I can just say that the ICO bubble can't burst soon enough for me.
It is like people who get involved in Pyramid schemes and think they are geniuses because they make profit out of them in the short term.

I don't mean to sound nasty, but people are just investing in crap and being scammed on a regular basis, but due to the massive increases in price when they are successful, they don't even care about the constant scams.

Do we actually have to use the slack or bitsend forum frequently?
I post here, but don't really post anywhere else about crypto, so would rather just keep everything in one place!

I joined anyway, will see how it goes.

Thanks for that, it is a very useful website.

I have just joined Bitsend, lets see if that works.  Byteball and Stellar Lumens were a bit easier to join, Byteball is crazy for bigger Bitcoin holders, it is a lot of money every month!

Well if only banks run full nodes, they can start to mess with it and stop transactions, as they see fit.
Then we have centralized mining in China, and centralized nodes in banks.

It isn't exactly the dream of Bitcoin that I think most of us had. It sounds very animal farm like, I look at the Bitcoin and I look at the Fiat, and I could see no difference.

I know that Le Tour de France isn't the biggest gambling event of the year, but I would like to see some specials or offers for some of the stages, especially when we hit the mountains.
I am loving the Wimbledon stuff, I don't watch that much tennis, but having a few bets on it makes it a lot more interesting, especially when there is cash back on the parlay.

If Federer and Djoko keep winning then the low odds parlays will be doing well for the next few rounds

If you really have 45 Bitcoins and could do with the fiat, then it would certainly be safer to sell some of them.
I am guessing that your 45 Bitcoins are massively in profit, i.e. you bought them for less that $45k total.

Why not sell so that you have enough fiat that you are comfortable, but still well invested in Bitcoin for the future in case the idiots in charge don't manage to ruin everything!

Or divest into PMs or Alts, though I think alts are in a bubble and generally a scam.

They will remove taxes on buying Bitcoin, but they will start to tax on profits made in Bitcoin, then a lot of people will be in trouble!
Fortunately here in Germany the rules are pretty clear and only traders will get taxed on their profits.

I think in other countries, the governments will go after the early adopters at some point and start asking for profits, dates and trades.

It will be a nightmare to prove the profit and loss made on every Bitcoin movement, but if they want to hurt Bitcoin, they will do it.

It's obviously a pretty stupid question, but as a general answer for you, look at the depth of the book, and the amount traded in the last 24h.
If there is little money propping up the price, it will be hard to trade out, without accepting a lower price.

The same is true if the trade volume is very low too, you have to take a worse price usually.

Poloniex removed plenty of coins that were hardly traded, the ones left generally have enough volume that you don't have to worry unless you are a big fish.
Which coin will go up, and which will go down, unfortunately I don't know.

If you are recieving very large amounts of money 'from friends and family' they can quite rightly ask you what you are doing!
They are a business after all, they want 4% or so of your transaction, not that you send and receive money using paypal for nothing.

You can tell them what you are doing, I guess they will block your account. You could always open a new one anyway, though that is obviously against the rules again.

Up over 8% today, yes it looks quite bullish!
It has been in a corridor for a little while now, the price has been very volatile inside this $2200 to $2600 range, but it hasn't broken out for a while.

I think we might see a break out on the upside in the next day, then... ATH?

I assumed that the volatility would be reduced when the price went up, as it would take more cash to move the market, so dumps that would have been massive before, would now be relatively minor.

For some reason though, the dumps are just as bad if not worse than before!

Margin trading should also keep things in line, but also gives people the chance to leverage up and really attack the market.
I don't think that the volatility is going anywhere at the moment, I don't even understand why there are huge dumps, but it doesn't seem like it is becoming less frequent or severe.

Is there no trading here in the trading section? 

I don't really get Blackballs, there is a price on the Byteball website, but it isn't traded on any exchanges!
I guess it is worth holding anyway and see if it does ever come to anything, right now the price is low enough that it isn't really worthwhile to sell.

Is there any word on how they would distribute the coin, and how they would protect against pump and dumps?
I guess a government can keep everything centralized and just swap Yuan for this BitYuan, but that will make it an unfair distribution.

Also how will it be mined? Is it PoW? I find the details of such a national currency very interesting.

Even in the worst case scenario of having 2 active chains after 1st August, it doesn't have to be a bad thing for the price.
When ETH and ETC split the price of both were far far lower than they are now.  Different Bitcoin chains could both prosper, at least in terms of price.

The problem will be longer term, when new investors don't understand what has happened, or what will happen in the future.  I hope it stays orderly, but then I want the transaction fees to fall too, so we'll see if those 2 things are possible together.

Well that all went easily enough!  I didn't even know about Stellar Lumens really until earlier today, but I have managed to claim them with no difficulty.
I wish it was always so easy to get things done with crypto.

I don't know if I love the distribution method, it seems to be giving early adopters an advantage, but as I am one, it isn't bad for me.

I think CLAMS might have been fairer, Byteballs is crazy, but incentivizes people to stay involved longer term.

Do you have any information about how many people have been hacked, and whether or not there has been a password leak?
The fault could lie with you, we don't know that. I don't know why you don't just activate 2FA, even if it is a just in case.

I hope your password is crazy strong too. I don't keep much money at Poloniex or any other exchange, but I always use 2FA.

2 quick questions though:
How many Burger Kings are there in Russia? Here in Germany they are fairly rare, especially compared to in the UK. It looks like the 1st opened in 2010, I guess there aren't many.

How and why will people pay for a $5 burger with a $3 fee?  They would have to be stupid to do it!

Still better than nothing, but these kind of idea don't work anymore, Bitcoin fees are too high for Bitcoin to be used as a currency.

Look at India and you see why there are problems with centralized currencies.
They recently decided to invalidate most of thier cash money, meaning pretty much everyone in the country had to go to the (massively overworked) banks to change them for new notes.
If you had more than a certain amount, it wasn't a very high amount, then you had to explain why you had it.

If you earn your money and decide to keep it as cash, why should you be obliged to change it at the whim of the government and why should you have to explain yourself when you are there?

It might seem unlikely in America or Europe, but it could happen and the big notes are being slowly removed from circulation, they could invalidate them at some point.

India seems like the perfect sort of country for currency exchange.
Lots of people leave India and move to Europe or America, then send money home using Moneygram or Western Union.  They get screwed with exchange rates and fees, as well as having to travel to the office to send money and the receiver having to go and pick it up.

Bitcoin could solve lots of those problems now, and all of them in the future.  They would still need to exchange the Bitcoin into Fiat at the moment, but hopefully in the future that wouldn't be necessary.

As I understand it, you only get blackbytes in an airdrop when you already have byteballs in your wallet.
You (and I) didn't have any byteballs, so we only got byteballs, not blackbytes.

If you held, you should get Blackbytes next time.