There's no way for a user to apply personal rules on his threads. There's no moderation tools for users to excert their own authority over others on the forum, except of the report button maybe when global rules are broken. However, there's also the option to start threads as self moderated and in doing that, the OP can delete responses on command.

Ferratum is suspending multi-currency IBAN accounts. Now only EUR will be supported. This is so sad IMO, it was the best service to receive payments from other currencies and in many occasions had the best exchange rates. Maybe it was not profitable again, I hope they'll open it again.

OP, would you be surprised to know that markets price in potential changes to the landscape for the product related to the investment? It's the same with anything you can invest in and primarily stocks. BTC is less exaggerated in its connection to real world actions though as it's much more speculative based on market forces other than anything else. With that in account though, China is indeed a massive player and what the country's government allows or not could have serious ramifications in any market with its huge economy accessing or not.

I am glad that I see further adoption of technologies like lightning. If we see more such attempts to build upon the trustlesness of BTC and its immutable POW decentralization while maintaining these advantages, I'm sure we'll be coming closer to a viable replacement for FIAT.

I think that there's still too much room for inexperienced teams to come in and build up a facade just to gather in funds. People should really avoid putting money in ICOs and related presales. The answer to OPs question would be to stop giving money to teams that do pre-sales. If you really have to hold a token do it after it hits exchanges and don't buy from the team behind it.

The one thing I could say we're more certain about is that BTC prices are not bullish at all lately. But as there is a high correlation between trends in BTC and altcoin prices, I would say it's fairly certain that so long BTC is bearish, alts are going down in following that.  

I do believe that there is a tendency to dismiss posts of new users, but if a post is of excellent quality then there are a few incentives to provide it more attention. Theymos has made it so merit sources should suggest under-appreciated posts to even apply. And merit sources also hold in their hands the weight of allowing users to rank up by distributing merit.

I'm sure that sooner or later they'll have to be more liberal in spreading their merit to new users also, if that hasn't been done already. Accumulation isn't encouraged anyway, but that maybe could be enforced more strictly.

Many wonder why people pay attention to Craig Wright... All us here know the truth about him. However, the media, with all the nuance surrounding BTC and crypto, do not realize that even giving him the spotlight as 'alleged bitcoin creator' is a disgrace. I think we should organize our efforts to beat him at his own game, maybe beat him in SEO, trying to rank a page like the encyclopedia of Craig's lies.

To replace FIAT would mean to do away with government backed, central bank issued forms of money. The notions in the paper are only potential scenarios that could play out, mere ideas. Not even viable concepts that have been examined scientifically for their basis.

This is page two of the paper linked in the OP as research:

Bitcoin I think is already a re-invention of cash for a cashless society. Why does paper need to be part of the equation?

I doubt that we'll see such levels f support around 9.5k soon. Perhaps it'll take another quarter for such prices to be reached. I think that there's too much selling pressure from recent downturns when lower prices were reached and the BTC/USD markets sustained levels there even for a while. There's BTC to be offloaded also from times when where volumes were large at bigger prices. Profit taking and selling pressure would keep a bull run from taking off at a fast pace IMO.

Provide that your account is new and you've yet to earn trust here for your services, I'm offering to review the services as an experienced member of this forum, if given a trial.

I would be willing to do a vouch review for the aforementioned services if OP was to provide one for a review.

Let me know if interested OP.

Institutional investors want to put some of their money (a very small chunk) to experiment with the speculation of cryptocurrency, but without actually touching any crypto. They use derivatives for that and thus the crypto market sees no direct benefit as oftentimes those products have too much of a disconnect from the spot market and their settlement doesn't affect prices much. There now are quite a few derivative products and they're getting decent volumes, but BTC prices aren't seeing any advantage from that obviously. The institutional investors keep coming but as long as their money doesn't touch crypto we won't notice much of a difference.  

Quoting my response above for reference. I want to give an update on the above! If you're going to deposit to Coinbase, be aware that the required verification takes too long!

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Coinbase Pro requires 3527 transaction verifications for deposited ETC to be available for trading. With ETC having a target block time of 10 seconds, that's around 10 hours! So be aware! There's a risk of losing money due to the long wait and volatility.

There are dozens of exchanges. Kraken, Bitstamp, coinbase Pro and The Rock Trading are some of the most reputable ones known to accept SEPA deposits. They have decent volumes and there you will be able to exchange EUR for BTC at a real market-rate spot price.

After buying BTC in one of the above you could withdraw to an altcoin exchange if you want to buy another coin. Really though, you should do your due diligence and see which one fits your purposes best. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

I like the discussion that's taking place in this thread but I think it's becoming a little off topic from the original question. I asked for a way or guide on how to decipher BitPay locally, and got some such answers.

Frankly, I think a more appropriate place to discuss the technical details of how each wallet can fail to fulfill BitPay's ridiculous requirements would be a new topic. I too am very annoyed by how BitPay has started handling payments but I feel like I lack the technical knowledge to analyze it in depth.

Weve heard this time and time again. Such news are usually propagated more by BTC friendly news websites. I'd be very surprised if an EU state issued official statements regarding issuing ANY currency, let alone a cryptocurrency...

The EU stands for a commitment of countries to abolish their central banks in favor of a more centralized system. The EURO has been fairing well in terms of FIAT standards. I'm very doubtful that France, being the seond largest economy in EU, would break that commitment.

2-fa is a feature that has been requested already and I would personally love to see it. But I don't think that it's worth to try the BTC authorization in this forum. Maybe something as experimental would have been better for smaller communities.

Also, provided that epochtalk is being developed, I wonder how much point there is adding so many new features to the current forum

J agree with this sentiment. The only way it could affect the price is so that nibers would stay profitable, but then again miners are interested in selling. Aside of market manipulation, I don't see a good way of the price rising. I doubt that demand would rise much to more the price enough. The lower selling pressure for miners might have a positive effect but nowadays most miners know better than to liquidate on spot anyway.