what high fees and slow confirmation?
you are either copy pasting some comment from 7 months ago. or you are just spamming. fees have been minimal for 9 years except for ~3 months last year! and currently they are minimal again and it has been like this for about 6 months now.

other "platforms" also suffer from the same problem. you just haven't experienced it because you either haven't been watching (for instance ETH had $5 fees at some point last year) or because those coins are too dead that nobody even uses them. no usage = no transaction on chain = empty blocks = low fee. if their usage increases for any reason their fees will go up also.

wrong.
the right way to create an altcoin is to solve issues but unfortunately that has never been the purpose so far. the real reason to create an altcoin is to make money. that is why they are pump and dumps.

that is a strange statement
there is no fully or partly verifying your identity, you either verify it or not and the verification is way too simple. for example by the time CW drama was ongoing, Charlie Lee (creator of LTC) simply signed a message from the LTC genesis block and posted it online for everyone to see and verify. it is that simple.
and there has been zero cases of proof so your in parenthesis zero is right not the "few" contradictory statement

if you think these two are the same thing then you are the idiot!

of course there is no argument that investing your whole life savings in bitcoin is a terrible idea but it is nothing like buying a lottery ticket. it is simply because of chances.
when you buy a lottery ticket first of all you have no way of speculating whether you will win or not and second you have a minuscule chance of winning.
on the other hand when you invest in bitcoin you do have a way of speculating whether you will make a profit (win) or not and also your chances are not at all small.

i only need one reason to know your comment here is bullshit and to ignore you, and that is the fact that you took the time to come to a bitcoin forum, sign up and tell us that bitcoin is going to die! LOL.

based on your comment and your 1-3 bullshit reasons you are an altcoin bag holder who has fallen for the advertisement and you thought you are going to be rich but now you are getting dumped on and you are losing a lot of money.

there wast only one exchange hack which was somewhat big but also it was mainly XRP that was stolen not bitcoin. where do you get the rest of them that you call it "a lot"?!!

and no it will never end. just like anything else on the internet, exchanges will be under attack specially since they are handling money and successfully hacking them means a lot of money. it is a never ending war. like viruses, there is a new virus every day and there is a new update to antiviruses to protect against that.

last year changed a lot about bit coin though. it was not just a huge price rise, it was a huge adoption that happened around the world. when Japanese did announce bitcoin as a legal way of payment, that adoption as a currency pushed everything forwards by a great deal which meant a lot of people changed their minds about bitcoin and it washed away 8 years of FUD for many of them. and the merchant adoption of course grew big.

it is called FUD and the purpose of it is to try and bring the price down and the reason for it is because they want to buy bitcoin.

the thing is many people know the fact that bitcoin market is still small and can be influenced a lot by the decisions that people make. and sometimes these decisions are based mostly on drama and what they read online. but generally it is from the news they read like the hack news, or some adoption news (as an opposite way which leads to rise) not some random idiot's comment on a forum.
with that mistake they start spreading bullshit about how price is falling so that they can buy more of it.

Mt Gox selling coins has never been the reason for price drop so that their stop turns the market into bullish, market has been able to easily absorb the amount without changing anything. in fact the sale started right in the middle of the rise when price was around $4k-$5k and ATH happened while they were selling.

just like any other FUD this will also be replaced by another new one.


i think it is because of the altcoin dumps.
this is just a guess at this point but it is based on two main facts:
1. the drops started wit the big altcoins before they continued with bitcoin
2. the final drops have been much bigger in altcoins than they have been in bitcoin.
and most of the money at least exists through bitcoin.

yeah i can see why you would think that and it sounds logical but history suggests that whenever a news comes out or even an expectation of a certain news the effects are instant. it sometimes happens even before the news comes out (the insiders).

the best example of an exchange hack and the drop is Bitfinex in 2016. when it was hacked nobody still knew it but the price experienced a small drop like ~5% then in an hour or two the news came out and the panic started. in less than 24 hours price had dropped about 20% and after 2 days it reached the bottom at 30% and by the third day it was over and price stabilized and even went up a little after that. in 10 days price went back to normal.
and it has always been like this with different type of news. for example when ETF was rejected last year we had a similar scenario. even rising is similar for example when the news about SegWit came out (i think it was in July) price went up in a similar fashion: small rise first then news comes out and a shoot up.

definition of money is clear. it has certain attributes such as being a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment.[1] but the main attribute is anything that is widely used and accepted to do all those things above.
if everyone starting creating their own money there will be chaos. imagine you bought a printer, designed a currency and printed it on special papers. can you go to the grocery store and buy stuff with it? you can try to convince someone else to accept it then someone else but after a lot of effort you won't be able to get many to do it. so what you have just printed can not be money.
not to mention that because you were not familiar with the process of printing money, had no access to special expensive printers government uses to print money, and also didn't have the special paper for money and a lot of other factors your money can easily be faked. i can also print the same thing at my home which means your money has no value either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money

one word: adoption!
people chose bitcoin to be a currency, they saw others, weren't impressed so they decided to use altcoins for pump and dumps only. you can't force people to what they don't want to do.

have you tried searching? there is no need for starting a topic when there is a list already available to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country_or_territory

and here is a map (the red parts are the "hostile" countries only):

sometimes yes but not always. price jumps can have many different reasons for instance some good news that people were waiting for can lead to a FOMO buy that makes the price jump like that. or for instance breaking an important resistance can lead to a FOMO buy because people see the direction in which bitcoin is headed and start buying with confidence and make the price jump.

