dunno about that one, there's only so much that people can do spreading fud, especially without being in a position of power and influence. when i say this, im referring to the recent events that have happened in the past few months. when the ceo of jp morgan spoke about bitcoin on september, the price of bitcoin dropped a bit. same with what happened when the chinese government moved to ban ico's. these aren't just wealthy investors and groups, these are people (and governments) in positions of influence, and their word carries as much, proven by the effect it had on bitcoin's value shorty after. im more inclined to believe that most of the individuals who try to spread fud here on the forum are just newbies that panic at every price dip honestly.

you should really consider moving your funds the other way around, with some wallet backups for your hardware wallets. you might like the convenience of an online wallet service, but that gives you that much less control of your funds. in addition, if you lose or forget your password to these services, your coins are essentially lost for good, although the same holds true for an encrypted hardware wallet. but the main point is that you place your trust in these services, and are at risk if they decide to just up and run. one of the bigger inconveniences, however, is reliability; if the service provider's servers happen to go down, you cannot access your coins until they become available again.

i think its mostly the newer people that have zero experience in financial holdings that do this without knowing, they've never experienced their assets being devalued, and thus panic unreasonably. since bitcoin has surged in popularity recently, it only makes sense that all these newcomers would needlessly contribute to this effect. it might take a while, but i'd think these newbies come to learn after a while to trust in the strength of bitcoin. also doesn't help with all the forks going on lately, theyve made for bigger and more frequent swings than in the past.

im 100% sure you didnt even read my post, i dont think ive said anything that wouldve lead to your comment, nice spam.

it's not impossible though, it can still happen for that one lucky individual. i used to run a gridseed back when i was in college too, free electricity why the hell not. ive since sold the miner, but it was a tad fun having it run constantly. never actually found a block though, but i expected as much.

price isnt the only thing that matters, if anything, its one of the lesser factors in my opinion. it's been a while, but there were several altcoins that surpasses bitcoin's price at the time, some by fairly large margins. what matters more is the cryptocurrency's adoptability, functionality, and the features it offers. just take a look at ethereum; its value is a fraction of bitcoin's value, yet is keeping up with bitcoin in terms of popularity. why? because it offers features that bitcoin could never offer such as the smart contracts that everyone seems to be going crazy over, and tokens (i still dont understand how all of that works).

that's not the point of something like that though, it's just something youd set up and not even have to think about, and given that infinitesimal chance that you actually ended up finding the block, you'd just be rewarded a hundredfold for something you spent pocket change on. it's a fun little thing you just keep going, and if i still had my usb miner i would probably set it up too.

i think you misunderstood; the topic is about attempting to solo mine with an obsolete setup, not on a pool. and even then, with a laptop and a 2 gh miner, i dont think you would even get more than 10 cents in a year the way things are looking right now. 50 dollars? fat chance.

you dont seem to realize, or are just ignoring the fact, that anything of value in this world can be used for illegal purposes. got a stack of bills? great. you can now buy a gun illegally from that one guy you know. or a pound of weed, doesn't matter, it's still illegal. and bitcoin didn't have anything to do with the trade. however, your point does still stand; bitcoin is extremely suited for illegal trades simply because of the fact that it is pseudoanonymous, and can be sent to anyone with an address (although in most cases trust is a pretty big factor). rather than its compatibility with illegal markets, i think it's more the fact that it is decentralized and uncontrollable that pushes governments away from bitcoin; governments exist to mediate and control, and bitcoin goes against both of those.

baseless thought, dunno if youre trying to conjure up some fud here or just clueless, but there's absolutely zero evidence pointing towards the drop in value being correlated with the fork, nor is there anything to lead to the idea it would fall that far. bitcoin's value fluctuates regularly, it's something you should come to expect and not panic over.

possible, but im more inclined to think that it's one of those regular swings.

probably because they dive into bitcoin with the idea that bitcoin is some promised magic gift to the world, and cant wrap their heads around the idea that bitcoin, just like anything else of value in the world, can become devalued at any time.

neither can credit cards and paypal / skrill / bank / whatever servers, which i would bet to say that people use way more often in both frequency and volume traded than physical money. in addition, the internet is a fairly new invention in the world, even though many of us has known it to exist for either our whole lives, or the great majority of it. (if you want to read up more, just use google, but tcp/ip the basic transfer protocol, was developed only in the 70s) the internet is still developing; speeds are getting faster, infrastructure is still growing, and there are yet to be places that will have readily available access to all. it's only a matter of time before the entire population of earth gains the access to internet as a basic right, and i personally believe its not that far off. of course, until that happens, not everyone will be able to use bitcoin because of the inherent need for a network connection, but it's only a matter of time.

it doesnt matter who mined it, weather it be some middle school student that just discovered bitcoin, a major pool, or yourself. regardless of who actually finds the block, your transaction's hash is still public on the blockchain for everyone to see, as well as the source and destination addresses of the funds. don't know where you got that idea though.

exactly. i bring this point up every time someone tries to say 'bitcoin is used by criminals,' which isnt untrue, but always fails to examine the fact that just about anything of value can be used in a trade, and therefore, in a criminal trade. gold, dollars, euros, weapons, etc, can all be used in part of a trade.

