Overstock.com only accepts Bitcoin through their main desktop site. If anyone uses their mobile site then Bitcoin can't be used as payment option unfortunately.

https://help.overstock.com/help/s/article/Bitcoin

On a more positive note, Overstock.com doesn't sell any of their Bitcoin you spend with them. In other words, they do not create additional selling presure.

If you are using the option goods and services, it's relatively easy to request a charge back and have PayPal side with you as buyer. Another option, which works with both friends and family and goods and services payments, is to charge back from your bank. PayPal will then make sure that it deducts that amount in full from your account.

Scammers tend to comfort people saying that they can't charge back on them because they use the friends and family option, but they don't tell them anything about how you can get transactions reversed on the side of your bank as well. I have seen it happen quite a lot that people have lost money thinking they are safe with friends and family payments.

Bitcoin might be volatile, but at least you won't be losing out by accepting it. PayPal & Co are too flawed and only have eye for the buyers.

You mean exchanges to blackmail people? I haven't heard of that one before.

Binance for example works with a fixed withdrawal fee of 0.0005BTC regardless of how high the price is or how heavily the network congested is. I like that. It may suck a little bit today because the network fees are very low, but whenever we see the an explosion in use similar to what happened in 2017, I'm sure that you will thank Binance for not increasing its fees.

Coinbase on the other hand works with a dynamic fee that changes based on how congested the network is. Currently you enjoy very low withdrawal fees, but whenever the network gets heavily congested again, you will pay whatever the actual miner fee is to get your transaction included in the next block. Coinbase's withdrawal fees in 2017 were +0.002BTC for quite a while. People didn't like that.

It's hard to take anything serious when it involves Russia or WEX, especially in this case.

The annoying thing about these bomb threats is that it motivates others to do the same in an attempt to get whoever they threaten to send them Bitcoin. It's like a domino effect. It's kinda similar to what happened with youtube's censorship recently, where some youtubers who's channels weren't striked were threatened by random accounts demanding Bitcoin or else they would get that channel striked as well.

The article date is from 24 december btw.

Decentralization sucks when it comes to social media platforms that need to process extremely large video files. It's people who keep talking about how important decentralized youtube alternatives are, but they work like crap and are extremely costly to scale to any useable scale. Not in a thousands years will they even remotely challenge youtube. It's nothing but a crypto coiner's wet dream.

Every single company will blame an error or a bug instead of pointing at their own policies/terms that caused this to occur. I still don't know what exactly happened, and we will probably never find out, but it just shows how weak this ecosystem really is in terms of social media traction. In such a short period of time crypto youtube was silenced. That's dangerous.

Content creators put their everything into their content and it was taken down as if it was nothing. 

The cost of transactions isn't that high at all. I haven't paid more than $0.10 in fees in the last couple of months for a single output transaction. If you still think that's high, then there is Lightning that allows you to do micro transactions for fees like 1-2 satoshis. Instant settlement and with time huge adoption. What more can you wish for?  

Most of the people complaining about fees very likely use wallet clients still using the legacy address format. If you use a wallet client that supports bech32 Segwit, your transaction fees will significantly reduce compared to the fees you pay for legacy transactions. Electrum is my preferred SPV desktop and mobile wallet client. If I'm not mistaken, they were the first client to support native Segwit.

Digital future is already here. Banks by far conduct most of their transactions digitally, which means that it concerns dozens of trillions worth of transactions every single day. Banks in various countries have rolled out instant transfers, and that regardless of the day or hour. You no longer have to wait a full business day for your money to post in your bank account, that's awesome.

Even if banks fall (which I don't believe they will), something else will replace them and that something else might very well be even worse than the current banks you want to see fall. In that regard, be careful what you wish for, because it can back fire on you and everyone else very hard. Nothing changes if the people on top of the food chain don't change.

If by digital future you mean that crypto will take over, I highly doubt it. It's an alternative and will likely stay that for ever, especially if in so many countries the legal status of Bitcoin is different. It's not going to become legal tender ever.

That's the mindset of a noob in any field. If you can't beat the game, it cheated on you. The most used term amongst noobs in the last 6 months is 'whale manipulation'.

Price drops 5%; whales are pushing the price down to buy lower.
Price drops another 10%; whales are still hungry for more.
Price pumps 10%; bull run is around the corner boys, let's buy more! (no mention of whales doing anything)
Price then dumps 15%; whales don't want the price to go up.

You get the point. It's kinda hilarious reading through all those claims and gibberish conversations, but it's sad at the same time. These people shouldn't be here speculating.

It depends on what time frame you are looking at, but it could just as easily print another lower high by topping out at $9000 or any other level below the peak of the 40% "China pump".

The bullish nature of stocks hasn't done anything for Bitcoin despite some people saying it will lift Bitcoin up as well. Stocks keep printing new all time highs and Bitcoin keeps falling. Clear indication that money is only interested in buying assets that go up and ignore that what goes down. I can't even blame them. Money is better off in stocks as we speak.

It's something that doesn't only happen within Bitcoin. I have noticed myself by reading through forums where mostly Gold bugs communicate, and the general theme amongst those is to get to the 1KG milestone eventually. People want the rarest and most expensive metal, not a cheaper, far easier to obtain metal such as Silver. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion.

In fact, the hunger for more probably doesn't even change when people own a cheaper coin, because they first want 10 coins, then 100, then 1000, etc. People always aim to increase their holding goals no matter what it is that they hold. In that regard, you can better hoard more of the best and rarest coin than to own a ton of garbage coins. Quality over quantity is what I value.

