Agreed. These are pointless forks with no real use-case. It's all about trying to grab some money through association with the bitcoin name.
If you want a good alt, then look for one with a real use-case. Ethereum obviously being a good example.

I wish that were the case, but I suspect that people will continue paying attention to him. There was already more than sufficient evidence for him not to be taken seriously, but he is still here, still clogging up crypto news with his nonsense. Unfortunately headlines are created not by those wielding truth, but by those with the loudest voices. The reason he is still such a public figure is just that he is controversial, and so articles about him provoke emotions and generate clicks. Just add him to the list of self-important liars who have made a career based on nothing more than being the loudest voice. It's a long list, with some big names on it (hello, Donald Trump).

It's certainly true that he's a clever man with a phenomenal track record. But he's also an 89-year-old confronted with a paradigm-shift. Bitcoin is so utterly different to everything that has gone before, it must be profoundly difficult for someone with a lifetime's experience in the markets to process the full implications of something, in bitcoin, that up-ends previous truths.

Bitcoin is a revolution. Look at every revolution in human history, and you won't see an 89yo establishment figure in the vanguard.

I'll second this one as well. Truly excellent.

OP - and anyone else - if you're not aware of the site, Project Gutenberg has Gibbon's book plus thousands of other classics available for free.
Johannes Gutenberg's printing press was a revelation and kick-started the modern age; it is fantastic that this valuable repository is named after him.

First of all be careful to only use reputable sites.

As to why you need to go through KYC - since bitcoin and other cryptos started to attract serious money, they came more to the attention of governments around the world. KYC is partly to protect users and partly to comply with legal safeguards against terrorism and money-laundering. Exchanges and gateways that don't comply with the laws of the country in which they are based are liable to prosecution.

You must also remember that blockchains are transparent. It is only anonymous so long as there is no connection to a fiat gateway.

KYC is an increasingly contentious subject. There is plenty about it online, have a read of this for example.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-covid-19
https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data



Agreed that there is a balancing act here. Food and medical supplies must be maintained. The consequences of severe economic damage can and will cause deaths; it is always the poor and vulnerable who are disproportionately affected in these situations.

I've had discussions with you in numerous threads, and I almost always disagree with you. But I can't let this go without meriting it. Data is king. The place where we find truth is in pure, unadulterated facts, the full thing, and not (as is often the case) just some partial dataset that has been carefully selected in order to reinforce a predetermined message. Whilst CV19 is still in progress, so much of our understanding is based on projections from the current state... and projections of an exponential progression are by their nature prone to orders-of-magnitude inaccuracy.

There is I think a common misconception about the measures governments are taking and the advice they're giving. Not saying anyone here is making this mistake, but we need to cover it for clarity.

The virus doesn't kill a huge percentage of the people it infects. This is a fact. It's a small percentage, low single digits at most, probably lower.
Face masks, other protective equipment, social distancing, etc are not perfect defences against the spread of the virus.

The virus can be stopped either through a vaccine or through a sufficient proportion of the population having been infected and carrying antibodies against it. That's it. Palliative medicines can potentially alleviate symptoms, but vaccine or natural herd immunity is the only way to stop it (ignoring for simplicity any future mutation of the virus).

So why the masks and the social distancing? The purpose with these measures is not to stop transmission, but to slow it down. The spread of a new virus through a population is a geometric progression. It's exponential. Small numbers become big numbers absurdly quickly. This is the crucial factor here. If face masks have some beneficial effect, if social distancing has some beneficial effect... then these approaches should be used.

It's all about management of the spread. Flattening the curve. Ensuring that the finite resources of health services are sufficient to deal with the number of infected patients. Ensuring that anyone who can be saved will be saved. That's it. Even if face masks are only 10% effective, that still means we should all wear them.

Whilst this is true, there is an important distinction between the virus inside the mask getting out, and the virus outside the mask getting in. Reminds me of the problem of J Edgar Hoover.

