no. mining can be done by anyone with the hardware and a basic understanding of bitcoin mining. as long as they can follow the directions on how to set up a miner or whatever, they should be able to get a miner going and just leave it there. of course, troubleshooting a broken mining setup might require some technical knowledge, but for the most part, you can just leave the miner running there with the absolute minimum amount of involvement. there's really not that much learning to do on the subject beyond reading a couple guide threads here on the forum or even a few articles off of a google search.

bounty projects that ask for millions of dollars worth in funding without a guarantee that they will actually produce what was promised after whatever time period. not really reassuring if you ask me. if you do your research on the projects and make smart decision, you may have a chance at pulling ahead.

i dont think any single 'great hacker' is going to be able to destroy bitcoin singlehandedly; the power of bitcoin lies in its users and their belief in the system, for any single individual to shut that down all down, which would have to involve the security in the blockchain system, access to bitcoin, and usability of bitcoin, would take something beyond a miracle in my eyes. but then again, i've no doubt that even if all this were managed to be destroyed, there would be more than a handful of die hard believers that would keep it going, maybe even implement changes that would cause a revival of bitcoin or something.

the amount of money in the system doesn't really change things; sure, it might influence people to act in order to protect their holdings, but maybe it might cause them to panic dump in order to salvage what the can. that aside, there is no such thing as 'too big to fail,' if anything, the more money put into the system, the bigger the bubble if the system does balloon to that extent without adequate backing.

i think its rather that, this time around, people have learned. we've seen, what, three separate instances of negative bitcoin - related news in the past two weeks? with the price tanking and recovering fairly quickly each time, i think people have learned that itll take a lot more than just china to destroy bitcoin, and have finally gotten to the point where they can see past the unreasonable amounts of FUD that people are spreading over every bit of news. that, or maybe the chinese have run out of coins to panic sell, and everyone else has already bought them up.

maybe, maybe not. like it or not, china has a pretty big global economic presence. it might be beneficial in the future for them to be involved.

not necessarily, there are multiple services out there that will accept a bitcoin payment on behalf of the merchant, and immediately convert that amount into whatever fiat currency they use in exchange for a small fee. not exactly sure what it was, but i do recall seeing that somewhere here some time back. dont take my word for it, but i think coinbase offers something similar for bitcoin accepting merchants as well (i only remember reading a mention of it somewhere, i might be totally wrong).
that aside, bitcoin integration on such payments can be an incredible convenience for both the customer and the uber driver; if we can assume that the transactions for these are irreversible, then there's a guarantee that the driver will receive their payment. there's no hassle of counting out change, zero worries about a credit card charge being declined, etc. it provides security for them. on the other side, all the customer might have to do is scan the QR code with their smartphone (assuming their smartphone bitcoin wallet is capable of this, it should be anyways) and pay in a matter of seconds.

personally, id like to believe all the panic and price fluctuations are over and done with for the year, with bitcoin stabilizing around the 3800 - 4000 usd mark, but im starting to accept that this next year will just be filled with price fluctuations like like ones we've had the past few weeks. were it just a year ago, id think the price would stabilize around this point, but it's becoming more and more apparent that the world is taking a greater interest in bitcoin, and in turn, the governments of the world will start to formulate and enact policies that directly affect bitcoin, just as china has done these past few weeks. soon, i think, we'll see the us government put its collective opinion out there, which i think will cause the price to tank, seeing as how congress is pretty much run by lobbyists.

personally, im not too sure about that; people have been, and are always looking for a superior alternative. namely, the 'big' attempts so far have been litecoin and ethereum, neither of them able to replace bitcoin. however, they have proved their points; bitcoin is severely limited in what it is capable of, and with something as innovative as ethereum, the gap between the popularity of bitcoin and these altcoins is closing. who knows, in a few years, one of these coins might just be both appealing and practical enough that it pushes bitcoin aside and takes over.

there's no telling what happens in 5 years; sure, we can extrapolate a generalization and say that the price will rise overall, but the events of the last few weeks are quite telling. there's absolutely no telling what will happen to the price of bitcoin in the following years. as bitcoin and cryptocurrencies gain traction around the world, governments and groups are forced to take a stance on them. we've been left alone for a while now, but as that begins to change, i can see bitcoin going either way.

really hard to believe it was just a single individual, i'm of the belief (not to mention this is the infinitely more likely to have happened) that as the price neared 3000, people started buying bitcoin in hordes, driving the price back up practically overnight.

