There are features some exchanges offer that are misleading. You may notice that certain exchanges offer you a menu of networks you can use in moving funds. These networks' respective fees are indicated. Exchanges make them appear as if you can easily switch between them. In avoiding high fees, the tendency is that some users choose the network with the cheapest fee, therefore ending with the wrong network. Funds are lost in the process. Indeed, in avoiding high fees, you may lost everything.


These centralized exchanges are imposing high fees. This is just one of their numerous disadvantages. But if you want to move Bitcoin from one exchange to another, why not trade it first into an altcoin with a much cheaper transaction fee and do another trade as soon as it arrives in its destination?

Anyway, I haven't tried it but Trust Wallet has made announcements almost a year ago that it already integrated Kucoin Community Chain (KCC) to their wallet. Did you not proceed with this option?

If we speak of an ideal cryptocurrency, I guess there is none, or perhaps current ones are yet to develop into our ideal cryptocurrency. The best among the existing ones, of course, is Bitcoin. But even Bitcoin is far from ideal. With Bitcoin, affordable and instant transactions, for example, can only happen off-chain. In which case, Dogecoin is more convenient to use than Bitcoin especially involving small amounts. Or Monero and ZCash are better than Bitcoin in terms of privacy. So I guess an ideal cryptocurrency is the combination of all the best features of all cryptocurrencies.

I doubt it. Although we are often reminded to gamble responsibly, the truth is that gambling and responsibility do not really go together.

If the government really wants to protect its people from the possible repercussions of gambling, they might as well just ban gambling outright. I am a gambler myself but if there is a law that prohibits gambling entirely, I guess I will readily support it. Whatever amount of fun and money that gambling has given to some of its players, they cannot equal the losses and misery of the rest of the gamblers. However significant the amount of taxes paid by gambling businesses, they cannot equal the social ills gambling has caused. The employment that gambling businesses generate cannot compensate for the big number of gamblers who have either left or got kicked out of their jobs.

Hong Kong has been on the news lately, and for good reason. It is a bit surprising and certainly a welcome development that despite the city being under China, a country generally averse to cryptocurrency, Hong Kong is moving toward the opposite direction. Rather than follow China's stance on crypto, it aims to be a cryptocurrency hub.

As far as the US is concerned, it seems it is also going the opposite direction. It has become too intolerant and too single-minded that it seems to have betrayed the very spirit of America. Strict policies are like betrayals to the very foundation of the land of the free.

So, have you been getting bigger gains because of this strategy? You've been here for around 6 years already. Which is better so far in terms of profit, to DCA or to buy Bitcoin in bulk following the Fed's decision?

Personally, I don't care so much about what the central bank of a faraway country is doing. Especially when it comes to Bitcoin, I'd rather just acquire when I have the money to spare and hodl. After all, I don't think that Bitcoin's price is really in correlation with whatever decision the Fed makes about its decaying currency, notwithstanding those moments when there is seemingly one.

All those that you mentioned are scams based on fake versions: fake links and emails and sites, fake giveaways, fake exchanges, fake apps. Indeed, they are relatively easy to avoid. One may be easier to avoid than the others, though, as in a fake Binance site is easier to determine than a fake Binance email which may even carry the words official or staff or team or whatever.

But the scams that are harder to avoid are those that aren't fake. FTX wasn't fake. BlockFi wasn't fake. The same is true with Celsius and Three Arrows Capital and others. They were all duly registered and licensed. They were all legal business entities. They all had highly paid teams and sleek headquarters and whatnot. But they're all scams!

Because everything has a schedule. But the schedule is not time-based but formula-based. So here is the formula as to why there is only 21 million in total supply and why the generation of new coins will last until around 2140:


https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1564742835223633921/photo/1

In addition to this, each block is mined within 10 minutes more or less, so while the formula above is based on blocks, subsequent halvings and when the final Satoshi is mined are still predictable. Hence, the estimates that the next halving would occur somewhere in April or May next year and the last Sat to be mined in around 2140.

It seems the domino of bankruptcy and insolvency is now being replaced with a domino of voluntarily giving up. But I think this isn't part of it. It seems this isn't even about regulatory policies smothering them. Perhaps it is convenient to drop this regulatory challenges excuse, but this isn't the primary reason. This is also not about centralized platforms offering P2P, competing against them. 

This is most probably the result of Youssef's co-founder Artur Schaback's lawsuit against both Paxful and Youssef. Schaback was kicked out by Youssef more than a year ago. Schaback then filed a lawsuit in Delaware 3 months ago. As a direct result of Schaback's legal actions, the "key staff departures" that Youssef mentioned happened. To the point that "there were no engineers, compliance team members, or security personnel left working at the company." This actually prompted Youssef to shut down the platform, specifically its security implications.^[1]

---

[1] https://decrypt.co/125411/paxful-bitcoin-marketplace-closure-cofounder-lawsuit

If you are limiting your choices to centralized exchanges, then you will be forced to choose the lesser evil. If you are looking for alternative to centralized exchanges, then you can have DExes, although with much lesser features, lower volume, lesser trading pairs, and so on. But if you are looking for an alternative centralized exchanges, then I guess you will have to risk with the big names such as KuCoin, Coinbase, OKX, Huobi. The assumption is that they're relatively safer since they're large enough to crumble easily, but it is never a guarantee.  

