and get experts to follow the hackers digital footprints. It will eventually lead them to the guilty party. A white hat hacker would have offered the information for free to help the community, but I guess you not coming in from that side.

All hackers involved in Bitcoin should be against this type of actions, because it hurts their pockets too, every time this happens in the Bitcoin community. In the end people will lose trust in the technology and the price will drop and their Bitcoin holdings will be worth nothing.

Do the right thing, a lot of innocent people lost a lot of money and you want to profit from that, while they are suffering. 

I have friends working in the News media industry and they all say the same thing. The editor are told what stories they must push in the media. He or she then instructs the journalists and the photographers to go out and gather the data and compile the story. The editor then decide what goes into the news paper and what not.

Most of the time, these people work on strict deadlines to get the story out, before other competitors and they have to cut corners < poor research / poor editing etc. > This means a lot of, let's call it <Junk> articles gets published and if mistakes and errors happens, they usually just keep quite.

This is possibly a <Junk> article or placed there to push a agenda coming from the shareholders. 

If you travel all over America, you will get 53 different definitions from the legislators there. They have several divisions within government and each of them has it's own views. If I started to name all of them, I would spell out the whole alphabet. SEC / IRS / NSA / CIA / BS ..... and we can go on for hours.

One thing about the Americans, they like to over regulate everything and they like their abbreviations. ^smile^

If he says there is no banking conspiracy, then tell me what is this? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1335098.new#new

I find it difficult to imagine that you would make a huge announcement like this < Declaring Bitcoin Died> and then within a week announce that you are working on a private “permissioned” blockchain that would be in direct competition with Bitcoin.

This guy can say anything and nobody will believe him, even if it is the truth. 

Just look at Charley Cooper's background and previous employment history with the government and you will know what they are planning to do with private “permissioned” blockchains. This will be the ultimate Honey trap for the US government.

How many other sovereign countries will want to use such a network, where every transaction will be scrutinized and monitored and controlled by the US Government? This is why public “permissionless” blockchain allows ANYONE to join in, without ANYONE having centralized control.

Do not give these people control, they have f#@% up before with the dinosaur legacy fiat systems and now they want to implement these same controls on a new innovative technology that enables freedom to the people. 

If he wants to work in a corporate environment with bosses telling him what to do, it is his choice. He worked at Google before and I was quite surprised at that statement. I would much rather work in a unstructured environment where innovation are not hampered by masters telling you what they want you to do.

If I have to pity him, it would be for burning the bridges with this community, in the way he did. The legacy he left behind here are full of deceit and lies and he will be remembered for that and not the other contributions he has made.

We have to get used to the idea that more and more countries will develop Blockchain based services not necessarily linked to the bitcoin token. Just recently there were rumors being spread that China will be developing it's own digital equivalent of Bitcoin. If this happens, Bitcoin will struggle.

The one thing where Bitcoin has the advantage over these other Alt coins, is that no conversion is needed to jump from one coin to the next. Every jump adds fees and makes it more expensive. Bitcoin to Bitcoin will stay the cheapest option.

Tell me why you think it is a perfect way to launder money? Have you used it for that purpose, to be able to say that? Most people think it is a perfect tool, until they try it. There are ways to follow the money, even with Bitcoin, when you are using this tool in the wrong way.

Most of these people wants this money in fiat and it's very difficult to convert Bitcoin to fiat, without raising the red flags. Agents even infiltrate localbitcoin to identify these activities and the rest are done on exchanges and banks with the implementation of strict AML and KYC rules and regulation.

I guess the current line of thinking is just to kick the can down the road. You do not implement something before it was thoroughly tested. I agree with this thinking in the sense that developers need to scale Bitcoin without risking the integrity of the whole network.

For example - " In 2MB blocks, a 2MB transaction can be constructed that may take over 10 minutes to validate which opens up dangerous denial-of-service attack vectors. Other lines of code would need to be changed to prevent these problems. " - quoted from https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq#roadmap

You cannot just dump bigger block sizes into the protocol and hope nothing goes wrong, because it is a Billion dollar network. Let's just approach this with caution.  

Bitcoin has some super hero characteristics, every time you think this new villain will kill it, it bounce back with new tricks. We should make a series about our super hero and sell it to the networks. It will last for at least 90 seasons. You just have to laugh at the media, when they try different angles to kill Bitcoin.

The same happened with the internet back in the days, and most people said, a unregulated environment like that will never fly, and guess where we are today?