Those articles are being taken out of perspective a bit in my opinion, note  that they read "credit cards". People see these articles and think banks are censoring peoples transactions.
I think this is more aimed to avoid people taking on debt to buy cryptocurrency, which is a very good thing imo. We all love bitcoin but we should at the same time be responsible adults. Look at how many lives got damaged by beeettkoonneeeccctt!! (sorry but you all know we gotta say it like that  )
I don't  have nearly as much coin and token holdings as I would like to have, but I am fine with that because I only invest surplus money I have left from my last paycheck on payday. It will get there one day.

I think some banks will manage  to move into a grey area and keep themselves relevant for financial services even after bitcoin takes over the world, the ones that are beginning to adopt around this space and innovate, that is. Their business models would of couse drastically change though. Others will die out though like the pests they are and I look forward to that.

I don't think that is the right way to look at it. 1 BTC is not worth $ 10k.  It is worth 1 BTC. We don't know what 1 BTC is worth, nobody does. My bet is that this is so revolutionary that if you want to express its real value in dollars it is way more than it currently is "valued" at. But who cares? When BTC takes over the dollar and fiat is dead anyway.

Bitcoin is not dependent on anything, and it cannot be stopped. 

Anyhoo, I think if fiat falls gold and bitcoin will thrive. Both are much more legitimate forms of money. Infinite supply digits on an SQL database hosted by a bank and honored with infinitely printed paper has no value.

All I want to achieve is own 1 bitcoin then I know I am sorted

Is this mail from an exchange you have been dealing with and do you own 2 BTC ?
What do you mean by "conto of coins" ?

I am in agreement with the other folks there that this is probably a scam(99.99%). If you clicked on that link I would advise you burn all your wallets on that PC and move your coins to new ones and format your PC. You never know what kind of tojans and other nasty's downloaded when you opened that link.

Always  be 100% tinfoil-hat paranoid about security. Better to do all you can to protect yourself than to get hacked.

Thanks Danny,
That is actually a pretty good way to explain LN from a high level view.

So basically most wallets already summarize the inputs? Does that incur a fee of some sorts? If I summarize 1,2,3,4 into 8 by myself how does the network know my 8 = 1,2,3,4 and it is valid? I assume that is doing something similar to a multisig address to join inputs and outputs?  (I must apologize here I cannot write an essay on multisig yet, and only have a very vague understanding so far. I am still working to understand bitcoin under the hood well )
If this is like a multisig you can just say so an I will google on from there.
The inputs should surely be announced to the network and say "this is the new input that summarizes them" and it needs to be recorded somewhere and agreed upon?

Since this will be a hash of sorts I expect there is no way to know that these 4 inputs = the new input. If you guys can shed some light around that I would appreciate.

Sorry for asking such questions, I know these actually warrant very long answers. Unfortunately getting answers around things like this on google is difficult, you just find irrelevant results on "when moon" or information that even I know is wrong. Nobody is interested in understanding the protocol

Thanks again for taking the time to explain to newbie old me. I promise to pass on the knowledge imparted onto me by you and educate my fellow bitcoiners.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Below is a video where Andreas discusses MimbleWimble (lol @ that name) and Schnorr Signatures as proposals for bitcoin. It is really cool technologies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qloq75ekxv0

As far as I know these are some of the features and upgrades that will be coming to bitcoin in future. (hopefully if they work and can be implemented)

But thanks for clarifying, I wasn't aware that we can consolidate our inputs. I think if this can start happening automatically at a protocol level that would be best though.

Hi Forum
Let me first state my understanding of how a bitcoin transaction works. Please correct me if I have this wrong.

Let's say I am a miner  and I mined a block, I got my fresh and unspent 12.5 BTC. Bob loans 12.5 BTC from me and I send it to him. He is supposed to pay me back 1.25 BTC every day for 10 days.
When I send him the 12.5, I send him  a valid Input worth 12.5BTC. Which equals the size of 1 Input( 0.225 KB I think?).  10 Days now pass and Bob has paid me back. I now have 10 valid inputs worth 12.5 BTC in total. If I send my 12.5 BTC to binance now I will be sending them 10 valid inputs, meaning my transaction will use 2.25 KB in the block. Thus in turn I pay 10x more fees than my first transaction.
In short the more bitcoin gets spent  the more inputs we will use to make up a transaction?

