I can't speak from first-hand experience, but in general at least the more trustworthy exchanges shouldn't cause you any problems when withdrawing larger sums of fiat money. Assuming you passed their verification process -- eg. Kraken has a multi-tiered verification system, where you are subject to different withdrawal limits depending on how much personal information and documents you provide them to proof your identity and residency. It is always a good idea to take care of verification first, lest you get money stuck in an exchange due to issues with the verification process.

Also note that local regulations may require you to pre-announce larger incoming international bank transfers to your bank and / or local authorities.

Coinbase won't be able to help you, since once the coins leave Coinbase's wallet they are out of their control. At this point the only ones that can help you recover your coins is Bitmain. Maybe try reaching out to them on Twitter if the regular support channels don't work.

Excellent point, nodes are also a very important part of the Bitcoin ecosystem, which is why keeping a lean blockchain is important for decentralization. In practice there's nothing stopping miners from mining on a fork with poor node density though, as propagation will still find a way one way or another. It's just that network stability is likely to suffer, in addition to increased centralization towards the network segments with the best access to full nodes.



The market has decided in favor of Bitcoin Core's design philosophy and development approach over that of its hardfork competitors. Anyone who believes that BTC's market support is only caused by market manipulation and astroturfing should rejoice over the possibility on getting their hands on cheap hardfork coins until the market finally decides to wake up.

The network would grind to a halt, no new transactions would get processed anymore and the market would get batshit insane due to downward pressure caused by the mining crisis and upward pressure due to the lack of liquidity caused by no new coins being able to enter exchanges.

It's an unlikely scenario though, as someone would always be willing to mine bitcoins since the less miners there are, the more profitable it becomes for the individual miner.

From a purely technical viewpoint the consensus is based on mining hashrate as mentioned in the post above.

From a practical viewpoint it's the market that decides. The more people believe in the viability of a hardfork, the more people will buy into this hardfork as opposed to the other side of the fork. The more people buy into one side of the fork over another, the higher the profitability of said fork, the more hashrate you will find on the respective side of the fork.



They are free to continue mining on the old fork and / or to buy coins as issued by the old fork.


Of course if either side of a fork has a bad codebase the fork may still fail regardless of market sentiment -- as has happened with B2X, as was the reason for the BTG delay.

Because of aforementioned orphan issue and the increased rate of blockchain growth which would subsequently increase the risk of centralization further down the road. Additionally it would have required a hardfork, which back in the day wasn't treated as lightheartedly as nowadays.

In the end it breaks down to different design philosophies. The beauty of open source and the free market of cryptocurrencies is that you can always choose to abandon one cryptocurrency over the other -- or hold a selection of cryptocurrencies based on their respective merits.

Try accelerating the transaction you want to succeed using the ViaBTC transaction accelerator:

https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

They have a limited hourly contingent of transactions they accelerate for free, but if you submit your transaction at the beginning of an hour you should be able to get your transaction accelerated, ie. it will be confirmed the next time ViaBTC finds a block.

Not necessarily, in theory you can also sell / buy the private keys themselves, without a public transaction on the blockchain. Of course you'll have to trust your counterparty and forgo the security of the blockchain in that case though.



Yes! A well known issue that is already practically exploited -- or utilized, depending on your point of view:

http://fortune.com/2017/08/22/irs-tax-cheats-bitcoin-chainalysis/



In theory yes, in practice coins are also lost, burned or used for transactions that are never actually bound to real world identities or physical goods.


Note that there are alternative cryptocurrencies that focus on the anonymity aspect, more or less viably, with varying up and downsides. If that topic interests you, I suggest looking into Monero, Zcash and Byteball Blackbytes for different approaches on achieving anonymity.

With gold's total market cap being estimated at USD 7.8 trillion I guess the upper limit of BTC's price would be around USD 370,000 (at USD's current purchasing power) simply because I can not fathom all of BTC to be worth more than all the gold in the world. However there is a lot of fiat currency in the world, all of which gets issued more or less out of thin air, trying to more or less successfully reflect the effective wealth of global economies. So relative to fiat the sky is the limit.

Then again for all we know people could just lose interest in cryptocurrencies as fast as they have gained it, and in 10 years time we'll be shaking our heads at our own naivité while trading coins that are worth only fractions of current levels. Not that I expect such a thing, but reality rarely turns out as expected.

Oh they did, far and wide.

Even with the Bitcoin Cash hardfork they told people over and over again that they would not support it and that people should withdraw their coins from Coinbase, should they choose to split their holdings. Alas many people completely ignored Coinbase's announcement, only to accuse Coinbase of thievery despite the exchange acting exactly as advertised, forcing Coinbase to offer eventual BCH support.

Never assume an exchange will provide you with fork coins, especially if they explicitly state that they won't do so. Anyone can hardfork Bitcoin, it's not an exchange's duty to extend their platform each time a new alt enters the market place.

