I might also add here to the above discussions (now aware that am on both discussion threads) on piracy that very little is actually known about the motives behind modern piracy, as well as the targetting criteria. What is known is that it isn't actually as random as we'd like to think, nor completely driven by wealth acquisition.

I would suggest though, that integration of foreign communities should be a very high priority. Often, in impoverished countries I've lived in, you get these little expat "enclaves" where the residents play little to no role in the host community. When they did, it was almost lip service, and regarded by host communities as condescending (wealthy white people making small donations to orphanages, for example).

If anything, the increased security and protection afforded to them makes them even more of a target. In my previous community work with non-profits, we had very different ideas of protection... for example, guards, armoured protection, weapons, even bullet proof vests - we didn't use them. If you act like you could be attracting threats, the threats will come.

Every action or inaction has a lot of social and psychological meaning...

Addiction is always very difficult to address, especially in the gambling industry where there is a clear conflict of interest... Do we maximise the gambler and classify compulsions as demands that engineer profitability? In the UK for example we see industry experts argue that regulatory intervention, such as attempted banning of Fixed Odds games... As unfair to the industry. On the other side we see ex addicts say these are the "crack cocaine" of gambling, the gateway to dangerous addiction.

What makes it harder to help these individuals is their own insistence that they keep their habits private and their own refusal to admit to having an addiction.

We've seen the other "vice" industries evolve... Alcohol and tobacco for example, but with the effect of declining revenue. I wonder if the same will happen to gambling.

I think the trading community here welcomes all new initiatives from groups like yours, especially if you're not seeking profits from payment - sharing advice and strategies will never be frowned upon. Like you, I also think all the paid groups are rubbish at worst, unhelpful at best. Even the highest paid signals barely give you enough information about the decisions behind the trade - and no, a chart and a few lines of FA/TA is hardly the best information to justify most signals.

Full transparency would be appreciated. Every single entry and exit point, with full disclosure of order size against bankroll. Also shockingly missing from all these paid signal groups.

Personally, I think the only people truly "earning" are the exchanges themselves and the people making money selling their programs, strategies and signals. We've seen Binance now making more in Q1 than Deutsche Bank, and the top 10 exchanges by volume making millions of dollars daily - this is just fees and commissions, they win whether or not traders make money. I've seen "whale groups" numbering in the hundreds (still calling themselves exclusive) with fees that start at $100 a month.

After all, profits taken from the market aren't really earned, plus I would only count "realised" profits (actually booking in the profits and taking it out of the market). You see all these portfolios showing huge green percentages, but until traders actually sell and withdraw these, they're only potential profits.

It wasn't to be, after all. Credit to Juventus for clinching this with a game to go, but also a nod to Napoli for pushing them all the way... Perhaps to still get 90 points at the end of the season itself speaks a lot for them.

Roma and Napoli won't get honours but hopefully we will remember their exploits domestically and in Europe... The way they have played might still spark a much-needed revolution in Italian football... World cup absence is proof it needs new life.

 Hopefully, they build on this and give us the same cause for excitement to watch next season's Serie A.

That's the sad/perplexing/crazy truth bout guys like McAfee, isn't it? No one takes him seriously, but his influence on mainstream and social media has grown to such extents that even his shilling has become some form of predictable market factor, at least for the extreme short term. Not so for Bitcoin any longer though, as you say. His past several BTC shills have gone by unnoticed.

I suppose it isn't very different from alt projects that succeed temporarily from the sheer weight of expectation and hype from so-called crypto personalities...

Oh that's strange. Pretty regular Revolut user here and I somehow missed this piece of news! I know they've been pursuing a banking licence in Lithuania for the past half year, so I guess they've either obtained it already or got it somewhere else. A crypto debit card has really been the last piece of missing vanity tools I've been looking for, though I'll have to really suss this card out to see if it's any different from the past providers' offerings.

The hot/cold relationships with Visa and MC over Bitcoin just doesn't give me much enthusiasm at the moment. And once the UK fully (if ever) extricates itself from the EU, though, I wonder about the implications.

What news have you managed to find so far? I'm also curious as am helping one of my business partners considering the e-Residency option (although only for a secondary location/license). I have contacted one of the government portals but was pointed to several incorporation services - which apparently don't even need that e-Residency status for already EU residents. I checked out a few private ones who'd do it for you, costs between EUR 2.5 to 5.5, depending on what kind of entity you want to incorporate (and LLC seems to be the favoured one) and apply your licence for you.

Half the price is to do it yourself but it seems pretty tedious and also unclear. From what I understand, you have to incorporate, then issue a notice to the Police and Border guard (I know, weird) of your engagement in financial payment services, and then they take 6 weeks to approve and issue (upon approval) the authorization plus fees. This is in effect, the licence for the licence.

With that authorization and all company incorporation docs, you apply to the Registrar for a crypto exchange licence. That's another 6 weeks to hear back from them.

Luno is a centralised exchange. This means you never really owned any of your coins deposited into their web wallet. They store the private keys, not you. You can't export them either. If you need proof, you can check your deposit address on blockchain, it's probably all gone from that address.

Only Luno support can help you. Contact them through a support ticket, give a detailed explanation of what happened along with account details, and request assistance. They should get back to you.

It is both true and a myth, as your own commentary describes. Fiat has the exceptional advantage of being supported by the states sponsoring them, but then you can look to recent examples in Greece to see just how much a state's promise to honour its currency is worth. You can go farther back in time to also see how much a bank's guarantee of your savings is worth, like when Barings collapsed after a rogue trader used depositors' funds to gamble and lose on the stock market.

