Definitely. Installing untrusted alt coin wallets not only potentially compromise your Bitcoin wallet, they potentially compromise your whole operating system -- including every online account you are using on the same PC.

You could try running alt coin wallets in a virtual machine though. Some people argue that even this can put the host system at risk, however those kind of attacks are fairly advanced and rather unlikely.

You'll never find any traces because none are left

These browser-based mining scripts are written in JavaScript, which means they are just running out of the box in your browser, without any need to install anything. It also means they are only running as long as you are on the website in question.

2X was never accepted by Core and was not sneaked into the codebase either.

It simply is a fork of the original Bitcoin code, maintained by a different development team, backed by various members of the industry and parts of the community. It came to life due to some people persisting on (1) on-chain scaling as being the preferred solution on the one hand and (2) adding a short-term scalability fix on top of SegWit on the other.




SegWit blocks can theoretically reach close to 4MB:

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/understanding-segwit-block-size-fd901b87c9d4

I'm not sure whether we need yet another faucet, but posting links to giveaways and freebies as mentioned by Blake_Last sounds like a good idea. Assuming your site takes off, companies may later on approach you directly (and pay) to promote their products via your site, for example if they have promotional codes to offer. Even better if these companies offer discount for paying with crypto.

Gold and Bitcoin are similar in that they are both (1) attributed value by social convention, (2) can serve as store of value and (3) can be used as a currency. Apart from other precious metals there have been very few commodities for which all three of these apply. While gold, due to its physical properties, has industrial uses as well, those don't even closely account for its price.

In the end both Gold and Bitcoin are bought, used and have value for mostly the same reasons, which is why a comparison is quite apt in my opinion. Heck, most Gold is traded digitally anyway, just with much less transparency.

Any solution that adjusts dynamically based on the amount of transactions is likely to be exploited, as spam transactions are easily created. Dynamically adjusting block times would require dynamically adjusting network difficulty, which even in a relatively simple use case such as BCH's EDA already prove to lead to problematic side effects. Additionally you'd need to find a new metric on how to define difficulty periods based on hashrate and to dynamically adjust block rewards, as otherwise you'd unwillingly increase Bitcoin's issuance rate.

Either way, as it would require some deep changes in the current consensus it would likely require a hardfork.

The approach as you describe it sounds kinda familiar to me, but I don't think Core ever considered it.

While technically true, keep in mind that whoever eventually operates your device, will have to adhere to certain rules and regulations themselves. And those will need to be reflected in your hardware and software, otherwise it's going to be hard to find operators. Potential buyers need to have reassurance that whatever product you are offering won't bring them into legal trouble. Otherwise they'll go buy somewhere else. It follows that although these rules and regulations arguably don't affect you as a hardware / software provider directly, it will still affect your business indirectly through your customers.

I second that.

While it may be incredibly tempting to add even more profit on top of what Bitcoin could potentially yield, more often than not you're going to lose money. There are a lot of "investment" options out there, but most of those are just trying to extract money from their "investors" in one way or another.

Have you tried echoing the callback_log URL and visiting the link with your browser directly?


Maybe the response by blockchain's server is indeed empty and the problem lies somewhere else.

Maybe an old 2FA key backup? Some sites use pretty long 2FA keys.



Armory wallet root keys are 18 x 4 characters, lowercase, no numbers, which doesn't quite fit OP's description.

Do you get an output if you try accessing other URLs? For example:



Are you running the script on a local server? If yes, maybe it's your firewall.

Is allow_url_fopen enabled in your php.ini file? See here: http://php.net/manual/en/filesystem.configuration.php

What's the output when directly echoing the get_file_contents result without trying to parse it through json_decode?

Meaning:

Because BTG's impact on the BTC price was heavily exaggerated and outside of Bitcointalk very few people even cared about the BTG fork. Arguably not even on Bitcointalk many people did.



Sorry to say, but price assumptions are not right until they actually occur. Take this as a lesson that markets, especially BTC, are not as easily to predict as one may assume

Yet again, who knows? BTC may fail to break USD 6000,- and drop down to USD 5000,- after all. I wouldn't dare bet on it though.

Which bubble?

One may argue that BTC is overvalued right now. However since BTC was heavily undervalued the last few years, I think it's mainly the market going beyond the initial upward correction. We may see the market retracting a bit, but I don't think we're at price levels that would lead to a bubble-burst -- ie. a drop of larger than 50%.

If we are in a bubble, I'm fairly positive that we're still in one of the early stages of this bubble cycle.

Here is a good overview on technical analysis:

http://www.investopedia.com/university/technical/

It won't teach you how to trade, but it should introduce you to some basic concepts and terminology that will help with following trading conversations.

Well, in this case I will have to simply forward you to this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1629118.0

In the end the most effective way to get your hands on BTC is either by buying some BTC or by offering services / goods that people are willing to pay for.

Hard to say. I wouldn't be surprised if BTC were to drop as low as USD 3000,- some time in the next few weeks or months, but it's also not something I would bet on.

I guess it mostly boils down to your own risk aversion and financial situation.

What would be worse for you? Buying in now and potentially losing your investment or not buying in and potentially missing out on what could be financial revolution of the century?



Dollar-cost-averaging is also a viable option to reduce volatility risk.

I'm not sure I understand your question. What do you want to do? Get paid online? Use Bitcoin to buy stuff? Use Bitcoin to store money? Use Bitcoin as an investment?

There are a lot of use cases for Bitcoin, some for which Bitcoin more viable than others. You don't have to be rich for any of those, however.

I think we may be at the verge to a new bubble, but I honestly doubt we're already in one. While I didn't expect BTC to grow this large in such a stable manner this year, it still doesn't feel quite "bubbly" for lack of a better word.

But even if we're in a bubble right now... I'm fairly positive that BTC will be able to recover again sooner or later. With each "death" the chance of BTC utterly failing got smaller and every "attack" only made it stronger. I have no reason to believe that this will change any time soon.



You need to take timeframes into account. The move from USD 200,- to USD 1100,- took place within a single month. The move from USD 1000,- to USD 6000,- took close to a year. That's not quite as drastic.

"Bitcoin is a technology that allows you to globally send money on the internet without the needs for banks or other middle-men."

Or is that too shallow a description?