I happen to be autistic, and I'd like to clear up some myths that you've covered this thread with.

1.  Most of the health services in Europe are in the public sector.  Therefore, in the event that there was conclusive and tested evidence that a drug would reverse autism symptoms, there would be no profit incentive for them to avoid that drug.  Actually, it would save the state thousands in specialised schools and other aid.

2.  Autism is not always debilitating, nor are autistic people stupid.

3.  As pointed out in 1, if there was conclusive evidence of a drug being successful in "curing" autism (if you can do such a thing), national health services would have an incentive to use it.  Therefore, all the studies that you have posted are inconclusive.  A study does not "prove" anything, and "science" does not unanimously make decisions.  Actually, what we think we know as facts today have changed countless times over many years while real scientists are keeping an open mind and peer reviewing studies effectively.

"Qualifications" mean nothing - tried and tested meta analysis over several years are what means something.

I hope your tin foil hat fits on your big head.

My belief is that socialism is an extremely appealing ideology to poorer people and leaders want to utilise that, sometimes maliciously.  When a revolution begins, at first a leader is required to establish order.  In capitalism from feudalism, that eventually resulted in (partially) democratic systems, and I'm confident that a more economic and direct democracy can be implemented in socialism given the right conditions.

That leader can attempt to manipulate the people when they are in this phase, using the pretense of socialism.  The difference is that a capitalist society admits to rewarding selfishness through money, while a socialist society intends to prevent it - this means that false claims of a capitalist society (or corporatist, we could also say) are less likely to happen.  When I refer to a "socialist society", I mean the socialist society envisioned by Marx and Engels, not by Lenin (although I must say that Trotsky was reasonable for his time).

It's not though, is it?

Historical gold prices have moved around loads.  If you had to retire in a certain 5-year timeframe, you could be talking about losing half of your initial investment at many points.

You might be getting something that's safer than fiat currency because of its scarcity, but you're not getting something that's a very strong savings account.

Bitcoin is different to that because any other coin can provide the exact same utility.  You mentioned Litecoin - oh look, Litecoin has SegWit and a faster block time, and a few other improved characteristics.  So who's to say that Litecoin doesn't suddenly become the "very strong savings account"?  And if another coin is more scalable than that and does away with some of Litecoin's problems, then who's to say that that coin doesn't become a "very strong savings account"?

My point is that digital assets can be scarce, but there can be any number of assets with different characteristics.  Therefore the only ways to ensure that the price of a cryptocurrency is stable enough to use are:

-Systems which give the price a fundamental reason
-A cryptocurrency which is good enough that people don't feel the need to rush off to a new one

Both of these things are difficult and could take several years.

Are you aware of the concept of "onchain transactions"?

You don't have to keep your coins in the wallet they give you afterwards.  That would be stupid.  Any mixer could steal your funds when you give them to the mixer, but there's no higher risk involved in receiving a wallet to receiving a transaction.

Due to the high network fees right now you're unlikely to move that satoshi. 

The current recommended fee would require paying more than that for the median transaction size.  If you've accepted more than one transaction (input) to own that 78,000 satoshi, the transaction fee will end up being even higher than that.  As it suggests:


Blockchain.info is known for weird fee estimation, so they could not even be paying that fee and it's impossible to tell.

If Blockchain was actually setting the correct fee (unlikely), you could probably get away with sending a fee of about a third less than that and it would still go through.  However, the receiver would not be able to spend that satoshi that you send and it would be completely worthless.

"MySpace" was the funniest one I've seen.

It really means nothing.  ETH is currently impractical for micropayments.  ETH fees are at least $0.1 or so right now, which is still impractical for those same microtransactions that people are supposedly trying to sort out.

Bitcoin will remain a dominant cryptocurrency for as long as a truly great cryptocurrency hasn't become popular yet.  Bitcoin is not a truly great cryptocurrency, nor is Ether (not that Ether is a cryptocurrency either).  As soon as there's a system which makes micropayments practical and gives a fundamental reason for the price to remain relatively stable, that system will be dominant.

The only thing that avoiding taxes on Bitcoin would prove is that the capitalist system is extremely easily exploited, and thus that it is flawed.

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Clearly this sort of thread is meaningless.  When a group has few strong arguments to give, the sort of argument they resort to is ad hominems (which I personally refrain from using in political arguments) - in this case about the physical strength of socialists.

