Even if they allow you to add any more hash power to your contract in order to keep your contract for a little longer, why would you do it? I mean, your old contract isn't all of a sudden going to become profitable or anything like that. They'll still provide you zero profit and probably terminate sooner or later, while you've landed yourself another contract that you're stuck with for ages.

No, you'll not get any money back. This is how their business works. They market their lifetime contracts as something profitable, while in reality, they're neither lifetime nor profitable.

Unfortunately, your contract will be terminated. That's the sad part as well. Not just hashflare that does this, but they've just been notoriously unprofitable recently. Once you put in money, you don't even know if they're mining or not. I would avoid cloud mining altogether in the future if I were you.

As others have mentioned, it's definitely Japan right now despite the fact that they seem to be taxing at extremely high rates. But at least they are regulating exchanges in the right way, or at least the closest to getting it right.

I have to say as well that Australia, after it got rid of the double taxation on bitcoin, is slowly emerging as one of the more well managed countries when it comes to bitcoin regulation with guidelines and regulations that are definitely a lot clearer and logical than many other countries who may still have double taxation. Bitcoin profits are taxed as the same rate as income tax in Australia, and there is a 50% reduction in CGT if you hold your BTC for more than a year. Only thing though is that bitcoin is still treated as a property, not an actual currency.

There may be other countries as well, however, I'm just not familiar with them. But Australia and Japan are definitely two of the top right now. It doesn't mean that they've got bitcoin regulation completely right, it just means that they are progressive towards the issue and not stagnating and trying to restrict access like other countries such as India.

Ironically, they advertise themselves as "anonymous and limitless". Literally the only reason why anyone would use them is because of the anonymity and the unlimited exchanges that they provide, and both of them are breached here.

Their company isn't even licensed by the looks of it, and no physical address is provided. Yet they're here trying to preach about KYC to you - absurd.

The fact of the matter is that they shouldn't even have asked you for all of these verification pieces because they advertise themselves as anonymous, especially if you were perfectly fine with getting BCH that you sent, back. As if that wasn't enough, if a customer provides all of the docs that a business requires, release their funds! You don't just go around in circles and do something unnecessary, when real ID has been given.

If you have KYC as a business, you should make this clear in the beginning. Notice how they say that they are anonymous, and that during the exchange process, there are 0 warnings about the risk of having to provide extensive KYC verification. Only after the funds are sent by the user, do they mention anything about them not being a totally anonymous business.

It just looks like they're trying to play for time here and hold your funds as long as possible, possibly due to liquidity issues or whatnot.

Kind of reminds of changelly, tbh. They have similar problems where customer funds are held while asking for unnecessary KYC that was never required until the customer sent the money. OP, I do hope that you get your money back soon, because you deserve every cent of it back with compensation for lost time.

Obviously will depend on the bank.

I would definitely advise against trying to link your credit card to coinbase if your bank have explicitly stated that credit cards from their bank are not allowed to be used in the purchase of bitcoin. Even if it does work on coinbase's end, it could potentially mean that your card will get disabled or something of that sort by the bank, which is something that you don't want.

This is part of the reason why working with bitcoin is much easier and safer than working with banks of this sort. This doesn't just happen with credit cards but even bank accounts in general. A lot of banks disprove transactions to and from known bitcoin services altogether.

It's not illegal, nor is it illegal to hold or trade with bitcoin at all.

I don't even think that it's illegal for banks to continue to offer services to bitcoin exchanges. However, they will obviously be facing scrutiny and probably delicensing from the central bank of India (RBI) which is something that they wouldn't want to ever do.

The thing is that this isn't law, this is a regulation from the RBI. It doesn't mean that bitcoin is all of a sudden outlawed.

That's why you still see buy/sell listings on LBC and elsewhere, because bitcoin is still fully legal in India. The government is still obviously anti-bitcoin, though, that's for sure.

Hence, trading p2p with bitcoin for cash on platforms such as LBC and paxful will be a growing trend in India as a result, in my opinion, because of the regulation.

We're seeing an adjustment in price right now which is pushing prices up from the current $6k floor, I know that.

However, this seems to me right now to not be established enough to say that it's going to be the start of a bull season, all of a sudden. Even if it does go up to test the $10k resistance again (which is very unlikely imo), we can't call that the start of a bull market.

People are saying that in the second half of the year, we'll see a bull run in the same magnitude as something like last year. To me, this is not going to happen. It's extremely probable that prices are going to continue to either dip, or move sideways for the year with basically no upward growth simply because we've got no bullish momentum right now. If you look at previous bitcoin price cycles, you'll see that bear markets will last around 1.5-2 years, and we're nowhere near that yet.

Don't get too optimistic and ahead of yourself. A full on bull market will come eventually as a natural part of the price cycle, but definitely not this soon.

