Not sure what you are basing that on, but Binance's security is as good as all the top tier exchanges in this market. In a way you can even say that it is better than the rest in security terms, because they haven't gone through anything seriously damaging yet. Admittedly, Binance is relatively new in the crypto world still, but they as largest exchange face the heaviest stress testing, and they handle everything without many problems.

In more recent terms their security trigger system prevented coin theft as result of an API key attack. In other words, Binance saved plenty of users, and that while these users messed up big time. Even if Binance's security trigger system didn't jump in, the loss of funds would still be people's fault. That's what you get when you use malicious bots and other services requiring input of API keys.

Why should everything be backed by the government? Governments in some cases decide to significantly lower your retirement funds, which is just insane. You work your entire life to build it up, and the government 10 or 20 years later decides that due to whatever economical difficulties, you get 25% less.

The older generation has quite some luck with how they somewhat escaped the worst case scenario, but we as the younger generation will be going through extremely difficult times in the forthcoming decades. I can't trust on anything the government does, so I have to take care of my own retirement funds. In the end when the time is there, I think that at least 50% of everything that I worked for and saved up will vanish.

I see Bitcoin as a perfect hedge, but if people are skeptic, then there are more conservative ways to eliminate the governmental poison exposure that everyone here is subject to.

What you are trying to point out is already taking place, but just in a slightly different manner. Important to understand is the fact that we aren't yet where governments think we should be at, in terms of regulations. Everything that happens right now is nothing more than governments testing out what works and what doesn't, where throughout the forthcoming months we'll see them adjust their regulations based on how this market grows and develops.

In order to properly regulate this market, governments first have to understand it, which isn't really the case right now, and that directly explains the frequent adjustments in regulations in basically every country. Even Japan is constantly adjusting itself in crypto terms. While people think Japan is quite a crypto friendly country, which it technically is, they will put extra pressure on everything crypto related in order to patch weaknesses in their regulatory framework. In other words, it will become less friendly overall the more Bitcoin and everything around it grows.

It's a process that will probably take years before it is properly shaped.

It doesn't.

You have to understand that there is a major difference between the centralized and decentralized aspect of this market. The decentralized part will always remain unaffected and will always allow you to bypass these measures. The centralized part of this market is where everything starts to become very interesting, because this part is the only thing authorities can control, and for that reason they will choke it with regulations in every possible way till they feel somewhat comfortable.

The choice is and will always be open for you to be made. No one can force you to do anything you don't want. People just need to remain realistic and accept that the centralized market comes with drastic measures, and that they aren't against crypto at all. Regulations are there because this market has been maturing rapidly. People want massive growth and mainstream reach, well, this is what's needed. Crypto is no longer mainly a niche thingy.

Less network activity means more free block space, and thus people don't have to outbid other transactions to get quick confirmations.

Some reasons are;

- Close to zero speculation in the market.
- No spam attack going on.
- Transaction Batching.

I think the speculation aspect is a very important one, because as soon as the market starts heating up again, the network activity literally explodes, and that directly incentivizes spammers to choke the network in an attempt to make Bitcoin look bad. It worked last year, and it will probably work again. Segwit will just require the spammers to push a little harder, but it won't form that much of a challenge.

In current stage you can get first or likely second block confirmations with just $0.01 in fees.

It's the start of how China is going to dominate the crypto space again in the longer term. I wouldn't be surprised if Huobi ends up having a few high ranked government officials in its board. It's quite remarkable how it manages to moves through complicated and very time consuming laws that easily. Their ETF is just the next thing that confirms that there is a higher authority cutting that exchange plenty of slack.

Good thing is that there is no negativity in this case because of how it will stimulate growth in Asia and likely also in South America. Everything that helps pushing Bitcoin to the mainstream audience is what I consider to be a welcome step forward. With how the government in Brazil is just as bad as most of the other governments in that region there is no doubt in my mind that crypto will explode there in the forthcoming years.

