The closed-source nature of iOS makes everything worse imo. I'd rather go for an open source OS although it comes with vulnerabilities. In fact, nothing is 100% exploit-proof in the technology area as we've seen. There's always gonna be a little room for some exploit(s) to come in.

Wow. That's all I can say - wow.. that's a lot of damn money..


It's my pleasure.

Because realistically, the idea of Bitcoin as payment method will not be that widely agreed. It's okay now that we only have a few services accepting BTC, but if it ever becomes widely used, it will become a problem for authorities.

I understand it could and probably will be modified in time according to what it needs to become a good payment currency, but it just won't work.

By volatility, I did not mean the Bitcoin price has to necessarily be stable in order to be considered a great payment option. If we ever move from fiat to crypto completely as in having the possibility to not only use satoshis (or mBTC) as prices in stores but to also literally live only on BTC (including paying for bills/taxes etc), volatility will basically be over and everyone's money will only have a higher purchasing power as time passes (thanks to halving). This is, however, very unrealistic.

Interesting replies, didn't expect this many to come up

Hmm. It looks like not as many people as I thought had learned to safely store and use cryptocurrencies the hard way. I did, I lost a little bit but I've always earned more after making mistakes. And I'm more than happy to having learned from mistakes because I'd rather lose $100 through a mistake and prevent making the same mistake in the future than lose $10k because of it.

It would be pretty interesting to hear if someone here has ever lost thousands of BTC through silly mistakes. My story of losing the Blockchain wallet password is way longer than the one I've written in OP - I tried calling out hackers and literally anything possible to try recovering my BTC but they left me hopeless. My password was so strong that even after a few weeks of running a super powerful bruteforce software on a PC 24/7 had 0 results.

It looks like I'm 1 merit away from being the required number to become a Hero of this forum! Thank you all for the sMerits!

It wants to become the universal payment currency, but it will never be. This is why I support the "digital gold" name of it. It's more of a transferable gold, but one with fixed supply.

Take it as if you were able to pay in gold coins/bars on some websites. The main problem here comes with the possibility of sending a fake gold coin and scamming the service. On the other hand, we have double spending with BTC but counter-measures can be taken. Double-spending aside, Bitcoin is much more safer for services to accept especially because it does not need a physical transfer but only a digital one.

One of the typical reasons services and companies do not accept BTC yet is volatility, and that is understandable. Unless you want to accept and hold BTC while also assuming a risk of negative price change, you'll have to rely on and trust a third party that exchanges your BTC into USD in an instant. Another issue comes with fees during network congestions and tx confirmation time. If all of these would somehow be solved, Bitcoin would be much more practical.

Fiat? Fuck it. Fiat isn't stable at all. Just because 1 USD you have today will be worth 1 USD tomorrow too doesn't mean it's stable. In fact, you can see how we lose purchasing power the more time passes.

If BTC would have been used as the national currency, you would've considered it as "stable" too. But you probably don't take into account the diversity of fiat currencies and the ratios between them changing on a daily basis.

Cryptocurrencies are decentralized, anti-inflationary.. all great & fun until we get into the intimacy subject. That's when things go dark. It's probably going to be a fun game for max 5 more years and then freedom will be just an idea, just a definition. I'll bookmark this reply with the hope of finding it again +5 years later to see if my words came true or not.

Paper money is better in terms of privacy/anonymity although it's not very transparent at all. There's no need for a public record of where I received my banknotes from and where I spend them. I can hand you $10k in paper and nobody would have to know where that came from. However, it's centralized so just fuck it. That's where fiat will never beat Bitcoin. You always know that your 1 satoshi is real, is only yours and will never be replicated by anyone ever.

I've read the replies so far and I'm pretty surprised how you guys tell me the Bitcoin fall isn't correlated to the Coronavirus outbreak at all as if they're part of two different universes.

Do you guys think that cryptocurrencies are 100% immune to all the other moves in the markets? Some of the most important stocks USA just had the biggest crash in their history and overall it's been the biggest drop since 2008, and some of you say the stock markets need to have a bigger crash to affect BTC.. Isn't a worse-than-2008 crash enough?! Trillions of dollars have already been wiped out..

It is not like stock traders panic sell in this hysteria while Bitcoin traders are having the best time of their life. My main point was that a stock market crash will provoke a BTC sell-off too and, after a while, Bitcoin will wake up and surprise us with another insane boom.

Keep in mind that Bitcoin has never been through such hysteria before..

