Ironically one potential security measure against getting robbed at gunpoint would be storing your bitcoins in a bank safe. Robbers will have a hard time walking you in at gunpoint to access your safe deposit box. Same with possible backups -- although those probably shouldn't be in the same bank as your main wallet.



Hardware wallets relying on central servers doesn't put your coins at risk though. Worst case an attacker could only deny an outgoing transaction or prevent an incoming transaction from showing up.

Yes, but the private keys that give you control over your coins are kept offline, which is one of the main aspects of wallet security

Using a dedicated smart phone / laptop / PC you decrease the chance of getting infected by malware, but since the same device that signs the transaction (ie. being online) also holds the private keys to your wallet, your coins are still exposed to the internet, albeit briefly. That's not the case with hardware wallets, which keep your private keys offline, all the time, even when sending a transaction.

Read here, for example:
https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-faq/overview.html

If you use a dedicated smart phone (factory reset and everything) or a dedicated laptop / pc (fresh install, not used for anything else) you should be fairly safe, that's true. I'd still go for a hardware wallet however. They don't cost that much and keep your coins safe even if physically accessed.


You don't need your wallet to be online to store Bitcoins, only to sign transactions. Using hardware wallets or paper wallets enables you to store your Bitcoins without having the respective private keys exposed to the internet.

I personally prefer Xubuntu (= Ubuntu + xfce) since xfce is the most light-weight desktop environment available for Ubuntu. For mining it shouldn't make a difference though. Just make sure to get the latest stable Ubuntu version with the latest GPU drivers. Especially drivers can make a huge difference in performance.

You can always go for other Linux distros, but in my opinion Ubuntu is the easiest one to set up for a beginner and I'm not aware of any mining-specific distros.

...whereas in most cases the tokens either act like shares in a company or as utility tokens that can be used to pay for services as provided by these projects once the software gets done.

Problem being, that (1) in most cases, these ICOs explicitely deny any liability and shareholder rights and that (2) most of these startups are likely to either fail or vastly underdeliver.

Think of it as investing in a company that does not yet exist, for rights you will not have on profits that likely will never materialize.

LN hasn't failed, just because it hasn't been deployed yet.



Agreed. Doesn't mean that it will stay that way though.



Both of which will see an increase in fees once they run at capacity. How well they'll actually scale is something we'll only see once their blocks are full as well. It's easy to stay affordable when demand is little.



LN is already being tested on mainnet. It will take time, but progress is being made.



Increasing SegWit blocksize to 2mb would lead to an effective blocksize increase from 4mb to 8mb. A little more than "basically nothing extra".

Let BTC drop and let other coins have an increased market share. Who cares about short-term price fluctuations, it's the big picture that counts.



It's a free market of currencies, each with their own up and downsides. Religion has nothing to do with it.


That being said, while I mostly agree with OP I don't see it quite as rosy.

BTC is undeniably in a bad place right now and I fully understand everyone that is eying at the other alts at our disposal. And while decentralization is of utmost importance, it won't help if BTC gets crippled by its transaction fees.

Nonetheless I'm fairly confident that the problems we are facing right now are merely bumps on the road. A simple block size would only fix transaction fees for a short time, which doesn't seem like a worth-while trade-off if BTC's long term independence is at stake.

1) Simply holding your coins of choice instead of trying to increase your holdings by daytrading will save you both money and time.

2) Be highly critical of alts, there's a lot of marketing fluff. Especially the minor ones are mostly a pure gamble.

3) Stay clear of ICOs, most are scams, those that are not are severely overvalued.

4) Do your own research and form your own opinions.

Unless it is a really urgent I would recommend waiting for the mempool to clear up a bit before making a new transaction. The market is pretty volatile right now which seems to cause a lot of people to move their coins, which lead to more than 170k of unconfirmed transactions at the time of writing:

https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

Once the market cools down a bit and the amount of unconfirmed transaction reduces, fees should reach saner levels again. Which unfortunately won't make them cheap though.

As mentioned by bitperson, the overall transaction fee is dependent on the transaction size in bytes, which means that the more inputs a transaction has, the higher the fee. So if Ledger needs to gather Satoshis from a lot of different addresses to achieve the amount you are trying to send, the transaction size and thus the fee will rise accordingly -- ie. in your case sending 0.001 BTC will require more input addresses than sending 0.0001 BTC.

You mean Bitcoin -- or any other cryptocurrency for that matter -- replacing all the fiat currencies in the world?

Not going to happen. At least not within our lifetimes.

Currencies are much more than just a means of payment or value transactions. They are a reflection of the local economies and the sovereign states that issue them. Bitcoin may very well become a globally accepted means of payments like credit cards, existing side by side with fiat currencies, but I doubt that it'll displace fiat currencies any time soon.

I honestly doubt that even the concept of one global currency, that is shared by all, is possible any time soon. There's too many cultural differences and too much conflict of interest to achieve something even close to a one world currency.

Some alts follow different approaches or different use cases, neither which necessarily make them more technologically advanced.

Most alts are nothing more than marketing talk

Every alt has its downsides, no alt has solved the issue of decentralized scalability and no alt has the amount of development experience and community support behind it than BTC. The latter of which makes BTC most likely to survive during hard times.

Speak for yourself :p


What if Bitcoin's function today is the price of the future? Transacting value is just one use case, storing value another. There's nothing wrong with that.



