I picked Coinbase which are happy to take your money without much trouble on buying after charging you 3.99% and I clicked a link from Google that offered me
$10 worth of free BTC if i spent over $100 after signing up but i did not get these free coins and Coinbase does not answer emails.

Gets much worse because i should have some bit-gold since i purchased the coins before the fork and they won't give me access to them by putting them in my
account and I suspect they are printing there own BTC because when i checked using the public BTC address that they gave me I was surprised to find no transactions
on the account in the official block-chain.

I did a test using Coinbase to sell coins and get some money back into my bank account and you have to set up a SEPA transaction and send them a euro
before they can send money back to the bank account used to buy the coins in the first place and then when they send the money via SEPA to your bank it
needs converting to euro's and then your bank has to covert them back again and this all costs money.

In short you need to sell $120 of BTC to get just $90 back into the bank so I am far from impressed with the service and they have not even given
me a public address to use on my ETH account so I suspect they printed these themselves and they hold fakes on the internal database that credit
on-line accounts.

I see lots of inflation and the amount of tokens doubles each time a new fork is created and correct me if i am wrong but Coinbase
creates BTC out of thin air held on account because I cannot see mine in the public block-chain and then we have the new futures market
and derivatives and it is just this sort of activity that has been used to manipulate the price of gold/silver down.

Would be nice for me to get access to these Bit-Gold coins that i think i own because I owned BTC prior to fork but i have a feeling that I can
kiss them good bye myself.

After buying BTC from Coinbase they put the coins in a on-line account and gave me a public address so I understood that the
coins that they hold for me were in the public block-chain but when i checked the balance of the account using an on-line API
I discovered that the account had no transactions against it.

When taking some profit out of BTC using Coinbase the transaction completes in seconds so surly they are not waiting for the next block to be written to the block-chain

Later I also purchased ETH using Coinbase and was expecting them to give me a public ETH address that could be used to receive money from but they never did.

How would I know if they are printing these bitcoins themselves that are held in my account and would this not lead to a situation where we have a lot more
coins flying around than we think we have which is just what happened to gold/silver and resulted in market fixing.

Late on the 8th Dec 2017 the price for BTC reached an height of $19,340 which is way up on your $17,000 and I witnessed this with my own eyes
and yet all the major charts seems to have doctored the peek down to high 17k range

What concerns me is inflation in the system because i found out that the public address given to my by Coinbase does not have any transactions against it
in the BTC block-chain so this could well result in Coinbase creating it own internal representation of BTC and putting them in to my on-line account so these fake
coins will result in inflation because the system will have a lot more than the current 16m coins flying around if this carries on.

I sent coin base an email about this but don't think they will reply and they also store ETH for me and never did give me a public address for the account
so maybe someone else here can set the record straight for me.

You ask a good question and they have this AI machine that looks like a woman and took question from reporters
and 'it' said that she wanted to have a family and that man would be doomed if they did not work with AI

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8Ox6H64yu8

Well soon AI will invent its own computer programming language that we humans won't understand and this new code
will needed to be deployed to distributed servers across the world so that once the AI is running then nothing can stop it
and what better way to do this than exploit all the spare capacity offered by alt-coin servers   

Soon mankind will be knocked off from being at the top of the food chain and know it or not but we are helping this to happen.

Like you, I like doing things myself and tend to work in C# on windows machines using Visual Studio and my options are to use NBitcoin from Github which is a mega large
project and build a wrapper around it or cheat and use BTC HTTP API's when really i want to use Net.Sockets and post my own bytedata off over TCP but it seems like talking to
nodes directly has been implemented in such a way that makes this far too complicated even to someone like me that before now has written a bit-torrent client from scratch.

Maybe we should team up if using the same tools

Yes this is a major problem on BTC and has put me off using the coins when the cost can be over $20 per transaction and at the start of the year the cost was
something like $0.00001 and the miners should take profit by mining new coins and competing to add new blocks the the block-chain.

Unlike 99% of people I am not a big fan of the block chain because it's too slow and complicated to stop double spending when you have to process and check
history on all the inputs to a transaction in a database that is already 200gb in size and have all the energy and GPU power being wasted as machine compete
with each other to find out who is fastest at counting grains of sand to win a prize for the miners.

Cost something like 120KWH of electric just to confirm a single transaction so yes the block chain solves one problem and made ten more as I see it