During the old times, there was hardly any outlet to spend your cryptocurrencies. And the exchange rates were so low, that converting to fiat was also not the option. So many of the users who had cryptocurrencies in their wallets (from mining or freelancing) used to gamble them away in Satoshi dice. Also, when online casinos such as Prime Dice came up, it became possible to gamble completely anonymously (earlier with credit cards, this anonymity was not possible). This obviously caused a large increase in the number of gamblers.

Nowadays many of the countries have tightened the laws related to gambling, and as a result these online casinos are asking for KYC information from the customers. And it is not just when we are withdrawing the winnings. I have seen casinos asking for KYC even at the time of joining. If you still want to avoid the KYC, then there are a good number of sites that don't ask for the IDs, but the number seems to be constantly decreasing. Very difficult to escape the eyes of the regulatory authorities now...

It takes a lot of effort and skills, so I would not classify it as a pastime activity. A pastime activity is something like sports, watching movies, partying.etc which can help you to relax. Bounty hunting is not like those activities. It is quite demanding and it takes away a lot of your energy. I would rather classify bounty hunting as a passive source of income in addition to your full-time job. It has the ability to supplement your income from the full-time job, given that the bounty is paid on time without any delaying tactics.

I don't know how to interpret the statement made by John Rainey. He has admitted that the staff is working on both blockchain and cryptocurrency. But this can mean a lot of things. GIven the hostile stance taken by PayPal with regards to decentralized crypto-currency, I suspect that at the most we can expect something like FB Coin from them. They are not going to support any of the major cryptos in the near future. But Blockchain technology is different. It is something that can be merged with the fiat structure of Paypal.

It looks like some big players have got themselves involved with BNB. Until 2-3 months back, the daily volumes used to be in the range of $25 to $30 million. This has increased by 10 times, to $250-300 million. There have been a sharp increase during the first two weeks of this month. Anyway, for me it looks quite suspicious that this coin could rise by 170%, despite the fact that Binance underwent a major hack. It is quite possible that the exchange is pumping its funds in to BNB, to give a feeling that everything is going well.

I am glad that I haven't used them for quite sometime now. I got a notification stating that I need to do KYC (I first used this exchange in 2017) in order to get the approval for withdrawing my coins. I have already done KYC for more than a dozen exchanges and I am not going to do anymore. Luckily I have only around BTC0.005 worth of funds in HitBTC and I will just discard them. But I have sent an email stating that I don't want to undergo KYC and I want to withdraw my coins.

I got scammed by them as well. I was stupid enough to believe all the fake reviews. Created an account and then applied for a mastercard. First they ask for a minimum deposit of 0.1 BTC. Once you make the transfer, they will immediately block the account. There is no manual support, and they have a bot which dishes out automatic responses for support. I heard that the site is run by Romanian scammers. In total, I lost around $850 of my funds. Anyway, what has happened can't be reversed and I am moving on. No hope of getting back my money.

Got scammed just now.I can't believe that after being involved in crypto for so many years, I got scammed. Lost around $800 to these scammers. First they say that the registration is free. After that, in order to apply for the mastercard, you need to deposit a minimum of BTC0.10. Once I made the deposit, immediately the account got locked. And now they are asking for KYC documents. And I am not retarded to send my KYC documents to these scammers. Learnt the lesson in a hard way. 

With the trade war between China and the United States ongoing, the future prospects of gold has definitely brightened. The markets are down quite significantly (some of the world markets are down upto 5% in one week). If the markets go down for the next 1-2 weeks, then at least some of the investors may be open to shifting a part of their wealth to stable assets such as treasury bonds and bullion. And this may increase the demand for gold, and in the end result in a rise in the prices.

The alts are staging a massive comeback now. The total market cap has grown to $263 billion, but the Bitcoin dominance has declined to 55.7%. It is really frustrating, to see worthless shitcoins gaining at the expense of Bitcoin. As of now, the market share is as follows:

BTC: 55.7%
ETH: 10.81%
XRP: 7.57%
BCH: 2.94%
LTC: 2.47%
Others: 20.51%

I first entered the world of cryptocurrency long back in 2012. I had an account with Mt Gox, BTC-e, Cryptopia, Binance and countless other crypto-exchanges. The lesson I have learnt after all these years is not to trust these exchanges after they get hacked. At first, they will try to hide their losses and claim that everything is in order. And by the time the users come to know about the real extent of the damages, the website will be down and they will not be able to withdraw their coins and tokens.

