Indeed, these are the two outcomes I am really hoping for, and have put my bets with them for slim wins - the league is approaching the end of the first third and it is in dire need of some shaking up otherwise we end up with a boring season with yawn fests in mid season. As much as I think it'll be historic if Man City repeat the feat of Arsenal's Invincibles, but that'll be poor entertainment for the rest of us.

But football has a habit of throwing up surprises, so my money's on a defeat for the current league leaders and a big bunching together at the top of the table by Monday. Either case, I am hoping we get a very Super Sunday tomorrow. No boring draws please!

Week 11's first game kicks off in about three hours, guys, so don't forget to enter your prediction. I see two games that could potentially swing the scores around to the savvy predictor, but we have to wait til tomorrow for them:

1. Chelsea/Man Utd - I'm going for a slim Chelsea win here. I have a feeling Mourinho and co will do exactly as expected and defend in packs away from home. But there's enough blue quality for a goal.
2. Man City/Arsenal - I'm going to go for an underdog win here. Arsenal no longer inspire fear but they'll be desperate to win this and there's bound to be a blip for the Sky Blues, maybe it happens tomorrow!

Don't know if there's ever such a thing as needing a crash when it comes to Bitcoin. This crypto market continues to shrug off every known convention and technical analysis. The last time I remember a sustained correction was when it came back down to from 2000, and then some weeks below 4,000. Ever since then, though, it's just been on a hot tin roof. Every alt holder must really be hoping for some let off by now, but I'm done making any solid predictions. Just going to wait at least til December when the effects of Segwit2x will be more apparent.

There's hardly any more dips beyond the reach of day traders even to buy into now! Hold on to your seats, gentlemen and ladies.

What? No more free money? But, sir, won't I be able to just dump all my Segwit2x altcoins on an exchange, selling them for bitcoins and essentially boost my Bitcoins by a small percentage? People will be lining up to get mine, won't they?

Jokes aside, I think the forks need to be taken seriously. Indeed, they should never have been about free money, although the methods and experience of two forks in three months have given me more than 10% near instant increase on Bitcoins.

If we look past the baseness of "free money", of course a serious fork intends to keep legacy users, encouraging and convincing them that their new software, their new vision, is the better one. That Bitcoin Cash  and, some argue, Bitcoin Gold, merely used ideology to mask (poorly) their obvious ploy at instant profits, we can't pretend that Segwit2x is no better.

The Chinese miners at least have the straightness to come out and say it. The main advocates of Segwit2x keep talking about price and dollars. So why do we think they're sincerely in this for the betterment of Bitcoin? I'm not saying it's an outright truth. Just keeping things in perspective. And these forkers have always had the perspective of profit.

Some fair and valid points. Several years back, an experiment by MIT transferred $100 worth of Bitcoins to students in its particular year. More than half immediately cashed out, and only a handful had kept the coins, learnt more about it and used it, at the end of the experiment. Bear in mind that these were highly technically-gifted millennials with above average knowledge of computers and internet technology. It was evidence that Bitcoin - as intended use as a P2P digital currency - was still difficult to learn and adopt for every day use.

On the other hand, you can earn (or buy) and spend Bitcoin as easily as any other currency or payment provider online without having to learn deeper aspects of Bitcoin tech or its network. For the average user, perhaps web wallets are simplest, and you even have apps now that instantly convert your fiat to crypto and back to fiat whenever you want.

Myself, I've moved to my own private wallet, I've learnt how to spend exactly as I want, adjusting fees and dipping into the network when it's efficient, but perhaps it isn't urgently necessary for the vast majority of people.

P.S. There are already recommended wallets, merchants, and exchanges across multiple sites telling people how to buy and sell Bitcoin and use simple wallets.

Perhaps if Bitcoin had come a decade earlier, or I'd been involved then, I would have given advice to people, close friends anyway. But I'm a bit older, a little wiser (I hope) and I've come to learn that you should never encourage anyone to invest in anything. I still tell people about Bitcoin, but only if it comes up in conversation and there's interest.

I don't push it, I tell them what I know about it and why it's important for them to be aware of it. I did this even in 2013/14, long before I owned any of my own Bitcoin. The personal wariness came from my previous bad experience with digital currencies. I thought then that Bitcoin was special, but I'd been burnt before by new tech. Even today, with all that I have and earn, I would never go all in, and never advise anyone to.

Crikey, ciccio. Except for your Lazio-Nice game, I'd definitely have had taken up the AC Milan and Arsenal bets as a parlay padding, but I'm more and more reluctant to bet on Champions League/Europa given the results of the last few weeks. Just goes to show statistics can only mean so much when it comes to football. Even if you'd taken those three as even straight bets, you'd be out more than 50%.