If someone has the virus, and coughs up some infected mucus - which is a primary transmission mechanism - then the mask just needs to contain the droplet in order to stop nearby people from getting infected. The limiting factor is surely mucus droplet size rather than virus size, if the virus is inside the droplet? Apologies if I'm mistaken, but this is my understanding. Respiratory droplets are a much bigger factor than the smaller, 'airborne' droplets.

To quote the beleaguered WHO:

Of course there is the issue about the mask itself coming into contact with the virus and then acting as a contact transmission route. I'll agree this is a concern, but does it outweigh the protection a mask affords?

Can you honestly say that if someone with the virus is standing right in front of you and coughs, you are not bothered whether they cough into a mask or straight into your face? Also remember that quantity of exposure appears to be a factor in severity of symptoms. Even if a mask only stops 50% of the virus from spreading, that's a huge help.

Further (sorry, I'll shut up soon), I would argue that even if a mask has an overall zero effect, i.e. the quantity of virus is stops is balanced by the amount it spreads through becoming a contact source, then masks can still be a psychological help for the millions of people who have spend months in lockdown and are panicked about going out in public again.

So you're saying we should all wear masks, because that way the people who are contagious won't spread the virus, because the mask stops them from infecting other people? 

This is simply untrue. ETH is one of the most developed coins out there, with an extremely active community. The move to 2.0 is imminent, and with it the start of staking. This is a profoundly important shift. ETH has a well-established roadmap, and has done for years. Progress along this roadmap has been significant, and continues. If we add on to this the fact that ETH is far and away the biggest smart contract platform, and has one of the strongest use-cases in all of crypto... then I don't see how it can be characterised as 'very bad'.

A quick glance at this page will show you whether there have been any recent developments.

More bitcoin than bitcointalk, but I will post xkcd strips at any opportunity.

2010 and 2020


_{https://xkcd.com/2280/}

This is the essence of it. Bigger countries bully smaller countries, whether by troops on the ground, trade embargoes, or more subtle influencing or coercion. More powerful groups bully less powerful groups. More powerful people bully less powerful people.

I have no idea why people are attacking China. The idea of 'punishing' China seems like an abrogation of responsibility. CV19 originated in China, and China's initial suppression of whistleblowers was a dereliction of duty and did cause an outbreak when a different type of government might have managed to contain the virus. However their actions since then, purely in terms of suppressing the virus, have been exemplary, particularly compared with the atrocious mismanagement we've seen from other nations.

The rest of the world knew what was coming, and chose to do nothing until it was too late. Certain prominent politicians around the globe now seek to blame China in order to hide their own failure to take action. If the US/UK/whoever had implemented 14-day quarantine procedures for people entering the country as soon as the outbreak in China became apparent, then the death tolls in these countries would be negligible or zero, and the economic damage would have been slight rather than extreme. Blaming China is the 'grown-up' equivalent of the kid in the playground who is caught out doing something bad, then they just point at another kid and say 'he started it!'. You can't just try to pin your own failing on someone else, particularly if you run a country. Governments act too slowly, and are reactive rather than proactive. They are interested in what might make them look bad right now, rather than what might make them look bad a couple of weeks down the line. Our fault as voters in democracies really, it is us who put these idiots in power.



And this thing about the South China Sea, I am not defending China's attempts to wrest control over the area, but... this has been going on for years, but suddenly now it is a huge issue? Ridiculous. The people who are suddenly outraged by China's behaviour there and are demanding retributive action need to ask themselves why they had zero interest in this topic prior to the CV19 outbreak.

Agree with all of this.
I would also add, if you see for example an airdrop that is "worth $5", what that generally means is that they are basing this on ICO price... but almost all coins drop in price hugely once they become tradeable. I'd be very surprised if an airdrop that is "worth $5" can ever actually be sold for anything close to $5.

