you never "have to" expose your private keys online, ever. everything can be done 100% offline.

- you create the private keys offline using any wallet or even the famous bitaddress
- you print it offline and keep it on paper.
- you sign the transaction (by the time you wanted to spend) offline too.

this way, your private keys are never "exposed". they remain 100% offline at all times. and creating an unsigned transaction online and transferring it to your offline system to sign with the keys is not at hard hard or complicated.

it is actually easily doable.
and the technology is right there, someone just needs to start building some platform for it and then make it as user friendly as possible so that people can start using it with ease.
for example you can simply implement OpenBazaar and bitcoin to this completely decentralized and peer to peer while using bitcoin payments. but it is not an easy as just opening up a page like steamstore and selling your stuff there. so you will have a big competition ahead.

it sounds interesting but it is far from practical. it is too limited. you see a real cryptocurrency should be easily used everywhere, they might as well have given everyone coupons on a paper because both of them are going to do the same and a piece of paper is much easier to use than a cryptocurrency. and everyone can use it too.
in other words they have just complicated things for no reason!

when a shop or franchise starts accepting bitcoin, it is bitcoin, you can use it everywhere, you can get your change back in the same way. it is not limited only to that shop. so the hardness of using it is justifiable at least.

not to mention that with your own internal altcoin, you will have to explain to every single customer how it is going to work!

most of these don't really have much effect on the future of a coin. some of them like the supply and how it is distributed can affect things but some others like market capitalization have no effect on anything whatsoever.


- market capitalization:
is a useless thing here for cryptocurrencies. it is a term used for stocks of a company and it is used for them because it has a meaning. here it is a 100% abstract number without meaning. and you shouldn't even be using it to compare
- 24h Volume
shows how much market is interested in that coin in that day only.
- volume in general
it can show how much market is interested in a coin in a longer period. and if it is always high that is a good coin for trading and if it was high only a couple of days and dropped to nearly nothing that shows it is a pump and dump.
- Circulating Supply
the supply that was mined, distributed,...
- Max Supply
the maximum allowed supply, cap, final amount when mining is over,...
- premine
what they have created out of thin air. it is considered a negative aspect

if it were a "pump and dump" then price would have been back to $700 already!

i don't know when people are going to realize that not all rises are pumps and not all rises mean a bubble. some of you have heard some words somewhere but never bothered to simply google the meaning of those words.
here let me help you out a little: www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pumpanddump.asp
and one of the main features of it is the fake rise which never lasts because the rise was based on false, misleading or greatly exaggerated statements. just like what we see on altcoin market every day. prices go up then they start their downward spiral. do you see a downward spiral towards $700 here?

first of all confirmations are more of a luck thing when there is a big backlog of unconfirmed transactions and there is a wide variety of transaction fees. you can never say your transaction is going to be among the high priority ones or low priority ones. even if you are paying the highest fee. miners can always fill the blocks with their own transactions which they do quite often too.

secondly saying "my transaction" got confirmed faster than "yours" is meaningless. the information should include these:
what time the transaction was made? was in the most crowded time or when things were not so crowded
how much fee/byte the tx contained?
how much fee the site took from you?

i personally prefer a more active approach.

meaning to buy when there is a dip and sell on top or at least when you think it is near the top and correction is near to take all your capital and profit out.
after that you can do many different things. like investing all back in after the dip but this time you can buy more of that asset. or you can just invest the capital back and withdraw the profit and enjoy it.

i do this mostly because i don't like setting fixed numbers like "sell half", "sell at 30% profit", ... because most of the times things aren't similar to each other. 5% in one market sometimes is the most you can gain and 200% in another is the least you hope for.

never hope for bitcoin price to drop, specially a big drop like a 31% drop like what OP is hoping for (drop to $3000), because first of all that won't happen and you will just continue missing out on the rest of the price rise to $4500, $4800, $5000, $5300,... because you are still waiting for a huge drop to buy in.

secondly is that if a big drop like 31% happens there won't be any rise anymore for a long time, something is wrong that causing that kind of drop.

the 180 sat/B is for transactions that choose the medium fee from the options in withdrawal. i just made one myself just to check this out. it is good for those who don't care about a fast confirmation and can wait. you can also always use an accelerator if you got impatient.

the interesting thing worth mentioning is that bitsler deducts only 40,000 satoshi as fee from you but the transaction that i currently have includes 120,600 satoshi fee (3 times more than what they took from me)

what is your problem exactly?
is it the fact that your transaction was confirmed after a long time?
or is it the fact that it had 3 confirmation after a long time?