Put in that context, there is little that separates Bitcoin and fiat in what's supporting them.

What fiat doesn't have though, is the backing of users and their communities. It doesn't have the security of cryptography... Virtually impervious to hacking and getting stronger every moment. That is some serious support in my view.

That's it, isn't it? There hasn't been a trader or signal provider, individual or group, who can show consistent profits from Day 1. They'll tell you how they multiplied their bankroll by X% in a month or even a year, but seldom can provide exact entries, exact sizes of trades, exact portfolio. Just manipulating any of these items to suit their needs. Even bots and AI which claim to have an edge with emotionless trading invariably incur losses - strategies work until they don't. Positive growth is of course possible but only with patience and discipline... and a lot of luck.

Nice set of tutorials (I also checked out the earlier thread) for my favourite Bitcoin wallet by a mile, possibly will never switch from Electrum actually.

Thought you might want to add a small section on signing/verifying messages from Electrum. One of the most useful features to prove ownership, I've had to use it several times over my lifetime on this forum.

Also, one function that seems to get a lot of new users stuck/confused is using 2FA on Electrum, because of the 3rd-party service attached.

Well done to all you Top 5-ers! Guess we'll have to see how it all ends up still with BBC a bit wonky.

Liverpool still managed to upset me by scoring an extra goal to make my 3-0 prediction only worth 10 points. I have no idea how the scores really are though, as my personal weekly table has never really showed the correct score, but meaningless at the end of the day. Top 10 finish but I think I blew out of steam mid season. Too many gambles didn't work out, especially when predicted shock draws/losses correctly but not getting the exact scores right.

@hilarious. The WC pool I'm thinking off is more like a knock-out contest, as in, you can only select 1 team per round, with points awarded each correct team selected... almost like a survivor contest except you still get to play each round. I'll work out the details later but if it gets too complicated then I'll opt for a simpler version.

Yeah, they could have secured their place 3 games ago even but dropping points and that absurd loss to Chelsea. Oh well, they do have a knack for making life as difficult as possible for themselves. I arrived too late at home to make bets for the game or for any games, was ready to make some huge bets and the way things are looking, I might have had good profits, with Spurs trailing to Leicester and Chelsea a goal down to Newcastle!

Oh and Solanke scored Liverpool's third... 15 shots compared to Brighton's 1!

I suppose it would depend on just what kind of visitor we're talking about, and just what kind of service they're trying to access on the site. I've seen some sites implement what it would call a PPA tool as well now, requiring visitors not only to complete a captcha but to complete a set minimum of hashes on their CPU power - takes about a half a minute to complete. A hassle most people wouldn't put themselves through, as you say, but it's a service I somewhat require almost daily and have so far been willing to complete. I imagine the method has worked quite well for the site, I don't see why LN micropayments wouldn't too.

Come to think of it, there's so much hassle I put up with when signing in almost daily to several services I use. If there were a way to automate all this, reducing time spent, I wouldn't mind making the regular (small) payments.

Yeah, gone were the days I could walk into a bank and get an account done in minutes without even a deposit. Now even going to Western Union or a money changer here in EU and I get the worst kinds of stares, a lengthy passport check, all sorts of questions, and then not even a thank you for my business. These days I rather walk into a old looking office on a corner shop that doesn't ask me for much and thanks me for my business.

Funny thing is how you could easily just provide nonsense documents and they wouldn't be any the wiser. As you said, though, big brother Brussels doing the push. Wait till they clarify their stance on Bitcoin. It'll get much tougher.

Yeah, let's face it. There are no experts in trading in crypto yet. Experienced, sure. But when the market is so young, and people perhaps at most have 2 or 3 years under their belts, hard to call them experts. The fact is, almost anyone who's been able to buy low and sell during the spike made money, and to me this has a lot more to do with luck than with skill. Day trading is the same thing. All these traders are still resorting to bots and other people's strategies. In the end, this is all luck - good traders recognise that.

Patience is a skill itself, though, I'd agree. Discipline is the most lacking aspect of traders, old and new.

Great! Will do so real soon, am still curious to see what you can do. I think you can see a consensus from the comments here that daily content is probably not going to be digestible, especially if it's for a longish docutype show unless you don't rely only on fresh news. Weekly would be best, but understandably you want to grow an audience in the beginning so a daily show with well-researched content and analyses could build up to a weekly show that everyone would want to watch once your reputation's been built.

People are getting quite tired with daily, meaningless content... you'll also want to stay away from promoting brands, and leave a separate show for that.

One of the very earliest things I recall about LN functionality is the ability to send sub-satoshi payments, so it would seem your idea of matching last three digits could work. But I'm not sure it's exactly the same as the "probabilistic payments" referred to on the bitcoin wiki for LN. Probably not:


It seems to imply that the sub-satoshi payment isn't actually possible, just that it's reflected in the nett average effect - and only for someone logging in often enough.

Ugh, I remember those days. I started out trying to help like others, before realising after a while that most of them had repeatedly spent low-fee txs, and were just looking for a free ride.

In fact, @OP, I recognise your name and this isn't the first time you've experienced this... it's a real shame exchanges are still skimping on fees when they're already quite low now. Time to ditch that exchange, I'd say, no? For important txs like yours, need to use your own wallet to pay the right fees for the desired confirmation time.