I have been seen many complaints about Hitbtc so i highly recommend not to put your moeny in there, there are a lot of exchange platforms that are more popular and well known by people here, like Poloniex and binance, i personaly use poloniex because it has a lot of different of cryptocurrencies and you can easily exchange from one to another with a fairly low fee, the only downside is they don't have an android supported app, but if you have an ios or planing on just trading on your computer than i highly recommend it.

My geuss is that it is only a precaution thing, cryptocurrencies in gneral are anonymous so some poeple tend to use them for the wrong pourpouse like moeny laundry, and ICO are the perfect thing for this, they can eaisily dump moeny and get it back as soon as it goes on exchange, if you are a company and one person wants to buy 3000$ worth of token don't you know who is it, and why he is investing that much moeny into your company, does not seem specious.

As the cryptocurrency keeps on getting more and more popualr, people are starting to reialize how the blockchain technology could lead to the decentrelization to anything that could be stored digitly, from data to identity, and moeny, the whole world' enonomy involves around the us market and using the dollar as the main currency, and every international transaction needs to be governned by the finincial system, cryptocurrenies and the blockchain technology aims to decentrelize the international economy, international transactions and trades could be done quicker cheaper and without the involvment of any third parties, crypotocrrencies could simplify things and traders iand investors are starting to be aware of that, and soon it will take over the whole economy.

I dont think projects only do pre ICO, the whole pouprouse of it is selling tokens before the official ICO at a lower price is to get funds to cover the expenses that come before the main launch, like advertisment recrutments, that is why the pre sale has a lower fund raising target than the main one, investing in pre ICO is pretty good thing, because as i said the price of the tokens is lower than the launch so you will be able to make profit more than anyone as soon as the token goes on exchange that is if you are able to catch up to it as it tend to be over in the first 30 min, so don't let anyone scam you into investing into a pre ICO only, because they don't exist.

I think that ethereum's price is going to go up very fast this year, and that is due to it being so popualr recently and that goes to the fact that most of the ICOs that have or going to be created are etehreum based, and ico have seen huge success and a good representative of what cryptocurrency is capable of doing, as this has became a multi million dollar industry and that is why it is going to get more and more popular as time goes on and this will affect the price of etehreum in a positive way.

To actaully understand why bitcoin was created we need to go back to the roots of the problem, before all the finincail system, the only that tow people were to trade using products, a bag of rice for a jar of milk and that is how things worked, and then tehy started trading with gold and silver which are difficuilte to transport and difficulte to divide, so papaer moeny was created wich is a fraction of gold that exists in the bank, the probelm was that banks were printing moeny far more than they had gold, not only this but banks started giving loans at an intresset, which means they were giving money for somthing they don't have, in the end money was no longer an asset that is related to gold, but instead it is an indepandant asset controlled by govermments and bnks, which means no longer do people can freely do trades without the intermediation of banks which not how things supposed to be, so the point that we are all caught in a big scam, in 2009 Satoshi created bitcoin which pourpouse is to solve all these probelms and be an alternative to our current finincial system, that is aimed to be an electronic peer to peer system that is decentrelized and uncontrolled by govemrnets or banks.

The only hardware that i know off capable of mining bitcoin right now is Antminer s9, which coast roughly about four to five thaousand dollars, you will be able to make its money worth of bitcoin in about 6 to 7 months, and this considering that you will be runing it 24/7 and with 0 electricity coast, so all in all i don't think that it is profitable at all because even if you have free electricity these caculation are made at a certain mining difficulty which is always changing so 2 months from now this could change, so unless you have a lot of moeny to buy expensive hardware and an empty space and free elctricty i don't recommend mining bitcoin, instead do like everone and just mine altcoins with GPU and then exchange them to bitcoin.

People use bitcoin these days for one reason only, and that is to gain profit and moeny, they don't care about its adpation or wether or not it is accepted they don't really care if the transaction takes a long time because they don't use their bitcoin as a payment method, they only think of it as an investment, the fast increase of the price that happend last year brought with it many poeple who know nothing about cryptocurrency they just invested their moeny because they want fast and easy profit, the only way things could get better is if the price stabalizes for a while until this whole cryptohype goes away, and we can already see some improvemnts lately, the transaction time is getting faster and miner fees lower than ever which is a good thing and it is all thanks to the price stablizing.

For me there are tow ICos which i am really looking forward to invest in them, which are loomia and coinmetro, these coins have a lot of hype behiend them and they both have great ideas and great teams which in my opinion could actaully make a change, and they are getting popular and i am sure after their intitial sale the tokens will have their value increased, so they make a good investment.

