FB is pretty behind the curve. Alibaba has been developing and implementing blockchain tech since around 2017~, probably even earlier behind the scenes.

Ignoring the fact that no-one really knows what China did or did not ban as very few people in the West speak China and, anyhow, the Chinese authorities are renowned for their opacity, authoritarian governments do not like their citizens having an opportunity to transact outside the established channels.

Middle class and wealthy Chinese are desperate to leave due to the lack of a rule of law. Hence, they use whatever means necessary to send funds outside the jurisdiction of their PRC overlords. Some even buy four letter domain names which they know they can sell once they get to the West. Bitcoin is yet another way to store funds which can be safely accessed if they manage to emigrate.

Generate the keys using a Raspberry Pi, fair dice, or other entirely offline method.

Keep the keys in a Truecrypt file container. Or if I'm especially paranoid, put the keys in a Truecrypt file container, then put that inside another Truecrypt file container, and maybe three or four levels more. You may, if you wish, do this with both the hidden and outer partitions to implement a system of multiple passwords shared among multiple parties, so that a 3-of-5 or whatever could be used to access the keys.

Keep said containers on multiple hard drives in geographically separate locations, so that Yellowstone won't wipe them all out.

Samourai for mobile.
Ledger or Trezor as hardware.
But ask again in a few months, when there are lightning wallets on the market

What the media label "bubble" could also be called a "price discovery ". What is happening now has never happened before. Although bitcoin mimics the stock market very closely, it isn't actually the same thing. And as bitcoin hasn't gone through an entire market cycle as yet, who knows what the real price may be?

It could be worth $100 or $7 million. Nobody knows for sure and we won't know for a few years. It will continue to crash and recover stronger because the market cap is still very puny by comparison with the share market. There is tons of room to grow, so hold on to your hat...

In the currency of the future if you forget your password you simply lose all your money forever. But this is good because people have convinced themselves that lots of people losing money in bitcoin will make them richer since they think you will just buy more bitcoin instead of saying "that was a dumb place to keep my money"

Is it too late? Look around you, are your friends buying most of their stuff in crypto? No?

You're an early adopter! Even now even next year maybe even the year after that:)

In crypto the way it stands you're always going to miss the bus. Every crypto has its hype and so on, bitcoin the same, read the whitepapers, read the light papers and make an informed decision and hodl good products that provide something of value to YOU

So bitcoin is a great store of value at the moment because it's secure, has been tested in the real world and is not just a great idea on paper. It works. With limitations but it does.

There are a lot of bitcoin whales from the beginning that have lots of coin because the technology motivated them, and inspired them, they've almost all made the money they need to make and aren't selling the majority of their Holdings. Since 2009 0.01 cent to 18,000usd... Their fiat holdings over the same period have diminished by 2% inflation a year... This is a short time frame but to alot of us this market cap is just the beginning because we truly believe in Blockchain, and maybe DAGs and other tech. To take over the status quo meaning trillions that still need to come in... USD circulating supply is 91T ? Don't quote me on that... but for currency to work it has to have high liquidity--> 300,000,000,000usd for the BTC market cap is a joke for currencies.

Moral of the story you're on a hype train worth the hype:) buy atleast some Is it gambling? No, just skip the pack of cigarettes, or whatever 5$ is enough... It's not about owning much it's about the time when merchant adoption happens and they find out their consumers also have xyzabc currency and you can say yes I have that! It's a give an take, people will have to adopt currencies before retailers push centralised solutions onto us. Pick your currency with your conscience and you'll shape the world, I recommend not JUST holding bitcoin. For Store of value great! For medium of exchange? There are others! For privacy and anonymity in the market place? There's currencies for that! Democracy tokens? Insurance tokens? Lending tokens?

Even if it's just a fiver:) you're influencing the world:)

Segwit is already working. The spike a few weeks ago was probably companies testing integration.

Besides LN, there is also Rootstock project that will do two things for bitcoin. It will introduce a currency called RSK, which will be pegged to Bitcoin, and can be used for small value quick transactions, for example for micropayments. You will be able to go back and force between RSK and BTC without an exchange. It doesn't dilute BTC, because you have to lock up BTC in order to generate RSK, and you destroy RSK to unlock the BTC. Besides RSK serving as an off chain bitcoin transaction it will also allow smart contracts like on Ethereum, so people can start ICOs on Rootstock, backed by BTC, without inflating the Bitcoin blockchain.