I'm now about to try out a rough "Martingale" strategy based on stats, something like what you're already doing but doubling up on losses - and on straight bets only. So for example, if Arsenal has won 8 of 9, they lost now. But I'd bet 4x more on their next game, at the same odds. Incredibly risky unless I find a bookie that takes small min wagers though!

Ah there you go, first transaction is confirmed and Potato Chips has kindly queued the second for confirmation. Your immediate problem should be solved, I think we can trust you won't repeat this.

Also, I'd recommend to switch over to Electrum.org , follow the advice given to import private keys. Speaking from own experience, Electrum's ease of use is perfect for non-technical users (like myself) especially if you plan on consolidating small inputs like it seems you tried to do. It's got a great new version out too (3.0) which I just downloaded today. Includest native (opt-in) support too!

That's the most painfully obvious, isn't it? And there's really nothing wrong with that either. It's become an industry in its own right, and believe me, most miners share the same sentiment. If they take a side, it's only because they believe that brings the most profit. And while the opinions reflected in this article might seem refreshing to OP and others, it comes as no surprise. BTCtop and the big guys came into this business, stayed and expanded on simple instinct of economics. Chinese businesspeople may be more open about it, but I doubt non-Chinese corporate miners think differently.

Cypherpunks and libertarians by definition would never enter the hashpower game. And you know what? I think this varied spectrum of people across the board, somehow involved and shaping Bitcoin in their own image, is not only inevitable, it's good. The world can't adopt Bitcoin without bearing an imprint of extra-ideological motivations.

Hello Joel,

All right, you've had all the lectures on fees so I won't do that (breathe deeply ). I've accelerated your first transaction, so we'll need to wait for a few hours for that to confirm before we can work on your second TX. You're right, they're very small amounts and have zero fees (well, 2nd one is 1 sat/byte, effectively miners will see it as zero).

My advice:
1. Don't ever spend inputs that haven't been confirmed, or are reliant on spends that are unlikely to confirm.
2. If the purpose of these txs were to consolidate your inputs, try to hold off until you have many and until the network is relatively free. I also consolidate dust inputs, sacrificing perhaps a 10-20 satoshi/byte fee when mempool is almost free. That way, you get away with paying low fees to lean up your inputs.

I'll check back and accelerate the 2nd tx in a few hours.

And no, your bitcoins aren't lost forever. Had you persisted in broadcasting them, I'm very sure they'd eventually confirm (obviously when there are so few txs in the network that miners just pick whatever's left).

We need one more game, I'd say, before we can confirm this, but yeah I think Liverpool can get another win at home, and Chelsea can shrug off their 0-3 defeat to make good. 5 English clubs will definitely be a first, I think there were as many as four a few years back when Liverpool were also in it?

People tend to drift towards a country's style when we see seasons where 4 Spanish teams and 4 Italian teams in the knockout stages, but with such varied teams and managers for EPL's CL contenders, I guess we won't see anyone touting the English game after this.

If Spurs can continue their style, and City don't run out of goals, they're definitely favourites to progress to finals, for me. I guess it will partially depend on how the pairings show up. Would be pretty bad luck for entertainment factor if they get matched up with each other so quickly though!

I won't mind Liverpool scraping through Groups, meeting (and defeating) a German or Spanish giant in last 16. So exciting!

It's really hard to determine exactly what happened here, but if you really can confirm that your funds were spent from your Electrum wallet, then at face value, your private keys were compromised, wallet accessed, and funds sent out.

1. Is your Electrum fully synced (Large green button on bottom right screen), and balance shown in bottom left corner is zero? Then your wallet is indeed empty.
2. Can you see the transaction listed in your wallet? If you click on it to view the transaction on block explorer, do you recognise any of the addresses associated with the tx?
3. If you can share the tx ID here, we can help determine some things, but likely not recover the funds, if (1) is confirmed.
4. Does anyone else besides yourself have your Electrum seed and/or encryption pass?

If (1) is confirmed, and you answered no to (4), then someone somehow stole your seed and/or pass. The best thing to do right now is perform a full scan of your device. Ensure it is clean and safe before creating a new wallet and/or changing your password.

I'm going to go with in between your estimates, so a slow retrace back towards 4,500 after Segwit2x fork, settling down for a fresh attempt to break $5000 after Christmas. It's incredibly difficult to predict anything with Bitcoin now. One one hand you've got big players happy to take profit every ATH, confident that even a day's dip will give them opportunities for re buys at 5-10% profits easily. On the other you've got a non-stop influx of new people, many of whom are big bankers and middle-class suits with deep pockets, so buying demand will keep raising prices.

Then you've got our highly contentious Segwit2x fork, which I suspect will be a lot bigger, with weightier reactions than we experienced with BCH ad BCG. Efforts from substantial camps to force customers to recognise the forkalt as actual Bitcoin might work, too, you never know.

