That could probably one reason. The campaigns that are paying out in crap coins now has coins that has significantly lower prices due to the market crash, hence most campaigns might not be worth it right now for people hence the decrease in activity(assuming that activity here in bitcointalk actually decreased since the crash like you said).

The bigger factor though, in my opinion, is the not-so-recent 1 merit requirement for Jr members, and also the recent endless bans on people who committed plagiarism. The forums was far more active before that new rule. The forums are definitely a lot better though; activity doesn't necessarily mean better. I'd prefer low activity but high quality rather than the opposite.

By the way, I think this topic is more fitting on the Meta subforum[1]. It'd probably be better if you moved the topic to that subforum.

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[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=24.0

Fiat currencies like the US dollar is being used in gambling in general also, does it make it bad due to that specific reason? Not really.

Also, most if not all technologies pretty much almost always has a bad side to it.

• Cars are used for better transporation but can be used as getaway vehicles for criminals
• The internet is used for various great things like storing/retrieving of information, etc, whereas it can also be used to commit crime(theft, identification theft, etc)
• Cellphones(especially the older, keypad ones), are made for better communication, whereas it also can be used to wirelessly detonate bombs

And many many more. So, for all these negative downsides of these technologies, does it really make them "bad"? I don't think so. The good things they can do heavily outweighs the bad things.

This. The scammer is only using Uphold's name to gain trust. As it was a very obvious scam to start with.

Anyway, unfortunately though.. using the address OP provided, looks like the scammer got a hold of a good amount of bitcoin: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/18h7EiyL5fJ1mY7qxnTsmxWiCYpZm8ib7x

I'm still baffled up to today how gullible people are to fall for these.

What was the price at that time? When I first got into a signature campaign I also almost automatically sold everything after every week and bought unnecessary crap. I had no idea of bull and bear markets in the past unfortunately. I was quite in disbelief when bitcoin started rallying up. Anyway, at least we now know better.

Guess how many so called "experts" also said that $5000 was the bottom?
Guess how many so called "experts" said that we would have $50,000 at the end of the year?

I'm not saying that you should sell your bitcoin, but "expert" predictions doesn't mean crap. No one knows with 100% certainty where the prices will go. Also, the article seems to be very inaccurate in the first place. Title says "Don’t sell your Bitcoins, experts warn", whereas the tweet of Phillip Nunn shown in the article isn't even related to price.

While it's definitely possible for people to somewhat control and manipulate the prices of bitcoin to a certain extent, we can't be sure of that.

Does it matter short term? Nah. Anyway, this 'problem' should be gradually fixed as time goes as the marketcap of bitcoin goes bigger(assuming the marketcap increases steadily yearly). With higher marketcap and with more money in general that's into bitcoin, the price of bitcoin will be significantly harder to manipulate and to significantly harder to skew over with big buy and sell offers.

Think about it. If a person has a list of private keys with some bitcoin on it, why would the person upload it on a website? Wouldn't it be more profitable for the hacker to steal the bitcoin himself? This makes completely no sense. If you want to make money, stop snooping around trying to find a way to earn free or easy money.

Ah.. I remember those days when bitcoin was at it's peak. I felt like a rich dude for a while and refused to spend a bit of it due to my BTC holdings being a multiple of 0.0375 that I didn't want to ruin. In second thought, I wish I spend just a bit of it.

Anyway, yea. Unless BTC crashes to triple digits or lower I don't see ChipMixer possibly adjusting the payouts just a teeny tiny bit to make it worth it for some people.

Yeap. I think it's currently legal due to bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general being currently unregulated. Bots are being widely used among multiple exchanges, even with the top ones like Bitfinex and Binance. As with manipulation? I'm not sure. I think price manipulation isn't legal nor illegal; in the cryptocurrency space at least.

I'm definitely not a trading pro and I never claimed to be, but I think this is a way of manipulating the markets. Either that, or the person is trying to undercut the prices.

Also, this person is most likely using a bot. I imagine it's pretty tedious to add and switch up 40 offers all day.

How do you say so? Have you actually tried to transact using bitcoin lately? Or is your opinion still stuck in late 2017? I really don't know what most of you are talking about. Bitcoin's transaction fees have been significantly low for a good number of months already. I don't think I've even paid a half a dollar transaction fee since January.

Even though that they're accepting bitcoin through BitPay, meaning that your bitcoin will be automatically sold for fiat at point of sale, it's still good news in my opinion. Certain entities that gives people the option to pay for whatever through bitcoin is always good.

Take a look at OpenBazaar[1]. It's a decent potential high-volume market in the future, but it's not that good as of the moment.

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[1] https://openbazaar.org/

1-2: While they do have a big influence on price and can definitely manipulate it, I'm afraid there's really nothing we can do about this. They got in early and believed bitcoin even when most people didn't, and they deserve it in my opinion.

3: It doesn't matter. Bitcoin is open-source; people can make as much bitcoin versions as they want. By the way, you can also create your own version of the USD, but will anyone use it? Same thing with all the crappy bitcoin forks.

4: Some use bitcoin as payments, some use bitcoin as a store of value, and some people use bitcoin to earn profit by selling it when it goes higher. What's the problem though? Isn't financial freedom one of the main points of bitcoin? People should do what they want with their money.

Though I do agree the suddenly halving the supply increases the price, we shouldn't be looking at the price here. We should be looking at the supply itself.  Also again, I really honestly don't think you can make the price stable just by decreasing the supply alone. It's still mostly due to supply and demand, like what Pursuer said on his reply.

Anyway, while I disagree with your proposal, thanks for creating a topic that's actually debatable and not bullcrap.

Regardless of how the mining scarcity is implemented, that really won't do much right now when talking about the volatility. Bitcoin is volatile simply because it's being widely used as a speculative investment, and not really as a store of value. A good percentage of all the bitcoin holders bought bitcoin for the sole reason of making profit, and nothing else; hence we have these huge hype cycles. Bitcoin could already be at 21-million mined BTC right now and bitcoin would still be very volatile.

I think your "solution" to reduce price volatility and increase price would only work if we assume that everyone simply just holds; which is definitely not the case.



? ?

Just to let you know mate. There's a big significant difference between writing with an idea with a certain post/article in mind and just straight off plagiarizing. The latter is a bigger issue than most people underestimate.

ICOs have been too risky for a while already that it's really not ideal to invest in one as the risks are unnecessarily too high, unless you probably know every ins and outs of the project and if you've personally met the team in their own office or something; just to have proof that a certain project is actually 100% legitimate. I mean, isn't bitcoin or ethereum risky enough as speculative investments? If it comes to the point that I'd invest in an ICO, I'd rather just go to a local casino. At least I would still somewhat enjoy it even if I lose money.

Having alternate accounts for specific reasons isn't against the rules, but on most if not all the signature campaigns, you're not allowed to enroll multiple accounts.

I personally don't know much about those file types, but yeah. Never download random files online especially from shady sites/groups/people. If needed, download the file on a temporary virtual machine, so your personal OS in general wouldn't be affected.

Most likely reason in my opinion is that people that bought bitcoin expecting that it will make them rich in a short timespan gave up as bitcoin is just continuing to drop in price, which is definitely not what they were looking forward to. Hence why we see "bitcoin is dead" news and a lot of people agreeing with it on social media. We're probably already in the capitulation phase or at least close to it. A bit more blood probably.