The important thing here is that your effective fee (in terms of cost per byte and not actual amount) actually has no direct impact on how fast transactions are confirmed (as blocks are found and txs included on an average of 10 mins).

But since miners choose which txs to include in the blocks they find, the higher your effective fee, the more attractive your tx is to miners. Since they have limited space per block it makes economic sense to choose prioritise txs which earn them more fees.

So, the more you pay as fees in proportion to the size your tx takes up, the higher its chance to get picked up by miners for block inclusion, hence confirmation.

Personally, all in. I earn 100% in crypto now anyway, amd with the outlook of Bitcoin in particular, it just makes sense to sell only what I need for living expenses and store the rest.

Some context: I spent ALL of my fiat savings around last year for a major life move. So anyway, I had no savings until this year.

Also, savings from my partner's income is strictly in fiat. We have never bought crypto.

So, not all in when taking into account family context. That's simply too risky, whatever I feel about Bitcoin.

@hilarious I had last night's at a 2-1 home victory, so whoever got the draw outcome at least bagged 10 points. What's annoying it to get more than your current average weekly score and still not climb a single position! I am pretty happy that Liverpool gave me two 3-0s in 2 matches finally. I suppose 2 out of 12 exact scores is fair return.

@tokeweed Ten bucks you're on, but is it only if our pick wins #1 or as long as pick finishes higher? How about we just remember this sidebet and no need for escrow and all that? End of season, you remind me or I remind you. I'll let you have first pick =)

Not sure if anyone pays attention to the heading or even the first paragraph, but this has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, let alone blockchain. It's simply a digitization of their national currency. This is really not much different than the electronization of currencies already carried out in most countries in the world. What they're proposing is like a voucher system, where electronic vouchers are redeemed for existing units of peso.

So I really don't see why the article seems to think that countries like Russia will pay any attention to it, since Russia and others are considering blockchain tech for their implementations, with intentions to create a new currency.

Sorry but if you use charts that include all the spam transactions as well as send-to-many transactions then you're not getting a real picture of efficient cost. When spending from my own wallet, I've still managed to keep fees very reasonable, never above 0.5% of total amount and on average far below 0.05%.

Just yesterday you could send txs for 10 satoshi per byte and get it confirmed in hours.

I get that a lot of people are complaining about high fees especially when withdrawing from services online but those are fees levied by the services. When in control of your own funds and wallet you can navigate around peak network times to get really cheap fees.

I think the industry has already reshaped itself far beyond this concept, to be honest. Can't remember the exact statistics, but I'm fairly certain a very high number of recruitments, especially in tech and white collar jobs, are now done via networking. I can even feel this myself, since I don't network too well. It seemed far easier to get noticed and latch interviews years ago. Last year, I sent out literally hundreds of CVs, each tailored and accompanied by targeted cover letters, with only a handful of responses.

Even when I still had my long-term career, it was more and more the norm for new recruitments to be someone known by someone already within the company. Formal recruitment processes were still carried out (advertising, shortlisting and interviews) but the decisions were usually made a long time ago. Colleagues from other industries also tell me the same.

Now if you had a blockchain that would level the playing field and reveal network links and associations...

This reminds me a lot about the Acorn app ads that ran in 2015/2016 all along London tube stations. This was actually even before I got into Bitcoin seriously. The app works in the same exact way as I recall, rounding up all purchases and investing it.

It made quite a bit of a wave also in Australia, but with less success. More an app for lazy people or for those afraid to invest, even if it claims it helps introduce people yo sound financial and investment management. Didn't try it out myself as it was a quid a month?

Now if you rounded up and instead got a few thousand satishi each purchase, I can easily see small fortunes building up. How about gearing this towards donations?

Some players have to wait before they realise their fyll potential. I'm not a fan of Mourinho nor Man Utd but to pull together some magic and get the likes of Pog and Zlatan together says a lor about championship mentality. Time will tell if they can lift their game for the remainder of a very long season.

Watford still overcame West Ham and even I bet against new team with new manager despite the league's propensity to shine a little luck on new management.

Still too early to pencil in St Totteringham Day?

And only just a couple of days ago I had been wondering what news of that trial. Bankruptcy is a tool of the elite, used often in every country including mine for the wealthy to escape punishment. Yet another ugly consequence of the current financial system if this is true.

What's worse is that this guy is saying that he wants to reimburse all creditors (then why didn't they get informed) and that even that amount of money won't be enough to do, so he is even now asking for interested buyers of his co rights. Even considering an ICO. Amazing, really.

This period in the year would have been a really good time to receive instalments of Bitcoin actually, at a fixed coin rqte. In fact, since January, if you accepted payment i  monthly instalments, you'd have made more in fiat value every month.

On the other hand, if you accept a fix fiat rate, then you would've been receiving a smaller Bitcoin amount each instalment.

So depends on which side of the coin you are.

Guys, obviously OP and others can't access direct support because they can't get verified. OP did you try emailing Brian007?

I am basic verified also unable to get enhanced verification but so far no issues on small withdrawal requests. Try reaching out on Twitter, direct message and tag. A bit ridiculous to have to pester for support but it seems to work eventually.

Shocking how exchanges have got away with this for so long. I'm now only using them in the smallest capacity possible.

That's the enjoyable "problem" we have with Bitcoin, isn't it? That it is, at the moment, unpredictably bullish, outperforming even most optimistic estimates that years of academic teaching, educational upbringing and trading experience has ingrained in us.

