I'm will not say that diversifying your investments is a bad decision, because it's not, but you can't avoid the comparison between bitcoin and gold. The fact is that bitcoin mimics gold very well, and in fact presents a lot of advantages over that precious metal. It's much more secure, because bitcoin can't be counterfeit. If you receive a bitcoin in your account you know it's real, either you are an expert or not. If you receive gold and you don't know anything about it, you should actually go to a specialist, because it might be fake.

Also, you know the real supply of bitcoin, and you don't really know the total supply of gold. You can also easily spent or store bitcoin, and you can't actually do that with gold, since you don't take gold bars to a store and try to spend them. I know you can't really spent bitcoin very well right now, but it will get there eventually, and you just can't do that with gold, and never will because it's not practical.

The list goes one, and right now, the only thing gold has in it's favor, is that it already well regulated, and people actually trust it, as for bitcoin, there is still a lot of speculation around it, and we can't say for sure that it will achieve all of it's goals, or any at all.

Gold also has many other use cases, and is not just linked to financial markets, but although bitcoin can only be tied to financial use cases, it will be quite good at that, so I can't say that's a disadvantage for bitcoin.

You have plenty of exchanges that do not ask for ID verification, and some of the most "trusted" ones, if you can actually really trust an exchange, have already been pointed out by some users. The problem in my opinion, is that as regulation of crypto takes place, I'm pretty sure all exchanges running with a license will have to comply with KYC regulations. That's the norm in financial services to somewhat help prevent, or at least make money laundry more difficult. So these exchanges will probably ask for ID in the future or close doors in my opinion, so you should still be careful with them.

Well I don't think this is just a correction. Decreases of 20 to 30% in the market could be seen as a correction, because we all know how volatile crypto is, but we are seeing dips close to 50%, so that is a little more than a correction. Bitcoin is taking a hit now that the futures have arrived, and although is not free falling is struggling a bit. When bitcoin struggles we see a lot of volatility in alts, because people make some profit there, and go to bitcoin again, and then make some more profit on the alts, and just keeps repeating that.

If you are a trader, then this is paradise, if you are not, then just buy whenever you can and wait for the next boom that will eventually happen because crypto is here to stay. Also since bitcoin dominance is declining, buying alts is a good option, because a lot of money is going there. Of course that people use alts mostly for pump and dump, so I would only hold alts that are solid, and would sell the others as soon as they get a pump. Put that money into bitcoin, and repeat.

What kind of service are you running? If it involves small payments, then even if you use a service that uses segwit you will still have to deal with some decent fees because of the congestion on the bitcoin network right now. So although you could try to provide that service, and that already exists, since you had steam, microsoft and other merchants enabling bitcoin payments, you shouldn't only depend on that payment method, because bitcoin right now, can't really handle well small transactions because they end up being to costly. You should try offering that service with other coins as well, like litecoin or example, and when BTC solves it's scalability problems, then you can turn to bitcoin again.

Bitcoin is not the best option is you really want an anonymous form of payment. If that is essential to you I would go to Monero right now. Bitcoin will become more anonymous once the lightning network and atomic transactions get implemented, but even now, using an address with segwit also helps, since segwit enables the use of tumblebit, that is a payment hub that allows off-chain transactions to be made.

I don't think neteller is an option. I used their service as well, and they receive in bitcoin, after charging you a 1% fee, but you can only transfer it for other users and merchants or make bank withdrawals, but you can't use it on your cards (both the virtual and the plastic one). At least that's the warning they have on their site, so I never tried to spent my money with those cards, after topping in my account with bitcoin.

There are plenty of credit cards that use bitcoin, xapo is one of them and there are plenty more if you google it. Never used their service though, but it should solve your problem.

Worst case scenario you just withdraw to your bank using an exchange, and then you can deposit on your PayPal account. It takes more time, but it will work.

I would say the normal methods would work, like running a signature campaign in this forum. I see a lot of twitter and facebook campaigns going on recently, so that might be an option as well. Having a thread in the gambling section of this forum is of course mandatory in my opinion, not just for promotion but for customer support as well.

All these things are quite normal, and quite essential for advertisement, but I would also recommend a competition. It's always hard to create competitions for these type of games, usually players that wager more money win, but if you could create some sort of give away in the games and rounds section of this forum. Maybe players with most wins would get an extra prize, and you could also have a bad beat jackpot, where players that lose more get that jackpot or a part of it.

I don't think having at least 10 posts will be a problem, so I'm glad you will consider a partial payment.
If I get it is great, if I don't there is no problem. Thank you for your reply.

I'm quite curious about this, since I open an account before they stop accepting new users, and I was considering putting some coins there, so I could start investing in other alts, because they have a huge selection of them. I never heard of withdrawal issues, what are you guys talking about? I know no centralized exchanges are safe, but I thought bittrex was among the "good ones" right now.

It doesn't make any direct profit from it's tokens, but since being a platform for investments is their main utility right now, I would say ethereum has a lot to gain on it's tokens success. As ICOs get more popular, and if good companies end up emerging from ether platform, more people will buy into ether, in order to be able to invest in these ICOs, so it's price will be rising. Also, as soon as ether moves to being proof of stake, it will be even more common for investors to hold to Ether, since they will be making profit from holding their investments funds, and then could be having profit from investing in ICOs, so if they make good decisions they will always have some profit, and this will be a great incentive to ether and use it as an investment platform.

