shouldn't there be a maximum deadline to participate in each of these "bets" that were introduced in the new feature called "BETTING"?
for example the one which is a bet on bitcoin price in 2020 is set to occur in 2020 or 626+ days from now. does this mean people can make bets starting from today up until 2020? if that is so then it is a very unfair game because the closer we get to that point the easier it is to make a closer bet so if anybody made a bet today they are going against others in the future with more advantage.

if it has a deadline then it should be mentioned in another countdown timer alongside this current and only timer.

if it is for investment, as in people investing in a token that a bank creates then I don't think it is that likely to happen. maybe big guys like Warren Buffet may invest in such things but regular investors would never go for it.
but if it is for usage, then yeah why not! people are already using banks so why not use other crap that is created by them. it is like opening up another account or even as simple as upgrading your account to enable you to use that useless token of theirs!
I don't see any future for something like that when decentralized bitcoin exists though.

no you won't.
actually earning has never been the focus of LN. quite the opposite, the focus has been on keeping the fees as low as possible so you won't be able to earn anything meaningful. specially with small amounts.

if you want to get paid for just running a node then go run a PoS coin and then experience the downfall of its price because of a bad distribution design.

I don't think so.
the price doesn't go up if you open LN channels. the price will go up only with more adoption. and more adoption (related to LN) will only happen when different businesses start opening up LN channels. like exchanges, merchants,... for instance if Amazon started accepting bitcoin and did it through LN then it would be leading to a price spike.

that wasn't really "heavy" though!
the sells were the normal amount that always happens after a big price surge and after price tries to break out of a new resistance and fails. in this case it was $5500ish and as it didn't happen the sell started to go back and start rising again as we are doing now. the volume was on par with any other previous time in same situation.

it is China and news coming from China on shitty news sites so I wouldn't be surprised that there has never been anything remotely close to an actual "ban" but something that the news sites exaggerated like they have been doing in the past 10 years just to get traffic with their click baits.

as for bitcoin price it won't change based on this news specially not upwards. if anything it should have dropped because of the panic. you can associate the recent small drop with it but that was too small and it is already over so it is not worth talking about that either!!!

that has always been one of the terrible things that the exchanges could ever do because it has zero benefits for their users while it adds lots of problems for them:
- you have to be able to trust that exchange with your most personal documents and know that they are not going to leak it intentionally or unintentionally on the dark market (selling it for example!)
- you also will face lots of issues when they don't accept it and have to resubmit and waste a lot of time waiting for confirmation if they ever do it.
- then there is the issue of them getting hacked. implementing AML or any other kind of regulation will still not prevent them from getting hacked or even worse from scamming you themselves.

so what is the benefit of AML for users? absolutely nothing.

I disagree, they don't function similar to fiat at all!
while fiat is being printed by the government and banks and they run the show, that gives fiat a very good level of security. for example if you are using USD you know that tomorrow morning USD is not going to be wiped off the face of the earth.
in comparison centralized stablecoins are controlled by a company that may not even be legal not to mention that when they "print money" it is not allowed in most countries around the world. so you can and probably will wake up one morning to see them disappear. that means they are not secure at all.

no they are bad because they are centralized. if they were decentralized then it was an entirely different story.
as for their benefits, if you are only using them for trading for example to transfer funds from one exchange to another with a lower fee compared to transferring fiat, or if you are using them in an exchange that  does not have fiat market but you want to temporarily exit that coin and go to a fiat like coin that keeps its value then they are good but other than that usage of them is a very bad idea.

so far it is mostly enthusiasts that are running lightning nodes because it is still hard to do it in my opinion and there aren't that many places that accept LN payments. but the best thing about this kind of growth is that the more users use different LN clients the faster the bugs are found and fixed so that we can get closer to real usages of it in places like exchanges for example.

OP is talking about an Electrum wallet not any kind of BIP39 seed phrase. this means you can't import your seed words generated by Electrum by default into another wallet like mycelium because they won't recognize it.

as for "Password" it is NOT for encryption or anything like that. it is used for extending your seed which is a completely different thing. in short if you enter a password in this option in your picture which I snipped, you will get a completely different list of addresses.

the talks about regulations and the way certain people think it is positive have only started in 2018 when price was going down  and everyone was becoming desperate thinking there is no way price can go up because it was the first time they were seeing a bubble. so they started looking for excuses that may increase the price, including regulations, ETF, SEC approval in general and a lot of silly things like that.