This incredible growth in 2017 alone has rewarded the risk takers, and made the conservative investors taking safer approaches feel like we missed out. Guy's been buying fractions since March, I've been able to hold on to fractions of Bitcoin earnings only several months earlier.

Still, if I can achieve 1 whole Bitcoin in fixed cold storage savings and it reaches that 100k valuation in 5 years, I'll consider myself a winner!

The information you shared doesn't seem to match up with the transaction details. You said it took 4 days to confirm when the timestamp shows that it confirmed actually almost immediately after the tx was submitted (the same minute in fact)? Maybe you got the tx mixed up.

Regardless, order confirmed on any site is on the merchants' back end. Bitcoin transactions cannot be canceled, cannot be reversed. They can be replaced... but that won't help you here.

Yep, second time for me seeing this chart, and I believe it and variations of it have popped up this year, perhaps even earlier. I don't buy into it, first of all, since Bitcoin is an extremely unpredictable market that has repeatedly eschewed all known conventions on any other asset/commodity.

But if I were to take a guess, then on a global weighted scale, we're yet to hit that "false bear" in the middle. I suspect when most of the world's big economies have their banks and traders and the full 1% of wealthy people in Bitcoin, the price will jump unimaginably high, unimaginably quickly... that will tempt enough long-termers to sell at their targets, trigerring mass sell offs to send that bear signal for a sustained term.

Long-termer here. I hope to see my target hit when I retire. Keep a few coins for whoever's left to live after me, and live the rest of my life out quietly. Too much to dream?

Well, this Professor doesn't seem to be very clued in on what Bitcoin is or how it works. Firstly, if you wanted to hide all your current fiat and assets into Bitcoin, you'd still have to buy the coins. There's that immutable, permanent, public trail you leave behind. If you only had a plan to earn strictly in Bitcoin, or mine them, then fine. Problem solved right? Except, wait, when you want to cash out to fiat. Another trail that leads to you.

You can mix, churn, anonymise all you want, but if someone wanted badly enough to find you, it's not impossible.

Besides, tax is a social obligation I believe we all should fulfil.

Yeah, I was hoping to make good progress in my difficult ascension to Top 5 but Carles and Rick just had to be the bastards this week.

Tonight's game: I made a 1-0 prediction on Watford... but then the early score means I'll have to hope both teams fail to net for the remainder of the game... over an hour of play. In my experience, very difficult to expect in the Premier League. But who knows, eh? I'll be very, very pleased to walk away with 20 points from today and tomorrow. I went with the safe bets of home wins by single goal margins.

Did you guys ever take on the sidebet on top scorer? My dark horse Mo Salah just topped the charts with yesterday's brace.

Not sure where you would be looking to identify "profiting graph" but there is definitely an increase in usage, which we can attribute partially to adoption. My conservatism comes from a number of considerations:

1. How much volume is attributed to non-trading use. Gambling has already fallen from half of Bitcoin usage, even illegal activity use has come down to less than 10 percent so that is great but if we take out exchange trading activity, I wonder what the volume would look like.

2. Sponsored spamming. Today, there are 22k txs in the network, which is a more normal level. The spikes that pushed it above 1k several times this year and last were artificially produced.

So yes, today maybe smack in the middle of mass adoption but 2020 and beyond should be the golden age. I could agree with that.

Each time you perform a transaction, what happens when you finalise your spend is that your wallet software broadcasts your transaction to the Bitcoin network, where it sits in the mempool waiting to be picked up by miners.

How long it stays there isn't really deterministic on the fee you specify. BUT because each block has a limited size, miners will naturally want to fill it up with transactions that will earn them the most fees (again a generalisation but evidenced by the fact that zero-fee or low-fee transactions do tend to stay longer in the mempool as miners will prioritise those with higher fees).

Now, most wallets will continue broadcasting your tx for as long as you keep them open, for as long as it remains unconfirmed. So, for your transaction to "eventually disappear", it has to stop being broadcast so the network simply drops it. To my knowledge, this is very difficult to do (stop broadcasting) if you're using an online-based wallet. I use Electrum, and even without the wallet broadcasting, I've seen txs stay for over a week.

I'm sure someone will have a more precise explanation, but in practice, I'm very certain that waiting for txs to get dropped from the network is at best a long waiting game.

Great assessment, Samarkand. Algorithms win Novel Prizes not usually because of their accuracy, strangely enough, but because of their innovation and critical thinking behing it. Again, the long-standing "problem" behind all economic models is their strict adherence to rational theories, by design built to fail because it does not to include human randomness and the persistence of human irrationality.

This year's Nobel Prize for economics incidentally was awarded for the recognition of human irrationality's role in those financial crises (and the puzzlement of how algorithms did not predict them).

Real markets have much more frequent big changes, and no more so than Bitcoin.

I think the reason governments and financial regulators are finally taking notice of Bitcoin is precisely because they now believe Bitcoin to be unstoppable. Even the most stout believers in the traditional banking and finance sector are beginning to seriously consider Bitcoin, explained by how so many investment and hedge funds are now diversifying into Bitcoin.

They may not fully understand it. They may not even really buy into it. But the forces that are now driving Bitcoin can't be ignored. Whatever some people may think, they see Bitcoin as "too big to fail", at least for many foreseaable years.