I think that we're very close to the bottom of the bear market right now, if not already at the bear market. It's clear from all the signs that we've got at the moment that bitcoin isn't going to go down much further, and bottom is probably in the range of $4-6k.

However, I very much doubt that even if $5.9k or within that vicinity proves to be the bottom that we'll see major bullish developments in the second half of the year.

The bearish sentiment is still strong within the market and a huge trend reversal seems unlikely at the moment. Even if the recovery starts, it'll be a gradual process that will see small increases every time, not anything absurd like last year that you're suggesting. An ATH is pretty much impossible even in the event of a recovery both this year and 2019, imho.

There isn't really anything that can be classified as "real money".

I feel like that you're referring to fiat currency when you talk about bitcoin being superior than 'real money'. Fiat currency is only one type of currency, so it definitely can't be classified as "money itself" or "real money" at all.

In fact, if we follow the definition that money needs to be a store of value in the long run, bitcoin is a much better form of money than fiat is as we know that fiat is centralised and tend to lose value in the long run due to currency debasement.

I myself very much would rather hold bitcoin as a store of wealth in the long run, than fiat. That's the simple truth. But obviously the short term usages of bitcoin is limited at the moment, coupled along with the fact that adoption is low (and awareness) means that right now, people still use fiat for most of their day to day transactions, even though bitcoin can be considered to be a better form of money and store of value.

It's not just you who have to deal with this kind of hassle all the time. A lot of people don't get why decentralisation is so important, it's because of this.

When you deposit money into a bank, you are handing over control over every cent. Even though technically it's your money, it's really more of an IOU promise of the bank to you. They can deny transactions outwards, request verification (as shown by your case), delay transactions, and even deny transactions from crypto exchanges coming in.

That being said, I don't think that banks will ever become obsolete.

Centralised banking services will probably co-exist with decentralised currencies such as bitcoin. Even if bitcoin does go mainstream, it's very probable that banks will simply shift some of their resources to serve bitcoin customers as well, instead of all of a sudden going out of business. Interest bearing accounts that they offer will still be needed, and so will loans. But they may only exist in electronic form by that stage with no brick and mortar business, who knows.

He is obviously a scammer by the looks of it.

The fact that he refused escrow should have been alarming enough, in my opinion, because if he was legit then he would have accepted any forum escrow that you would suggest. Telling you to send half of the amount first is a common tactic that scammers use, because it generates a false sense of security for the buyer. You are not protected by escrow if you send first any amount, period, and could get scammed.

DT members will tag him as soon as possible. Please update the OP with the screenshots links in the "proof" section, instead of posting it again in a reply.

BTW, what kind of business are you carrying on that requires 5 new PP accounts every single day? It sounds fishy for sure. It's against the PP terms and conditions as well, so I suggest stop doing it. Even getting a friend's paypal (if he is willing to take on the risk, that is) would probably work better tbh. A lot of these paypal accounts are actually fraudulent, hacked, or a result of identity theft.

I definitely feel like that this is more of a short term bounce upwards than anything major to signify the start of a prolonged period of bullishness. We did see bitcoin momentarily dip below $6k before the quick rebound which indicates that the support is extremely high, but I think that it's way too early to say for sure that this is the end of the bear market altogether.

It's very probable that starting next year we will see bitcoin definitively turn around and start its recovery. It could even happen in Q4 of this year. But as others have said, if we look at previous bear markets, they have generally lasted more than half a year.

However, looking from the information that we have right now, it's highly likely that we're already close to the bottom at the $5-7k level. I simply don't see prices crashing down much further than what it currently is, due to the high demand especially with the new institutional investors coming in. So it's a great time to accumulate overall, for the long term.

I wouldn't say that bitcoin would necessarily be able to combat the issues such as poverty per se, but it definitely provides some properties that will be extremely useful to those who are in countries where banking services are hard to reach, and overall global reach of the workers are limited, thus resulting in extremely low wages.

Bitcoin can open up tons of opportunities as it can be obtained and transacted with throughout the world without any sort of identification, without discrimination, and without borders. It allows workers from third world countries to connect with employers worldwide, and also have somewhere to save their money.

But the main thing is probably bitcoin's property as a store of value. There's a ton of countries with hyperinflation problems that face depreciation in their fiat on a daily basis. Bitcoin is able to help the citizens in their country to essentially have somewhere safe to store their wealth, instead of having to scramble to spend their life savings due to the inflation (Venezuela is a prime example of this).

So their entire site is down right now. The ANN thread is still active, however: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4599648.0 (Archived: http://archive.is/omQUt)
Good job to OP and the rest of the people who contributed to exposing this scammer, because it's very likely that they completely abandoned their project by this point because of this scam accusation which revealed their scammy behaviour.

