Office alternatives in particular never turned me on. I haven't found a free proper video editor I've liked at all either but that's one of those things you get used to and don't want to relearn.

Most of the 'alternatives' I have tried I fucking hated. I guess it beats having your life stolen away from you but I'll bet 9 times out 10 people will sample one of these and then go look for a crack again.

Idealism - meet reality.

I've probably downloaded it 4-5 times and gave up in disgust a short while later each time. Not even having a viable form of searching is just bizarre, or perhaps all of the sellers fell away.

Most people don't want to spend BTC. Those who do want to be able to actually find what they want to buy. If I remember rightly for the few items I found many had prices that clearly hadn't been updated since forever, or perhaps they were just very expensive.

If it fails it fails. Just like Bitcoin itself, if you become a charity case then you have no future.

As above, the only real future is dark market stuff for now at least.

The thing to do with cracked stuff is to keep the download you have and reuse in future if they work well. There are plenty of programs I've used for years on junk PCs that gave me no trouble at all so they get loaded up on the next one too.

For your crypto fun you should be keeping to a walled garden anyway if you value what you have.

And when it comes to Windows 10 Microsoft don't really care all that much if you're not activated. You can still use it in perpetuity. I'd much rather get the occasional nudge from them than go to shithole websites and download unknown crap.

Perhaps not enough know that.

Gotta love crypto. Bored? Don't like the market any more?

Hey, make a new one.

A lot of the time nothing happens. There've been months of coma in the past across all markets. That's the norm, not the exception. If you do find an obscure corner where things are popping the chances are high it's someone looking to prey on that boredom so keep your guard up and your sense sharp.

I would assume they assume that protecting Bitcoin itself is enough of a bug bounty. If you find a gaping hole it's likely you own some and don't want it flying down the toilet.

I think that's safe to say. It's interesting reading the moans they get on Twitter. Many users seem to a whole lot less cautious than us on here. There's often talk of running their entire finances through Wirex which seems completely and utterly nuts to me.

Everyone goes for the path of least resistance. And it could be said that a tiny jurisdiction is much more prone to being hijacked or undermined by one element. The big black holes will always be so.

As ever, the actually important and useful thing is the decentralisation and permissionlessness. That's why we have all that boring stuff like fees and waiting for confirmations. It comes at a cost.

Anyone can come up with something free and instant by discarding that. At some point it's going to fail or bite.

Since you're a ' big fan of fiat money and banks' (is there such a thing? Do you go on banking enthusiast days out with others?) then you are exceptionally well served. Nice one.

They know the crowd they have so they'd be stupid not to milk them. I guess the tricky part is the aftermath when your shittoken turns out to be brown and sticky too. Seems a bit stupid to burn good will but they do have something of a captive audience.

It sticks in my craw a bit when companies with what should be a successful revenue stream go down that road, though of course they know many people will swallow it. They're in one of the few truly dependable areas of this market, converting money, so there should be little need for it but obviously the temptation is too much to resist.

For me at least I'd rather be using a long established legacy company for this process and the day is approaching.

Seen it. Discarded it.

I automatically ignore anything of that nature from anyone. If they can't make money doing what they're supposed to do then I'm not throwing any more at them.

Did much become of their shittoken or whatever it was?

When people on here venerate 'crypto hubs' like Gibraltar and Malta I seem to be completely unable to find anything of any note that's actually operating in unfettered paradise there.

I think they seize on one vague noise the piddly government makes and then decide armies of grandmas there are running thousands of crypto street stalls while their crypto grandchildren code 'blockchain' on the beach.

Point us to where this US ETF is then. I'm sure we'd love to hear about it.

Even if this Bermudan development is an ETF no one's going to give a shit even though plenty of money is swilling around there. I'm not sure even a pan European one would stir people all that much. For some reason they want their American daddy to pat Bitcoin on the head by granting one.

Was there a great deal of resistance to it or was it an acceptable development? If they tried that in the UK people would be ripping their panties off and strangling each other.

France has top up health insurance. A friend of my father's moved there from Scotland, didn't bother sorting that out, had a huge car crash and was landed with a medical bill for many thousands of Euros.

I thought the shitposting would switch from shitting to make piddly amounts to shitting to rank up to make piddly amounts. It feels a little like that's the case but perhaps more people have given up. There'll always be enough who plug mindlessly along forever at it not understanding why they're not progressing.

Where's that? I haven't heard of countries having a full on downgrade.

Much of Europe has health insurance, either compulsory or top up. In Ireland you pay 50 Euros to see the doctor and pay a daily cost for a hospital stay. The idea of everywhere in Europe being free at point of contact isn't really true, but it still beats the pants off the US.

I think they paid back a dribble and then lost interest and relaunched. There was a thread on here somewhere reporting about payouts drying up and then like magic gate.io popped up. I may be wrong.

It probably did. Since security is such a potential minefield you're likely to settle on the most public and proven storage option. I'd rather go with that than the CEO's secretary's 15yr old nephew who got the job cos he hacked his school's fridge a while back.

It'll be interesting to see whether they take that angle. I presume they did it to better serve their existing customers but its existence might open up plenty of options to drag in conventional customers. My guess is making the rest of the world know about them is probably going to be too expensive an uphill battle.