this is a classic mistake that has always been very common among people. sometimes the news sites also write vague articles to intensify this confusion too.

it is based on the fact that bitcoin and the technology that bitcoin uses are two different subjects. bitcoin is the currency with its obvious network whereas the underlying technology is easy to use separately since it is open source and it has already been used about 3400 times by that many altcoin projects.

and that is what Facebook and the like of it will do, they use the technology to create their own altcoin.

actually i think it is impossible to predict.

because Lightning Network will also need to be used in order to be effective. something like SegWit. and if it is not used then it can't do anything!

additionally the on chain transactions won't just go away, there will still be a lot of transactions in the 1 MB blocks and also with the ever increasing demand they will also increase in number. which means higher fees.

there have been lots of arguments about bitcoin and pollution/environment/power-consumption/.... and lots more. you can find them with a quick research on the internet.
but most of the times, you can see many articles that ignore the fact that bitcoin is providing us a unique payment system which adds a value to the world. it is not something useless wasting energy.
and this is while there are lots of wasteful industries in the world without any value.

since all of these new useless altcoins are based on bitcoin core you can always use the offline signing method described for that client in a similar way for these altcoin clients.
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/signdemo.txt
https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-examples#offline-signing
that way you never expose your private keys at all.

but also franky1 had a good point in the second comment, if you haven't already read it then scroll up and read again.

price would have been a lot higher than what it is right now. it would probably be at something near $100,000 and we would have been discussing about how strong the $100k resistance is instead of the $20k.

and the reason for that is pretty simple, one of the biggest things that have prevented people from investing in bitcoin and seeing it as "too expensive" has been the fact that for example right now 1BTC or 100,000,000 satoshi is worth $16500. if there were 5 decimal places and we shifted the zeros to whole bitcoin then 1BTC would have been 100,000 satoshi and many of the mental barriers would have been lifted.

one of the reasons i suggested to move to satoshi: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1926157.0

at the end of the day, at code level nobody cares if 100,000,000 satoshi is called 1 bitcoin or 100,000 satoshi. the max is never going to be bigger than 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshi

and why exactly is that? because what you say here seems to me like pure random guess!

and from what i have been seeing from some people these days, this $20k is mostly like an arbitrary number that people have put for themselves to create a barricade. something like the first big ATH of $1200 when people didn't know which way it was going to go.

the $17000 resistance was broken and that showed that bitcoin still has lots of demand that is buying it regardless of what is going on in the media and social media FUDs.
but it didn't hold, although the drop was not big (it is still $16.5k), and at the same time the altcoin pumps are still young and ongoing which is attracting a lot of money. i say  bitcoin is back soon and when it breaks the $17.5k and goes to test the ATH this time.

"bitcoin" could come to facebook is a lot different from "bitcoin technology" could come to facebook. and i have a feeling from the article that i read that he is specifically talking about the blockchain technology not bitcoin per se` and that is a different thing.
for all we know he is going to start a new ICO and create his own coin. FBCoin maybe! a centralized system of payments working in a centralized platform. even something like STEEM could be possible.

there is always withdrawal limits on exchanges without any exceptions and you will most likely be able to withdraw that much to your bank account in multiple requests in many days but you will surely encounter a lot of issues when you want to get the money out from the bank to your own country.

only if these altcoins didn't have replay protection which it seems like they all have implemented it. so copy of the tx won't work in bitcoin.

his bitcoin will stay safe but he should consider the private key compromised since he has used it, specially if he is using it on an online machine and on these unknown altcoins with shady devs.

they say they are still doing it but for over a week i have been failing to submit any transaction to their service! i try exactly on the hour like i have always done in the past to be able to get my transaction through as soon as they reset, but as i said i have been failing so far.

which leads me to believe they may have disabled the system but they have it running to push for their paid services!

a website with .club domain name and similar topics by OP and other newbie accounts spamming the link in a similar way and on top of it a useless article written with lots of misinformation!

the title alone is dumb enough for making the conclusion without reading any further! no bank of any country in the world is ever going to even consider investing in bitcoin unless they offer services on it like coinbase does and make money of those services not from bitcoin price.

the same reason why people are still working to get paid $10 an hour while some other guys are making $100,000 an hour.

or if you like the stocks analogy: the same reason why they are still buying stocks of Apple at $173,... while someone else bought it at $0.4 in the past!

"does it need to be" is a hard thing to answer. and it will be a whole different kind of discussion about taxation and what are the things that should and should not be taxed in general. which has nothing to do with bitcoin but with the taxing policy of different countries.

but bitcoin is considered different things in different countries. for example US considers it a commodity and treats the profit you make differently. but Japan considers it a currency and treats the profit somewhat the same but when you use it as a currency you are not forced to pay any taxes.

generally i would not recommend blockchain.info as a wallet to anyone. it is not that bad to begin with it but try to move on from there soon.

try checking out Electrum.org and also read some about cold storage.

as for cryptopia it is not a bad place although the liquidity is not as good. try binance too.

when you take a trading route then you have to buy back after you sell on a spike.
if you have not bought bitcoin yet, then it is best to buy in the dips when the prices have a little drop and go below the support line. currently anything below $13k or $12k if you are lucky.

and also remember that it is always risky even if you know it is going up.

as for your investment in altcoins try not to buy coins that are already pumped. XRP is currently extremely pumped. these coins may go up but the risk of dropping hard is so much bigger.

it is a wise move.
although with investment you never know when prices will drop when they rise and how much. you have to do some risk assessments for example see what the possible bottom is and how much is the risk of staying on the side and waiting for it to be reached. if it is not high then wait.

if this is your only reason then i have to tell you to go back and look at the charts and check the same topics like yours and very similar comments that you see today in all the following dates:

2017-11-5 till 2017-11-15
2017-08-31 till 2017-10-8
2017-06-11 till 2017-07-17
2017-01-04 till 2017-02-20

each time someone like you comes here and says it is very similar to 2013 and asks us to believe him and they disappear by the end of each date on top. i can show you at least 30 topics in each of the above dates that are saying the same exact thing as you here without any bases.

actually i think they have been considering shutting down or controlling the miners more but they also knew that they are going to be incapable of even putting a dent in Chinese miners cartel. they are so much more powerful than the government.


this is the issue. the local authority is in on it themselves. when the government asks them to investigate they are getting paid to say there is no mining!

bitcoin is doing nothing just that it is going sideways while everyone accumulates more and more of it at this stable price and many traders have also moved to altcoins to join the pumps so that they can make more money to have more bitcoin when they see the dips they buy in.

king and queen,... are meaningless words.

i generally agree with what you said in here but not completely. 99% of those who are saying something negative about bitcoin are spreading FUD and i have been around long enough to know that.
we all know the problems but only few bother to check out the solutions and see where we are on that front.


and here is a good example in your own comment! you either don't understand things or are spreading FUD.

what better coins? and why are you calling them "better".
can they handle for example 1000 TPS? have they ever reached that much and remained there? so why are you calling them "better"?

of course it is easy to create huge blocks (eg 1 GB!) and lower time between them (eg 10 seconds) and then say my coin has the capacity to compete with all the fiat and crypto combined transaction per second. and never even go above 100 kB per block.
bitcoin cash is making such claims with 8 MB blocks, so do 100 other altcoins. but that doesn't make them true.

that is not going to happen for years since the adoption is not stopping. it will continue to grow and with it price will grow and remain volatile. the volatility is reducing though.

and if it becomes stable, it becomes more like a currency but the fees are still high which will be harming that. so unless fees come down, stability of price is not going to do anything for bitcoin in my opinion.