I am (somewhat) physically weak, and I am left wing.  The reason is not because I am pathetic - it's because socialists do not always feel the need to pressure themselves into traditional masculinity, just to achieve the approval of others.  What you see is physically strong, but what I see in this case is ideologically weak.

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Here's the bulk of my argument (don't respond to personal points there):

Capitalism results in inefficiency in that it requires huge amounts of resources for businesses deciding who to hire, businesses having unnecessary separate offices and having expensive marketing.  The only marketing which should be necessary is informational marketing, and this also does not mislead the public.

Key examples of these natural monopolies include phone networks, as well as electricity and water companies.  It seems absurd that you can pay for a month's subscription in order to call or text people, but you can only access one of several completely different unnecessary networks, run by several companies which are all in the same place.

Claims that money is being "stolen" from the rich are absurd considering that their money is a byproduct of surplus labour value produced by the proletariat.  Sure, there is the opportunity for others to gain wealth, however these opportunities are limited and are degrading considering that the sole argument is "no point rebelling because you could be rich yourself one day".  For there to be rich people there have to be poor people; such is the nature of employment in the private sector.

Furthermore, socialists functioning normally in an everyday society appears very strange to some people.  The idea of supporting socialism on a smartphone seems so strange - but socialists' belief are that a better system could have created that smartphone, and even if it didn't they would still have to function in the society they lived in at the time.  You could equally tell a peasant under the feudal system "you're so ungrateful for everything the feudal system has done for you - how can you insult the feudal system when you're wearing rags made under it?!"

The idea that huge numbers of deaths have been caused inherently by socialism is also absurd.  They have been caused by countries which deluded the proletariat into the belief that they were implementing true socialism.  Even with the skewered system which they lived in, the Soviet Union became a global superpower from a rural land of peasants in just a few decades.  Capitalism in its early stages also result in millions and millions of pointless deaths, as it continues to today in many parts of the world.

Some people like to deny this.

It'd be pretty weird of Chinese exchanges to continue having these limits for any longer than a couple of weeks.

To a Chinese whale who manipulates the price of one of these exchanges or does high-volume arbitrage trading, a withdrawal limit of 10 BTC is nothing.  A million dollars or so in a year is meaningless to some of them.

I'd be very surprised if LocalBitcoins trading was accepted by the Chinese government as well considering the regulations they want to impose on Bitcoin trading.

So this page is a giant advertisement, from which you get all the ad revenue?

Do you really think that advertisers will clamour to get space on this grid of yours with no actual reason for visitors to go on the site?

The amount of Bitcoin being bought is always the same as the amount being sold.  All that "more buyers" or "more sellers" means is that the prices are changing to reflect what people are willing to buy/sell it for.  Shortening it to buyers vs. sellers would be an oversimplification.

There are no "fundamentals" in Bitcoin in that nothing really pegs the price down and it does what it wants.  There could be a very slow increase over several months which was still a bubble, and there could also be a very slow decline which was not a death - you're right in that regard - but if merchant adoption doesn't match these trends, the increases are speculation-fuelled and are not "real" growth.

When the price just doubled in the past couple months, which of those buyers actually intended to spend Bitcoin in stores?  If the answer is not a lot, then the price growth is just a self-fulfilling prophecy, and will end as soon as people feel like they won't get rich.  That kind of media attention is extremely unhealthy because as soon as Bitcoin's price is going down, they turn on us and so does the market.

"I hate Jihan Wu for agreeing with a chain split"

"I think the solution is to do this chain split"

And then there's Quantus busy not being a hypocrite.  UASF, at least BIP148, is very risky, and not only does it not have miner support (of course), it doesn't have node support yet either.  There's still under one thousand nodes signalling for it.

That's why the OP wanted a Bitcoin-based distribution.  To have a similar user base.

I'm late to the party but I've bought my bytes now.  I'm gonna be HODLing for a good year now, probably.

OP, if I had to read through all this "unfair distribution" and "IOTA clone" crap I would have killed myself by now.  Good job not doing that.

Wow, you've matured a lot.  And you've only been around for like 3-4 months.

IMO Ether is not the amazing solution that it's cracked up to be.  It's OK because it can spur other blockchain development (ft. useless tokens as you point out), but still most of the buying is empty speculation.  Bitcoin is mostly speculation too.