I'd say that most scam projects right now will have used some sort of fake team or whatnot to cover up their tracks, and because they would be completely untrusted if real identities are given.. Legitimate projects will never perform such acts of identity theft.

Always research the project, especially the team behind it, before you put any sum into the ICO as an investment.

A lot of countries are just anti-crypto in general, as they see it as a threat to their fiat currency as it takes control out of their hands. As a result, they are reluctant to be honouring bitcoin's legitimacy and would rather ban bitcoin.

Taxation is obviously one of the issues that could potentially be a root cause, but each country that has bans have their own thinking that as outsiders we simply don't know for sure. Some countries that are restrictive economically obviously don't want their citizens to have a global outreach, which could be a reason why they decide to restrict or ban bitcoin altogether.

But to me, not a lot of countries actually do that. Most countries right now are actually striving for regulation instead of restrictions, which is a positive to me.

To me, Indian really made a bad decision by turning their backs on crypto altogether. I think it was a decision that made absolutely no sense, firstly considering that it will basically wipe out the entire regulated crypto industry which means more Indian companies will simply flow overseas, and secondly, people will still be able to trade crypto, just not through a regulated means.

There are rumours that this decision will be reversed some time in the future and a GST will be instated instead, but I really don't see that as much better.

It's 'choking' India's crypto economy for sure, and that's bad when crypto has a long way to go in the future and can really benefit a country's economy if it can regulate crypto services.

Anyways, I'm pretty sure that localbitcoins and paxful still serves India, and trading p2p is still fine. There's a lot of offers here: https://localbitcoins.com/country/IN

I can't say that it's impossible, but it's definitely very unlikely to happen.

It would require a worldwide adoption of bitcoin as a everyday and reserve currency, and the inflation of fiat to be accelerated many times to what it is right now. If we're talking about real value here (inflation accounted for), I think it's not possible for BTC even in the most bullish scenarios to reach the value that you're predicting by any stage.

That said, I am pretty bullish on BTC despite the bear market currently. I think that there is a real possibility that we'll see a massive adoption wave coming in at as soon with merchants and banking services all starting to adopt the currency, and as demand grows, so will the underlying value of BTC. But as I said, $10 million seems too far fetched at the moment to be considered reasonable, unless some sort of mass depreciation on the same scale as Zimbabwe happens over the next decade.

If we do refer to the last cycle which I think is really a valuable reference point to look to, then you'll see that prices actually bottomed at around February to April of 2015, which was actually around 1.5 years after the bear market had begun. Obviously, this is not something that will be replicated perfectly, but cycles should generally stay the same imo for a bull and bear market. Prices usually rise until a year or so after the halving, then the bear market kicks in for 1-2 years.

Also taking into account how big of a percentage was lost of BTC from its peak value (around 85% I believe from the 2014 bear market), I do think that there is some more dips and dumps that we'll have to go through before we bottom.

I would say that September is probably too soon, it's much more likely that this year will just continue to be extremely bearish. However, next year will most likely see prices bottom (imo, around $3-4k is likely) and the start of a recovery, but even then the markets wouldn't be as bullish as last year.

Decentralised exchanges are obviously way better, but I don't see at the moment any that would work on a large scale.

I wouldn't say that the exchanges I use (Binance mainly, shapeshift etc.) are untrustworthy at all. But if you deposit money, you are essentially handing over control of your coins, and there are many factors outside of even the exchange when it comes to securing your funds such as government regulations, hacks, etc.

For that reason, I personally only use an exchange to exchange funds, not store funds for long periods of time. But still, a lot of people don't take that advice and still continue to do that.

I think that instant exchanges such as shapeshift currently are probably the best to use, if you're not able to get verified. A lot of the times, your funds are actually at risk due to extensive compliance procedures instead of hacks.

I mean, it makes a lot of sense for sure to integrate blockchain into at least some of the components in their systems in order to achieve an immutable ledger. Banks are already starting to experiment with this and so are some governments.

It's important to note though that by integrating blockchain into a centralised structure, it's not really the same as using bitcoin. In this case, the central entity will still have full control essentially.

But even with a decentralised currency like bitcoin, it's obvious to me that there will continue to be centralised banking services that surround it. The banking sector won't just disappear as a result of bitcoin or whatnot, they will just cater for new services. Banking isn't dead. But as you said, it's definitely evolving to suit new technologies.

Unfortunately, this was expected to happen due to the reserve bank of India's decision to regulate (or rather restrict) banks that are operating under itself so that the banks are forced into not dealing with these crypto exchanges or other crypto businesses.

It honestly doesn't make sense, it'll just mean that users will now turn to dealing with cash, instead of bank.

But the smart thing to do right now is to definitely try to get your funds out. Nobody knows what's going to happen with fiat withdrawals after the restriction takes place since banks are technically not allowed to process them anymore. The earlier you get out, the better.