I feel like we still live in an approximately okay present, but the future looks horrific. Any attempt of having more privacy will most likely be seen as a crime..

You know, it's funny how I am literally able to hand a complete stranger a paper with the private key to some illicit-sourced Bitcoins and get them in big trouble because of it.

We live in a God damn shit world. Transparency apparently comes with its big cost too. It was somehow forseeable they'll count this as a crime though, all fun BTC-related stuff doesn't last very long anyway.

Well, I don't think mine really counts as a paper loss. I had the alts on an exchange at the time and I was on the website just about to sell them for BTC but I said no. It was basically a missed opportunity.

Well, some of us have learned the hard way. I almost lost >0.5BTC due to a lost Blockchain wallet password, but I've recovered it many months (IIRC, it was close to an year) later.

10 years later you might come here and say you wish you would've bought more BTC back in 2020. You never know - if history repeats, you will.

I was wandering around on the forum and it looks like I ran out of threads to answer on. Therefore, I started randomly looking at some of the 2009-2010 posts on this forum and found a post about someone losing their 1.2BTC back in 2010. This made me wonder a few things I'm really curious about:
  1. How much BTC did you lose ever since you started using crypto? How did you lose it?
  2. What was the biggest BTC loss you've ever had?
  3. What do you regret the most ever since you started using cryptocurrencies?

---

Now let me answer these 3 questions.

1. I think I've lost somewhere between 0.05 and 0.1 BTC. ~0.04BTC has been lost on exchanges and wallets forcefully asking me for ID and the rest has been lost through fake casino scripts automatically withdrawing my balance to their wallets once it reached a certain amount of BTC, without leaving even a single trace.

2. If we're talking about "loss" as in BTC sent to/stolen by someone else (or sent to nobody's wallet), it's somewhere around 0.01BTC. Otherwise... read answer no. 3 and you'll find out

3. My biggest regret is that one my alts portfolio had passed 25BTC and I was so stupid and greedy to think it isn't enough. Keep in mind the portfolio value after my last investment at the time was around 1BTC, so that's a 25x profit. And yes, if you're wondering, I've lost almost everything out of that portfolio thanks to a big dump in the markets. Stupidity pops up exactly when you need it the least, or at least this is how it works in my typical scenario.

Hence, I can consider my largest loss was somewhere around 25 BTC actually because I had that much in my alts portfolio and I never sold them all for BTC, although my gut feeling told me to do it.

---

What is your story? It would be more than interesting if some OG members would answer these questions. I'm wondering how much BTC did someone who's been using crypto since 2009-2010 lost in total.

The "worth the wait" excuse is now used maliciously more often than not by the so-called "developers". If a project's idea is good enough, they can ask the community for help with the development. You can't just blindly enter a project with your funds hoping it's gonna be worth the wait because you'll only end up supporting 8 scams and 2 legit projects.

I'd rather take my time and study a project in depth than hurry and invest my money in it, even if that means I'll miss the ICO. ICOs are crap anyways - I'll always be against them.

I still have a vague memory of the year 2016 (before halving) and I can remember a significant amount of people calling a Bitcoin crash coming. Remember, 2015 was the worst year from 2013 until today. All my friends have told me to sell my BTC in 2016 but I've done the opposite.

I still do not regret my choice. Follow your path if you've started paving it & become deaf to all the news and opinions around you. If you have experience and a good instinct, you'll be more than well.

You can use different exchanges if you need to trade a coin you can't find on the exchange you usually trade on. Example: Binance does not have DigiByte, and I have personally supported DGB for a while. If I wanted to buy it, I will have to open an account on another exchange.

A decentralized trustless exchange with high volume and a good number of coins. That's all I'm asking for.

Considering I usually write long posts, it's probably more than 3 hours a day I am spending looking for good topics and writing my little walls of text. Right now I have a total of 17 days and a half, but at least the first half of my posts here are just shitposts. Hence, if I calculate how many minutes I spend on writing a post using the total time I have spent on the forum, it's ~12 minutes/post.

But at the moment it takes me somewhere from 15 to 40 minutes to write an usual reply. I'm still working on writing less words per post because I bet only 5-15% of my posts are actually read

Bitcointalk is not a job. If you're interested in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, stay here and help others. Meanwhile, I can guarantee you'll learn a lot about cryptocurrencies. If you are considered to be a good member of the forum, you will have the opportunity to join a signature campaign and be rewarded basically for the good you're doing to the forum.

