No one should see this as a bad thing.  It would be extremely suspicious if they didn't do this and I would question what they were doing with their users' money behind the scenes, since a lot of people using Xapo will be sending and receiving small transactions with large actual sizes and Xapo would be running at a significant loss.

Explain in reasonable terms why Litecoin would be worse as a cryptographic wealth reserve.

You can't, because it's the exact same thing except it's a halving behind and the coins are still being introduced more quickly relative to the current supply.

There's no serious reason why a currency can't be a store of value as well.  Most fiat holders regard their fiat to be a store of value even though it isn't.

Who's gonna do the honours of a scam accusation against this guy?  I know he's probably leaving forever now, but might as well start one / leave him negative feedback.  Since it seems he still uses the same screen name, it might be nice to have another search result for the next forums he chooses.

No it isn't.  Fees of 120 satoshi/byte can leave the transaction unconfirmed for several days in most or at least many cases.  Note that on the site it says 5 blocks to infinity and half the transactions sent with those fees are not confirmed.  A lot of people send fees of that size, but a large portion of that is ignorant Blockchain wallet users and other newbies who didn't choose a wallet with decent fee estimation.

Sure, a transaction doesn't really need to confirm within the next block so you don't actually have to pay fees quite that high, but even 220-240 satoshi/byte fees often take an hour or so.  Litecoin transactions are much cheaper because the blocks aren't all full.

It's a spam attack, but they're definitely capable of keeping it going for long enough.

Yeah, pretty normal kind of DDoS which results in Poloniex sending transactions that didn't actually reach the recipient, the site still being up, trades going through for certain people who none of us know and open trades for the coins that didn't get pumped recently.

There's zero chance of that.  The SEC has made their choice and outlined their reasons for it (fraud protection, "penny stock", etc).

I hope no one else has got their hopes up about that, because if they did it would cause at least a slight dip when it's rejected again.

True, but the particular way that it's volatile may scare a lot of weak hands and institutional investors who are used to more stable growth.  The volatility may only be 2-3% (it's risen since the recent rallies from about 1.5%), but the difference is that during the day it could randomly drop $150 and then fly back up again.

The fundamentals are pretty off the rails as well and nothing is ever really predictable (Poloniex, ETFs, scaling etc).

Bitcoin volatility is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy - people get scared of the volatility which makes them panic sell/buy, making it more volatile.

Kwukduck must be quaking in his boots.  I'm thinking the price is headed for another rally and ATH. 

Looks possible that it could just barely top $2,000 next week, and hover from $1900-2000 for a while.

Transactions are extremely simple for miners to process and they can be processed nearly instantly.  The problem is that improvements in miner technology along with dramatically increased revenue from the rising price mean that there dramatically more miners than are actually needed to secure the network.  Furthermore, to scale the network miners have to come to a consensus on what to do, and by not scaling the network miners earn the transaction fees on top of the existing block reward, meaning that there are more and more miners added which seldom actually want to scale, and if they do it's only out of the desperate prospect that Bitcoin might become less popular.

Therefore the network will scale once everyone rushes to do everything at the same time with no actual consensus, or once BITMAIN and other monopolies give up on BU to shift to SegWit.

Eventually, I think it does have to happen.  Naturally, if people ran away from Bitcoin to alts (not actually happening yet) a scaling solution would be implemented.

Well that's always going to be a slight threat to decentralised digital currencies - certain countries are going to prevent this globalisation by starting their own.

With the amount of work that states are able to put into a currency, there can be a currency with a relatively similar system to Bitcoin except with addresses directly representing an individual and certain parts of the coin being controlled mainly by the governments.  It can bring the same convenience to the masses without being properly decentralised.

The network isn't necessarily slow, just congested.

It's like a road with thousands of cars of traffic which are barely moving, but if you pay a bit more you can hire a helicopter and take the fast track.  Basically, there's too many transactions but higher fees give you the priority and then your transaction will be fast.

You can use the recommended fees and you'll end up with fast confirmations.  Anything over 150 satoshi/byte or so will most likely be confirmed within a day anyway.

Even in the unlikely scenario that Bitcoin didn't scale and it ended up being a digital asset, this wouldn't necessarily be against Satoshi's vision.  Bitcoin as a digital asset would just show that it was an attempt to produce a decentralised digital currency which had many extremely good ideas for other coins to improve on until there was a very good currency (which hasn't happened yet).  Satoshi's vision was for a peer-to-peer cash system and altcoins take inspiration from Bitcoin to improve on it, just like Litecoin has.

Not true.  Often they can make profit in a downtrend as long as the downtrend is reasonably stable, as it is in coins like Litecoin.  Generally these bots are day traders and they make profit from minor fluctuations instead of the overall trend of the market.

Even in a significant uptrend there are always small corrections where the bot can buy.

Obviously no bot can make trades with 100% accuracy, but neither can any human.  As long as the human controlling the bot is a competent trader themselves, the bot can act as a good accomplice and help to make the minor trades based on the typical amount of fluctuation for a certain coin.

As long as traders don't view it as a get-rich-quick scheme, trading bots are reasonably effective.

It really doesn't matter where people bought their coins from.  Frankly, it's okay for people to be paying the hackers if they don't have a decent backup or a way of getting out.  If ransomware didn't actually decrypt the files after being paid, no one would pay the ransom, so in some cases people have to.

I mean what does this article prove?  Not a lot, really.

Well Kiklo was claiming that he either wanted his negative trust ratings to be removed or "Cyber Death".

Obviously he wasn't actually willing to accept cyber death, which is why he kept spamming threads packed with bullshit about how the trust system works.

I suppose someone needed to do it for him eventually.

Full nodes are just a form of wallet which uphold all the rules of the network.  It's hard to create a properly stable full node, as Satoshi pointed out in 2010, and the original version will usually be the most secure (for now). 

Your choice of node won't change the fees you have to pay because a hard fork hasn't happened yet.  Running a BU node would just be running an alternative implementation of the same network rules, which won't have been changed until BU has actually happened (if it does).

How stupid do you think people are?  You know perfectly well that:

1.  Exchanging PayPal with cryptocurrencies is against their ToS and is therefore dangerous.
2.  You can issue chargebacks for an extremely long period after they receive the funds, so they don't own it after they receive the PayPal transactions.
3.  $3000 per week is several times higher than the median average wage (which you could scam at any time as you have no roots in the forum or reputation to preserve).

It's not realistically possible for governments to ban illegal activities being done with Bitcoin.  The reason for this is based on logic that people like you state yourselves.

Actually, it's a paradox.  If Bitcoin really is untraceable, then a government trying to ban it will fail because criminals will not be traced.  If it is traceable, then a government will have no reason to ban it.

Regardless, they can't ban a decentralised network.  They can't just force someone to stop because "someone" is thousands and thousands of participants that they don't know.

Nah, the mainstream media has made surprisingly little mention of Bitcoin in their reporting of the ransomware attacks and it doesn't matter - it's just another crime that people can commit with Bitcoin if they want to.

Bitcoin isn't even the best thing to use for these attacks - Monero and other anonymous alts would ultimately be much better choices.

If anything, the price will go up because of people buying Bitcoin to pay their ransoms  

The chances are that Poloniex isn't fully solvent.

Let's look at the signs:

-DDoS attacks that don't affect the main site, don't affect certain coins and don't make Poloniex close down all trading.
-DDoS attacks also mysteriously allow a few select individuals to trade while others can't.
-Some people's large withdrawals pending for a long time.

They're clearly trying to earn loads of money by buying coins, waiting for pumps then dumping the coins themselves while others can't.