If I understand the above correctly.
This then means that any max block size will eventually run out if we cannot summarize those inputs back into single inputs? Regardless of how big we make the blocks. Using bitcoin as currency in this case would then mean we slowly kill it. If all inputs are worth 10 satoshi's then we cant use BTC anymore?
I am aware NimbleWimble is a technology that can fix this. If my understanding is correct then this is quite an urgent problem to fix.

Also please clarify with the transaction fees involved in a block, do they become part of the newly created input from the block I mined?

If I understand the above incorrectly
You are welcome to call me an idiot haha, as long as you explain where my understanding is wrong. We all gotta learn

Thanks for taking the time to answer guys

I like how we can actually go onto Github and see these things ourselves; where the developers are that is. Below are some stats for the last 30 days.

Bitcoin cash Github
https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/pulse/monthly 0 Merges 2 Proposals 6 Closed 4 New

Bitcoin Github
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulse/monthly - 101 Merges 61 Proposals 68 Closed 54 New

BitcoinXt
https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/pulse/monthly 28 Merges 1 Proposal 2 closed 1 New

Bitcoin Unlimited
https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited/pulse/monthly - 27 Merges 7 Proposals 4 Closed 3 New

I welcome you to support your flavour of Bitcoin you wish to, I am happy we have freedom of association in cryptocurrency. But it's best if we can keep things to fact as much as we can. Looking at those stats it seems to me that Bitcoin is evolving rapidly. The misc forks seem to be getting much more development love than bitcoin cash too(although I think these other githubs work together on bcash to be fair, I'm not sure). The point still stands though.

I myself have begun reading the LN whitepaper, trying to understand as much of it as I can and I really love the technology, the only issue I have with it is offline payments. But I am sure that will be sorted out, Rome wasn't built in a day. And as for centralization; you would be very dumb to try make a lightning hub and run 100k channels funded with 50k BTC. You are begging to get hacked and the fees you collect would not justify the risk at all.

Yea but getting in early isn't a viable option anymore. Look at Davor, it lasted like a month. I think BCC failing after getting so big is a good thing in a way, it got the message across clearly. Lending platforms lost a lot of credibility and awareness against them have gone to an all time high. A lot of people learned their lessons. The wounds are fresh and I don't think anyone would have near bitconnects "success" again anytime soon. There are far fewer fish to take the bait now.

I still don't regret losing a bit of my free money though. It was a life education experience for me. I am happy that I managed to hold my own against the urge to chuck in more money.

The next lesson the community needs to learn is that you cant just throw money  at cryptocurrency, not know what a public key is and expect to drive your Lambo on the moon in a month. Things like BCC unfortunately result in loss for some, but in the grand scale it matures the community and we all learn our lessons the hard way to become wiser.

Well I knowingly took a high risk on it (ended up breaking even) with a small amount that I mined in the first hour of mining Electroneum as its blockchain launched(free money as I see it). I checked it out myself before I put anything into it. It did raise some red flags for me, however I saw some legit income streams for them as well. The fact that they held so many BCC and were pumping their own coin meant they had the capital to pay. They could POS mine their own coin and get a ton of the block rewards and keep generating BCC. If they kept the dollar value of their coin up then that meant they could keep paying. If they needed more BCC they can just dump a ton to drop the price for a bit and buy up  more BCC on the cheap.

There was also the possibility of a trading bot actually existing (I never really thought there was one), but heck trading bots are widely used so if it actually existed that would be a bonus. Their exchange pulled a ton of volume for which they also raked in fees.  I forecasted that BCC will fail if they run out of coins, if I kept an eye on the big wallets in the explorer I could be ready for it. I didn't expect a fail before that stage.

As mentioned I did always feel iffy about it though, but heck it was fun to see how much % I get every day lol.