the first one can be because of low fee, high number of unconfirmed transactions, full blocks, miners finding blocks with a delay (maybe a lower hashrate issue), and also some miners finding empty blocks.

but the first one has only 1 reason, and that is miners aren't finding blocks. and that is a difficulty thing, and it is common from time to time when there is a bigger gap between the blocks that are being found so your see 3 confirmation after an hour for example instead of half an hour!

in other words the rich gets richer and the poor gets dust.
the rich such as the ethereum foundation and the dev who are holdinga total of 72 million ETH tokens which they premined.
such a good decentralization. well done.

you are a fool to think ethereum is anything like bitcoin!
bitcoin price rises because it got rid of a cancer called scaling debate. and it also rises because it has real demand. neither of these are true in ethereum.

you are even a bigger fool if you think a comment on bitcointalk can change anything about price.

i don't think we can really call "pump and dump" as "demand". if anything it is fake demand.
and there is a big difference between the two of them too.
if demand is real then the price will rise and it will remain up and it may only have a correction but it will stay up and may even continue rising.
but a fake demand that is coming from a pump will never last. it goes up and then it will fall down. in case of bigger altcoins with a huge pump and a lot of "wishful" people, it takes a long time but you can clearly see the downward trend after their pumps.

we still have SegWit2x to look forward to.
i said this before in this topic too, it can go both ways. it may even cause a panic sell and slow down all the build up to the big rally or it can even be the fuel to the rally and make it even bigger.
it all will depend on how it goes. if it gains a very large miner support but not much community support it can harm bitcoin.

bitcoin cash has implemented a "replay protection" which has been working properly and that means if you spend the same outputs on one chain it can not be spent on the other.

you can safely transfer your bitcoin to another bitcoin wallet and then afterwards import the same private key in a bitcoin cash wallet and spend the coins you have there too.

read this topic for more information: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2059111.0

effects of regulation is no longer a guess because it has already happened on a large scale. before when bitcoin was not regulated in any country you could only guess that such as such may happen if it someday became regulated. but ever since Japan regulated bitcoin we have a real life example.
here are the results:
1. huge adoption by investors
2. huge adoption by different merchants
3. with removal of taxes the adoption by merchants grew even more
4. finally the price went up from $1000 to $4000 (although most of it was because of scaling and SegWit but Japan was very effective also).

right now it is still too small and way too manipulated. there are a lot of things going on, mostly in the last week to interest miners and bring in hashrate so they pumped it as hard as they could. it even went up near $1000 but as you can see it can not be held for long and it gets dumped.

i can't believe nobody has given you the links yet
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2040221.0

it is very hard to say.
it really isn't doing anything special. nobody supports or wants it. there are no merchants nor services using it. the chain is too unstable with all the ups and downs in difficulty and hashrate and miner shenanigans,...
but with all that said, there is a deep pocket behind it trying to take over bitcoin so it will keep it alive for some time at least.

mining altcoins is usually dependent on what you mine. most people invest in GPUs and mine GPU mining coins. and the most famous one of these use to be ethereum and because of its difficulty, fast blocks, huge block reward and also the pumping price, mining it became very profitable. so it was good to buy equipment so far for mining.

but the difficulty is higher, the pump stopped, and to top it all, they are killing the PoW and with it mining.

in other words if you can find another coin that is pumping with a lot of noise, or has a more solid price and can easily be mined then invest. otherwise i say investing in mining at this point is not worth it.

bitpay only accepts bitcoin and i don't think they plan on doing it for any other altcoins. it is a good service to use.
for altcoins you need to run their client yourself, generate new addresses for each user and ask for payment, and in short it will take up a lot of resources. so only do it if your site is big enough.

also i have 1 more idea which i don't know how you should do it but it is worth mentioning:
use ShapeShift!
they have an API and you may be able to implement it in your website. you set an amount in USD, convert it to BTC and use ShapeShift to accept an altcoin and they convert it to BTC (or anything else you want) and give it to you.

you ARE paying low transaction fees already.
next time you pay 0.0004 or 0.0002 or whatever amount as fee from your account, check out your transaction ID in a block explorer and see how much fee it contains. you'd be surprised by how low a fee "you" paid and how big a fee "your transaction" is paying. and that goes out of bitsler's pocket.

@shield132 we will surely see it again if the mempool is smaller again. which may soon happen as the bitcoin cash hashrate drama has already ended.

you know there is this super secret website on the internet that nobody knows about and it can magically answer a lot of questions.
but i will introduce it to you only. don't tell anyone
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+a+bitcoin+full+node