"Two Hundred Thousand United Dollars"; "Mr Warren Buffet Billionaire", lol If any American/British man fell for this, I'm not sure internet is the best place they could be on - no offense. I'd see some older persons fall for this scam though, if they have no idea how to use the internet and somehow fall into this guy's email list.

How is this related to Bitcoin in any way though? I don't see BTC mentioned anywhere in the e-mail you have received, it's just USD so it'd most likely be a fiat trap..

This. I'll never appreciate or praise a man who helped create this insane wealth inequality while still claiming to "make the world a better place".

You don't have to convince someone to get into BTC. Same goes for precious metals. Some people simply don't think a precious metal should have any value at all. Others use gold as a money laundering tool.

Put the illegal uses to the side and think of the real benefits Bitcoin provides. Crimes will always exist in any medium. BTC crimes are nothing compared to the amount of fiat and bank crimes there are every day. I personally need it for the freedom it gives me. I'm simply sick of the literal slavery banks put us into, so I'd rather be my own bank instead.

I don't think I have done something illegal through crypto and that certainly isn't my goal. My only goal is to be financially free. In the end, I'll probably cash out and pay my taxes in order to materially benefit from my coins - but nobody will know what happened between the moment I bought and the moment I sold all my coins. I might as well use a mixer to improve my privacy - and in the end, I know that my money is real, has not been counterfeited/double-spent and the inflation rate is precise and known. The trustless manner of BTC is wild.

Not sure what you mean by "security measures", but there's no one specific reason - it's a cumulation of factors that influence the price, and that includes supply and demand obviously. A probably significant one is the adoption level that's been on a progressive increase for years now, and most people going very bullish on BTC post-halving is probably another determining factor. And then you have the legal status of BTC (regulations), the hash rate etc.. they all contribute to the price one way or another.

They are already making our lives difficult, just take a look at how the regulations progressed from "the grey zone" to abuse within a matter of years. The struggle US investors had after trading when it came to reporting their gains to the authorities (IIRC, they had to prove and list every single little transaction in the report), the struggle privacy-conscious users are having with KYC, the bad look individuals/companies have been getting for trying to accept crypto, the way XMR and mixers are now getting targetted and the list goes on..

Besides deposit tx confirmation time, how exactly is an ETH bet faster than BTC on the casinos you're playing at? The websites I gamble on require a deposit before I can play and whether I deposit ETH, BTC or any other coin it doesn't matter, betting is still going to be at the same speed.

It definitely looks to me like another round of crypto hype is getting started. Seems quite similar to what we had post 2016 IIRC. I also notice a lot more "Bitcoin predictions" around; it's probably going to go wild once BTC makes a big move. Halving every four years, it's a pretty long timeframe until it happens which means there will obviously always be more focus on Bitcoin around halving than usual..

Perhaps there is a news publisher out there who's posted something about this man you could contact?

Lots of people have gone off the grid every year. The thing is, even if your notebook has something related to his keys/seed(s), the only thing you could probably help with is give it to his family. Maybe these are some places they/he frequented or had a very good memory of.. so the family may be able to connect the dots themselves if that's the case.

The strange set of references otherwise probably do not mean anything related to Bitcoin, unless he used them as codes.

If you offer a service for BTC and gain trust, you'd be better off in the future on here so if you have any talent you can monetize, you can try your chances (see posts above to find the proper boards). If you're willing to go for signature campaigns, my advice is not to rush in for them and first spend your time trying to be part of the community.

The time will come when you'll be easily accepted in campaigns as well, but imo being in a rush lowers your chances of acceptance drastically. Moreover, if you're staying here just for the bucks, you'll reach the point where you will shitpost, burstpost and/or spam the forum just to fulfill a campaign requirement - leading to the placement of your name on some list of spammers (speaking from own experience).

Take your time to look over other threads, try to actively participate in our community and see you around!

I can translate that to "In some ways we are always going to be slaves". We don't need banks. Banks need us.

Bitcoin banks? Never. Maybe a "crypto bank" that promotes a centralized currency, but Bitcoin will never be agreed. Banks will never step forward and lose their power, not even partially. If we all were to stick together move completely from banks to crypto, we'd easily get them all into bankruptcy.

What banks can do and Bitcoin can't is control and seize your assets.

Websites can be compromised to show the false app. This is Google's fault for letting any app (and ad...) on the Play Store without proper analysis beforehand.. I used to heavily critique Apple for being so harsh but in these cases, it's way better to be that way as a software publishing platform.

I agree with @Maus0728, sticking with the web version is what I recommend as well. Also eliminates part of the privacy-stripping permissions apps usually request upon install.

He was the Hypeman and the Shitcoin Pump of The Year. We all know he isn't going to do what he promised and it was all done for the hype and money he was getting at the time. I'll never forget how much he helped with the pump & dump of the markets at the time - or, in other words, with making the poor even poorer.

If this is how well he delivers his promises, then I'd imagine how well he would if he became the President.

Following the trend to make profit by purchasing top cryptocurrencies is like purchasing Microsoft and IBM stocks today. If you want to simply seek % volatility, lesser known cryptos are the way to go imo. You can literally have 100% increases in under a week.

DeFi are too new to be able to say "yeah, they're going to be a thing". I really wonder if within an year people would still care about them.

While scarcity is one of the factors influencing price, remember this doesn't make BTC worth a lot of money without any other determining factors as well. Halvings alone don't make it rise either.