i think its fully possible for a government to shut down bitcoin entirely, it's just a matter of how much theyre willing to dedicate to the effort in terms of resources. iirc, law enforcement was able to pinpoint illegal TOR based sites (not that TOR is illegal itself, but sites such as drug exchanges, child porn, stuff of that nature) by tracking ip response times and other factors (it's been a while since i've read thsi, wish i remembered it more clearly). in addition, bitcoin has an inherent weakness to the dedication of excessive resources: the 51% attack. if a government was willing to actually dedicate the resources to set this up, they could effectively start reversing transactions and manipulating the network to their means, which could lead to the death of bitcoin. at this point, they wouldnt even need to outlaw it, they would control it.

honestly dont think this could be it, even if bitcoin is booming right now, i still think the actual percentage of people who use bitcoin hasnt event broken 3%, although there could be actual stats that say otherwise (this is just my personal take on it, i don't run into very many people who actively use bitcoin). in addition, japan's government is fully supportive of bitcoin (although there are rumors they plan to ban ICO's, those are ust rumors, and are not tied directly to bitcoin itself), and that is something i have personally witnessed myself. in tokyo, there are many merchants (saw it more so in larger stores, hardware stores especially) that openly accept bitcoin. id assume these stores do pay taxes for legal reasons, but i dont see how the government would be able to track individual citizens who use it without disclosure on the users' part.

received for the first week, thanks. also, what do you require from us in order to change our payout address? im switching over to the core client in preparation for the fork, and am trying to just use addresses generated by the client until im sure importing my keys won't cause problems (due to the fork).

verified using bitcoin core, good luck on recovering your account.

i couldnt verify the message using both core and electrum, don't think i messed up copy pasting either, try again. note: i tried using both the text directly from the post and again from the text from a quote of your post in the reply page in case there was some funny font business going on.

ive actually been thinking about this in the shower for the last few days, and i think i've a rough idea of a feasible solution to this: the use of a dead man's switch. if you're not familiar with it, you can read the wiki article on it here, but ill also give a short explanation on this in case you dont.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
basically, this is a switch that will operate under the conditions that the owner becomes incapacitated to the extent that they cannot maintain the condition of the switch to remain inactive. the easiest wat to implement this is a timer that constantly counts down, resetting on user interference and will trigger once said timer reaches zero. now, there are services that offer these services, such as sending an email to a designated address / outlet as well as files or anything in the case the user is unable to check in in a given period of time. now, with this implementation, it would be feasible to set a wallet file and the encryption passphrase to be sent to your progeny's email address should you become unable to keep logging in to that service to keep the switch inactive. however, it might be better to use two services, one for the wallet and one for the passphrase for the sake of security in case you don't deem the service providers trustworthy enough. going off of that, it would't be difficult to implement your own switch with a pi setup and some fiddling with code either, might make for a fun project later on.

sure, there's no actual need for it, as is the same with most other things in this world. however, the main point here is that there's no real reason not to have it. besides, there arent many downsides that this little experiment could have, aside from some bad pr if the project were to bomb. when the coin is released to the public, actual exposure to cryptocurrency would increase dramatically, and people might feel more comfortable with the idea of using cryptocurrency if they don't already by using one created and backed by the government. one though that comes to mind is that the japanese government might be using this was a means to move japan forward with use of digital currency (and i don't specifically just mean cryptocurrencies, but also credit cards and the like in general usage) as paper cash is still used more often than not; a lot of restaurants and merchants don't even have card readers to be used form personal experience, and only accept cash as the means of payment.

just because the government doesn't support bitcoin does not at all mean that bitcoin cannot become the predominant means of payments in an area. bitcoin's strength lies in the people, the userbase, the population that decides to use it over the existing systems. sure, the government's endorsement may help, but the government isnt a necessary factor in determining bitcoin's success. if the people decide to use bitcoin, and the companies and businesses decide to implement bitcoin as a means of payment, unless the government rules that illegal it will happen.

it wont take much time before we see how the world as a whole will react to bitcoin; we are now undergoing numerous forks to fix the scalability issue, and potentially could see widespread use within the next decade.

only for now however. i feel most of the responses to this question have little thought in them; with some innovation, we could easily integrate bitcoin into a system for paying for daily commodities such as the ones you've listed above. let's take a look at your example of public transportation fees here. in tokyo, there are IC cards (suica, pasmo) that use nfc technology to store a balance, which is automatically read and deducted for travel with a simple tap on a machine. now imagine how we could use bitcoin in this situation: if we could create a nfc card that would use off chain transactions for processing the fees, with on chain transactions for loading the cards, we could feasibly integrate bitcoin payments into this system. what's more, near major stations, there are restaurants that will accept these cards as payment, and simply deduct the necessary balance from the card needed for the transaction. of course, actually implementing this system might be tough, but it's a feasible idea, already proven in its effectiveness by its use.

its not that bitcoin is electronic and fiat is physical, in fact most of our money today in fiat isnt made of paper, its all digital and stored as numbers; i believe the actual number was over 90% iirc (as digital). fact is, bitcoin is inherently different from fiat money; cryptography, decentralization, and the inherent need for cybersecurity to name a few. in addition, bitcoin is not backed by anything; the united states treasury was backed by gold at one point (though not anymore), but bitcoin, as an inherently digital asset, cannot be deemed to be worth anything of equal value in the real world except by what its value relative to a currency is determined to be.