Hi there,

I'm the lucky winner of your new year give-away. I can't thank you enough - it's helped to soften the blow of the recent bear market considerably!

Thanks again!

Bitgrail (RaiBlocks centered exchange) disabled all withdrawals without verification, without ANY prior notice to its users. This has resulted in the majority of user's coins being locked in the exchange unless they verify. However, the owner of BitGrail is little more than an angry, borderline unstable, child. He largely ignores his users, and when he does communicate, it is to openly threaten them on Reddit (https://np.reddit.com/r/bitgrail/comments/7qbph2/for_those_who_accuse_us/). No one in their right mind would send their documents to him. Additionally, people who did attempt to verify have reportedly been waiting over 2 months. In short, no one can withdraw their coins.

Troy, one of the RaiBlocks developers, apparently spoke to the owner for "several hours", and they are still no further forward. When a coin dev has to step in to help you run your exchange, you know things are bad.

There is some suggestions that this might be an exit-scam, and that all coins are lost. Either way - scam or gross incompetence - I would advise anyone considering it to look elsewhere. Now that RaiBlocks is listed on KuCoin, there is no need to ever use BitGrail.

Removed

Same as any investment - fiat, bonds, stocks, shares - pay your taxes and you will have no problems, provided you aren't doing anything illegal.

After Dimon made those statements, and bitcoin price fell, JP Morgan bought around €3 million of bitcoins. JP Morgan are now launching their own blockchain project called Quorum. I'd be very wary of talking what Dimon says at face value - he's obviously a very smart man, and with the power to manipulate the market he will do just that to make himself a profit.

The US have already started doing this by asking Coinbase to report their biggest spenders to the IRS. All countries will follow suit eventually. As with any financial investments - stocks, shares, bonds, etc - you need to pay your taxes.

By some quick, back-of-the-envelope maths, even if there were a billion planet earths, each with 7 billion people, and every single person on every one of those earths looked at a thousand addresses per second, every second, since the universe began, you would only have examined 0.000000002% of all addresses (1/500 millionth).

[(1*10^9)*(7*10^9)*(1000)*(13.8*10^9)*365*24*60*60]/(2^160)

You are wasting your time.

Bitfinex will let you buy DASH and EOS directly with USD, as well as ETC, ZEC, XMR, XRP, IOTA, SAN, OMG, NEO, QTUM, and some others. Bitstamp sells DASH for USD or EUR. To trade with fiat you will need to go through their KYC/verification process however.

As mentioned, both trezor and ledger are very good. They differ a little in which coins they can store - so buy the one that most closely matches your portfolio. For coins that can't be stored on them, a paper wallet is the next best thing.

Not at all. Banks will work to harness the power of bitcoin. Look at JP Morgan launching Quorum, for example. They see the profits to be made - far from trying to destroy crypto, they want to get on board.

I also have not had any payment from the promotion. When is it likely to be restarted?

Go outside. Take a walk. Cook a meal. Go to the gym. Go to the pub. Socialize with friends. Watch a movie. Call your mother.

Just do normal life stuff and forget about it for a while. Don't open an exchange, don't open Blockfolio/Delta/whatever, don't open this website.

Chill out and come back in a few days.

Arbitrage is inherently risky. The widest spread between exchanges is going to be during big price fluctuations. How long will it take you to trade on one exchange, transfer the bitcoin to another exchange, and sell them there? The price difference may have disappeared in the time it takes you to do that.

The way around this is to have fiat sitting on a generally bearish exchange, and bitcoins sitting on a generally bullish exchange (taking bitcoin as an example). Then you can make both the trades at once. However, be aware that means you are reducing your holdings by half, as half your holdings are sitting in fiat waiting for an arbitrage opportunity.

So yes, it is possible, but it is risky, and you might make more gains by just buying and hodling.

Right. Because people are going to turn off their lights, TVs, heating/air con, etc. because they are all so busy mining bitcoin. This is clickbait nonsense.

"Bitcoin mining-related electricity consumption is estimated to have increased by 29.98 percent, and if it keeps increasing at this rate, Bitcoin mining will consume all the world's electricity by Feb. 2020."

and if it keeps increasing at this rate

It won't. The end.

No.

I made a couple of trades, ended up back where I started, and have stopped. It's been too volatile for the last 24/48h. I'm going to wait until we break out of this channel, in either direction, and then consider shorts or longs.

When I started on freebitco.in about 2 months ago, I bought lottery tickets in batches of 500 to see how much percentage the FREE BTC rewards went up by, and worked out I would need to drop about 25k satoshi in to lottery tickets to hit the next level. So I saved everything until I reached 25k satoshi. Tested it again with batches of 500 - now it looks like I would need around 40k satoshi to hit the next level.

With the amount of satoshi per roll forever going down (as bitcoin price is forever going up), it seems like it will be impossible to reach the next level and stay there without external deposits.

Is this accurate or have I missed something?

This is the safest course of action, not just for crypto, but for your entire life (emails, social media, banking, etc). Public WiFis are unsecure and it is notoriously easy to compromise any data being sent through one. Using your phone's mobile data to set up a private wifi hotspot is safer if you absolutely must, but I only trade crypto on my home WiFi - no deal, no price, no dip is worth the risk of losing that much money.

Also, if this story is true, why did he spend €100,000 on bitcoin but didn't spend €100 on a hardware wallet?

Clearing high interest debt (>10%) should be number two on your "Financial Checklist", straight after number one "Make a Budget". There's no point thinking about long-term investing if you are potentially going to lose your gains or more paying outstanding debt. Yes, you MIGHT get a better ROI, but you also might end up selling all your belongings and having your house repossessed because of the debt. That's a level of risk I wouldn't accept. I'd rather guarantee a nice life than take a gamble between millionaire and homeless.

I do not understand how to convert game winnings in to BTC or how to withdraw, and I cannot find any information regarding this on the site.

You can say the same thing about any stock, share, gold, silver, precious metals, gemstones, etc, etc. If someone is buying, someone is selling. Is everything a bubble? Obviously not.