YoBit is a very shady exchange. I've used it a few times and I honestly never trusted it so I've made 0 deposits on there. They've got low volume, random ICOs are randomly popping up here and there, we had the X10 and YODA scam and they also have their own forum which they advertised here on Bitcointalk, which is basically a shithole for all types of shitposters you can imagine. Their signature campaign for BTCTalk is over fortunately (been a part of it but I honestly regret it), but they left the campaign page still alive on their exchange for some reason.

In conclusion, just stay here on the forum, learn stuff while you share with us your knowledge and all will be fine. If you deserve it, there'll be a point where you'll have the opportunity to join a sig campaign.

Weaker hands don't get there are more people who don't have any fiat savings than people who do. One of the consequences is, when the need of a larger capital comes, all of those who did not save any cash will be obligated to sell their assets to get some tangible money.

That's why I don't give a damn. Today is the day I'm getting more BTC.

Ia în calcul și faptul că, în timp, vei avea nevoie de upgrade pentru a îți menține același venit sau chiar să îl îmbunătățești.

Eu n-am vrut niciodată să merg pe minat, deși e o parte frumoasă (dar cu multe bătăi de cap) și ar fi meritat să o încerc și pe asta. Dintre toate mișcările și calculele pe care le-am făcut din 2013 (când am aflat de Bitcoin) și până azi, cel mai tare lucru pe care l-aș fi putut face era să nu schimb niciodată tot ce am avut în BTC. Aș fi fost acum pe un profit imens.

Cum spui și tu.. Mineritul pentru viitor e efectiv o bătaie de cap fără rost pe care o poți evita efectiv cumpărând săptămânal sau lunar BTC. Mai departe în legătură cu mineritul eu nu mă bag, căci dacă merg mai departe de chestiile basic mă pierd.

I don't give a damn about a crypto project's website. Look at this forum - it doesn't have the most modern UI, it's not even very mobile-friendly, yet it presents a lot of interest to me and a lot of other people here.

If a project doesn't want to fall in the scam category in my eyes, then I'd want to see progress. If there's no progress, no development, it means the project is likely left in the dust. Satoshi left Bitcoin too, right? Well, after he did, an entire community from all around the world came in and started developing the coin we know and use today.

Because there are so many thousands of projects nowadays, there are only a few (probably <10%) that still stand out and present some interest and would continue to develop and make progress even if the team behind them would leave.

We don't need more BTC forks, we don't need more shitcoins and tokens that are just copycats of other coins with a different name, supply etc. We don't need ICOs either. If you have a great idea in this community, people will support you.

If there's no development, that shows how much the team truly cares about the project they've initiated. Nobody gave Satoshi $1 to start developing Bitcoin, and yet here we have it thriving as the king. Nobody gave a buck to the devs behind the first cryptos after Bitcoin, and yet most of them are still standing with so many dozens of thousands of developers making progress. ICOs and BTC copycats are all just a joke.

Safest? If Binance is what you define "safest", you're very wrong. And by the way, Binance does allow you to trade without any ID verification with certain limits. Still, it's NOT safe.

The way to go without verification is by using Bisq or by buying some BTC through an ATM, but I'd make sure I call the operator to ensure there will be no KYC imposed up to some limits. There are some people interested in taking face-to-face transactions too, and you can find some of them here on the forum (make sure you check your local board if you're not a native English speaker).

You can also buy from the Marketplace, but make sure you're going to use a trusted middleman or you might be the next scam victim.

Unless you're going P2P, there's no guaranteed way you can buy or sell without being requested ID. I've been through this before and even if a website says you can use their exchange up to X BTC/day without verification, there is a good chance you might be requested ID verification at one point.

Good luck!

You have to be greedy to win in gambling. Trust me, I've tried both playing with $100 per bet and going for automated bets starting with $0.001. The results were that in the first try my $100 was lost in half a second, while my second try ended after hours of automated bets with the same result: a $100 loss.

If you want to earn something through gambling and you think you don't need to be greedy to win, then you're lying to yourself. At one point, you're going to have to risk a larger amount to leave the casino with a positive balance. Otherwise, you'll stop right there and come the next day with more money which is actually even worse.

And one more thing: I think +90% of the gamblers play with the money they need on the short term. I haven't heard yet of people gambling the money they've saved for retirement. Investing is like a safety plan for the future, for retirement, while gambling is mostly a "hey, if I win I'll buy myself a..." kind of plan.

Any way of earning some decent amounts of money requires risks. If you can't assume that and want a risk-free income, then just get a simple grocery store job and that's it. Risk-free.