the same exchange as everyone else.

yes, you can see then on order books are walls and when they are filled you can see them in the history. you won't learn much from seeing these orders though.

it doesn't work like that because of two things: these exchanges have nearly similar volume (~10% of total) and also arbitrage trading is a thing.
so for example if a whale sells a large amount on exchange_1 and drops the price down people who are seeing price is up on exchange_2, 3,4,5,... are going to buy bitcoin on exchange_1 and transfer it to other places to sell and make profit. since it is many exchanges versus 1 it makes that 1 exchange price to come up.

no detection means also no effect on the price.

this dip had nothing to do with Bithumb because that hack is already too old a story to want to be affecting anything anymore. it happened 3 days ago  on June 20.

if you paid attention closely to how the market changed you could have seen that the drop is much bigger in the altcoins such as ETH and EOS. these coins have been getting dumped hard as people are leaving them. and when they do they usually are doing it on altcoin exchanges that don't have any fiat market. so they sell their altcoin to bitcoin then transfer bitcoin to another exchange like Coinbase for instance and sell bitcoin to get fiat. the result is that bitcoin falls because of the altcoin dumps.

which is why altcoin drops have been bigger than bitcoin's. because some people either sell for fiat directly or sell for bitcoin and hold bitcoin.

it needs a starting 0. the correct hex is 05-f5-b9-f0 this is 4 bytes but the amount field is 8 bytes so the remaining 4 bytes are empty/zero 00-00-00-00-05-f5-b9-f0 (big-endian). since this has to be little endian you must reverse this: f0-b9-f5-05-00-00-00-00 (note that you are reversing a hex not a strong so f0 which represents 1 byte remains f0 you are just rearranging the byteArray)

in python the hex() function doesn't include the leading zeroes. you can use the .str.zfill()

i can't believe i have forgotten about this:
14-Jan-2016 Mike heard basically calls bitcoin dead. "The death spiral begins"

we got a 25% discount on bitcoin sales thanks to this FUD and then prepared for the launch to the moon. it sounds silly now that i think about how i bought bitcoin around $350 that day

---

bitcoin history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bitcoin
http://historyofbitcoin.org/

despite what certain people wish, the chances of price going lower than $6k is extremely small at this point. we have already tested breaking that resistance multiple times and once in the past during the peak of the panic sells we even saw $5900 but it did not last more than an hour.

additionally  with the recent $30 million exchange hack and the fact that price did not move at all proves that market is not ready for a drop anymore. i presume there is a serious accumulation going on which is buying bitcoin these days.

i only see one problem in your comment and that is "manipulation" and that is not a big problem when it comes to "bitcoin growth" that you are so concerned about.
manipulation is a part and parcel of any market and it happens all the time. the difference is that bitcoin is still small so it is more effective here. but it is a lot bigger compared to previous years and as we move ahead and have increased adoption it becomes less and less effective. and people aren't going to give up getting involved with bitcoin just because in short term there is some manipulation!

you can still lose your money whilst using a decentralized exchange. because even when you are not leaving your money with a third party when you use these exchanges you are still having your funds in a hot wallet and you are connected to the internet so you can get hacked. and there has been some cases of bugs and exploits in these platforms which is normal with any program that has led to losses.

i say decentralized exchanges aren't the solution for protecting against hacks. hacks do happen, we need to increase the security.

although the problem most exchange hack cases in the past has been the fact that there weren't any hacks. the exchange lied to scam its users.

there was an increase in the number of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool but even with that rise the fees weren't that high to force them to charge such a huge amount (400k satoshi) that is about 1600-800 satoshi/byte depending on the size of the transaction which is usually 250-500 bytes that exchanges use. any way you think, it is unreasonable in my opinion.

Warning: this is complicated and long. i posted this here just FYI. don't bother doing it because of its complication and the reason i mention in the end.

go to Send tab, enter the required information such as address to pay to, amount to pay,... and set a fee. now click preview to see your transaction. instead of signing it, click Copy to copy the hex of your unsigned transaction.
note the amount you are sending. lets say it is 1BTC and your fee was 0.0001 so your final amount after the fee would be 0.9999BTC.

now go to your transaction hex that you just copied.
find 99990000 satoshi in it which is f0b9f50500000000 in hex. replace it with 100000000 satoshi which is 00e1f50500000000 in hex (note that numbers are little endian).
you can use something like this: https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/decimal-to-hex.html to do the conversion and then manually reverse it and add the zeros to increase it to 8 bytes. eg. 99990000 is 05F5B9F0 reverse is F0B9F505 and pad with zeros F0B9F50500000000 (upper or lower case doesn't matter)
copy the edited hex.
go back to electrum, import the new tx, check it 10 times to see if you have not messed anything up! sign. viola you have a transaction with 0 fee.

problem?
you will have 2 problems.
1. propagating your tx. nodes will reject it because majority of them have set their minrelaytxfee to 1 satoshi/byte (mostly by default)
2. getting it to be mined. miners have also set that minrelaytxfee and won't accept any tx with 0 fee even if they see it and even if the blocks are 90% empty.
...believe me i tried...