Most likely as a hedge against falling Bitcoin prices.

If Bitcoin prices were fall to a level where mining stops being profitable, they could use Bitcoin futures to cushion the blow. Pretty much how commodity futures are used to hedge the market risk of whatever commodity you produce or require -- which was, if I'm not mistaken, the initial rationale behind futures trading before it became a playground for speculators and investment bankers.

1) Learn how to securely store your coins and get a hardware wallet such as a Ledger Nano S or a Trezor. Not getting hacked is half the battle, the other battle is not getting scammed out of your coins, which brings me to:

2) Avoid ICOs and HYIPs like a plague.

3) I personally mostly stay away from alts since even the more innovative ones have failed to fully convince me (eg. ETH doesn't scale well either and has insecure smart contracts, BCH is just BTC with less features and bigger blocks, IOTA currently requires a central authority, XRP is fully centralized to begin with, LTC is just BTC with shorter block times and a different hashing algorithm...) but it might be a different story for you. Long term BTC has been the most reliable cryptocurrency so far, so I'd recommend starting with that.

Take your lesson from it, move on and try to avoid repeating your past mistakes. Beating yourself up over bad trades or trying to trade your losses back will only make matters worse.

Don't fret about falling short on trading for a new ATH, because calling the top correctly is next to impossible. Most of those that do, simply get lucky, whether they know it or not.

You can't control the market, but you can control your emotions. If you sell, try to find the sweet spot where you won't regret that you didn't sell more if the price falls and where you won't regret that you didn't keep more if the price further increases. And vice versa for buying, of course. Additionally, don't buy anything just because the price went up. If the only reason for you to buy into a project is because the price went up, you'll feel double the pain when the price goes down.

We've all made bad decisions. We've all regretted doing (or not doing) a trade. The important part is to act smarter the next time around. Good luck!

Let's be real here, although volatility has been cited it definitely is the smaller issue. The transaction fees are currently too prohibitive for Steam purchases, especially since they strike twice once refunds are considered. At least lightning network seems to be progressing well, it is indeed much needed right now.



I wouldn't be surprised if other services soon follow suit as well, but it won't be because of Steam. I guess Steam is more heavily affected by transaction fees than some of the other services, due to relatively small purchase amounts mixed with a very permissive refund system.

January 2018, from the looks of it right now.

It seems like the market has discarded any bit of sanity left and is going batshit insane. That's going to be one bumpy ride once the market sobers up, let's see if USD 10,000,- holds once correction comes.

Judging on the high increase of media attention I'd say we're in the mania phase right now. The interesting part being that in the case of BTC we are seeing the public entering the market way before institutional investors, so who knows where we really are. And especially, how institutional investors will shape the market.

But maybe... just maybe... we're not in a bubble after all. Yet.

You glorious bastards.

I can't believe 2017 ended in not only USD 10k,- but also EUR 10k,- being broken. If the price now manages to hold itself above USD 10k,- / EUR 10k,- for a couple of months, BTC is primed to become the new gold during the next recession.

If you're an alt coiner that is unhappy with BTC but don't want to invest additional money it's a godsend. You now potentially have an alt that does everything you were missing from BTC without spending a single Satoshi.

Current hardforks being mostly pump-and-dump schemes without bringing anything new to the table is a negative, of course, but I don't see much harm done as long as the community stays clear of them for the most part. The crypto community has survived so many "investment" schemes that it really doesn't matter anymore. Just be careful out there.

In the end I still think that any real innovation will either become part of the core implementation or as part of a wholly new alt altogether. I don't see much input coming from hardforks unfortunately, but that might change in the future.

How so? In 10-20 years transaction fees will already be a major part of mining income. Which means that miners have more than half a century to adjust to mining for transaction fees instead for block rewards.



It's not quite that simple. The amount of decimal places doesn't stop Bitcoin from being a deflationary currency. The way we understand economics today, inflationary (fiat) currencies are necessary to allow for economic growth via credit. The latter is up for debate of course, but human history seems to agree. It doesn't detract from Bitcoin's value either way though.

As I mention in the latter part of my comment, I'm rather positive about a precision update being less debatable than a block size increase. On the other hand you're not wrong. It's indeed something that could be worth looking at rather sooner than later. But in my opinion 5 years for getting a hardfork in place is still way too pessimistic. But who knows, there may be some nuances to the problem that are not obvious at a first glance.



I also think that lightning is very close now. But the timeframe from "very close" to production ready to the actual deployment and real life usage may still be 1-2 years away. I will be gladly proven wrong though.



The technical reason is the size of the integer datatype that Bitcoin is currently using, OP is suggesting to use a larger integer datatype instead



nice catch



I too would love an answer on that question.