this is the move i foresee as being the most likely; in the event japan moves to ban ico's, it would be because the administration determined that the ico scene was too sketchy, and decided that banning them outright would be the best interim solution until legislation were to be implemented that would regulate the projects and create a safe environment for its citizens to invest in. and as for your second point, ico's arent even necessarily tied that strongly to bitcoin. if japan were to ban ico's permanently, i think very few, if any people at all, would even consider moving out of japan just for the sake of investments. there's not much offered in taking that course of action, and unless ico investment was literally their only source of income, i dont think the option would even be considered. i dont know where you're getting that idea from.

there is no server, thus, it cannot be turned off. bitcoin runs off the bitcoin network, which is comprised of the many bitcoin core client (or any other hard wallet) nodes that serve as the backbone of the network. your friend is absolutely clueless and has no place speaking on the subject.

you also seem to be clueless on the subject. educate yourself.

in that scenario, that one machine would essentially control the network. and that's not an understatement. if you read up on the 51% attack theory a bit, you'll understand how that works. not going to explain it here. however, i will say that the numerous nodes and other miners constantly running on the network are what contributes to preventing these attacks and maintaining security within the network.

how is it a difficult concept? maybe to understand the inner workings, sure, but to use it? it's a fairly straightforward thing in my opinion, no different from using paypal. using paypal as an example, let's compare. with paypal, an online payment processor / method that is accepted by many retailers online, we have an account tied to our identities that we can use to pay for goods. with bitcoin, we have a (preferably) encrypted wallet, which we can access when needed to pay for goods for merchants that accept bitcoin as a payment method. in both cases, if we have our login info or wallet and encryption passphrase compromised, we run the risk of having our bank account (or paypal balance) or our private addresses emptied. the only real difference i see here is that paypal payments are reversible, and are more or less insured if the account were to be compromised. however, theyre not that different if you strip it down to the basics. we have money and we send it to a recipient. doesn't get much simpler as far as general use goes. not sure how it's so daunting for the average person to understand that and use it.

i dont think so at all; banks are more than a place to put your money into nowadays. they offer so much more that 99% of the posters in this thread are ignoring. investment plans and funds, credit / debit cards, etc are all valuable services that banks provide. even if bitconi or another cryptocurrency does go mainstream and becomes the primarily used form of value of in exchanges, the need for these services will always be present. are you going to make every payment manually? or could you use the bank's card to use coin from your balance and not worry about losing whatever device you use for your day to day transactions? and before you can even say 'ill just carry around my bitcoin on a smartphone wallet or something,' the great majority of people do this already. rarely do you see people carrying around a wad of cash to pay for their groceries or whatever, they just slide their card to pay instantly. no matter what, the financial institutions will adapt to meet the needs and wants of a new financial system.

ideally, they are supposed to be benevolent entities that exist to serve its populace. however, it remains a fact that human beings with their own interests in mind (and puts those interests ahead of those of the people) are the ones that write and pass the laws we live by. now, there are people that work in the government who are true public servants, and live to serve, but this doesn't hold true for the great majority, which is what matters. were the government (ill use the US government as the point of reference here as that is the one im most familiar with) comprised mostly of altruistic congressmen, i've no doubt that bitcoin and blockchain research would have been brought up in congress a long time ago in an attempt to introduce a new technology that might benefit the people.

posts only get deleted if they break the forum's rules. judging by the thread's topic, im guessing the posts you reported consisted of derogatory statements to a religion, which doesn't constitute spam. that, or the moderators havent gotten around to your report yet.

even barring the possibility of economic failure, there's still the fundamental infrastructure that makes bitcoin usable, which, if shut down or crippled, would result in the collapse of bitcoin: the internet. in the event the internet backbone were to be crippled or entirely destroyed, the usage of bitcoin would become extremely limited, or even impossible. of course, you could create transactions offline, but you'd still need them to be boradcast to the network, and confirmed by the miners. financially, the strength of bitcoin lies in the userbase. unless a great majority of the users suddenly decided to drop bitcoin completely, and a great numbers of nodes just went offline and stopped supporting the network, bitcoin will hold strong.

as much as im sure the chinese government would love all that tax money, i'd think the very idea of bitcoin goes against their desire to maintain control, it being decentralized and all that. the chinese regime has been an authoritarian one for years, and i dont think they'll come to accept bitcoin without some sort of means to control it, or at least their population's usage of it.

rumors will always just be rumors, but it always seems that at least 95% of the people here either take rumor for fact, or blow everything out of proportion (or both) when they hear something. you've just got to filter it all out. as far as the fork goes, it likely is the reason for the price spike; people are getting really hyped up about the potential for improvement it seems.

this was already answered in a previous post.