Has the US dollar been acting as the world's reserve currency for over a century already? Isn't it that its status as the world's reserve currency was agreed upon under the Bretton Woods System? The Bretton Woods Agreement which made the US dollar the globe's reserve currency was entered into in 1944. If this is the case, then its status as a reserve currency is only 79 years old, and it seems it is already weakening.

Aside from the fact that you can safely and easily self-custody Bitcoin, it is decentralized. That is the most convincing feature of Bitcoin. It doesn't have the abusive rulers who got all the powers in their hands as far as money is concerned. Bitcoin is ruled by codes that are etched in stone, that can't easily be tweaked in whichever direction the greedy fiat gods think of. The same decentralized feature means it doesn't have a CEO or a president to kill, a headquarters to raid or burn, central server to seize, and so on and so forth, which government agencies are fond of doing to anything in their way.

But if a skeptical person isn't convinced of this, try telling him/her the real situation of fiat and banks and governments and how ludicrous the monetary system actually is. If he/she is still skeptical, it might help mentioning to him/her that the likes of Elon Musk, Ray Dalio, Tim Draper, Jack Dorsey, Robert Kiyosaki, Tim Cook, and many others also own Bitcoin. If he/she isn't convinced of Bitcoin, perhaps these influential personalities, one of which he/she might idolize, have found something.

It is quite expected that the best time to gamble for most people is during the evening. It is when they are already done with their work and other responsibilities during the day. But if I am to think about it, evening is not really the best time to gamble. It's just that most don't have a choice. There are works to do, so gambling time will have to adjust.

But if I am vacant all day long, I actually prefer to gamble in the morning, when I am at my best mood. Evening is a time when you are already wrapping up the day, when you are already sort of exhausted after the entire day's activities. I think I just want to bond with my family in the evening and share stories of the day.

45- Darker45

Please and, as always, thank you, krog!

It will be good for Joshua to fight Fury. That would give him a nice paycheck. And he's already made it clear that he's mainly after the "money, money, money."

I think there have been opinions from boxing pundits that Joshua is not somebody who is really a feared heavyweight warrior. I sort of agree. His name is actually way bigger than his accomplishments or his boxing performance and skills. His résumé is lacking. To be quite frank, he has not really made a name by beating all the seemingly insurmountable odds. It was more or less smooth sailing for him. Some are even implying that Joshua is kind of babied all the way to the championship. Indeed, he's always been fighting in his own backyard. The first time he left his home court, he was knocked out.

Well, I guess you will have to do some research. There are videos and articles and even podcasts on Bitcoin online. Many are already mentioned above. If you try to search for some good old threads here, you will also find a lot worth reading. There are also new ones, although it is getting harder to separate the wheat from the chaff lately.

As to engagement, if you have something worth contributing, then make a reply. If you find a discussion not worth participating, then skip it and look for another one more intellectual. There are countless of threads here.

This is all founded upon a subjective presupposition. This is based on mere opinion. In the first place, why is this standard applied to Bitcoin when it is not even applied to fiat? Is a soiled 1 dollar bill lower in value than a newly printed 1 dollar bill? Does a crumpled or creased 10 dollar bill have lower value than a smooth one? The answer is no.

Scientists and chemical analysts actually found out in a number of studies and surveys that more than 90% of US bills are contaminated with cocaine.^[1][2][3] Do these 90% contaminated bills have lower value than those cleaner ones? Of course, not! So why should Bitcoin be treated any differently?

In terms of Bitcoin used in criminal activities and transactions, they should be confiscated the way US dollars used in illegal transactions are confiscated. And then they will go back into circulation carrying the same purchasing power.
 

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency#:~:text=%22It's%20virtually%20impossible%20for%20cocaine,was%20confirmed%20by%20Ronald%20K.
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/cocaine-on-money-drug-found-on-90-of-us-bills
[3] https://www.acs.org/pressroom/newsreleases/2009/august/new-study-up-to-90-percent-of-us-paper-money-contains-traces-of-cocaine.html

02- Darker45

Please and thank you, icopress!

The process of dedollarization has been gaining momentum already. This doesn't look good for the US. The influence and power of the US dollar in global affairs is waning. The sad thing is that the strongest competitor is a currency of the enemy, not from an ally country. It would have been less troubling if the competitor is the euro or the pound or the yen, but it isn't.

The Chinese yuan is a considerable threat. Its growth is fueled not just by its strength but even more by its desire to dethrone the USD. Just recently, the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) will also start to replace the USD with the Chinese yuan.

But this has its own advantages and disadvantages, just like a bank's reversibility feature. In other words, this is actually a double-edged sword. With a Bitcoin transaction, there is only a very small room for error. If you failed to double-check the address you will be sending Bitcoin to, for example, and you sent it to the wrong address, you might not get your Bitcoin back. In a bank transaction, you may have it reversed. The same goes to fraudulent transactions. The way Bitcoin transactions are designed, it is somewhat unforgiving to mistakes.

Those were the days, the good ol' days!

I was also a big fan of Bittrex back then. Bittrex was the top, the number 1. It was my exchange when I started learning about Bitcoin and trading. I never had a problem with them.

Being admitted there used to be the ultimate dream of new coins. Bittrex listing carried some sort of assurance and guarantee. And it almost always meant a pump.

Binance's arrival in the scene was very timely. It was around the time when Bittrex started to implement mandatory KYC. Binance offered what Bittrex deprived CEx users of. Unfortunately, years passed and Binance ended up implementing the same.