because bitcoin debit card is not using bitcoin, it is using a third party that holds your bitcoin and may or may not allow you to use your bitcoin and may block your account, run away and scam you, and also it takes a lot of additional fees from you just to let you use your bitcoins!

in comparison the device that OP wants, puts you in full control of your money (your bitcoins). you can spend them however you like and whenever you like and never pay any additional fees apart from miner (network) fee.

this title is a little misleading.
there is no bitcoin "usage" in Korea that government wants to ban. what they want to tax is the trading volume. although you can call it "usage" but it technically isn't.
with that said, it is about time they did that. other countries (like IRS in US) already has laws about taxes and bitcoin. they call it a commodity from back in 2014 (IIRC) and they take taxes based on that.

as a matter of fact this is one of the oldest news around. but it is one of those news that people always miss. i believe it is because they have not added the direct option in their payment page, or at least i have not seen it.
the option is that you can add funds to your account using bitcoin. then use your money in Microsoft account to buy anything that Microsoft offers.

well, some of these "issues" are work in progress. it is not like they are ignoring them. some of them like the PoW change already has the Pull Request open, the code is ready and somewhat tested. the other issue that may be overlooked is that when forking something like this you have to "extensively" test it. it is not enough to do some tests and rush the fork to meet the deadline.

i also agree, the biggest problem of BTG is the lack of communication. for example the dev only has the slack and twitter. someone who is not on either of these platforms will be left out.
they need to start a proper announcement on bitcointalk, a reddit sub and then start answering questions.

that is why it is considered free money or airdrop anyways
specially with the big premine that it has

i am not sure if you can create a transaction with 1 satoshi fee using common bitcoin wallets. they usually force you to pay a higher fee.
unless you are talking about fee/Byte then it is a different story. 1 satoshi/Byte is a good amount most of the times and it will be confirmed soon enough. for example right now the mempool is empty and you may even see a confirmation in next block for such transactions.


"money" never leaves your wallet until it is confirmed. think of it as checks that you write. imagine you have $1000 in your account and you write 2 checks each worth $1000 to two different person. until they go to the bank and cash it out you remain the owner of that $1000 and them with a promise of getting $1000.

writing difference checks is like creating different transactions. and cashing out that check is like getting the transaction confirmed. obviously one check (one tx) gives them money (can be mined). and the other is rejected.

that is why everyone waits at least for 1 confirmation or they do some kind of "risk analysis" if they want to accept 0 confirmation.

• the website is empty http://www.btcgpu.org/
• the code is not ready yet: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU
• they have not yet even updated the date of the fork yet! it still is set for a block that is long past (10/1/2017 12:00 UTC:
  https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/blob/925606b6cba5e866026fd7726a75470384ed8782/src/chainparams.cpp#L82 (current height is 489898)
  
• the main change which is the heart of this fork (changing the PoW) is still a work in progress and not yet complete: https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/pull/15
  
• there are other serious issues which are still unsolved. such as two-way replay protection https://github.com/BTCGPU/BTCGPU/issues/18#issuecomment-334234022

you can't expect anyone to take it seriously when nothing is yet clear. they should at least release a wallet/client for it before exchanges even consider adding it and releasing statements.

nah, it won't need "something entirely new". you can already make something yourself. it is not even that complicated if you know some basic stuff. there currently are mini computers such as Raspberry Pi or others similar to it with cheap prices you can set up a very customized Linux on them and carry that around in your pocket (there are small and light versions) and use it to sign transactions and broadcast them.

the reason why they don't already exist is that there has not been a demand for them. and as long as you can do it with your phone which you already use there may never be a demand for it either.

the exchanges are not wallets.
and the fees they take from you are not bitcoin transaction fees even if it is called liked that.

these fees are the cost of them giving you the services they are offering. you can call it cost of using their platform. if you check your real transactions in a block explorer you can see the fee that your transaction includes is very different from what you paid the exchange.

i disagree with them because whenever they are talking about bitcoin price and how big it is right now they are just looking at the price and the size of it (% it has risen). but they ignore all the adoption that has been going on this year.

i am not denying the fact that this rise is much bigger than anticipated but when there is a growing demand for something the price rises like this. yes it may even enter a bubble territory but because of that growing demand when the correction for the bubble comes it won't be a "collapse" as they want to put it.

the funny part is that whenever they talk about the bubble they are talking about the price, and then follow up with the collapse but they no longer talk about the price they talk about bitcoin collapsing!