Very true. Watching cryptos over the years I've learned a lot about people. One of the biggest lessons being, that people overvalue assets that go up in price because they go up in price while undervaluing assets drop in price, merely because the price dropped. Which ironically leads to the exact opposite of "buy low, sell high". Which could be avoided if people were to invest based on the merits of cryptocurrencies and their own valuations instead of focusing on the price only.

Alas, you don't only learn this about people, but also about yourself. You as a person are also prone to such irrationalities. The tricky part being not getting caught up in herd mentality and not losing sight of the big picture.

Nonetheless I'd argue that this mindlessness of the masses is also a good thing for Bitcoin. It's how Bitcoin gets attention and as many people as possible get introduced to the concept of cryptocurrencies. It's only when people don't bother learning more about the basic concepts and only care about the price that things start getting problematic. However those people learn their lessons soon enough.

If you use one of the Ubuntu variants you should be fine even with limited college experience, assuming you got a basic handle on the linux shell -- or at least know how to google it.

Using Xubuntu I once had to go through the extra steps of compiling one of the drivers, however that was for the Wifi adapter, the GPU drivers were mostly fine. Depending on the alts you are trying to mine you might have to compile some of the mining software from source though. If you're not comfortable with having to compile from source, Windows might be the better choice. It still doesn't hurt to give Linux a try though

That's the thing though, EtherDelta is a decentralized exchange that leaves users in full control over their own private keys, so OP didn't even store his tokens on an exchange.

What happened, however, is that EtherDelta's DNS got hacked, giving attackers the opportunity to deploy a phishing site:

https://themerkle.com/etherdeltas-dns-hacked-website-replaced-with-hackers-duplicate-to-steal-funds/

It goes to show that security and decentralization is only as strong as its weakest link, in this case the web interface of the decentralized exchange smart contract


Sorry for your loss OP, I'm afraid those tokens are gone.

All of these alts, including BCH, will see the same issues once their adoption increases though. The only reason why most alts still have lower transaction fees is because barely anyone is using them. Should they ever run at capacity they'll face the same scalability issues that BTC has. But who knows, maybe the future of crypto-scalability simply lies in spreading your transactions across a multitude of blockchains instead of using just one.

The only alts that currently may have a handle on scalability are centralized (eg. XRP et al) which is more or less beside the point of cryptocurrencies however.

I don't trade much except on larger moves, so I wouldn't even think about moving crypto to fiat over the holidays. I'm fairly comfortable with holding crypto, otherwise I wouldn't have bought into it.

When I shift my position from crypto to fiat (or the other way round) I do this due to market events, not because of the calendar. Crypto never sleeps and I'm not going to change my position in fear of short term market movements. Especially not in fear of short term market movements. Never lose sight of the big picture

Well, their reply is true enough, but it seems like your problem goes beyond the issue of an unconfirmed transaction. Problem being, that at least one of the transactions that funded your transaction dropped off the mempool -- ie. timed out and got cancelled by the bitcoin network. So your withdrawal transaction will fail and drop off the mempool as well, meaning the funds remain in btcmarket's control.

Maybe you should point out to them that your withdrawal transaction is not only unconfirmed, but has already expired and doesn't show up on block explorers such as blockchain.info any more.

I have no experience with either btcmarket or their customer support though. From the looks of it they've got quite a mess at their hands, so you are likely not the only one and they are probably swamped with support requests right now. Maybe you have more success reaching them in 1-2 weeks. Maybe you need to reach out to them publicly, on Twitter or something. Good luck either way, I hope you'll get your coins back soon.

It seems like btcmarket fucked it up on their side. Looking at the input addresses used there are unconfirmed transactions all over the place, some of which apparently already have dropped off the mempool (eg. 1GMvRMi3PsvTU97kBGP6CM4PWFM88o8kt). The transaction fee they paid for your withdrawal seems to be fine, their internal processing however apparently paid too low a fee to get confirmed in the first place.

The good news is, there's no such thing as perpetually locked BTC due to an expired transaction.

The bad news is, at this point you'll have to rely on btcmarkets customer support. Have you already tried contacting them about the issue?

Thanks for the link! Seeing how there have been multiple proposals regarding dynamic increases of the maximum blocksize I've actually been wondering why there hasn't been any hardfork yet trying to implement one of them -- unless there is, I sort of lost track.

Nonetheless I'd probably just go for a straightforward static periodical block size increases every year or halving period instead of an algorithm based on network traffic. Assuming the latter can be gamed in one way or another (I still need to let your proposal sink in a bit, but I'm not yet fully convinced that it can't be exploited to force the maximum block size increase anyway) this would at least skip the extra step of trying to anticipate transaction workload.

Problem being, once the blocksize is increased, there's effectively no going back. So I do understand Core's conservative blocksize philosophy.

It may hurt short- to mid-term, but I think in the long term BTC will be fine, because...



^ this.

I have yet to see an alt with a scaling approach that actually convinces me. So in the end I personally am still on-board with SegWit1x blocks for a safer, long-term perspective, despite the current short-term problems. You gotta look at the bigger picture. If all goes well these 1-2 years of shitty fees we are looking at right now will be nothing but a minor bump on the road.

The BTC price simply got way ahead of itself.

The growth of the last few months was pretty nice and stable. It was only after breaking through USD 10,000,- that BTC went full on crazy. Ever since we broke this barrier, the price has been incredibly unstable, so of course a correction was due. Accordingly a new bottom has to be established. Hopefully above USD 10,000,- otherwise things might get ugly.

Keep in mind that the fundamentals haven't changed -- BTC is still BTC -- it's just the price that is fluctuating. If you're convinced of BTC's long term viability, short term price drops such as this pne shouldn't worry you.