$10 fixed fee still means that the fee itself is outrageously high compared to the amount you buy. For example, you buy $50 worth of Bitcoin but have to pay $60 including fees. It means that your fee is 20% which is insane. For those who only can afford to buy small amounts once every week or month, they will overpay significantly every single time they pay a $10 fee.

I get that they want to make money and are dealing with a base fee from the financial institution they work with, but that's not fair for people with a small wallet.

The fewer people try out new hardware wallets, the less likely it will be that new hardware wallets will be exposed for having bugs or backdoors. It basically means that even after the few people who used their wallets without any problems for a couple of years straight, the vulnerabilities can and probably will show up when the mass is stress testing it.

It's hardware and software combined, so there is a lot that can go wrong. The best hardware and software engineers work for the biggest companies in the world, and even they don't manage to design a perfect product in terms of safety/security. In that regard, we should expect less 'perfect' products from the companies behind the most popular hardware wallet brands.

I still hold about 70% of my cold wallet funds in simple paper/metal wallets. Easy to hide and transfer and it gives me a peace of mind. The other 30% sits in Ledger Nano S's.

It happens in all fields. I think the correct term is brand loyalty outside crypto, where people stick to the products or service of a certain company regardless of how many other companies there are with even better and cheaper products and services. In some form or shape, I think we all have been there at some point.

Bitfinex for example was experiencing massive outflow of capital, but they managed to gain back quite a chunk of what they lost. Currently they have over 190,000BTC sitting in their two known cold wallets. That's at least a plus of 50,000BTC, which is quite impressive. People keep going back to Bitfinex no matter how hard they get screwed over.

I see that with a lot of people. Why should I use a mixer? I have not had a problem using an exchange to "mix" coins.

People fail to understand that the records exchanges store are stored on their servers for ever. Just because you haven't had a problem using exchanges to "mix" coins, that doesn't mean you won't be facing any problems a year later, or perhaps even longer. Exchanges are honeypots and people have provided them all their personal information, so how easy do you want a government to find you. 

I'm glad you woke up.

Gold will not crash with central banks pumping ridiculous amounts of their freshly printed phony moneys into it.

I actually started to like Gold because it's in fact doing the same thing as Bitcoin does (in some areas just not as convenient) before Bitcoin even did it, and it actually serves multiple purposes as metal. It's hard to not like something that has been proven and 'stress tested' for thousands of years and still serves its purpose in today's world.

That being said, I find it hard to believe that the USD will be backed by anything again. On top of that, it's more likely to see a Gold standard rather than a Bitcoin standard because of how much countries already hold of it. You don't want countries to start stacking up Bitcoin. It's only giving them more incentive to exercise control over the network.

There have been many hard forks that Ethereum went through, which one exactly are you referring to?  

In short, it's great to get more features and code improvements forked in, but when the demand for the actual asset isn't increasing but decreasing, there isn't much that you can hope for. The most you can hope for is a buy the rumor sell the news type of event where people dump just before or just after the fork.

I seriously wonder how much of Ether's current price is held up by those having confidence in the POS transition. If this is in fact a driving factor for demand, which it very well could be (who doesn't like trustless interest and getting paid out in the native asset?), and the price is still tanking, the price would have been well under $100 if there wasn't that POS demand.

I'm actually more of believe that the insiders and people behind the projects were dumping.

I'm sure there have also been short term flippers having made a sweet initial profit, but most of the noobs who bought into projects really believed they were going to change the world. Tokens that are going to change the world are kept for the very long term, which a lot people did and lost a lot of money with. Retailers have been rekt hard and won't touch this crap again any time soon.

The IEO hype was kinda similar, it just turned out to be a flop much sooner, where ICO's had around 1.5 years to thrive. The only good thing about that is the fact that fewer people fell victim to their own greed and shitty nature of the projects.

Very flawed basis. It's something projects purposely exploit by printing as many tokens as possible, but only have a small chunk of it in actual circulation. The small chunk will obviously make the whole market cap look big while in reality it's just based on the small chunk of coins that are circulating.

Forks get an easy ride too because at the moment of forking, they have the exact number of coins as total supply, just way less in circulation in the initial phase, which we have seen pump the market cap of BCash to crazy high numbers.

It takes time for people to convince themselves to import their private keys into a new (most likely untested) wallet, and in most cases there is no replay protection right off the bat, which only further prevents people from dumping early on. Market caps are the Chuck Norris in crypto. Can't take them serious.

Sad reality indeed. In some cases banks do have to adhere to the laws the government has outlined, which sucks for the people in these countries, but banks always manage to break laws in other areas and get away with it. In this case I would say that the penalties are too soft because all banks do is pay a measly fine and they are free to continue operating.

Coming back to the first point you brought up, namely money laundering; the fines banks end up paying probably don't even account for 10% of the profit banks make. It's more like collateral damage to them. It's written off as a loss in their "books" even before they are fined. It's a joke. Why would they stop doing that when it's so exorbitantly profitable?

In the end, banks such as HSBC enforcing sanctions against people just do that because they have too many things going on in China that they don't want to risk losing. It's their financial incentive that goes against the incentives of the people, or more precisely said, a bunch of numbers in their database that aren't profitable to the bank. It's a mess, and people as always suffer. 

Of course there is a long term impact. Miners are rewarded fewer coins, which means that there is less that they can dump on you to cover their expenses.

The thing that people have to keep in mind is that a bear market can drag on for such a long period of time, that it may seem that the halving doesn't have much of an impact, so you have to be patient and not get worried if the price doesn't right away go up to whatever level you hope to sell at.

It's a game where the most patient holders are rewarded the most. Impatient 'holders' will get less, or nothing at all if they sell out of frustration.