The problem... well there are so many problems! We've now seen how the big bankers have slowly turned perceptions from outright fear of Bitcoin, to curiosity and now greed, keen to take advantage of the next hottest money spinner. Across the continent in the UK, a company's stocked jumped more than 400% just by the addition of the word "Blockchain" to their name.

Just two days ago, an old classmate of mine, a particularly prominent figure in his business circle in the oil and gas industry, actually asked about Bitcoin. Long story short, Bitcoin's suddenly transformed into a legitimate commodity simply by its recent new packagings the likes of which you've just shared.

And so all this new money is flooding in. We can't do much about it. They may yet push current climbs to the bubble they all accused Bitcoin being. I'm loathe to celebrate this new ATH when the best I'd hoped for only two months ago was $5k.

Solid enough win for Liverpool, think it's a bit unfair everyone expected the scoreline to be bigger! Was always going to be a difficult task without Mane, and compounded with Coutinho out of action, plus Maribor were never going to let a repeat of last week's mauling happen away from home. They didn't feel compelled to entertain and as a result was a tight first half, much like Huddersfield several days ago. Pity about your parlay though, you got the other two pickings just about right.

Remember this is football, there's no guaranteed win. Last night's draws for Barca and Juvie took a lot of people by surprise.

I was just discussing with a couple of parters actually touching on something you said.

I'm not a big ICO chaser. This year, I participated in exactly three, and all modest sums below USD 1,000, basically a small pool between myself and two friends who can't be bothered to get into crypto. At this very moment, none of them are profitable! Other than an actual interest in the tech/product, I spent considerable time and effort to conduct some research and invest only in those we felt were long-term buys, with solid developers on the team, etc etc.

It seems even the best-researched decisions are prone to failures.

For our next possible venture, and perhaps for the foreseeable future, we have actually thought along the lines of ICOs that are more like IPOs. Similar to our second ICO, we want something with a real world business that simply wants funding to expand. So not necessarily blockchain innovation or decentralised solution. Simply a business with a tokenised model for expansion.

At least we'd have a product with a track record to look at!

There's an even better solution, which I enjoy using now. If you've traded in crypto marketplaces, you might be familiar with it: escrow! I only sell my Bitcoin with Localbitcoins and Bisq, which have inbuilt escrow releases. Even dark markets used them. I know people have mentioned them earlier, but here's a few places you can find them:

1. This forum. There are several professional escrowers in Services section. Contact them for their services, they charge between 1 to 5% of the fee, but that's probably far bigger savings than what you'll end up paying for Amazon's administration fees on reversals, for example.
2. Coinpayments.net is an example of a professional service that'll set up an escrow payment for you. They even have ICOs using them now to escrow investor funds. They'll verify you've received your goods, and release payment to the seller.

Not perfect, but that to me is a better solution than what's traditionally available. If you've ever had to fight for your money in a dispute over some seller not delivering... you'd understand it's a huge waste of time (not to mention you get back your money minus "admin fees").

@Luan, yes you're correct, these statements from central banks in our region (I'm from Malaysia) are pretty much only worth lip service. My country and Indonesia have regularly come out with opposite statements saying that they don't recognise Bitcoin as payments, but the nett effect is close to zero in terms of actualy volume. Southeast Asian trading is still very low globally, but they have been climbing and if they keep at the same rate for a year or two more - which they surely will, they may very well become significant minorities in the global market.

Nevertheless, a lot of people will see this as positive. Now on the point of regulating exchanges, I believe coins.ph and Luno (active in all three countries I mentioned) have been several months in talks with central bank reps from all three. If nothing more, it merely legitimises their business of trading Bitcoin. Won't have affect on price, but definitely adoption.

Poor Nova. I started by very first few Bitcoin trades with smaller exchanges Nova and Tradesatoshi. More experimental than anything else, since I was new at the time to altcoins. Found a new-ish ANN thread with what looked like a fun coin, discovered that it was PoS and was introduced to the idea of staking. So I got my first stash of several hundred coins from Nova, staked for months. My last login was in July, to sell off everything. In total a 300,000 satoshi investment returned me just over 0.02 BTC. My very first profit.

I know much better today than to risk trading large amounts of BTC, but we've got to appreciate all these smaller exchanges listing exotic coins. Hope the new management understands the importance of having actual developers on their support staff.

Eh, what a way to lose the Benfica game. An own goal and a penalty? That was just really bad luck for them, and Mourinho and co get to benefit as usual. Seems like they'll be in the Last 16 for sure, unless both Basel and CSKA win their last two matches AND Moscow somehow score 6 goals without reply in those games.

And Chelsea, what the hell? No cards in the game, 5 treatments, 11 shots (6 on target) and they still manage to lose. Athleti had better come up with the goods in next game, they really blew this chance with Qarabaq, but what about them right? 2 draws and 2 points in their first ever Champions League against Roma and now Athleti. Sweet games.

And eh, wrong calls on Juve and Barca. Bloody draws.