just to be clear, i fully agree with this. the 12.5BTC the miners get is more than enough even when price was still at $600-$700 range. and now it is pure profit with the current $1200+ price which is continuously rising.

all i am saying is that they are extra happy with the additional 1BTC ($1200+) (1.5 current total fee - 0.5 previous total fee) profit they are getting because of the spam attack and this additional profit is rising out of control and soon will be 1.5-2BTC additional profit more than they deserve.
and these numbers are just for one block, multiply it by the total number of blocks these pools mine each day, it accumulates fast.

and that can be enough reason for them not to adopt any of the solutions because it leads to spam attack to stop, fees going back to normal and their bonus to disappear.

This is just my conclusion based on observation.

people always speculate about who and why this spam attack is happening.
some say it is political to force a proposal.
some say it is miners
...

what i am more interested in is the results of this spam attack!

think about this, as a miner the only thing you care about is money and how to make more of it.
after the halving the amount you earned was halved, still profitable but half.
you were getting paid 0.2-0.5BTC  ($120-$300 approximately) as fees per block in addition to the block reward (12.5BTC).

now thanks to the price rise and more importantly the spam attack the amount of fees has gone up to 220 satoshi/byte and you are getting paid 1.4-1.5BTC ($1770-$1900 approximately) as fees per block in addition to the block reward (12.5BTC). and that is a 530% increase in USD profit! and 200% increase if you think of it as bitcoin profit.
and this additional profit is increasing every day.

would you adopt any of the scaling solutions if you were a miner?

when in doubt, just invest your money in bitcoin and keep it long term. the chances of losing money with buying bitcoin is so small they are practically non-existent.

all the altcoins you see are good for investment but only short term and preferably before the pump so that you can dump it hard on the top and take the profit and run like hell
the key is figuring out when the pump is going to come.

you should report the "size of transaction in byte not in bitcoin" for all we know you send a 5000 byte transaction with 10000 satoshi fee!
even if your transaction was the smallest 40 satoshi/byte is still very small.


again the same thing here. the size of transaction in byte is important not the amount you send.


well it depends on what you mean by practical. if you want to buy something with crypto currency online then bitcoin is the choice. very rare places also have litecoin as payment option.
if it is any other purpose it is still bitcoin because of the price. but litecoin can be used too.

and just FYI price of litecoin has been very stable and good. it is still worth $3.78 as i am typing this and it has been around 3.5-3.8 dollar for a long time. so i don't know what you mean by "price going down and down"!

this seems to be a very new feature that btc-e.com exchange has added. according to their website (here: https://btc-e.com/news/234) they have added this feature called bitcoin betting last month (10 Feb). you can read the details in the news link i gave above.

and in my opinion it is a cheap move. an exchange is not a place to gamble. and if you can predict the price it is best if you trade bitcoin instead of betting on its price.

a while back when price was very low at $400 or less, and the ETF guys were buying bitcoin and injecting the huge amount of money into bitcoin nobody knew about it.
then again when price was trying to break $800 (OP's target) nobody around here even knew something called ETF exists. again when $1000 resistance was being broken not so long ago.

and we are still on the same path. nothing has changed and price is still rising because the rest of the world and those who are still investing in bitcoin or start investing in bitcoin today don't know and care about ETF. bitcoin is still the same as it was back at $200 and and there is still going to be the same limited amount of it available with or without ETF or any other crap like it.

FUD is always going to be a part of the market. and i have seen it everywhere, the magnitude is different though. for example in my country, a while back there was some FUD about dollar price and the price tanked pretty hard and then bounced back, in the end it was all about some people wanting to make some more money in the chaos.

the more experienced people get the less effective these types of lies are going to be.

and besides someone said a nice thing above, try to use FUD to your own advantage and play it.

this is so funny
blockchain.info sinks down more and more everyday, and this chart is mostly showing their services they offer not the price.
the only reason they are still alive is because they offer a newbie-liking-wallet and the name it has. otherwise it is the worst service around.
their blockexplorer is known to have many bugs, they don't show all the transactions (they filter them out!!!) and i am just waiting for the massive complains of people saying they lost money because of the recent cloudflare bug which blockchain.info is using.

you know what the funny part of it all is?
when these coins are getting dumped hard, their price falling for weeks or even months, and when their prices are low with no sign of rise whatsoever nobody talks about them, make any topic, make an article (not necessarily the link in OP but in general)!
but when they are pumped, and price reached the high levels that nobody is buying any longer and they want to cash out, everybody starts talking about those coins. you hear their names everywhere. on the forum, on news sites, on blogs,....