nothing is immortal. if the scaling problem before the forks showed anything, it sure made me think about how scalable bitcoin actually is for the coming years. as of now, it's still a very small percentage of people that are actually using bitcoin; there's no way the network would hold up if bitcoin were to be adopted by a majority of the world's population, in its current state at least. if bitcoin ever gets that far, it'd be after going through quite a number of changes and forks to meet the needs of the future and its users. at that point, it might even be something extremely far away from what bitcoin originally was.

not really, if anything, it's easier for most irl / land based casinos to cheat you; in the current state of online casinos (bitcoin based casinos anyways) we have the provably fair system, which allows us to not simply trust, but to verify the results of our plays and outcomes. compare this to a real casino, where you've no choice but to trust the system. there does not exist a way to verify every roll you've played, weather it be the slot machines or a table game where the cards are shuffled by a machine (well it's been a machine that shuffles them in every casino that I've been to anyways) where you can't tell what's going on in there. for all we know, they could be cheating us right in front of our faces. I'm sure there are government regulations they have to follow and all that, and their systems are probably tested for fairness regularly, but still, not exactly reassuring.

personally, i don't trust any of these articles or predictions, when something major like a sudden 25% price tank happens, every crypto related blog and media outlet puts out all sorts of numbers and predictions, enough that one of them are just bound to be correct. at this point, i just take it on myself to guesstimate a number or just get a general feel of when the price fluctuations will stop. i ended up making a small chunk of change from the fluctuations over the past few days, for what it's worth.

not too sure on that one, if bitcoin can recover this quickly form the events of the past week or so, i dont think any new events would affect bitcoin nearly as much.

going off the feed back on mellorbo's profile (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=124041) that it is either a bought or hacked account, we see the address: 3KqCD8rdc2e1eXh9tfGxfDg4twd7zbgCMU
used by both mellorbo and the user finaleshot2018 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=999808)

obv conclusion: finaleshot either bought or hacked the account mellorbo.

archived posts to posted address:
http://archive.is/btZZX#selection-2707.18-2707.52
http://archive.is/vBihu

sure, there was a lot of money to be made, and i do sort of regret not putting down a couple hundred when it was ~3000, but i dont really think anyone could have reasonably predicted that bitcoin would do a near 25% dip and bounce back in a 24 hour period. it's crazy how that happened from anyone's standpoint.

dunno if i can really define this as a 'long' bump, the major fluctuations all took place pretty much over the period of just a week, its just a blip in the grand scheme of things as far as im concerned.

it's not bitcoin, it's the people. my guess is there were an extremely large number of people who took advantage of the drop to 3000 and as a group, drove the price back up just off of buying alone.

can i get a vouch for visual studio 2017? thanks.

if it's not illegal or scammy id do it, shoot me a pm.

might be an error with electrum specifically, can you sign something simple along the lines of: This is a message from 15th September 2017 by chrisrov

edit: they've pmed me a different signed message, seems the account is indeed hacked.

couldn't verify for some reason, and dont think i messed up copy pasting, try again?

i could verify the signature using electrum, however, could you please sign another message with a timestamp on it? preferably the current date and time of the forum (top right corner) to ensure that this wasn;t a prepared message or anything.

quote of the message in another quote:

all you have to do is report them; going as far as to quote their post and just write 'reported' is first off, unnecessary, and is also itself a low quality post and deserves to be deleted as well.

Bitcointalk name: subSTRATA
Altcoin I choose: NEO
I will pay 0.01 BTC once 10 people joined: yes
After 10 months, return my 10% to: 1SubSiKMkZuqMBaCeqehVQ1zSunVBAER8

you wont be unbanned. learn from it (which you clearly didnt your first ban) and try again in 14 days.

pretty sure the world will not follow suit, if any other major country does implement similar policies, its because there's a necessity for it, such as shutting down exchanges that are breaking federal regulations. china may have a strong economic pull on the international scale, but i don't think bitcoin is something they have too much geopolitical influence on. in any case, its not china that are directly contributing to the massive amounts of FUD that is spreading across the crypto community, it's mostly new users that havent experienced having a stake in a volatile asset and don't exactly know how to react. of course, there's always the possibility that china is actually doing this to manipulate the market, i wouldn't put something low as that past the chinese government, they've done much worse than this.