It's actually very simple;

If you can't handle this market, then why bother investing in it?

If you consider this market to be impossible to trade, then why bother trading it?

If the long term is the only thing you care about, then why bother with the short term fluctuations?

To me this market makes perfect sense. I don't expect anything from it short term speaking because I know how brutal and manipulative it can be. Open the charts and see for yourself how insane this market has been throughout the years; the only certainties thus far have been the bottom development and the constantly increasing price, everything else is just rubbish being the direct result of people's fear, greed, etc.

Whale manipulation was present since the very beginning, which means that by your logic the market shouldn't exist in current times.

I was purely referring to the trash talk happening, not so much to the similarities or the lack of similarities between the industries.

We don't really need an altcoin for that. If we look at how LN enables atomic swaps, we can basically become an exchange ourselves from within our clients. It will allow everyone to exchange one coin for the other without much effort, and without needing anything than our own clients, and the best is that we are getting closer to it with the day (even though it can still take more than a year to become an actual user friendly main net thing). It will also combat market manipulation since you aren't forced to buy from one or more sources. The entire market will become your source.

Does it make sense that you are subject to these barbaric threats when you are just protecting yourself from the biggest thief on the planet (ie, the government)? Instead of making me pay tax, these threats once again convince me NOT to pay tax. I am not here to financially support governments to extort people. The more we pay, the stronger they become.

It's not all that difficult, but in most cases people think that just because governments don't explicitly refer to crypto, or that it isn't legal yet, they don't have to pay tax, which is completely wrong. Some even think that due to crypto's 'anonymity' they can freely do everything they want without paying tax.

This legacy account thing is nothing more than a way to trap in people thinking they enjoy a bit more freedom, where after that they are put in the same category as the rest. In the end governments don't really care about what your account is, they just want to know who or what you are, and whether or not you end up paying your due taxes. Every exchange that somewhat differentiated between regular and legacy accounts have put it to waste as easily as it was implemented.

I wonder how long it will take for governments to ease in one main verification level for everyone, whithout anything below or above it. Regulations become stricter the larger this market grows, which means that governments become more paranoid and control hungry. I strongly believe that it is just a matter of time. We haven't seen the worst yet.

If we look at the block generation times (starting from block 1), then it's clear that it wasn't just one entity minting Bitcoin. The inconsistent delays between the blocks hint that there was at least some form of miner competition going on. It technically could be Satoshi himself minting from several locations/machines attempting to test how it fares, but it's likely just that there were more individuals involved.

Is there anything even indicating that it was Satoshi who actually minted the genesis block?

Tax = legal theft to have wealth flow out of the pockets of the regulars, straight into the pockets of the elite.

Sure, tax is also used to build infrastructure and whatnot, but that only concerns a small fraction of what they gain from our financial support. It's only done to show the sheeples of this world that their financial support is being used for good things. What these sheeples don't know, is that all the contracting concerning building infrastructure goes to companies within their own circle. It's again the elite feeding the elite. In other words, itself.

Regardless of what people say or think, no one has the right to force me to pay tax over my income, gains, and existing wealth.

You can seize everything on my bank accounts, you can seize all my assets being controlled by whatever central party. You can't reach my Bitcoins.

Believe me, if the tax policies were set up in a fair manner that actually benefits the country, and thus not the elite, people would pay tax out of free will. Tax evasion happens for a reason. These people are labelled as criminals, but they are people just like you and me, protecting what we believe is ours.

What fatal blow from China are you talking about? There is none. Also, do you even know the definition of fatal?

The Chinese market is thriving perhaps less hard than before due to the legal restrictions, but they are still in the market, don't forget that. China's +1.3 billion population means that if even 1% (which equals to 13 million) of them is still involved in Bitcoin, they are still a very large market. I am even pretty confident that there are more than 1% of them still involved in Bitcoin.