i wonder why

the first thing that matters when it comes to investment is trust and we don't know you. you are an stranger to us, so trusting you with our money is a hard thing.
so we have to first see the site, see the game and see how dedicated you are to the project. and see if it is really a game that is going to or can stay around or not.

in the end, if trust is established, if the game is good and people find out that players want to play that game they will make investment. for dice we all know people will play it no matter what just as long as it is fair and trusted. but with a new game that we don't even know what it is, things become harder to decide if to invest or not.
you may think others want to play it but in reality not many do. and when you get few players investment doesn't make much sense.

in short: we have to see first.

it doesn't have to be like that. people usually are too hard on themselves when it comes to gambling. they try too hard to make profit but it is hard to do it with gambling. instead they should start thinking of gambling as a game they play, like many other games they play and pay money to play them. the difference with gambling is that you pay money to play it but also you can make some of it back too.

it can but it shouldn't although nothing is stopping anyone from doing it.
bitcoin should be used and views as it is intended to, as a currency. and only because of it being a digital decentralized currency it can grow and become more valuable not just because it has limited supply and is rare!
and one of the reasons that bitcoin has been rising and has its price go to the moon is exactly this. because people see this decentralization and the fact that there is no banks bullshit anymore.

making profit is not equal to not being scam. i have a feeling that you are calling "losing" as "scam" and these two are completely different things.
the site's being provably fair can easily be tested and proved. it is not something too complicated. it is actually very easy and most sites even provide enough information for newbies who have no idea what it means so they can read, check and make sure about it.
but again none of this means you will win if the site is provably fair. being fair means your result was perfectly random, and that is your luck to lose or win the game.

usually in many of the card games, your skills are the only thing that matters. your bankroll or the amount of money you have is of less significance.
this means if you are a skillful poker player for example you can go in with a small amount of money and win a larger amount.
and the opposite is also true, if you have no skills, no amount of money in the world can guarantee your win in a skill-based gambling game. that is why you see so many idiot rich guys going in casinos and coming out lighter.

which altcoin? they are not all the same and they are not all moving the same.
for example all the altoins that are being traded with bitcoin and fiat will go down when bitcoin price is rising. but try looking at ETH market next time this happens you will see huge buy walls put there by whales to both get cheap coins and prevent the crash of the market.

then there are pump and dumps coins, these coins move up and down and don't care about anything in the world they just get pumped in a day and dumped the next back to the graveyard.

then there are coins like litecoin which have big news like segwit coming (http://litecoinblockhalf.com/segwit.php) and if it is activated, they will go to the moon again paying no attention to anything else in the world.

because on the rise, everybody is buying. the small traders, the whales,... everybody buys slowly and they try their best not to cause a spike with their buys so price goes up slowly.

but when there is a drop, it starts most of the times with a whale making a big dump to create panic, then they take the money they got and start orders at the bottom. at this time everybody starts panicking and dumping like idiots they are and the whales are sitting down there with their mouths open to eat all the cheap coins. then the rise starts again.

most probably they changed the name from Bitcoin to Blockchain in order to have a wider range of possibilities. with bitcoin you are only in the decentralized ledger called bitcoin but with blockchain you can talk about the technology and it seems like these days corporations and banks are all interested in the technology and want to use it for themselves as something separate or better called an altcoin.

ICO is Initial Coin Offering.
it is a method of crowdfunding cryptocurrency projects by raising funds through an ICO campaign and in that a percentage of the coins are sold to those who are investing.

but in reality this is turning into a new method to scam people out of their money. the projects are all bad and they show it as being good to take the money and if you check the history majority of the ICO coins get dumped pretty hard after the release.

what does it mean "i forgot the link"!!!! do you memorize them
that topic is usually in the first 3 pages, you can also always find it through search function, and here is the link (on the first page): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1585408.0

@justdimin what do you find hard about finding a trusted casino? it is a piece of cake. you open google.com and search the name of the casino or game that you want to play then add "Site:bitcointalk.org" in the end to find the announcement topic or possible scam accusation against them!
in the end you open up the website itself and check their provably fair system too.

just developing the site and then what? sell it or also operate it yourself?
you have already done the most part of it that counts, and if the game you designed is as easy to play and as interesting as it sounds like then it can be successful. if you just developed and want to sell it later then it can be profitable for you.
but if you plan on operating it yourself too, then you have to invest some more money into your own project to make people pay attention to your game. they won't come on their own. and you can grow it slowly but it can happen, market is not full yet.