Perhaps you should provide more information than saying I paid X fees for a transfer.

Poor fee estimation on the client side in most cases leads to people overpaying with 50%. I have seen it happen myself that clients recommend me a fee that makes zero sense. Most people will probably go with what the client recommends but that's not a good thing, and leads to even higher fees if enough people do it simultaneously.

Another thing is that high fees are the result of multi input --> single output transactions. You think it's just a regular transaction, but under the hood multi input transactions take up more block space and thus require a higher than average fee.

My highest regular size transaction fee so far is still sub $1.

As weird as it may sound to you, I don't even blame criminals for using Bitcoin. If you want Bitcoin to be open and free, you also have to accept that criminals use it, because it's useful and valuable. I'm sure that with time people will be less bothered by criminals using Bitcoin, but they have to accept first that Bitcoin doesn't need a central entity to be in charge and issue the coins.

Average joes are used to have banks and governments be the central point of everything, and the decades of indoctrination in economics didn't really help either.

I am not per se against banks, because I still can't rely solely on Bitcoin for my daily needs and bills. It's just not going to work for me to store physical cash under my bed year in year out. I wouldn't feel comfortable at all. I feel more comfortable to have an acceptable amount sitting in my bank accounts, while the majority of my wealth sits in Bitcoin.

I don't always need a censorship resistant form of conducting payments. Fiat has served me well locally and I don't see much to complain about here. Bitcoin complements fiat's ability to be a good form of local money. With Bitcoin I can send any amount to any country 24/7 and nothing can be done to stop me. No government or bank can touch even one single satoshi of mine in cold storage.

I think these exploits are the result of people using third party bots that are programmed to work how the programmer(s) programmed the bots to work. Retailers especially use mass produced bots that are easy to manipulate because you know how they react when X or Y happens. It wouldn't surprise me if the backend details are sold to whales.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7z51k1/what_is_going_on_with_xbtcad_on_kraken_lately_why/

XBT/CAD pair on Kraken is shit. An 80BTC sell wall a year ago managed to keep the price below $13,000CAD for a couple of days. No wonder it flash crashes like that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ktorpey/2019/01/23/bitcoin-lightning-network-payments-have-already-surpassed-all-altcoins-at-this-retailer/

Bitrefill a few days ago announced that they opened the first 1BTC main net Lightning channel, which will also stimulate non micro payments. With time there will be 10BTC channels and up. It's only a matter of time, but yes, there is a certain degree of risk you have to take into consideration because the funds have to be online.

As for the fees, I don't really see it as much of a problem. Most people won't ever bother to use their own node anyway, so they will use a third party service that they can top up through a wide variety of fiat payment options.

Lol. The bad guys are part of the 1% club in crypto. In order to hit these bad guys you want to punish the good guys accounting for the other 99%?

If people weren't so naive and stupid, scams would be way less of a thing. Most scams can be prevented simply by having people use common sense. If something looks too good to be true, it mostly is. The potential 'gain' there is to make isn't worth the risk/reward ratio. It offers odds worse than a casino where most people lose anyway. You think you can beat that? Think again. 

Then why is barely anyone using the stated altcoins to conduct payments?

Bitrefill's Lightning payments generated almost just as much transaction volume as ALL altcoins they accepted combined. Now let that sink in.

XRP army is only interested in waiting for institutions to use xRapid so they can sell their bags. EOS is controlled by a few Asian whales that occassionally pump and dump it. Doge is the only altcoin with a community behind it that somewhat focuses on actual usage of the coin.

Bitcoin isn't forking, scammers fork off because they want to rip off people and make millions in the process. Don't blame Bitcoin for that.

Lightning is instant and makes altcoins pretty much obsolete when it comes to instant transactions. Give it a try to see for yourself.

Even if there are coins gaining a bigger market cap than Ether in the future (technically speaking, XRP has a +$40 billion market cap based on its 100 billion circulating units), nothing comes even close to the development going on in that platform, and the fact that its network effect is incredibly strong. EOS raised $4 billion in funds and has not managed to attract even a tenth of the developers and activity that Ether currently enjoys.

Platforms as EOS and TRON are similar to wash trading exchanges, they thrive on manipulating volume and transactions.

The most painless way? No amount of money printing actually solves long term problems. All it does is just buy you some time in the short term, but the underlying problems that will hit you hard at a later point are still present, but certainly not pretty. If you want to know what not pretty means, then look at what's happening in Venezuela and in the continent of Africa.

Bitcoin doesn't have to replace fiat, it just needs to work and provide a decent enough alternative to fiat. A healthy balance in use between Bitcoin and fiat is what I consider a realistic goal. Bitcoin can't scale enough to serve a whole world. I don't think even a fully deployed Lightning Network would be sufficient to do so. We have to accept that decentralized networks have their limitations.

That's what Lightning is for. You don't have to use an altcoin for fast and cheap transactions. It requires you just a simple third party wallet to receive payments right away, which is a perfectly viable option since you don't require the uttermost security and self control of funds with such low amounts.

