As long as there are miners supporting either side a hardfork is inevitable and will occur as soon as the first SegWit block will be mined that is to large for core. Which side will see more long-term support and thus have more mining power is anyone's guess.



To be honest, after the BCH split of I see hardforks as having merits of their own. Given that there is a proper 2-way replay protection. Dynamic scaling leads to yet a different set of challenges, but I didn't follow that discourse too deeply.

Good to see that people are finally looking at ICOs more critically. For a couple of weeks I thought the whole (crypto-)world went mad.



I think there's next to no money needed to start an ICO, you'll probably just need to look up on how to issue a token on the Ethereum network. The value of X tokens will be defined by how much people are willing to pay. How much people are willing to pay depends on what you have to offer.

2x is a "physical" blocksize increase to 4-6MB, not just 2MB. Regular SegWit already leads to 2-3MB blocks.



BCH has barely any blocks that are larger than 50k because there are hardly any transactions being made, so it hasn't proven anything so far.



Regular SegWit does as well.



Spam is defined as transactions that are made explicitely for the purpose of clogging up the network, akin to DDoS requests. While to my knowledge there's little "hard" proof that spam transaction exists, they are not simply "transactions person A does not like."



Agreed.



Problem being, that this approach would require a hardfork any time a block size increase takes place. While it went fairly OK with BCH, a hardfork is always a risky endeavour.

Historically, whenever BTC loses value, the alts react even stronger. Many people know this, so they trade accordingly, lest they are left holding the bag.

To add to that, in times of uncertainty people tend to move to assets that they perceive as safer. Apparently BTC is still more trusted than ETH.

Definitely. It would be naive to think that BTC would have simply continued to grow without any much needed corrections along the way. Once the China situation has been either resolved or forgotten BTC can move on. I think at this point it doesn't even matter whether China decides in favour of or against BTC. Even a negative decision will be better for the market than the current uncertainty.

Additionally, SegWit2x looming on the horizon doesn't exactly help the situation.

Having to trust is the very thing you want to get rid of in crypto. You store your own private keys so you don't have to trust exchanges. You have consensus mechanisms such as PoW so you don't have to trust miners.

The moment you have to trust a third party, such as the USDT issuers, you left one of the most important features of crypto behind.

Most support issues are cold storage / hot wallet related, thus I understand that the admin prefers not entrusting those parts to anyone else. But indeed the general email support / community management aspect is slightly lacking, which is a pity for a site that has proven itself to be trustworthy so far. I'm sure that with more consistent customer support more players would be drawn to SafeDICE.

Each hardware wallet comes with a 24 word long seed phrase that can be used to restore your wallet in case your device breaks or gets lost. This seed phrase you can and should back up, giving you the ability to back up multiple copies just like with a paper wallet. Worst case, if your hardware breaks, you can always restore it to a software wallet such as Electrum (or to a new hardware wallet, should you decide to buy a new one).

If you stick with paper wallets, you can check its balance by entering its address in a block explorer such as blockchain.info. Most other alts have block explorers of their own.



If you're actively trading it makes sense to just leave the coins on the exchange. Once you stop actively trading and decide to just hold, however, it makes sense to take them off the exchange to mitigate the risk of the exchange being hacked or going bust.

Whatever you do, if you're new to crypto you shouldn't be trading. Trading cryptos is risky / hard enough as is, moreso if you're not familiar with the market.

Additionally, try to focus on BTC. While some alts may have merits on their own, many of them are just ways to extract money from newcomers.

The way I understand it atomic cross-chain swaps could indeed be used to enable decentralized crypto-currency trading. However amongst other technical limititations the logic for atomic swaps would need to be implemented for each respective currency so you'll probably have only a handful of alts available for trading -- if atomic cross-chain swaps ever come to full fruition.

Btw, USDT is running on top of the BTC blockchain via OMNI, so by definition you won't see any atomic cross-chain swaps for BTC / USDT. Other technical solutions may be viable though.

In other words: long term we may be able to decentrally trade some alts, but it will take a while to get there.

Nah... Bitcoin has become more widely known and people are just starting to realize that there might be something to it, that's true. But it's still quite far from mainstream, albeit we're slowly getting there.

Knowing about something and using it are two very different things. A lot of people knew about cars, computers and the internet before the general populace started using them.

PayPal's market cap is a useless metric in this regard, unfortunately. It will be mainstream once the userbase is the size of PayPal.

Actually the title is slightly incorrect, reading the statement of the Deutsche Bundesbank [1] itself it should say:

"Germany's Central Bank: Consumers Won't use our Blockchain for Payments."

And with that, they're not wrong.

[1] https://www.bundesbank.de/Redaktion/EN/Topics/2017/2017_09_20_monthly_report_dlt.html

How can it be exploited if both parties keep track of and agree on each transaction that takes place while the channel is open? The involved parties are able to see whether they received the correct amount each step along the way. Whether the selling party actually delivered the goods or services for the payment received is neither LN's nor the blockchain's responsibility.

Apart from that commercial partners need to keep books either way, regardless of whether they get paid on-chain, off-chain, via traditional banking or in cash.

Bitstamp has a fairly good reputation, so while it's hard to tell how fast they will respond (depending on how swamped their support is right now) they should get back to you reliably.

Either way I wouldn't worry too much. Depending on at which point of the process you cancelled the deposit, Bitstamp may not be able to tell an aborted credit card transaction from a failed one. This means they will likely just log the attempt as "failed". Either way this should affect neither your credit card nor your Bitstamp account balance.

I'm afraid it would need to be the other way round... first the world governments would need to be interested in using BTC as a reserve currency, then we would see a market cap like that.

Nonethelesss I think USD 1M,- is way out of league. In my opinion even USD 100k,- is already a long shot, but there's still a lot of growth potential nonetheless.



Well, all you'd need is for the dollar to become worth next to nothing

My guess would be that it's the calm before the storm, due to the uncertainties regarding China. Most people already have taken position in the last few days, may it be fiat or crypto. But right now everyone is just waiting and watching in which direction the market may move next.

What makes you think that BCH will fare better than BTC during the SegWit2x fork? Even without replay protection people could try to get their hands on both sides of the BTC/ SegWit2x fork. With BCH they will have neither. In addition we will then see 3 forks competing for the same hashpower, with BCH possibly having the weakest support from miners, merchants and the community.

I mean there's very likely going to be a BCH pump in anticipation of the SegWit2x fork. I just wouldn't be so sure about what comes after that.

Just my 2 Satoshis. Nothing wrong with taking profits. Good luck out there!

That's what I meant by BCH getting that part barely right

If I recall correctly they had their wonky first 2-way replay protection already earlier in place (wonky in that it was opt-in for BTC transactions). It's just that the final 2-way protection got implemented about 2-3 days before the fork.

I initially thought of SegWit2x as a good approach to bring the community back together, but the more time I spent looking into the matter, the less convinced I was. The final nail in the coffin being the deliberate lack of replay protection.

I'm all for hardforks to let the market decide which currency prevails, but the lack of replay protection is just reckless. Say what you will about BCH, but at least they got that part right, albeit barely.

Permissioned blockchains as a settlement layer between banks may be viable at one point, nonetheless I yet fail to see the benefit. Governmental issued crypto-currencies however... nah.

I don't think any central bank would be crazy enough to try it. Well, the PBOC maybe, but apart from that I'm sure that deep inside they are themselves aware of the absurdity that such a public-facing crypto-currency would represent.

However if such a digital currency would arise, I wouldn't be surprised if people actually bought in. Just look at XRP for example. Or USDT. We're practically there already.