I would argue that ETH's method of centralised development and continuous hard forks is not effective in the long run as a speculative asset because the supply could be changed, basically at any point, as could any other aspect which fuels the greed of the centralised development team.  It feels like every single decision in the hands of that bastard Buterin.

There are good alternatives.  Those in existence and those being developed.  

YORK, since you're kind of interested in alts now, I definitely suggest that you read the Byteball whitepaper.  It has some very clever solutions to many of the fundamental problems in Bitcoin, some of which also exist in ETH.  Also, you get free Byteball, just sign messages with a Bitcoin address that you hold and it gets given to you in each distribution round.  The idea is that 98% of bytes are distributed to existing Bitcoin holders.

There are good alts and good technology, but it'll take time...  ETH is not worthy of being king.

I was recently transferring all of the funds out my old Blockchain.info wallet into my TREZOR.

Naturally I had assumed that Blockchain.info was going to screw up the fee like usual and pay about 120 satoshi/byte.  They recommended a fee of about 1.6 mBTC, so I increased the fee to 3.8 mBTC to get into a safe boundary, but the fees ended up being nearly 800 satoshi/byte.

I was shocked.  It looks like they were intending to pay a reasonable fee.

Maybe they're finally starting to change the way their wallet works (which of course leads to giant bugs, like usual...)

Some promising altcoins are distributing their coins to existing Bitcoin holders.

I would recommend participating in the Byteball airdrop by signing a message with your current Bitcoin funds.  You will get bytes depending on how much Bitcoin you sign with, and about 200,000 Bitcoin are signed so far.  The next round is June 9th.

Stellar Lumens is doing a similar thing at the end of June.

Careful when making proper investments into altcoins though.  Some of them go down violently as well.

Also make sure to hold Bitcoin as your primary coin.  Even Ethereum basically revolves around it.

Banks create money out of nothing.  The money that they create is now not based on gold or another scarce asset - it's only based on non-existent money that was created before it.  The money's creation is very poorly regulated.

You should try watching the documentary Money Is Debt (revised). 

Furthermore, banks are seldom insured for more than a hundred thousand dollars or so in your local currency.  At any point they could prevent withdrawals to avoid a run on the bank.

It's not very expensive.  Typical exchange fees are about 0.25%, like those on GDAX, Bitstamp and Kraken.  There can be other fees involved but it's very unlikely for it to be a huge amount if you don't mind verifying your identity.

You could also sell on LocalBitcoins for cash, then deposit that in your bank account instead.

You can put your altcoins on a software wallet that actually lets you have your private keys, like Jaxx.  It would be a lot safer than holding them on an online wallet like that - Jaxx is integrated with Shapeshift.

Larger exchanges aren't always safe either.  We know that from Cryptsy and Mt. Gox.

Neither Coinbase nor Xapo are wallets per se.  They're online wallets, which are basically a bank that you're trusting to store and spend your Bitcoin for you.  A proper Bitcoin wallet is one where you control your private keys - these are wallets like Electrum which you download.

You can also deal with hardware wallets like a TREZOR, and use these with Electrum if you want.  I would argue that these are a very safe option for users who are not tech-savvy.

Alternatively you could use Bitcoin Core, which is a full node.  This way you're contributing to the security of the whole network.  However, it can be resource intensive to run these clients.

An important note for you:  your chance of getting scammed on Bitcointalk is much higher than on LocalBitcoins.

Cryptocurrencies and PayPal don't mix, so if you're buying or selling for PayPal you're just asking to get scammed frankly, but on LocalBitcoins you have a lot of options, the most prominent of which is cash transfer.  Often this can be very useful.

On Bitcointalk the trust system is somewhat broken because account sales are allowed.  It means that a lot of accounts with high trust get farmed and sold and people often scam when handling bigger transactions.  There are only a few trustworthy users who act as escrow and you'll have to choose one of those and cooperate with your buyer/seller.  On LocalBitcoins there's a built-in escrow to keep you safe.

If you don't mind verification, your best option would be Coinbase (if they were fully functional).  If you're handling larger amounts, I would actually just wait until Coinbase sort their problems out and then buy from them.  It tends to be expensive dealing with credit cards on other places.