I only invest less than a 1000$ into icos, because first of all ico starters are enthouthiests, people with ideas that want to make it work, and what people tend to overlook these days is that ICO are not regulated this means that if anything goes wrong or the project faills all your investments can go down the drain, and what really drives me crazy these days is that ICO they end in less than an hour which means if i want to partake in them i need to send transactions with higher fees in order to get somthing, which is not good. so i tend to invest a small amount.

Initial coin offering have been a very successufl and popular thing in the past few months, it is hard to see new ico not launching every week, with this wied variety of ico it is hard to tell the legit ones from the scammy ones, but there are few key thing that define a good ICO, first and far most important one is the goal of it, if its goal seems a bit unrealistic or hard to achive tahn you should not put high hopes to it and just avoiding putting your moeny, the whitepapper should be published and should be clear, a clear explanations of the project should be in it otherwise its sepcious, the team that is working on it shoud actually be legit, they must be capabe an qualifed and stated in the website, and not just a rondom group of people, these are the key things that you should look for when selecting an ICO to invest in, and it does not hurt to actaully ask people on the forum or anywhere else for it before puting your moeny.

Cryptocurrency is not somthing tha can be easily regulated or controlled, the anonyms nature and the decentreliaztion, makes it impossible or very hard for govermments to actaully track or monitor the transactions, the ICO regulation might get applied but only for the founders and the company itself but not for the actual users, the only way i can see cryptocurrency getting regulated is if govermment actaully leagalized it first, that way users can actaully use it without trying to hide their identites and they will start paying taxes for exchanges made by the govermments it self because it will be more convenient.

The recent rise of the popularty of bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, has lead of course to people abusing this to scam others and make a lot of money, the easiest way to avoid scam is to just stick to the main cryptocurrencies that are well known, but if you are determined to invest in others you should be able to determine who is scaming and who is not, usaly the scam coins will be not listed on the exchange sites, the webiste of the coin is suspicous, thier team will be a bunch of random people, they have no whitepaper or the coin's source code does not exists.

I am sorry to tell you that you have wasted your money down the drain, initialy the prices of the token was about 0.8$ and thay have stated that after the ICO ends the price will jump to around 80$ which is insane because no one will actaully buy it at that price, and if you are thinking that you are going to get profit either way by exchanging the tokens you bought at 0.8$ for 80$ tahn you are wrong because to do that the coin has to be issued on an exchange site which is not happaning, so it is actaully a scam.

For me i use Poloniex, in my opinion poloniex seems like the most secured exchange/trading platform out there, not only they have a wide  variety of cryptocurrencies so you can deversify your coin pool, but it has one of the easiest exchanges with the lowest fees out there, so you can easily convert your bitcoin to whatever coin you want and vis versa, there is also binance which is also well known for its wied variety of coins but it has slightly more fees when exchanging, but they have app which supports androind, while poloniex suports only IOS.

The only platfrom that i can think on top off my mind, is poloniex, poloniex is an exchange platform used mainly buy traders due to how many cryptocurrencies it holds and the ability to exchange between diffrent coins easily and with less fees, i know most poeple here will tell you never keep your coins on exchange and they have a point, but poloniex is well known for its security, the customer's deposite is stored offline, and the funds that you put into exchange are only used to facilitate trading.

I know a lot of people said that they are gambling for fun, and the reason why they say that is because gambling with mony is more exiting than just palying a normal game, having somthing to risk is more exciting and gives it more flavor, the feel when you are waiting for the resaults the rush that you get from gambling does not exist if you are just playing for nothing, besiades i am only talking about the people who spend like a 30 to 20$ not the ones who put like a 1000$ and excpect to have fun.

If it is real life gambling that you are trting to convince them to let him do it, than they have a point, i know that he is free to do what he wants and his luck won't be like his uncle, but family comes first if they don't want him to do it they probably have reasons, but if it is online gambling he could easily do it without them knowing he could buy bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency and put them in an online cassno, and they won't even know about it.

In games like poker it is not just being shy or anything its about stress and fear, because when you walk into a table and start betting poeple are going to look at you, and some of them are going to try to read you, some gamblers have played so many games that when they look into a person's eyes know if he is blffing or not so you have to be confidant about what you are doing, as for the other games as you said everyone is just minding their own bussnies and don't care about their surroindings, in online casions you can forget all about that because the humain interaction is gone, so you feel more confidant, the only thying that is weighing you down is your fear of losing.

The wisest thing to do to secure your profit from the crypotocurrencies when they go up is to withdraw only what you have gained and leave your initial investment, lets say you invested a 1000$ and after a while it becomese 1500$ you withdraw 500$ and leave the 1000$, that way if the market keeps on going up you would still get profit, and if it keeps on going down you can withdraw it and you would still have gotten profit.