there is a huge difference between these two.
the freebitco.in investment is a guaranteed profit no matter what happens. it is (as they claim) mining reward they share with you and their signed message from the address receiving the mining rewards confirms that also. in this case there is no chance of not getting paid.

in case of investing in a gambling site, there is always a chance that not only you don't get paid but also you lose money. it is not a common thing, specially with crypto-games, I have seen their good performance, but the chance is still there.


ok, I'll have that in mind too.

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to everyone else. thanks for the additional info, I already knew a couple of them and will check other suggestions too. for now I plan on focusing on getting some referrals in my freebitco.in account and try the investment with a larger amount. I believe it can be a good side/passive income.

it is not really a serious problem though. people think of bitcoin as something weird or maybe out of ordinary but in fact bitcoin is just like anything else. and the price and how much you buy,... is also like anything else.

next time you see someone say I can not afford 1 whole bitcoin ask them about when they invest in gold, do they buy 1 whole gold bar (like buying 10 kg of gold!) or are they buying small amounts. that is why the smaller scales exist anyways. you buy 1 ounce of gold, 1 gram, or something like that not 1 Ton!

whenever there is a downtime like the past month and price takes a huge dive because of a popular FUD, we always have a big rise afterwards. you can look at the charts to see this pattern clearly after each big dip.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1784749.0;all

although I am not denying the fact that Bitcoin Gold airdrop/fork must have been effective in this rise but I do believe that the dip-effect is the dominant one here.

also don't forget that most people don't even know about BTG fork yet. when you say upcoming fork they think it is the 2x fork. the BTG website is not even ready yet! how can people even know about it

LOL, bitcoin has never been stoppable to begin with. at least not that easily and certainly not by a couple of countries who do weird stuff like banning exchanges!

and price has nothing to do with that either. price is rising due to increasing adoption and increasing demand for bitcoin. sometimes this process is slowed down due to some issues like FUD, some uncertainty, some fear like the fork fear, and lots of different things but the process of rising is always there and present.

and stop getting excited when price rises. learn to get excited when price falls. if you reach that level it means you understood the potential of bitcoin. price rise is a sad day and price fall is the happiest day. because when it falls you can buy more but when it rises you can not afford to buy the same amount as you could in a dip

if you bought bitcoin just to make a quick profit then sure, sell and get out now. you have already gotten the "quick" profit anyways.
but if you are not just looking for that quick small profit then obviously you should hold for long term. these short term rises and drops are not for those who are not traders. and I don't think you are a trader or plan on starting to trade so selling now is not really a good option if you ask me.

many more cryptocurrencies are increasing in numbers not in quality. they are called altcoins and as you can see they are all getting dumped. and most of them have zero quality and are pure pump and dumps.

every technology is replaced by a new one after some years. but bitcoin is still new and it is the new technology that replaced other old ones. it will take years for something newer and better come along. probably not in our lifetime either.

no. bitcoin still is young and not reached the mass adoption stage. it is still rising and will continue to rise for a very long time.
don't forget supply is limited but the demand is increasing.

of course there is! like anything else.

not really. I think you are just caught up in the big bull pump market of this year which lasted a couple of months. it was a rare thing which rarely happens on that scale. in general altcoin market looks like this with everything getting dumped big time and the pumps are only a handful of different coins every day and the pumps are shorter than dumps.

it has always been like this. for now if you look around you can still find potential for profit among altcoins and every day a new coin is getting pumped. find those and make profit.

as for bitcoin, it is still the king and THE long term investment.

you can never be sure. what you can be sure is that nobody should care what the countries do. bitcoin is DECENTRALIZED! and that means something...


you are asking the wrong question. you should be asking what China and Russia really said.
China said they are banning ICOs and they also closed down a couple of exchanges that did not have any license and were laundering money.
Russia said ICOs are causing a lot of financial damage, they also said cryptocurrencies are dangerous, they also said cryptocurrencies are the future and should be legalized. they have not done anything about any of it yet though. they also closed some exchanges.

bitcoin is money, and like any other currency you can use it to buy (trade) any object that you can think of as long as you can find someone else that is willing to accept it.

think of it like going to another country like Japan and having USD in your pocket and wanting to buy launch. if the restaurant you go to in Japan accepts USD you can buy food there. if not you have to convert your USD to JPY and buy food with that.

I was always skeptical about freebitco.in investment and all the changes they have made, but it seems like they are doing fine after all this time. the site is turned into a proper gambling site instead of just being a faucet.