the fact is bitcoin was created in a decentralized way and its whole purpose is to not need any kind of regulations by any government in the world. so it is meaningless to talk about I!
at the same time regulations can affect the adoption and consequently the price of bitcoin. we have seen different cases of it. for example the Indian and Chinese restrictive regulations have slowed down the adoption while being incapable of stopping it and at the same time Japanese and... regulations have helped speed up the adoption and contributed to the huge rise of 2017.

the best thing I could have done is to encourage other businesses, merchants,... to accept bitcoin as payment while telling them about the benefits of doing so and avoiding advertisement of bitcoin as an investment or get rich quick, or basically anything involving profit making. I have also spent bitcoin anywhere that accepts bitcoin and is offering something I want. I have even bought computer hardware from physical shops with bitcoin.

the worst thing that people can do in the name of "promoting bitcoin" is to tell others to buy bitcoin, hold and become rich!

first of all "win or lose" is not a one time, one order thing. it is a long term thing that is the aggregate of all the actions you have ever taken or in the market all the orders you have executed. so you may lose money in one trade but make a lot in the other or vice versa. for example that is how a lot of newbies lost a lot of money (upto 90% of their investment) during past 2 years just because they thought they were "winning" because of a couple of shots in the dark that gave them profit during 2017.

secondly, the market is so much more complicated than that. for example imagine price that is rising from $3000 to $4000. if I buy at $3000 and sell at $3500 to you whom will sell at $4000 we have both made profit and there is no "loser" here.

what people publicly say is of no significance. they say all kinds of crap publicly while doing a completely different thing in their privacy. those "ex-supporters" you have in mind have already been filling their bags with bitcoin while price was much lower than this at the bottom while shouting their doomsday predictions of $1000 and less. and these McAfee type people who constantly talk about bitcoin are only advertising their own business in social media, after all that is how they pumped their useless centralized token last month.

we can barely predict what is going to happen in a year or 10 years from now. you are asking us to predict what will happen after about 90 years! that is simply impossible. not to mention that this topic has been discussed before many many times. example of the most recent duplicate topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5128657.0

that site is a propaganda machine created against bitcoin to undermine bitcoin, nothing else. and that is why the value is so small. it was created to advertise bitcoin-cash, if you look at the BCash bus you can see it is constantly being filled with "passengers" which are transactions but if you look at its blocks on an explorer you can see there is barely any tx in any of them!
blockchain.com is more trusted but unfortunately their system is usually buggy so it may not be the most reliable source either.

you are getting too excited after seeing the first rise out of many upcoming rises. this was just the first taste and the size was bigger because it was an excited rise due to the fact that many investors were waiting for a long time to see the rise happening and then jumped right back in. this doesn't have to continue like this just because it happened that way a couple of days ago. we may as well see a slow gradual rise from now on up to at least $8k before we see another big jump.

in a market, drop can also mean profit if you are a trader not a bag holder. for example you could have shorted ETH and make a lot of profit from that dump. or you could have simply pulled out, waited for the dump to end and bought back more coins in the dip.

not it was not, and you should look at the percentages not the shape of the chart. for example bitcoin went up a little more than 25% against USD while ETH went up a little less than 5% (because it was dumping hard against bitcoin) so technically you lost 20% profit on your money if you held ETH instead of BTC.

obvious answer is neither because if you stuck with bitcoin your final net profit would have been a lot higher.
but the reality is that profit doesn't depend on these things but instead it depends on what you as a trader do in the market. price can shoot up 1000000% but you miss it or buy too late and only see the dumping side of it and lose money instead!

of course it is more preferable if price was more stable or was rising gradually. one of the best times in bitcoin in my opinion was the 2015 year where price was rising with a solid support and slowly towards a 100% rise by the end of the year.
but this cannot happen, not because bitcoin is unpredictable but mainly because stability brings in more adoption since it would be so much easier to use bitcoin as a currency if it is more stable and more adoption means more rise so the price should shoot up. in other words the stability it self is the reason for some of the rises.

I really hope that someday (soon) we start seeing more mature investors in the market who instead of thinking they can bend the market trend to their own wish, accept the trend change and change themselves to that trend.
unfortunately we keep seeing newbies who have heard the term "FUD" and think if they open a silly topic like this they are actually FUDing and can pull the price down so that they could buy bitcoin since they didn't before and now are regretting that bad decision.

you can't technically count exchanges and big services that deal with processing transactions and are holding other people's money under the category of "wealthiest people in crypto". because they don't exactly own those coins and if people one day choose to abandon that platform they withdraw all their bitcoins and transfer them back to their own pockets in their own control.

the wealthiest people are never going to come out because of the privacy that bitcoin has offered them and since most of them are early adopters and those people knew better how to correctly use bitcoin because they educated themselves and weren't blinded by greed only wanting to become rich.