Like, if we had zero shops to accept BTC and no exchanges for it today, it would have been worth probably still almost nothing as of now even with all those halvings. Gold has its use cases, it's still being largely used today in so many industries. If Bitcoin keeps going the "authority-friendly" way, it might step in a large trap and fail to become what it was supposed to.

Although I do think BTC investments today are going to be worth it in a matter of months, I would rather not suggest you to put your money in cryptocurrencies. A little uncertainty could plummet your total portfolio by dozens of % in a matter of hours or days.

Perhaps you could invest a small part of what you initially planned to invest in BTC and see how it goes. Investing it all in crypto means going all in on the probably riskiest market out there. There's no guaranteed income - in fact, you might be a weak hand and panic when the price plummets, so at the end of the day you'll end up only losing continuously.

Unless you're a more experienced investor, I would in all honesty suggest you to keep researching about Bitcoin and only invest what you think you'd be fine even if you lose.

According to Bitcoinist, the watch starts from $9.8k. Some people wear more expensive outfits on the street, and if you include their brand new iPhones with 512GB of storage, you'd get past that figure easily.

If you think it's too vulnerable to thieves, then you may as well never purchase a brand new car or a mansion.

On the other hand, I personally don't think the watch looks that good for the price tag it gets. Goes up to +$50k as far as Bitcoinist says - I would never spend that much on a watch that looks like that. All of this aside, a $50 smartphone (or a $500 laptop) can do way more than this expensive watch - proving imo that it isn't worth the investment, although it is a quite interesting idea.

In order to be 100% anonymous, that means you'd have to hide yourself from all the security cameras surrounding the ATM, to hide your face from the ATM's camera, to refuse any kind of verification such as phone numbers (although you could use a burner phone) or ID card scanning and to send BTC to an unused address that you will not link with your other existing ones (Coin Control or just generate a new wallet).

So achieving 100% anonymity when purchasing from ATMs is pretty hard and hiding from the cameras would probably trigger a mandatory KYC procedure especially if txs are manually verified as I said a post above yours.

You could, however, try to at least avoid both any kind of identification and linking your purchased BTC to your other addresses. Most ATMs have a camera strategically placed so that it could take a shot of your face while purchasing anyway. And if you wish to further improve your privacy, after purchasing you could also use a mixer to make it harder for any bad actor to follow your tracks and identify you.

Congrats for using an ATM for the first time! Feels great, doesn't it?

In Romania we still have some ATMs that let you purchase at 0% commission/fee - basically at spot price. There are only few that let you do so, but I believe there are many around Europe that have zero commission as well. But unfortunately, most ATMs do have annoying commissions especially if you want to sell your coins.

Unless this is written in their terms and conditions, I would not try to make use of multiple mobile numbers in order to bypass it. Some ATMs verify each transaction manually, live - and take a snapshot of your face while purchasing/selling. That means if you go to the same ATM with 3 different phone numbers, chances are they'll find out you seem to be a familiar face and you may have a little big unpleasant surprise (KYC).

It's a shame the limit is not per day but a lifetime one. Same goes for purchasing precious metals in Europe right now; there is a lifetime purchasing limit before you are asked for documents that's been introduced.

Main problem isn't the use case of a coin. It's the fact that most coins don't even get to fulfill their main purpose and so get dumped and abandoned before they even start being developed properly, if at all.

Scammers won't give a damn about the utility of their coin; the only thing that matters to them is that the price rises enough to be able to sell a large quantity and abandon the project with a big bag of $.

First of all, a warm welcome in the crypto world from me.

There are hardware wallets (such as Ledger Nano X), software wallets (Bitcoin Core, Electrum etc) and online/web-based wallets (Blockchain, Magnum Wallet etc). Exodus is a software wallet, but as far as I know, it's closed source so I would not recommend it.

My recommendation is that you get Electrum for Bitcoin and separate open-source wallets for your altcoins. Electrum is more than secure as long as you download it from the official website and use it on a clean PC (or even better, on an offline PC). I know that a multi-coin wallet is very comfy, but I would assume that you value security over comfort in the end.

Online (or web based) wallets are the ones I least recommend. There isn't much of a difference between a closed-source software and an online wallet as you have no idea what's going on behind the scene with both of them. Online wallets may or may not go offline at one point as well - there are some cases of members on this forum who bought BTC many years ago and put their login information in a safe place, but when they came back to open their wallet found out the website had gone offline. With both online wallets and closed-source ones there's no guarantee that your private keys were only seen and saved by you.

So instead of putting comfort first, I'd say using Electrum is a way better idea. You have pretty much any option with it whether you want to use coin control, become a full node, a pruned one or use it as a light wallet etc as well. And then, it's fully open source and completely free (FOSS).

The biggest use case of ETH is probably right now being the helipad of more than two thirds of the currently existing shitcoins.

Besides this one, what else do you have? You only get to own a single address per wallet which significantly decreases your privacy, you have a community and price that is very highly influenced by Vitalik's words, we have a PoS system that is still inferior to PoW and some people fear it might not be a success in the end, we have infinite supply etc.

Imagine what happens to the price if Vitalik announced tomorrow that he's quitting the Blockchain life. It'd plummet the same way Charlie Lee's announcement did.

Honest opinion: the coins that will thrive the most will be those which are constantly developed by the community without the need of a team behind it - the same way Bitcoin is developed today. This is supposed to be a completely free thing. I completely understand the existence of teams that work together on coming up with something very interesting and innovative, but putting those teams in front of the coin most of the times will equal failure.