I tried their investment (4.08% annual profit) by making a small deposit and by following the funds I see their main wallet currently contains 508BTC that is $2.4 million!
https://blockchain.info/address/1CE5T4P6WmFUQvQFwvedgTEc5Z7BSVJLVN

does anyone have any feedback on their services?

for example I didn't find any Contacts/support/ticket section on the site. what do you do if you have an issue?

if you read what the Russian officials say about bitcoin (all of them throughout history so far), you can see their concerns are always "taxation". their statements are always like this:
"... it is hard and sometimes impossible to get taxes on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. and yeah there is the fact that rarely they are used for illegal stuff but mostly taxes....".

about 7 months ago, maybe less, they said because bitcoin is slow and the blockchain is public and everyone can see the transactions we are working with firms to trace transactions and solve the "taxation" issue and legalize it. you can fin this news with the title including "Russia U-turn" keyword!

not all of them rise, most of them start dropping from day one and continue going down and when you think they are cheap they keep going lower some more. there will obviously be some pumps at some point in their lifespan but that is another discussion.

the issue with these types of fork that do an airdrop kind of giveaway, is that most people sell what they get as soon as they get it. how much do you think the market is going to resist such a huge sell pressure?

since altcoins are going down, I think it is pretty obvious that you should have sold your coins and kept out of the altcoin market until the prices reach the bottom and start showing any signs of recovery before you re-enter the market.

also this is not because of the upcoming fork(s) though. it is a general suggestion that you always sell before the altcoin dumps start. right now the altcoin dump is intensified only because of bitcoin price rising. if there were no rise in bitcoin price, the dumps in altcoins still would have happened but they may have been smaller then.

this is not new.

it has been happening from first year of bitcoin release. that is what happens when your project is open source and also popular. also something like bitcoin that also has value leads to so many clones like these.
everyone wants to get some money by just using the "bitcoin" name. they make their money too. with premining, flash mining the first blocks, or things like that and make a lot of money. in the end none of them exist after some time because they don't do anything that matters to keep them alive.

they are never "valuable" though you can make some profit if you are a trader or a miner. it is very risky though.

there won't be any "collapse" of the bitcoin price.

there will surely be some drop in the near future as we get closer to the SegWit2x fork and it won't matter how it is going to happen, even if it doesn't fork it doesn't matter. in reality the news alone can cause a drop. it won't be a collapse and it won't be a huge one either because we already had a fork drop and also we recently had another drop due to China (reason doesn't matter the drop happened anyways). market won't be ready for any drop for some time.

all the speculation that is talking with certainty about a big drop and give numbers as targets are a 100% bullshit and should be ignored. the fact is, we don't know yet.

you only need to hold the "key". the key is called the private key. if you have it, you can claim this fork coins and all the future fork coins that are similar.

tell us which wallet you use so we can tell you if you have access to the private keys or not.
if you are using bitcoin wallets like Bitcoin Core, Armory, Electrum, Multibit, Blockchain.info,... you have the private keys
if you are using services like Coinbase, Xapo, exchanges,... as you wallet then you do not have the private keys and you will only receive the forked coins IF these services decide to be generous and give them to you.

exchanges usually announce their support very late. as late as they can. it is not easy to decide whether to add a forked coin or not. there are a lot of things to consider. and for BTG fork there is nearly 15 more days left and it may not even have replay protection! or even enough volume for exchanges to bother adding it.
for SegWit2x fork there is nearly 40 days left (more than a month) and it is too soon to say anything.

with that said Coinbase and Bitfinex have already released their stance about 2x fork though. you can find it on their respective blogs.

bittrex:
better interface (nice charts and faster to load), better support (no the best though), decent API (not the best), trustable, has high liquidity, high fees (0.25%) and their bitcoin withdrawal fees are also high at 0.001BTC

poloniex
I don't like their interface and it seems slow, bad support, very good API, trustable, has high liquidity, low fees (0.2% and less if you are trading a lot). and their bitcoin withdrawal fees are low.

yobit
worst interface which is slow too, horrible support! (you don't even get any answers sometimes, not trusted at all (they run a shady business and already have multiple scam accusations open against them), low liquidity, medium fees (0.2%) bitcoin withdrawal fees are high too 0.0015BTC
their deposit and withdrawals are mostly dead too, you can only do it for a handful of altcoins despite them having hundreds of them listed.

there has been a lot better days for bitcoin though. I don't see anything special about these days to be honest. the greatest this year (in my opinion) was when Japan announced bitcoin as a legal way of payment. then the other great day was when again Japan removed taxes from bitcoin payments a couple of months after the first news.

as for price (since this is speculation board) the great day was when price went down to $2970 after the ATH and helped so many people get on board (because they were left behind) and so many others to buy more (because they had more cash they wanted to dump).

oh and let me share this topic here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790863.0
it is only 2 more months before I once again update the "1 in a million" topic. and it is already >$40000 higher than 4 months ago!

this is why I keep telling people it is risky to leave your coins on exchanges just to claim your "fork coins reward". it may be so much more profitable but at the same time a huge risk. you can see those who had their coins on bittrex (me included) could dump on top when price was high. I even started trading the swings and make some more profit from them. but others on other places (or those poor people who had ETH and didn't get ETC because of no replay protection) missed the chance.