I think a lot of people reasoned like me, a lot of them however unfortunately didn't put in a small amount to see what happens for the lols. People got greedy. I myself experienced what greed is for the first time in my life with this scam. I was tempted to put in more a lot of times but luckily I kept it at my tiny $120 initial "investment". I do understand though how they could have gotten that big, a lot of people are struggling to feed their kids and just want a better life. A lot of people did BCC as their first crypto "investment"

My colleague wanted to put his life savings into it in December, he has just discovered bitcoin and heard I am into it as well. He thought bitconnect is "investing into bitcoin". Thank God I managed to stop him from doing that. However the lack of education in the cryptocurrency market is another thing to blame. A lot of newbies thought bitconnect = bitcoin.

I think people like my colleague made up a large part of the audience. To be honest I myself didn't see any good scam accusations and articles before I got into it, the ones I saw made their case very poorly. But like anything I researched it myself and got to the above conclusions and saw very high risk in it but was willing to try it out with my free mined money.

Well they have sanctions against them. So regardless of what legit sources say, it is a really bad idea to touch their cryptocurrency regardless of what country you are from. National sanctions isn't something you can just ignore and shrug off, its a serious thing.

It seems like a scamcoin to me anyway, because it is tethered to their oil supply but it is POW? How will they ensure they always accumulate the same amount of oil as they have coins in existence ? It really does not add up

It all depends on what kind of regulation gets passed. It could either be a good or a bad thing.
Regulation such as needing to register with an international authority body if  you want to launch an ICO would be fantastic. Some KYC is okay as well. It keeps governments at ease and reduces the risk of an outright ban.

If they however want to try ban it, they will fail. I think a lot of governments are starting to realise that bitcoin cannot be stopped. If you ban it then you lose all visibility on what people are doing with it. The best approach for any government is to implement some KYC so that they can at least hitch a ride on the bandwagon for their tax.

A short time back they said it is "not legal tender", well neither is gold. People often times overreact on the news. Do realise that bitcoin cannot be stopped.
This is the people giving the finger back to banks and governments. It is impossible for them to stop us using it. If they outright ban it they lose all visibility on it and cant rake in any taxes for it. Bitcoin has all the banks by the balls.

5% a day is not a cloud mining service, its most likely an HYIP Ponzi scheme.
As for legit cloud mining you need to run their numbers and see if it is profitable. I personally think that if you can see good profits in their numbers it is a good sign. I will use hashflare's numbers below as I know them.

1. Take the price of 10Gh/s on a contract and work that out to a fraction of an S9's price. An S9 does around 13.5 TH/sec. So that means they can sell 1350 10Gh/sec contracts. Lets say it's 2.2 USD per 10GH. That means they earn 2970USD per antminer they have. Each antminer costs them 2320 USD(they most likely pay quite a bit less as they will be ordering in bulk)

2. That leaves them with a profit of 650USD per year per antminer in direct sales. This I would expect would form part of their actuall business profit and "risk money" in the event of equipment failure or downtime if it is out of warranty.

3. They then have the maintenance fee, 0.0035 USD per 10Gh. This means each antminer earns them 4.7USD per day. We now need to go look at what power costs by them, and how much each antminer costs. I think they mine in Iceland ? ( Im not gonna do all that effort for a post lol). But the margin on this should be able to cover power, rent for the building, airconditioning and staff salaries(remember you will need people at a large farm full time to clean dust out and do general maintenance). Remember they will probably have a few thousand antminers.

If these numbers add up to a healthy looking business then I say you are safe(ish), if not then I would run the other way. Ofcourse you also need to do whatever you can to see if the facilities actually exist. Hashflare and genesis are probably your safest bet if you want to do this.

But remember cloud mining aint always that great, if difficulty keeps skyrocketing and price keeps dropping you could end up taking a loss. It is not infinite free money and make sure you run the numbers before you chuck money into these things.

Hope this helped

I would have to disagree mate, I am not saying this is the DREAM TEAM for any ICO and the best there is, they aren't. But I do believe these guys to be honest and doing their best. Our risk is only that they fail, I mean its not like they are Dan Larimer or Vitalik level skill in blockchain. Failure is possible like with any project.