The funny this is about those who are trying to buy high ranking account either having a green trust for a purpise to scam others are having a problem buying since the new security implemented which in result 2 scammers are scamming each other. How romantic.
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what new security features? ive only been back on the forum for a few months now, either i missed this announcement or this happened before that, mind filling me in?


LOL, I can just see all the prospective scanners racking up 100 posts in an hour or 2. I'm sure they can esaily figure it out.
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forgot to address this point in my previous point, my bad.
lets assume that a post would take someone around a minute to write, and with new accounts, the 6 minute restriction is in place in between posts. with that, we'd be looking at nearly 12 hours to write 100 posts to move this hypothetical restriction (of straight, nonstop posting). dunno how everyone else feels about this, but i barely make 20 posts a week even, granted they're thought out and the furthest thing from spam. however, 12 hours is a lot of time to dedicate, and would be a pretty darn effective deterrent against scamming just from the sheer effort required to bypass that restriction. not that i think this is a good idea, but just stating the point. it's not easy at all.

that's just the forum administration's position they take on scammers; in the past, they did manually apply scammer tags to verified scammers ass vod pointed out above, but with the amount of traffic the forum sees nowadays, that's nearly impossible considering the man hours that would have to be dedicated to the task to even keep up with the sheer volume, while ensuring accuracy. if the administration were to become involved again, it would be impossible to seem impartial or avoid the image that they were doing a half - ass job if they weren't able to keep up, which is likely, and they cannot seem partial in their management of the forum and its users. compared to this outcome, i think the laissez faire stance they have taken is a smarter move in their position, with the initiative placed on the users via the trust system; caveat emptor. personally, even if the old system were to be implemented again, scams would still happen, weather it be by new accounts, bought accounts, or established users looking to exit scam, which does happen every once in a while.
that's just my take on it, can't speak for the administration itself.

received the correct amount, thanks.

i doubt this would actually be implemented, but it's not a bad idea, especially since it would also serve as a deterrent to spammers creating new accounts considering the annoyance of the tutorial and the time that would be wasted. it could be an idea to consider in the new forum whenever the software actually gets finished, but as is, i dont see it being implemented on the forum running on smf.

pretty sure very few newbies (actual newbies) actually read those. it's like the ToS on every new piece of software you'd install on your computer: no one reads them. but if they can't take the time to familiarize themselves with the forum before going out and trading with anonymous personas online, that's their loss and they probably wont make the same mistake again.

since you got it from vod, you can try in a month's time assuming what he posted in this thread still holds true: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=887515.0
and it looks like it was more than just a few months ago, it's almost been a year since he's tagged you.

thanks for the great generalization, im asian too so i guess that means i have the worst english possible that's worse than what you would get out of google translate.

most of those campaigns encourage spam anyways, they hardly mange their posters and pay for pretty much any post, wouldn't really solve the problem of spam in the long run.


not necessarily. there are posts that a reply consisting of a short sentence, or even a simple yes or no answer would suffice. just because a post is short doesn't mean its instantly considered spam.

you wont, there are always plenty of spammers that plague the forum, and you sure as hell wont be the last to be banned. there are only so many staff members though, and it takes time to get around to banning the spammers as they come.

when we say 'china,' i would  think that the statement refers to the chinese government, as the chinese citizens are not a collective acting as one. i could think it plausible that 70% of the hashing power originates from china, but i think its fair to say that it's impossible to think that one entity controls all of that mining hardware. however, given how decentralized bitcoin is, i also think that figure is incredibly exaggerated, there are quite a few bitcoin fanatics all around the world, some without a doubt with mining farms of their own, not to mention all the small home miners scattered around the world.

they certainly are setting themselves up to be the world's center figure in bitcoin as it is. im actually looking forward to how the japanese government will push for bitcoin related developments in the coming years.

didnt catch the space when i was copy / pasting, my bad. anyways, message verified using bitcoin core

ill report the pm and the appropriate information to cyrus now.

message could not be verified using bitcoin core, try following the instructions here word for word (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=990345.0), or google the step by step on how to sign a message for whatever wallet you're using.

you're missing a message, there should be a message that you sign, and when you click 'sign' the signature should pop up in your client. try again, and please include the forum time and date (in the upper right corner of the page).

this right here. if you can sign a message with the address you used to send me the payment for that trade, ill do as h&co stated and report the original pm from your original account to cryus as proof of your ownership of that address, and therefore the account (as of last month).

the address in question: 1M15Lrgm4T9aQiH371r4hYZvtpjJn2iJdj

im not sure how much weight that address would carry since it was used so recently, but it's something i guess. in case you're not sure on how to sign a message with a bitcoin address: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=990345.0
be sure to include the forum date and time in the message.

that aside, the user did send me the correct transaction hash for the trade 'drippx' and i did last month, probably is him / her.