you can buy and sell bitcoin as fast as your bitcoin and fiat deposit and withdrawals get to the exchanges!

for example if you already have fiat or bitcoin on bitfinex you can open up the btc/usd page and click buy or sell and have your trade instantly!

but when you want to deposit and then trade there is always some sort of delay for both fiat and bitcoin before it reaches the exchange so you can trade them.

also remember that it is not only argument of web wallet VS. desktop wallet. it is also about being online and not being online. with a web wallet you always have to connect to internet and be on a high risk situation (key loggers, hacks,...) but with a desktop wallet you can technically install it on an "always offline" system and be the safest possible.

all the suggestions about reading charts and learning about trading are good and they will help you a lot specially if you learn different analysis but you should also remember that bitcoin price is not only changing based on what you speculate scientifically so to speak. but instead it mostly is changing based on news and how things shape up for bitcoin and also based on adoption.

those who are talking about blockchain and was trying to adapt it are still doing it, the only difference is that news sites stopped posting their click bait articles and have moved on to new and different click baits.

besides bitcoin has never left its position to want to come back now. no matter what those corporations say about blockchain alone, they want to make an altcoin, and theirs would also be centralized, unable to compete with bitcoin.

this is starting to become a common thing, to see a huge number of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool. a while back this could only happen once or twice a month but now it happens every couple of days.

and interesting enough this new trend started happening the same time segwit signalling started to take place! coincidence?

you are lucky to even win 50% of the time. because we are talking about gambling and that result is already pretty good. and on top of that when the house edge comes in play your win percentage is going to go down even more in the long run that is why some people go as far as saying you will always lose in the long run.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/search?q=unconfirmed+transactions&sort=new&restrict_sr=on
Hmmm. it looks like there are others who said the same thing before and not got removed though!

maybe the removed topic was automatic and accidental or maybe the topic was praising something about block size that they didn't like

pump or not, i have been hearing the same argument for over 2 years now. and i have also been investing money in bitcoin. and in the past year or so price has been going up from $200 and now it is $700+ and i have been making profit.

so yeah i am still willing to invest more and more of my money.

what he forgot to tell you about #4 is how to know how much fee to pay per byte. for that you can see this website which updates based on the current situation: http://bitcoinfees.21.co/

also you can use Electrum which has a dynamic fee calculation which if i am not mistaken takes from the servers and it is based on previous blocks.

if you can find some others like yourself who are willing to learn and "share ideas" with each other is much better than what you are suggesting. this can be with a friend and about trading, i am already doing this with a close friend and we watch the market and analyze and share speculation with each other and then we invest individually.

you have to know that person and get the same amount that you give and know he is as willing as you.

i hope so but i also doubt it.
because $1000 is $250 away and that kind of rise in only one month is not possible and it is not even favorable because that kind of rise will be followed by a big dump back to $700. but i think we may see price touching $800 near XMas.

being fair or not is an endless argument without any result.
but it happens because blocks are full and there is only finite number of transactions that can be included in blocks each day so this creates some sort of competition that whoever pays the higher fee has the higher priority because miners prefer earning more at the moment.

that is not a restriction, it is a feature and in fact it is a good feature too. we have all seen scammers online and in many cases having the option to do a charge back is good for customers. you should always see things from two point of view (the customer and the merchant) and having that reversal option is favorable for customers in case they encounter any problems with the merchant.

gambling is already banned in some countries regardless of taxation or not.
and what you said is already happening in these places and even in countries that have not banned gambling, there are illegal gamblings that happen underground like cockfight for example. and if caught it has consequences.

and as for VPN i have to say it can still be traced but government usually don't care about a single person at home gambling and are not out to get them. there are more important matters to attend to.

i believe that you need to use analysis for everything that you do in life so gambling is also a part of it. so it doesn't matter what kind of gambling game you choose you should always stop and think about your strategy and how you are gambling then start with real money.

that way you will have a clear outlook in front of you which you can then follow in order to get less emotional and possibly lose money.

that may be but it sure doesn't look like it. because the profit loss for investors has been lasting for a long time. if it was some whales getting lucky, then the investors losses would have been for a very short time like a week tops. but instead this has been going on for at least a month (maybe even more).

this doesn't seem to be as anonymous as it shows! because this service is following Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) policies and as a result is asking its customers for their name, address and phone number and the other type of account with more balance needs photo identification also!

short term fluctuations of bitcoin price is actually a good thing for traders. and you can make good amount of profit each day from these changes and sometimes it is even bigger profit like the last weeks when price was changing a lot. of course it would mean spending more time on an exchange and having bots to watch the price go up and down to act on each change accordingly.

these are all speculations and from what i have seen so far, most of them are usually hypes and they have some kind of hidden agenda.

and if you really think about it, no big player is willing or even care about others enough to reveal their strategies and what they really expect from market to the public so they can make anything out of their speculation!

not much left to the new year and if we are talking about the start of the year 2017 i think there may be some small rise because of the new year up to $780 (lower than $800) but in the first half of 2017 we will surely see $820 as the new stable price.