However I really don't see much of a risk of them "exit scamming".  These guys will do their best, if the  project does fail I don't hold it against them, I know they gave it their best shot. But my money is on its a slow-rolling snowball hitting a few rocks down the hill.  It will take time to gather some momentum.
I will be launching some businesses on their platform once I can do my own testing on it. I am looking forward to seeing it come to life ! (Hope their platforms can do what I want to do with it haha)

If they don't then random Steve  who bought some  after the price plummeted basically loses everything since the BAR blockchain will be discontinued.  
The other thing is they have to hardfork, among the stolen BAR are the tokens that were to be used for commercial agreements, product demos etc. If they didn't have those it would have seriously hindered their ability to get the product going.

I am quite disappointed that they didn't use cold storage though. They should have known better.

It is okay though I guess, maybe itl give the price a bit of a reset. I am shocked actually that such a potentially good product is falling so low in price, yet *Insert random hot-trending-pump-and-dump-shitcoin with no real use case* is on the top 100. BAR can potentially be absolutely huge if the stars align correctly for it.

I hope they can recover fully from this and make TBAR a success.

Its a good time right now, however if you have a lot of money that you wana spend I would recommend stretching it beyond ETN and CND. Buy some top 30 stuff too. Higher market cap is safer and it is good to reduce risk wherever you can.

Im holding my ETN for now, I expect a bull run on it soon. CND is also a great project, a really unique and awesome token.

Honestly imho dont even worry about spam posting, it wont get you anywhere. Dont ever worry about getting merit. Rather try educate  yourself on cryptocurrency as best you can and try add value to other users on the forum. Try to help people with the best advice and insights you can give.

If you are going to start a topic, make it about something you already tried googling/searching the forum on yourself and still need clarity on.

Merit will come by itself one day, or it wont. Quality is what is most important. And here I now vow this to be my last response to a "how do I get merit" post.

The chances of us getting 10000x returns... maybe thats over. But significant gains are definitely still possible. I started with 70 dollars in June last year, up to around 2k in total now. My biggest leap was due to getting into a very profitable ICO in the start. (Electroneum) which I subsequently dumped most of it and move the money around well.

I think 2018 will be absolutely insane, there are still major gains to be had. If  you learn more and understand things better than the rest of the crowd you are at a major advantage.

If we look at the total marketcap of cryptocurrency it is still a tiny market compared to most others, we still have plenty of room to grow.

But to me, I am also very excited for what this technology will bring, I am happy to be part of it even during a bear market. We should always remember the core objective of bitcoin and not look at it just as a dollar value. If Bitcoin achieves its goal then a dollar value is completely irrelevant.

You should jump in with what you can afford to lose. I can assure you that if I took a loan I would not have been able to hodl through the last bear market. Be smart about it.

Hi guys
I see your github activity has slowed down a bit, can you please give us some feedback as to where matters stand with your roadmap and exchange listings?

Thanks for the project, I like the idea of not having an ICO and unnecessarily raking in millions. All coins should grow organically. Good luck. I am looking forward to your updates here.

As someone who works for an ISP, I can tell you with 100% certainty that everything you do at work is 100% traceable. Even if your boss doesn't see you doing non work stuff your name will show up when reports are pulled.

A Job is worth more than browsing a forum. I would suggest going on the forum off your mobile whilst not connected to their wifi.

Since you probably wont have full access to your PC, there is almost nothing you can do to anonomize yourself at the office. Leave the forum for home or use your mobile.

Guys another tip around this is to always check who the certificate is made out to. It is quite easy to get a "green lock". Make sure you always click on the "secure" button by the URL and make sure it shows the correct owner before you login anywhere.

I think though as a community we need to push binance  to register  all these fake domains themselves.. literally every possible fake iteration. If they have the domains registered then someone else can use them.

I will kick it off by sending them a ticket, I think its a good idea for us to all do this. It breaks my heart to see people get scammed out of 1000s of dollars or full bitcoins. Newbies getting scammed is not something we need in this space.