What I am trying to explain is that, Binance has underwent a major hack and significant amounts of crypto have been stolen. Until the things get in order, we should stay out of the exchange, as well as the BNB coin.

OK... so it is confirmed. Those users, who had their funds remaining in Cryptopia are now royally screwed. I can't believe how lucky I am. Just a few hours before they closed down, I had transferred my BTC from the Cryptopia wallet to one of my personal wallets. I still have some CLM tokens remaining there, but the amount is not that big.

Now I guess what happened with Mt Gox will repeat with Cryptopia as well. The Mt Gox users are yet to receive any reimbursements, despite the process going on for more than 5 years now. Anyway, all the best guys!!!

It is not that simple. The NYAG claims that as of now USDT is 74% backed up with cash or cash equivalents. On top of that there is a line of credit agreement for $900 million with Bitfinex, which lasts for 3 years at an annual interest rate of 6.5%. Out of that $625 million is claimed to have been transferred already. Now this doesn't mean that USDT was 100% backed up prior to the loan. It also doesn't mean that the funds already transferred to Bitfinex came from the cash reserves of USDT (need some clarity on this).

The Bitfinex official statement mentions that around $850 million in customer funds were made "temporarily" inaccessible by the authorities. But the NYAG has said that this is false.

This is very confusing situation for me. I just have one advise for all. Stay out of Bitfinex and USDT, until they conduct a third party audit.

The OP posted this five months back, I hope that he went ahead with his plans and made the investment in crypto. Assuming he did just that, he may be sitting on top of +122% returns now. And for the past 24 to 48 hours, it looks like the prices are stabilizing and we may see a slight correction affecting both BTC and the alts. But from now onwards, it should be a smooth rally to 10K or more. The thing to remember here is that the additional supply has been removed from the market. So now the demand is outstripping the supply.

As long as cryptocurrency exists, there will be hacks. It can't be eradicated, but we can take precautions to reduce the risk. Increasing the level of security requires more funds and extra staff, and I don't think that all of the exchanges can afford that. Even the most reliable exchanges such as Bitstamp are not protected from these hackers. Bitstamp is the world's longest standing crypto-exchange (after the liquidation of Mt Gox and BTC-e), and they were hacked at least once (in 2015). In order to completely eliminate the incidence of hacking, we need many of these smaller exchanges merging in to a single platform and then using their resources collectively. But that is not going to happen anytime soon.

What a load of BS!!!

The sanctions and embargoes are applicable only to certain sectors within the Russian economy. The Russian banking system is still connected to the SWIFT, and until that remains in place they don't need to do any sanction evasion. What you are claiming can be true with North Korea. The sanctions against DPRK cover almost all the sectors and it is difficult to make international banking transactions for them. But then, North Korea doesn't have the funds needed to manipulate the BTC prices. 

I would advise you against doing KYC in exchanges as well. I went through the KYC process for at least a dozen exchanges during the past 3-4 years, and you don't know how much I regret about it right now. The exchanges are getting hacked right, left and center. So far this year, we had two major hacks (Binance and Cryptopia). Your data is no longer safe with the exchanges. Also, I regard Blockchain.com as a reliable online wallet. But why they encourage the users to go through the KYC process? Why they want to know about the real identity of the users?

I would stay out of Bitfinex, no matter how attractive their IEO is. Until they conduct a full professional audit of their funds, I would advise the other users to do the same. Rumors are going around that they lost $850 million in trading. Now what makes matters worse is that the money they used for trading was not theirs. It came from the accounts of their users. I have seen the response from Bitfinex, but it is a bit vague and a lot of questions remains to be answered.

They started creating the new hot wallets almost 3 months back. And until April, they were giving regular updates. But all of that has stopped now. On April 4, the announced in Twitter that they are 50% through the hot wallet creation process. At this rate, they could have completed this process by the first week of May. But as I mentioned earlier, there have been no updates and so I don't know what's going on. And just a few minutes back, they published this strange tweet:

https://twitter.com/Cryptopia_NZ/status/1128491715608727553

I don't understand much. Are they going to liquidate the exchange?

Not really. From what I have observed, it is quite the opposite. When Bitcoin goes up, the alts also go up. But then, worthless shitcoins will not see much of a price movement (unless some whale manipulates with the volumes and try doing a pump and dump cycle). For example, almost all the top altcoins have seen anywhere from 50% to 300% increases during the current bull run. On the lower end, we have coins such as ETH which has seen a 50% rise. On the other end we have Bitcoin Cash with a 160% spike.