LOL

- stop reading "a" blog. people say all kinds of crap on the internet. try looking for more reliable sources.
- share the link

who was the author, what is his history that he calls himself a "professional".

this is bullshit.
~6 months ago Litecoin activated the same SegWit
~5 months ago the developer places $1 MM worth of LTC in a SegWit transaction and called out publicly to everyone who claims this FUD to steal it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/6azeu1/1mm_segwit_bounty/
https://twitter.com/satoshilite/status/914372293232660481?lang=en

maybe some "real" experts around here can explain about the technical part of it to you but i want to ask you to ask this "self claimed expert" to give us an example.
there has been so many SegWit transactions on bitcoin network. ask him to go spend one of them and show us how it is done!!

it is good and all to see the rise like this and so far it seems like a strong rise, we even had a nice little correction already. and price is still rising. but also it looks a bit scary. bitcoin has gone up a lot in the past couple of months. i could see the price stabilize around $4500 if this rise never came and it would have been a solid place to stay.
some say it is because of BTG airdrop, if so we are in for some dip. $6000+ may not stay with us since there is only 10 days left to the fork.

step by step?
wait until we hear how the fork is going to be. it is not yet ready! and things can be very different for example if it has replay protection or not!

that is when the waiting part comes in. with or without replay protection what you need to do are two completely different things.

but in both cases you need to first move your bitcoins to another address after the fork and then claim the BTG tokens.

it has nothing to do with ICOs
it also won't affect bitcoin price that much. because mostly people sell BTG for USD directly and those who bought BTC to get the airdrop may not sell all at once.so there may only be a small dip.

it is never clever to buy ICOs to begin with.

it is too soon to say, neither of these are released yet. there may or may not be a strong 2 way replay protection in either of them.
- there is A replay protection in SegWit2x (one way and also opt-in) for now. it is that multi sig address thingy
- there currently is no replay protection for bitcoin gold. but there is an open PR in their repo talking about it. and in their latest statement they said they are working on it.

first you need to wait and see if they are going to implement a strong 2 way replay protection or not.
- if they do, it is not necessary but it is highly recommended.
- if they do not, you must split your coins first and then use the keys.

it is always safer to move your bitcoin first and then import the private keys in the new wallet software. you never know what malicious things or even simply bugs are in these wallets. they are not exactly tested or reviewed specially in if you are doing it in the early days.

you can move your bitcoin anytime you want. bitcoin network has been working and will continue to work at all times.

you do NOT lose your bitcoin if you move your bitcoin.

replay attack means the transaction you make on bitcoin network will also be valid on the other (fork) chain too. so it can be mined there too.

imagine you are making a payment to 1BtcAddress... you obviously don't control the private key to 1BtcAddress and you are making a bitcoin payment. that goes one fine without any issues. but the same payment will happen on the forked chain and you also pay bitcoin_forked to 1BtcAddress... on the forked chain. but since you don't control the key to that address, your bitcoin_forked coins are practically lost.

remember this works the other way around too. meaning if you claim your bitcoin_forked coins, the transaction you make on the forked chain is also valid on bitcoin network so you get the bitcoin_forked coins and lose bitcoin!

that is why these chains have to implement a strong two way replay protection or if they don't you have to first split your coins then make a transaction.

bitcoin and bitcoin cash, and also bitcoin gold and all the possible future forks that are similar to these, use the same key pairs. it means a bitcoin address has the same private key as the bitcoin cash address.
in other words if you send bitcoin to a bitcoin cash address or vice versa, you can simply get the bitcoin cash private key, import it in your bitcoin wallet and have access to the coins on bitcoin chain.

although this is only going to work if you have access to the private keys and also as long as these different forks continue to use same keys. things may change in the future (like BCH doesn't have SegWit).

in case you send them to an exchange (a wrong address) it depends on the exchange service to bother recovering the funds or not.

he just makes himself look stupid by saying all these. and it has absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin. bitcoin price may have stayed the same or even dropped to $0 and he still would have been looked upon as some idiot.

you see he is from US, the same country with multiple gigantic companies accepting bitcoin (the same bitcoin he calls fraud) as payment.
Microsoft, Dell, Overstock.com, Valve, even PayPal has partnered up with coinbase and bitpay!, and a lot more...
are all these accepting a "fraud" or just one guy is an idiot

of course it will!
you can't really expect price to always rise, certainly not after a fast and big rise like the recent one. after each rise, at the very least there will be a correction which means price will drop back down a little. sometimes that little turns into a bigger dip, sometimes it is accompanied by other stuff (such as the China ban FUD) that causes a deeper dip!

don't forget we still have the SegWit2x headaches coming on. and that can disturb the market a lot.

there are some facts to it too. obviously there are always people who are going to buy because of the "free money" they are going to get. and bitcoin gold fork is a bullshit fork anyways. so it is obvious that it will be 100% free money without disturbance.

depending on how this ongoing rally goes, we can see the $4xxx prices again. but it may require some drama though.

simple small differences in what you say make huge difference in the result:
a hard fork is changing bitcoin's consensus rules which may result it a chain split.

all true but you forgot to mention in the first line the assumption you are making which is assuming if there is no enough support for the hard fork proposal.
OP is asking about "hard fork" in general, he is not asking what is "bitcoin cash hard fork" or things like that.

the proposal comes out, then they do the coding, then choose a method for signalling support for it. bitcoin is decentralized so signalling is by upgrading your node to the newer version, adding some string to your "user agent" for example to support a proposal. for miners it is with changing the block versions. there are guidelines for it which you can find among BIPs (i don't recall all of them).
and in a hard fork all the network should switch because it will not be backward compatible.

LOL, why?
just because you keep spreading FUD and i pointed out one of many?

have fun though.