Also, China will be back. Ditching everything related to crypto isn't something they want to be doing, but they are pretty much forced to do so due to the explosive growth.

The far majority of the people buy their coins from exchanges, so while you may think that no one is tracking you, the exchange certainly is, and very likely whatever agency as well. As soon as you buy coins from an exchange, consider your privacy to be compromised. You need to get rid of these coins if you care about privacy, and mixers offer that service. 100% anonymity doesn't exist, but getting rid of your tainted coins makes things very difficult for others to track you.

Satoshi never said third party escrows are whatever form of solutions, because they aren't. He creates an electronic peer to peer cash system and then he recommends centralized escrows? Does that make sense to you?

Manipulation patterns are obvious, but indeed, without actual proof we can't say it's actually happening, even though we for sure know it happens.

Think about it, if multi trillion dollar asset markets are subject to manipulation, don't you think the same entities will throw in some pocket change and play with Bitcoin in the same way? I think it's actually pretty foolish to not think there is manipulation going on. The market is heavily being manipulated right now, and this manipulation has been going on since the very beginning of Bitcoin being a tradable asset.

Bitcoin's market is extremely illiquid, especially in traditional market standards, so just a small amount of capital from institutions is enough to make Bitcoin go beyond the moon straight to Jupiter. If we also add that you only need to manipulate the price on one or two main exchanges, then they can even blast the price to Pluto.

Bitcoiners are the Warren Buffetts and Charlie Mungers of the crypto industry. People blame these oldies for talking trash about Bitcoin, but we as Bitcoiners tend to do exactly the same when it comes to altcoins and tokens. I personally have been doing that as well, but we should all acknowledge that there is indeed more than Bitcoin, and we won't be getting rid of them.

I strongly believe that once the filtering of coins has somewhat completed, that we'll be left with a small bucket of coins and tokens actually serving a purpose other than speculation. I also strongly believe that we need altcoins to balance things out. If we talk about mass adoption, then Bitcoin just isn't enough to serve people in that regard. Bitcoin can take care of the basic aspects, where altcoins can clutter their blockchains with smart contracts and all things basic users don't care about.

It's important to understand that mining equipment is still in its very early days in terms of energy efficiency. It's already an ongoing process where equipment is becoming more energy efficient, and this is literally just the beginning. I am sure that eventually, the network will be able to keep growing massively, but without the massive increase in energy consumption. People just need to stop being so short sighted.

I think it's even safe to say that we as home and professional consumers have wasted more energy than Bitcoin's network will ever be able to consume. Mining farms are the most consistent consumers of energy, where there is very little waste, which can't be said about how inconsistent we all are. All the fools blaming Bitcoin for its energy consumption should look at how they are wasting energy at home without even knowing. Pathetic beings.

It depends. General Bytes has a few products that it offers, where per product it differs what you can do with it, but it certainly is possible to buy and sell if you go for the higher end models.

https://www.generalbytes.com/products/

I like how simple and quite affordable they are, but that's not the main problem unfortunately. If you want to have them operate legally, you have to obtain the proper licenses, and this can turn out to be a very expensive and time consuming process. In the US, obtaining such a license can turn out to cost you over $150,000 which is insane, and then you also have to deal with +$100,000 renewal cost after whatever period of time. Operating an ATM is definitely not as easy as some people think.

I see a lawsuit coming up backed by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Governments and a free and prosperous long term economy don't go well together, we have had decades of proof to figure that out. Bitcoin will only form a help to people if they use it as a tool to hedge everything the regular economy stands for. The regular economy is set up in a way that will always benefit the elite over the hard working person, which is why the gap between rich and poor has grown to how it is in today's world.

Governments have had plenty enough chances to prove themselves, but failed every time. Now it's time to stand up for youself and take distance from that what's holding you back in life. It's pointless to keep wasting time and hope for Bitcoin to help the governments do the right thing, because they won't. Don't forget that as with everything in life, it can be used and abused, and governments always stick to the latter.