0x and Eth Classic are probably worth keeping.

As for the others - it's a difficult decision. If you've held them through a long drop, then it might make sense to just keep hold of them now in case one or two do suddenly become huge successes.
The key thing really is to base your decision on what the coins are worth now, rather than let what they were worth in the past influence your decision-making too much. We are near a market bottom at the moment. CV19 has had a huge effect, but we are seeing some recovery across all coins. I would be tempted to keep what you've got and see how things play out over the next few months.

Normal US behaviour is destabilising intervention. At least since WW2 finished. A lot of the current instability in the world is due to US adventurism.
Not saying China is innocent in this, they are not, they are clearly trying to flex their muscles and establish control over the area.
But if the US sending missile-equipped naval destroyers halfway around the world is normal behaviour, then there's something wrong with 'normal'.

I'm not really attacking America here, just the sense of entitlement that comes with being the most powerful country in the world. I'm from the UK, we used to act like that too (partition of the middle-east being one example), and the only reason the UK acts less like that nowadays is that we have lost almost all power on the global stage.

In the long-term, halving will surely lead to higher prices. However in the short-term I do expect a quick price drop when the halving actually takes place - because there has been the usual FOMO in the run-up to the event. The halving is already priced in, but people still think there will be a short-term rise, and so are buying more and pushing the price up further.... which can't really be sustained. I think it's very likely we'll see a pullback. It almost always happens with any hugely anticipated event in crypto, be it bitcoin or alts.

Long-term though, yes, price increases.

I agree, and I've posted quite a few times about this too. There is inevitably a lot of FOMO as the price rises in advance of halving... but halving is already priced in. This means prices rise higher than is really justified, which will surely then lead to a drop when the event actually occurs. We see this time and time again with alts as well as bitcoin. It's the old maxim of 'buy the rumour sell the news'.

I would have to add however that this is all about the immediate effect of halving. Long-term, halving will I'm sure have a positive impact on price... it's just that people shouldn't anticipate magically accelerating upwards price movement the instant that the transition to lower block reward occurs.

It does indeed sound very much like pointless spam.
OP, if you are trying to market something, spamming will just annoy people. Concentrate on quality instead of quantity. That's a much better (and more likely) route to success. If you are not trying to sell something, and are instead talking about crypto social media bounties, then again quality ahead of quantity is better. If you are marketing something for someone else, they won't want to be associated with low-quality spam.

It may have peaked, depending on future responses.
The lockdowns across the world have in many societies reduced the 'R₀' value to below 1... which means that on average each infected person passes the virus on to less than 1 new person. This is how we control the exponential growth - by keeping R₀ below 1. What happens as the lockdowns end and societies begin to resume some approximation to 'normal' activity is that people come into contact with more people again. So there is the chance that R₀ rises again past 1 and we see a return to exponential growth, and a fresh outbreak. This is why strategies such as some form of physical distancing need to remain in place, and why masks etc are important, and why some form of automated contact tracing is a good idea (privacy concerns notwithstanding).

It may have peaked for the moment, but this isn't the end, we need to take great care to ensure that we don't get new peaks as this thing progresses. The only real solutions are a vaccine or else enough of the population has been infected and carries antibodies to make it very difficult for it to spread. It's not just a matter of time until CV-19 goes away by itself - it won't go away, it will remain, we just need to keep that R₀ <1.

Just to head off anyone who comes here genuinely believing that this thing was man-made, the data suggest very very strongly that it wasn't, and that it has a natural origin.
Scientists Are Tired of Explaining Why The COVID-19 Virus Was Not Made in a Lab

Trump and others around the world are trying to pin the blame on China in order to deflect the focus away from their own failings in dealing with the pandemic. These people couldn't care less about evidence and truth, their sole focus is on getting through this without accepting any responsibility for their own decisions. Kind of a surprising personality trait in a leader, isn't it? Unless of course these people were not fit to lead in the first place...