You are correct about this, but let's not forget that bitcoin is still evolving. I remember when bitcoin passed $1000, and then it crashed and everyone though it would never get to $1k again. It stayed there during a lot of time but it fought it's way through it. It passed the bcash fork, it passed the china fud, it passed the segwit2x threat, and now faced a bit of Korea fud. We need the lightning network for sure, but I'm very confidant it will happen during this year (given a few recent news that some transactions were already made on the main network), and everyone that stays on bitcoin will be hugely rewarded by their patience with this coin.

For me, bitcoin can even go to $8k, I don't really care. It still has the biggest growing potencial of all coins, and the best dev team, so even if it fall behind other coins, it will then recover and stay miles away from them.

I would say those are very risky coins to be holding. I like cardano and stellar, and I think they can still go up but I'm not so sure about ripple. That looks like a bubble to me, and it could dump at any time. I'm not very familiar with tron, so I wont say anything about it. It still looks very bullish and if I already had a long position I would keep it running with stop losses, since I was only playing with my profit.

You are right about ether, but it's proving to be very resilient. Even with the latest fud about Korean markets, ether stayed quite solid, so I would say it's a good coin to invest. Maybe it wont give you fast profits, although it could easily still move to $1800, but even if it doesn't, it looks like a "safer" investment compared to other coins.

Hi aTriz, thanks for accepting me. I have a question regarding this week. Since I got enrolled in this campaign at the end of this first round, will my posts count towards the second week, or will I get a partial payment for the first week?

If the posts aren't counted at all it's ok as well, I just hope that this week will not count for the "Users not posting a minimum of 30 posts a week for 2 weeks be removed" rule.

Hi aTriz, I've been in the Bountie Signature Campaign and I hope I can join another campaign managed by you.

Bitcoin Talk Name: Bolt Brownie
Bitcoin Talk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=546142
Rank: Sr. Member
Post Count (including this post): 498
BTC Address: (1EEhtw3mtusU6uKpQyxVifMHxbsFWysE86)
ETH Address: 0x30A49Cd287bE973A0E37C1d163929A351CA98F66

Why do you say that this correction is looking to big? I think it's perfectly acceptable that the bitcoin price went up the way it did, since it was getting major awareness, and now that the awareness factor has passed away, bitcoin will need development improvements to rise again, or real changes regarding regulation or finance markets integration. Until then, it's perfectly normal that people are not buying anymore, and those that don't really understand the coin and it's potencial will probably sell it now for profit, or maybe in a loss for a lot of cases. Only those that know what are the future plans for bitcoin (like ETFs and lightning network that will allow global adoption and use) will hold the coin. Those that only see it's price, are selling right now, only to see that they bought at a temporary top, and sold at the very bottom and lost money.

It already had an effect on the market since most people use coinmarketcap as reference for prices, and since there was no clear sign that the influence form Korean exchanges prices was being removed, people just saw a huge drop in price of a lot of coins, and start panic selling. Of course that is now solved, and things are getting back to normal, but I hope things will be done differently in the future. I usually go to the markets detail, to search for arbitrage opportunities, so I actually saw that small note that exchanges like bithumb were no longer taken into consideration, but things should have been made more visible in my opinion.

I'm also very bullish on ethereum, but I don't think ripple will go that far. Ripple is just a payment system, and it forgets the main purpose of crypto, that is to allow for people to have no need for banks. It's not just a system to make transactions faster and cheaper, it's supposed to be a way to financial freedom. I think ripple is a bubble, and it will collapse as soon as decentralized crypto solves it's scalability problems, and gets ready for real use.

I found your suggestion of building a community swimming pool funny. Nothing wrong in it, but it just looks like a random idea. I got into bitcoin "late", so I don't have a lot of money because of it, so I don't really have that much to spare. I'm also honest, I did came for bitcoin for the profit, but then I start understanding how good this could be. I do use part of it for trading because I enjoy it (just like playing poker, or any other sort of game that involved some skill and investments). But I agree with you, people that got lucky and got a huge amount of money from BTC could definitely help their community a bit, or at least family, depending on how much they have made. A lot of people that win large amounts of money just start spending it with stupid things like big cars and a lot of other things they really don't need. I guess money makes most people greedy.

That is probably the best option for most people, since trading is incredibly hard. I tried it a few times, and I still try it from time to time, but on the majority of the occasions I end up closing my trade with a loss, only to find out hours later that what I was trying to do would work, if I had waited a little longer. I would definitely had more profit if I just had hold the coins. The problem is that I see it as a game and I actually enjoy it, so I will probably keep trying.

I don't trade much, but I would say bittrex is better that those two (although poloniex seems fine to). It has more altcoins available, and normally more liquidity. Just go to coinmarketcap and see it for yourself. If you want to trade crypto vs fiat, then I would go for coinbase/gdax, since you can trade there with no fees, or to bitsamp that also looks good to me.