As far as spending goes, you can't do much with $1 to begin with, unless it concerns a third world country, but even then you can convince the store or other person to accept your satoshis. It might require some effort, but it's not super difficult either.

Cashing out $20 million easy? Can you give me an example of how cashing out that much in value is easy?

Yup! Bitcoin isn't doing anything, it's just the US dollar that's about to lose or gain a bit more of its non-existent value. 

I remember having seen an old video clip from 2013 where some legacy bobos just couldn't wrap their head around how 1 Bitcoin could be worth more than a single US dollar. It must have been a tough decade for naysayers looking at how their predictions were trashed by Bitcoin, while the worst part is that they are missing out on these gains themselves.

Even if you don't like Bitcoin, every rational thinking investor would at least allocate a certain smaller percentage to Bitcoin in order to not miss out.

I'm quite sure that most of these high level legacy investors are still somewhat afraid of the satoshi coins, which is a good thing, because it prevents them from going balls deep and potentially have enough incentive to steer development to a certain direction. Satoshi hasn't only done us a favor by leaving, but his coins also help keeping the bad institutions at a more safe distance.

As for the article, it really wouldn't surprise me if it was meant as a joke to point out how bullish that 'investor' is on Bitcoin. Forbes is a champion in giving articles a little twist.

Taxation is harsh in Japan, which is very likely the main reason they didn't consider it a worthwhile investment. Obtaining the right licenses and whatnot costs millions and requires you to go through a lengthy legal process. CZ cares too much about his net profits, therefore only settles in jurisdictions where his profit margins are not being threatened by greedy governments.

Japanese exchanges aren't generating that much in volume, so if the above is indeed the reason, then it doesn't surprise me at all. Japan is not a trader friendly environment. Taxation in Japan is similar to theft with such insane rates.

I can't seem to find anything that indicates that Coinswitch is a scam, just a few complaints that more exchanges have to deal with. You can do a test transaction with the minimum they allow you to convert to see if it's legit or not. Their web ranking looks good and they kept growing throughout the last months, which is a positive sign.

RDD chart however looks nasty. It has has broken through its support this year and is currently going through a freefall. Wouldn't surprise me if this ends up well under 10 sats. Don't catch a falling knife.

Why don't you just paste the whole guide in this thread? I don't think there are all that many people going to visit a random website to read through it.

People nowadays are rightfully paranoid about what they click on.

If you're referring to the different sorts of Bitcoin flavors as people tend to refer to them, then you're wrong. It's Bitcoin vs a shitfork. Sound money vs a scam.

In my case Gold actually offers some tax advantages, so I wouldn't mind Bitcoin to be put in the same category. However, I don't think that governments have to classify Bitcoin at all in order to tax your Bitcoin gains. In reality it doesn't even matter what it is that you have, if you buy it low and sell higher you are subject to taxation whether you like it or not.

I have seen a lot people say that as long as Bitcoin isn't legal or accepted by the government (whatever that means), they don't have to pay tax, which is bs. I'm certain that most people here haven't ever had to deal with taxation. Governments aren't stupid, they know how to subject literally anything you can think of to taxation.

McAfee hides in jurisdictions he feels comfortable. One day he'll make a mistake and pay the price for his deeds. If people for once stopped looking up to such a scammer, he would be way less lucrative for scam projects to pay him ridiculous amounts of money. If his money runs out, his personal security will too. Who's going to hang with someone not having any money left?

Another thing is that most ICO victims are noobies. I doubt they even realize that they have been scammed. If there aren't any reports, he will enjoy a free ride and repeat his scams during the next bull run.

What bothers me even more is that some popular Bitcoiners on Twitter see him as a good guy.

If you also add that miners only sell the bare minimum in order to cover operational costs, there is basically no flow of freshly minted coins finding their way into the market. CashApp alone based on its previous financial reports has been scooping up 10% of the daily number of minted coins, and this is just one service.

Another positive aspect is that in about 3 weeks, the last futures contract of the CBOE expires and no more will be added. In other words, less overall shorting with coins people don't have.

The "issue" you're referring helps miners earn millions on top of the block rewards, which no other coin does.

Just Bitcoin's fees per block are consistently much higher than BCash's + BSV's ENTIRE block rewards. If you seriously think that endlessly increasing the block size is the path to success, you don't know much about Bitcoin's economics. There is an infinite amount of demand for free to almost free block space, while Bitcoin's block space is almost an asset on its own due to its scarcity.

BSV is going to raise the blocksize to 1GB this year. Fantastic upgrade with no one but Craig and Calvin using it. Next upgrade is 1TB blocks.

He won't reveal anything but his own stupidity and shadiness. This drug abuser is a scammer. He is responsible for noobs to lose their life savings on shitty projects he promoted during the altcoin/token boom. The crypto space is a MUCH better place without scammers like McAfee. No one but his dealer is going to miss him.

Lol. No. Authorities are looking for mr McAfee. He's running like a bitch because he knows that what he has done throughout the years is illegal and fraudulent.