There is also Shnorr signatures, which will bring partially confidential transactions, and 25% capacity increase to Bitcoin.

There are other projects, one will bring confidential transactions to BTC, and another that completely changes how the blockchain is stored in an extremely efficient way, and how bitcoin is mined called mimbewimble, but it may not replace bitcoin's code, rather work as a sidechain similar to how RSK works.

Tezos ICO wasn't capped but timed for two weeks, which gave it a kind of cap even when it wasn't as popular as Telegram, I will be restrained from TON and buy from exchanges if the ICO is scheduled to run for more than one week! For then the whole world of crypto and newbies will buy heavily into it. So many newbies has asked us to remind them as soon as it is scheduled.

Meanwhile the whitepaper is full of fantastic imaginations, thoughts, propositions...mouth-watering!

I think it is possible. It already got pretty close earlier this year to bypassing BTC's market cap. That said, the rally over BTC at the time was largely driven by ICO hype combined with BTC fork fears. ETH in its current state doesn't scale anywhere near as well as it should for a dApp platform, though it's not like investors aren't aware of this - Vitalik and others have been very transparent about the challenges involved in scaling.

So when the naysayers talk about cryptokitties slowing down the network, yeah, those of us that have been following ETH for a long time knew this would happen. Doesn't mean these issues can't be solved, though. If ETH successfully implement PoS and sharding I'm about 90% sure it will top BTC in market cap.

Personally, I've bet accordingly. 50/50 on both, and rebalance when I think it's a good time to do it. Has worked well for me...

I don't trade any of the smaller coins anymore, aside from XMR. I think there will be a big consolidation of money into quality projects if there's another crash. In that respect if you're staying in crypto I think you can't go wrong with either BTC or ETH.

Money system works great. It's bartering, but working through a common medium of exchange. Bartering becomes too unwieldy on the large scale.

A typical use is a company, or several companies wanting to share information with other companies, or their customers. Each runs a node and all are guaranteed to see the same data in the blockchain. If they generate blocks all will see consistent data.

So the blockchain is being used as a decentralised pool of data between multiple organisations.

They can't ban Bitcoin. But they can ban official exchanges. Truth of life.

If they are informed, they won't try to ban bitcoin, because they know they can't ban bitcoin. If they ban it and it doesn't work, which it won't, then the confidence to safeguard your capital in the ultimate off-shore tax-haven country "blockchain" increases exponentially.

From the states perspective, tactically it's much more preferably, if the general public believes as long as possible, that they could ban it at any moment.

Even more corrupt banana-republics that already banned bitcoin will jinx it for more sophisticated states, tough. Once it's obvious that no matter what someone with an important sounding title writes on a piece of paper, your brain wallet is your brain wallet, Hyperbitcoinization is one step closer, if it hasn't occurred by then anyway.

Transaction time.

It was created as an exit from state and bank currency. Even today it is primarily used for regulatory arbitrage. Ironically enough it is also a hedge against Anarchism. If States and Banks disappear(not going to happen) than bitcoins largest premium evaporates supporting its utility, value, and thus security. One day more and more statists will start to realize this inconvenient truth: The strength and growth of the state indirectly supports the premium those will pay for bitcoin to convert energy into fungible value thus they would be wise to invest in bitcoin and the flip side investing into bitcoin supports the security of this anarchistic currency.

Trading requires TA which is a specialty that can take years to learn and decades to master and with the FINTECH industry trading becomes even more difficult to come out with a profit. Nowadays you're trading against computer systems that can beat any trader, regardless of expertise. That being said I've made all of my money by hodling, all of my positions come from hours of research.

I think is a bad thing for new adopters. Most of my non-tech/non-financial friends are very afraid of getting in because of this.

Not my full time job. I'm also a freelance programmer.

Started just over 3 months ago with $1500 investment. Was up to $28,000 before the latest dip. Down to $18,000 now. Also cashed out about $3000 so it's going pretty good so far.

I spend a LOT of time researching. Too much probably...

They can not. Russia banned it at one time, Bitcoin went to an all-time high. China banned it also for a little while, and it went to an all-time high. I cannot wait for America to ban Bitcoin....if it goes to an all-time high after that, it will mean that no one cares what America says....ever. It would spell the death of any respect for the White House, or the federal reserve. Suicide really.